From Watch Dogs to Lap Dogs (Part 1)
Dog Pack Journalism and the Manufacturing of Consent
How the Mainstream Media Misleads Us on GMOs
The Washington Post won lasting acclaim for its bold investigation of the 1972 break-in at Democratic National Headquarters that led directly to the White House and ended with the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. The reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein under the guidance of legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee is undisputedly a pinnacle of American journalism. But the “Watergate Affair,” as it was known, proved to be an anomaly whose legacy was lost in a decades-long wave of corporate takeovers that culminated with just five corporations owning roughly 90% of all media outlets.
In this climate of consolidation, investigative reporters, science writers and ombudsmen began to disappear, and over time the journalistic watchdog became a lapdog. When Ben Bradlee died last October, Post editors spent page after page reminding readers of the golden moment in American journalism that was Watergate and the central role that the Post played. But that message was lost on a growing number of skeptics who believe that the Fourth Estate has evolved into what Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges calls a “class of courtiers that captivates us with the hollow stagecraft of political theater” and in the name of journalism “ignores what the corporate state wants ignored.”
One of the biggest beneficiaries of this paradigm shift has been the biotechnology industry, or big bio-tech, whose genetically modification of agriculture (GMOs) swept across the U.S. like a prairie fire during the 90s and now stands poised to dominate world markets. But the engineering of food is an imprecise technology that has been long on promise and short on delivery. GE food got a pass thanks to the wishful thinking of greedy politicians at the highest levels of government eager to fast-track it without considering the consequences. Today, the government, its regulatory agencies and the media simply stand aside while lobbyists buy the influence of revolving door regulators who have the industry’s back and the votes of Congressmen who override or simply sidestep safety and environmental concerns.
Because of a news diet over-weighted with celebrity gossip, scandals, and endless distraction stories, few Americans until relatively recently knew little about GMOs other than that they are supposedly needed to “feed the world.” Over the years, many FDA scientists raised safety concerns about the science, and its value. But political expedience trumped caution, and in 1992 “substantial equivalence” replaced the long entrenched “precautionary principle,” paving the way for commercialization of GE foods, which public interest attorney Steven Druker calls “the greatest fraud in U.S. history.” In “Altered Genes, Twisted Truth: How the Venture to Genetically Engineer Our Food Has Subverted Science, Corrupted Government, and Systematically Deceived the Public,” Druker documents how the FDA covered up the warnings of its own scientists, repeatedly lied, and deliberately broke the law in enabling GE food to flood the market without any vetting.
Many critics believe that glysopohate, the broad-spectrum systemic herbicide marketed as Roundup that’s key to GE crop production, harms both our health and the environment. Because of the government-media-industry alliance, however, safety questions have gone unchallenged and GE crop production has exploded. According to the USDA, it now constitute 93% of all soy and 94% of all corn grown in the U.S, most of which is processed into the packaged foods found on grocery stores shelves.
Despite assurances in mainstream newspapers that GMOs are safe, consumers remain skeptical and, according to polls, the vast majority wants them labeled. But because grocery ads easily account for the lion’s share of the 69% in ad revenue that the Pew Research Center says that the average U.S. newspaper takes in, and critics argue that this guides news coverage and editorial content. The result has been in blackouts of newsworthy items such as the May 23 March on Monsanto, which took place in 428 cities in 38 countries, and a scarcity of news and op-eds critical of the technology. My own piece on “the myths and truths of GMOs” was finally killed without explanation 13 months after it was assigned vetted and accepted by the Washington Post.
GMO advocacy is not just limited to editorial pages. The 47% drop in newspaper ad revenue between 2005 and 2011 and staff cutbacks of 25% between 2006 and 2009 seems to have translated into more clout for advertisers who stuck around. In the case of biotech, that meant not only running articles favorable to the technology but routinely dismissing critics of it as “anti-science,” often in concert with industry front groups.
