Article: How Monsanto manipulates journalists and academics

This opinion piece is very interesting because of the players mentioned; an old friend from Reuters crops up and also a new friend who we discovered in the last week or so: the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) who were behind the doxxing article which mentioned Michael Sharpe.

I know the connection between Kate Kelland and Monsanto isn't new but it's interesting because this topic doesn't usually make the mainstream newspapers. The ACSH sounds like the SMC on steroids!

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/02/monsanto-manipulates-journalists-academics

The emails show that a controversial story published in June 2017 by Reuters, raising questions about the integrity of the IARC’s review of glyphosate, was secretly fed to the news agency by Monsanto executive Sam Murphey. Murphey gave the reporter documents that had not yet been filed publicly in court along with a desired story narrative and a slide deck of suggested points to make in the story. The story, which did not disclose Monsanto as the initial source, closely followed Monsanto’s suggestions, the emails show.

My bold. Sounds familiar?

ETA: more words to make sense!

 

I don't doubt that Monsanto have made some fairly disastrous PR decisions, but much of that is because they became bound up in the very conspiracies they were accused of.

The whole Look-Who-Is-Connected-to-Who thing is quite distracting and creates a false sense that there is Something Going On. There usually isn't (any more than the usual political shenanigans). We humans love finding patterns where there are none, and then we make them into something they aren't.

Glyphosate really doesn't cause cancer: https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4676

Monsanto may have been corrupt(ed)(able), but that's a different issue.

 

That's not why I found the article interesting. More that it's another situation where Kate Kelland appears to have been a journalist for hire without making it clear that that is what she is doing. Who the company is or what they are promoting isn't my point.

I personally think that in the case of the SMC and the ASHC there is Something-Going-On and it would be the first time in my life I have ever engaged with a conspiracy theory.

 

Thank you for this, it's well written and easy to understand. I am very defensive about KK because of the way she behaved over her David Tuller 'investigation' and other M.E. related articles. If she'd have included information like that in your link it would have been helpful, just laying out basic facts always works.

 

That's sort of why I mentioned the Skeptoid article, because it touches on that. I think we have decided that SMC and ASHC are shady because of their stance on ME/CFS and the people involved, and it thus colours everything else they say on every other issue, whether that is the case or not. It's the Availability Heuristic.

It's worth knowing about the Information Cascade and how it works, because it's the vehicle by which organisations and individuals can use other organisations to propagate misinformation (knowingly or unknowingly) while at the same time claiming to be tackling it. Ultimately, it's sort of how mass media works.

 

It's akin to a form of corporate-driven gaslighting. Deliberate Machiavellian manipulations to skew the public's perceptions of reality. And as you say @SallyC, it's the self-serving mechanisms being employed that is the key concern. Though with my pretty tarnished view on human nature, I would be much more astounded if this sort of thing did not occur.

 

For me it was actually the other way around. A number of people associated with SMC and Sense about Science are people I have known for years. Reading about the interconnections and knowing what I already knew I was persuaded that the shadiness had seeped throughout - which then coloured my view of how they were reporting ME. This was way back in 2014 when I had not really formed any opinions about what was going on in ME.