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On Sunday the Associated Press published a piece on Iceland's elf lobby, a group of believers who object to a road being built near Reykjavík. Media outlets on the island nation found fault with the piece.

In order to write about the interesting part of the story — loony elf "seers" trying to stop construction of a road being built — the AP story glossed over the actual purpose of fighting the road: it would disrupt construction in a protected area of untouched lava.

According to Jenna Gottlieb at the AP, the "elf lobby" partnered up with environmentalists to protect the elf habitat, which allegedly includes an elf church. The project would build "a direct route from to the tip of the Álftanes peninsula, where the president has a home, to the Reykjavik suburb of Garðabær," according to the AP.

The article goes on to say that the Friends of Lava, an environmentalist group, have brought "hundreds" of people to protest, impressive considering that Reykjavik has less than 300,000 residents. The Huffington Post, Salon, PBS, NBC, The Guardian and others all picked up the story. However, Benedikt Jóhannesson, writing for the Iceland Review, argued that's all false:

There have been many people protesting in the lava, but not hundreds. One of them is the self-confessed elf believer mentioned in the story, the others are environmentalists. The road is not from the tip of the peninsula, but rather a new connection from the main road to the existing road in the peninsula. The president does not have a property in Álftanes any more than Obama has the White House. Bessastaðir, the official residence of the President of Iceland, is on Álftanes.



The road has not been blocked. Work continues on it and the lava has already been crossed by bulldozers.

The Reykjavík Grapevine, another English language paper, said the story had "cobbling together" quotes to paint a picture of elf obsessed pseudo-environmentalists. The Grapevine also collected responses from Iceland's media. The state-run news channel, RÚV, said the AP story had "numerous misrepresentations," and implied that one woman quoted by the AP is not a representative source of Icelanders' view on elves. Then again, the AP introduces her as "a self-proclaimed 'seer,' [who] believes she can communicate with the creatures through telepathy." Alda Sigmundsdóttir of the Iceland Weather Report told The Grapevine that thanks to the AP article a conservation effort "is turned into something trite and superficial."