Some journalists have refused to march in lockstep, beginning with award winning reporters Steve Wilson and Jane Akre who set out in 1997 to expose the problems associated with rBGH bovine growth hormone milk in the debut segment of their television show, “The Investigators.” But a fax sent by an attorney representing GMO giant Monsanto that warned of “dire” consequences if the heavily documented, four-part series aired frightened Fox station WTVT in Clearwater, Fl. into pulling it and eventually firing Wilson and Akre. Their smack down imposed an ominous silence among reporters that foreshadowed broad acceptance of rBGH here in the U.S. But Monsanto encountered unexpected difficulty in marketing the hormone abroad after Health Canada scientist Dr. Shiv Chopra turned down a $1 to $2 million bribe to rubber stamp and fast track it north of the border and instead went public with his inauspicious findings. Dr. Chopra’s lost his job and his career of 35 years for speaking out, but because of the uproar from his revelations rBGH was never approved in Canada and elsewhere. Today, the U.S is the only country in the world where it is legal. Meanwhile, only a handful of mainstream journalists report critically about GMOs. Earlier this year, Monsanto tried without success to have one of them, Carey Gillam, fired from her job of 16 years covering agriculture for Reuters.
In March, Gillam reported on a whisleblowing complaint filed by 10 US Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists who accused GMO promoters of exploiting vaguely worded policy guidelines to manipulate their findings, enabling the USDA to suppress and alter research that, regardless of merit, might negatively impact big agribusiness. This, she wrote, gives companies "access to top agency managers,” empowering them to order scientists to withhold data, rewrite, retract and delay scientific papers, and lodge complaints. Scientists whose work could cause industry regulatory headaches, her article stated, face lengthy, intimidating investigations and disciplinary action.
"It is not the proper role of the USDA to engage in a cover up for Monsanto and other agrichemical companies,” noted Gary Ruskin, head of the pro-labeling group US Right to Know, in a letter demanding that the US House and Senate agricultural committees investigate the matter. News of the complaint appeared in the Huffington Post and the alternative media, but not the Washington Post and other “opinion leaders.” An exhaustive search of various data bases failed to find a single mainstream publication that ran Gillam’s piece about the bullying of the USDA scientists.
The bio-tech industry’s domination by a few powerful companies that push a technology that offers consumers no real advantages caught the attention in 2010 of the Department of Justice, which launched an investigation of Monsanto for allegedly anticompetitive practices in the U.S. seed market. But in 2013 the DOJ mysteriously withdrew its complaint without providing additional information. Even stranger, Monsanto itself announced an end to the investigation.
But instead of taking a page from Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee, and drilling down about why an official three-year investigation ended quietly without any explanation on a Thanksgiving weekend, the mainstream media simply let the matter drop. The media also failed to examine whether GMOs could be linked to the surge in allergy, cancer and autism that began roughly about the time that these controversial foods appeared on the market, or why the U.S. has become what the National Research Council has referred to as the sickest rich nation in the world despite having the world’s best medical technology. Even enterprising reporters would have difficulty getting to the bottom of such a complex story, especially since bio-tech companies do only short term testing which because of patent rights is off limits to outsiders.
All told, 1803 scientific studies have reported adverse reactions to GMOs, while about 1700 others – most conducted by industry – declared them harmless. But rare long term studies have produced results that are troubling. A particularly high profile study conducted by Eric-Giles Seralini and his research team at the University of Caen found that rats weaned on a diet of BT corn laced with glyphosate, the chemical integral to GMO production, sustained severe liver and kidney damage, breast tumors and died young. When images of Seralini’s grotesquely deformed rodents went viral in 2012, the vast majority of journalists had no idea what to make of it. So for guidance many of them turned to the Science Media Centre and other self-styled scientific bodies which offered assurances that Seralini’s study had no merit because it didn’t include enough of the right types of rats, even though the Sprague Dawley animals used in the experiment were identical to those employed by Monsanto in its own short term tests. What many journalists didn’t know was the SCM is largely funded by big biotech, resulting in largely negative coverage that according to SpinWatch was filled with "ready-made quotes from scientists savaging the study" that had been "spoon-fed" to news outlets by SMC. The New York Times even referred to one of the SMC's "experts" in its coverage. Subsequent to the uproar over Seralini’s work, hundreds of scientists who assessed the study found it significant and criticism of it unconvincing and politically motivated.
The unbalanced reporting prompted independent GMO scientists and academicians to write an open letter lambasting reporters for not including “even minimal coverage of support for the Seralini paper.” The mainstream media similarly overlooked the findings by the World Health Organization (WHO), which in March announced that glyphosate, the chemical central to industrialized GE crop production, is “probably carcinogenic.”
