A Short Report on Journalists Mentioned in our FOIA Requests →

Posted on September 28, 2015

by Gary Ruskin

On September 23rd, Washington Post food columnist Tamar Haspeladmitted to receiving “plenty” of money from pro-agrichemical industry sources.

Following her admission, I thought it might be useful to report on journalists – including Haspel — mentioned in the documents we have received from state public records requests.

U.S. Right to Know is conducting an investigation of the food and agrichemical industries, their PR firms and front groups, and the professors who speak for them.

So far, three reporters come up in interesting ways: Amy Harmon, Keith Kloor and Tamar Haspel.

These reporters appear in the context of Jon Entine, who is perhaps the leading PR operative working to promote the views of the agrichemical industry, and its pesticides and GMOs. Entine is founder andexecutive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, which, along with the PR firm Ketchum’s GMO Answers, are the agrichemical industry’s two most visible front groups. Entine is also founder and president of the PR firm ESG MediaMetrics, whoseclients have included the agrichemical giant Monsanto.

GM Watch on Entine's new nonsense

Entine’s new “big list of studies” tells us very little about GMO safety, writes Claire Robinson

Jon Entine, PR man for pesticides and GMOs, has come out with another GMO promotional in Forbes, called “The debate about GMO safety is over, thanks to a new trillion-meal study”.[1]

Entine is referring to a new study on the impacts of GMOs on livestock by a former Monsanto employee,[2] Alison Van Eenennaam (Van Eenennaam and Young, 2014[3]). The study, Entine writes, “reviewed 29 years of livestock productivity and health data from both before and after the introduction” of GMOs. These data, Entine adds, represent “more than 100 billion animals covering a period before 1996 when animal feed was 100% non-GMO, and after its introduction when it jumped to 90% and more.”

The findings, according to Entine, show that GM feed is safe and nutritionally equivalent to non-GMO feed, on the grounds that “There was no indication of any unusual trends in the health of animals since 1996 when GMO crops were first harvested. Considering the size of the dataset, it can reasonably be said that the debate over the impact of GE feed on animal health is closed: there is zero extraordinary impact.”

The truth is, however, that the new study tells us almost nothing about GMO safety. Entine’s claim that it shows GMOs are safe is false. The new study should be treated with the same sceptical scrutiny that we should apply to all “big lists of studies” claimed to show GMO safety: the Snell review,[4] the Nicolia review,[5] and the GENERA database.[6] 

Generalized claims about what these lists and reviews of studies show are not accompanied by analysis of the individual studies that make up the “big lists”. Such claims rely on readers not examining the studies and seeing for themselves what they contain. If they did, they would see that the studies, taken as a whole, do not support a “one size fits all” conclusion that GMOs are safe. 

Here’s why.

GO TO http://gmwatch.org/index.php/news/archive/2014/15669-why-jon-
entine-s-trillion-meal-study-won-t-save-us-from-gmo-dangers