Compare the mainstream’s underwhelming coverage of the Seralini study, the WHO announcement, the marches against Monsanto in hundreds of cities around the world and the virtual news blackout of the USDA whistleblowers with the headline grabbing letter signed by 10 “prominent” physicians who demanded the resignation of staunch GMO labeling advocate Dr. Mehmet Oz from his post as chairman of Columbia University’s surgery department and cancellation of his popular television show for touting naturopathic remedies on the air but almost certainly because of his advocacy for GMO labeling and his ability to curtail drug purchases by members of his large viewing audience. The Washington Post, National Public Radio, USA Today, Fox News, Forbes and other “opinion leaders” that rely on advertising by pharmaceutical companies, grocery producers and other special interest companies professed outrage because many of Oz’s essentially harmless recommendations that probably don’t kill anybody are not “evidence-based” while ignoring the fact that evidence-based prescribed medication causes at least 100,000 deaths in the U.S. every year. Dr. Bob Arnot, chief medical correspondent of NBC News, caught his peers with their pants down by linking the manufactured assault on Oz by dog pack journalists to special interests tied to the $30 billion a year drug industry and the pro-GM lobby, pointing out that one of the “prominent” doctors who signed the letter, Gilbert Ross, spent nearly four years in prison for Medicare fraud before heading up the American Council of Science and Health, an industry front “astroturf” group for GMO, drug and tobacco producers. Another “prominent” signatory, Dr. Henry Miller, turned out to be a vocal bio-tech industry shill who in 2012 claimed false connections to Stanford University during the heated battle over California GMO labeling initiative Proposition 37.
The media attack dogs were at it again in May, this time targeting Chipotle for becoming the first fast food restaurant to go non-GMO. “Chipotle’s Gimmick is Hard to Swallow,” blared the Washington Post. “Why We Can’t Take Chipotle’s GMO Announcement All that Seriously,” chimed in NPR. “We’ve come to expect a complete and utter lack of balanced reporting and journalistic integrity when it comes to some of the issues the natural health community cares about,” commented the Alternative Health Daily, “but this sort of vindictive screed against a company for simply trying to satisfy its customers strikes us as particularly egregious and appalling.”
The harshest criticism came from the editorial board of the Washington Post, which blasted Chipotle’s “global propaganda campaign” not only for being “contrary to the best scientific knowledge but also potentially harmful to vulnerable populations,” suggesting that scientists whose work reveals inconvenient truths about GMO technology (presumably including the 10 USDA whistleblowers) are not the “best” scientists and perhaps even “anti-science” as well as personally reprehensible for preventing the bio-tech industry from “feeding the world,” when there is already more than enough food to feed the world, 40% of which goes to waste because faulty or non existent distribution networks. Most significantly, these “opinion leaders” seem to be saying that any restaurant chain that dares to follow Chipotle’s lead can expect to be savaged by dog pack journalists.
From Watch Dogs to Lap Dogs (Part II)
Dog Pack Journalism and the Manufacturing of Consent
How the Mainstream Media Misleads Us on GMOs
With criticism of genetically modified food and crops all but shut out from the opinion pages of mainstream newspapers, the GM narrative remains not only intact, but unjustifiably rosy, encroaching even into prestigious publications such as The Atlantic and the New Yorker. The May 4 issue of National Geographic, for example, featured a feel good article about genetic modification that centered around a new “breakthrough” form of rice touted by leading GM spokesperson Pam Ronald, eulogizing Ronald’s marriage to an organic farmer to suggest that GM and organic farming are somehow compatible. However, the piece neglected to mention that the particular rice in question wasn’t even genetically modified, undermining author Jeremy Berlin’s entire argument. Also unmentioned was the fact that in world of science, retraction of a scientific study constitutes one of the biggest black marks. Had he probed deeper, Berlin would have discovered that two of Ronald’s studies have been retracted, while a third has been under scrutiny. Such oversights are hardly surprising, considering all the special interest money flowing into National Geographic, one of the world’s largest non-profit scientific and educational organizations, including 15 pages of ads promoting GMOs, pharmaceuticals, alcohol and crop chemicals in Nat Geo’s May issue.
Despite the public’s growing concern over GMOs, the narrative about them seems unlikely to change, especially in Washington, DC where the media elite have conferred on themselves a kind of celebrity status flaunted at the annual star-studded White House Correspondents dinner and the festive parties leading up to it that affordable news executives and their editors an opportunity to rub elbows with bio-tech and other company bigwigs and their congressional enablers.
It’s not clear whether Microsoft founder Bill Gates has appeared at any of these extravaganzas. But photos of him on the Internet in the company of various U.S. presidents suggest that Gates, one of most prominent promoters of GM foods, doesn’t need to. Gates’ announcement in 2010 that he had joined the fight against hunger and poverty in Africa was spotlighted over public broadcasting, recipient of millions of Gates Foundation dollars every year, underscoring his image as a great philanthropist. When wife Melinda appeared in 2014 on NPR’s nationally syndicated Diane Rehm Show, Rehm gloatingly asked about how she met Bill and and other softball questions while overlooking her repeated references to the “right” and “great” seeds that the Gates Foundation has been aggressively pushing on African leaders, despite resistance from African nationalists and small farmers who, like much of the world, are suspicious of the encroachment of GE technology and the ability of these “right” and “great” seeds (which cost three to eight times as much as conventional seeds) to “feed the world.” Rehm also failed to inquire about the 500,000 shares of Monsanto stock that Bill Gates purchased in 2010 just prior to his foundation’s involvement in its African venture, which have since more than doubled in value.
Rather than taking aim at the industry for misleading the public, journalists for the most part have instead directed fire at its critics, or what the Washington Post called in its editorial of March 30, 2015 “anti-science,” anti-corporate “activists,” using straw man tactics to portray them as starry-eyed 60s throwbacks more in tune with Peter, Paul and Mary rather than conscientious citizens genuinely concerned about our health and the financial health of our nation.
On Jan. 3, 2014, for example, the Post profiled Adam Eidinger, a former head shop owner with 15 arrests who sports a car mounted with a caricature of a grotesque, genetically altered fish in a nearly 4000-word piece in the Washington Post Magazine, portraying Eidinger as the face of the anti-GMO movement rather than, say, any of the hundreds of independent scientists whose research has produced results inconvenient to promoters of the technology or any of the hundreds of thousands of “Mom’s Across America” who have marched in protest against Monsanto out of concern that its glysophate-infused GMOs may be harming their children.
The Post editorial pointed to a Pew Research Center finding that 88 percent of scientists believe genetically modified food is generally safe to eat compared to only 37 percent of the public, disregarding the fact that relatively few scientists have specific expertise in genetic modification and simply defer to their well-funded peers who insist that it’s safe. It also failed to note a 2013 survey of 200 medical doctors on the front lines of health care, 80.5% of whom believed that GE foods are harmful. Yet the editorial cherry picked the Pew report as “a classic example of activists overstating risk based on fear of what might be unknown and on a distrust of corporations,” without further discounting the fact that a large percentage of pro-GMO scientists are affiliated with companies that produce GMOs or universities that are dependent on lucrative research grants from these companies. It further ignored Monsanto’s practice of paying university scientists such as Dr. Kevin Folta of the University of Florida, who repeatedly insisted that he had no Monsanto ties before a FOIA request revealed that he had taken a $25,000 grant from the company. The editorial also offered assurances of safety, stating “unsurprisingly, institutions such as the National Academy of Sciences and the World Health Organization (WHO) have concluded that GM food is no riskier than other food.”
The NAS, however, has never issued any blanket claims of GMO safety, but rather a report that concluded that GM posed a higher risk of introducing unintended changes into food than any crop propagation other than mutation breeding – a method in which plant genomes are bombarded with radiation or chemicals. Further troubling is that the Post editorial ran a week-and-a-half after the IARC, the World Health Organization’s prestigious cancer research arm, designated glyphosate (key to GMO crop production and the world’s leading agrochemical), as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Where were demands for epidemiological studies? Not in the Washington Post, which hosts Monsanto’s extravagant “Feed the Future” events in its spacious auditorium. Where were the cries of “conflict of interest,” a term that in mainstream journalism seems as out-of-style as landlines or phone booths.
The Post’s editorial further noted that “GM crops flourish in challenging environments without the aid of expensive pesticides or equipment. This parrots another discredited bio-tech industry talking point: GMO crop production reduces pesticide use. However, chemical “stacks” concocted to combat increasingly resistant “superpests” and “superweeds” have trapped us on what Doug Gurian-Sherman, chief scientist at the Center for Food Safety, refers to as a “pesticide treadmill,” dramatically ramping up herbicide use while contributing to the $16 billion in sales that Monsanto racked up in 2014 alone. Further, the editorial claims that GM can play an important role in alleviating hunger and food stress in the developing world.” Can? When? Despite more than two decades of failed promises, GMO poster boy Golden Rice still hasn’t even passed field trials, let alone proved safe or effective in combating vitamin A deficiency in the malnourished, according to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the body tasked with rolling it out. Carrots, anyone?
Ironically, “anti-science” critics have been blamed by the bio-tech spin machine for preventing Golden Rice from reaching the market. Despite the spin, compilers of the IAASTAD report, sponsored by the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), UNESCO, the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and the UN Food and Agricultural Organization clearly aren’t impressed with GE crop production. The landmark 2008 report, which included input from 400 scientists over three years, concluded that industrial large-scale agriculture is “unsustainable and required much more research” to determine both their benefits and safety.”
But in their attempt to push this technology and its patented seeds onto a world that increasingly rejects them, which Vatican Cardinal Peter Turkson has referred to as “a new form of slavery,” and Prince Charles has called “the greatest disaster in history,” the Washington Post and other media “opinion leaders” maintain that mandatory labeling would mislead consumers who “exaggerate the worries,” suggesting that these worries could be ameliorated by passage of H.R.1599, Orwellingly dubbed the Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act but nicknamed by critics as the “DARK” (Deny Americans the Right to Know)” Act, because, if passed, the bill would outlaw mandatory GMO labeling legislation in Vermont, Connecticut, Maine and isolated communities, making labeling strictly voluntary, in defiance of the wishes of 90% of Americans.
Censorship about GE technology extends even to bookstores. DC’s landmark Politics and Prose carries tens of thousands of titles and features hundreds of lectures every year by authors who come from across the country and sometimes the world to speak about their about their latest books. Steven Druker hasn’t been among them, even though his “Altered Genes, Twisted Truth” has received stellar reviews, including one from Jane Goodall calling it “without a doubt, one of the most important books in the past 50 years.” Patrons can special order “Altered Genes,” but cannot find it on the shelves of Politics and Prose, supposedly because it didn’t sell well. Nor, despite broad public interest, does the store stock a single title critical of GE food technology. Could this be tied to P & P owner Lissa Muscatine’s ties to the State Department, (a huge promoter of GMOs), where she served as a top aide to Hillary Clinton, who over the years has accepted so much Monsanto money and as recently as December coached the company at a San Diego biotech conference about how to improve its image that a disgruntled voter in Iowa referred to her as “the Bride of Frankenfood.”
In case the outcry of our under informed/misinformed public manages to stop Senate passage of the DARK bill, critics point out, the bio-tech industry can always fall back on the TTP and TTIP trade treaties, which, they allege, are touted as boons for free trade but are actually secretly negotiated protectionist measures which, if approved, would curtail competition and allow Monsanto and other major corporations to sue entire countries whose laws inhibit or prevent the sale of their products, including GMOs, which now are either banned or require labeling in 64 of those nations.
The brazen disregard of Congress in thwarting the will of the overwhelming majority of Americans who want GMOs labeled, and in attempting to void labeling legislation already on the books and ban all future labeling, combined with the exceptionally aggressive promotion of GM by the U.S. State Department in overseas markets, suggests a much deeper agenda that brings to mind Henry Kissinger’s famous quote from 1983: “Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.”
This mindset was mirrored in a reflective remark by Dan Glickman, President Clinton’s secretary of agriculture. "The attitude was that this technology was going to solve the problems of the human race and feed the hungry and clothe the naked…that a lot of money that had been invested, and if you're against it, you're Luddites, you're stupid. You felt like you were almost an alien, disloyal, by trying to present an open-minded view of some of the issues being raised. So I pretty much spouted the rhetoric that everybody else spouted. It was written into my speeches." A 2007 cable from then U.S. Ambassador to France Craig Stapleton, a friend and business partner of President George W. Bush, reflects how seriously the GMO agenda was taken at the top tier of government. Stapleton’s cable asked Washington to penalize the EU and particularly countries which did not support the use of GM crops with “military style trade wars” against any European Union country which opposed genetically modified (GM) crops in response to moves by France to ban a Monsanto GM corn variety in late 2007. "Country team Paris recommends that we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits,” the cable said. Despite growing voices against them, GM crops remain more entrenched than ever, while Dan Glickman, now a high paid lobbyist, is one of their biggest cheerleaders.
Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” The growing rejection of GMOs indicates that people are no longer so easily fooled by lap dog “opinion leaders” who act in their own self interest rather than that of the public. The audacious use of half truths, misinformation and outright lies by both dog pack journalists and astroturf groups to tilt the playing field even more against consumers than it already is conjures images of Marie Antoinette’s fictional rejoinder to “let them (peasants) eat cake” on the eve of the French revolution.
As Peter Paul and Mary would put it, “Where have all the flowers gone? Where has all the science gone? Where have Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and Ben Bradlee gone?
When will they ever learn?” #