No more GMO: Monsanto drops bid to approve new crops in Europe

[proverbialwisdom]

65. ABSOLUTELY FALSE -"Peer review tells us that...Pusztai performed shoddy research."

Vet your sources and seek robust redundancy among those fully vetted sources, or you just might be completely misinformed.

http://www.psrast.org/indmanipsci2.htm

BioMedNet
BOOK REVIEW: http://news.bmn.com/hmsbeagle/109/reviews/review (inactive)

Trust Us, We're Experts
How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future
by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber

Reviewed by Sibylle Hechtel PhD
Posted August 31, 2001 · Issue 109

It's not often you read a book that dramatically changes your outlook or opinions. Most books amuse, entertain, or inform. Trust Us, We're Experts shocks. It easily could lead the uninitiated to question their assumptions about "facts" and "truth" in the marketplace.

Authors Rampton and Stauber of the Center for Media and Democracy ( http://www.prwatch.org/cmd ) chronicle the history of public relations...

I was particularly appalled at the story of scientist Arpad Pusztai. Pusztai identified troubling results in rats fed genetically modified potatoes. When he announced his findings, his bosses at the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland, suspended him (he soon retired) and discredited his research. Before reading this account, I had believed the official version: Pusztai did shoddy research. But this book indicates that Pusztai's work was fine - its only fault was that it went against major commercial interests.

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The authors recount similar cases in which millions of dollars were paid to PR companies by corporations whose interests ranged from the food and restaurant businesses to the oil and chemical industries. The issues involved industrial diseases and work-related illnesses; safety and risk assessment; and the impact of organochlorines such as DDT, PCBs, and dioxin, chemicals that can disrupt hormone metabolism.

Rampton and Stauber continue with a description of the battle between environmentalists and the biotech food industry. They note that many of the world's largest chemical corporations, such as Monsanto, Novartis, Hoechst, Pharmacia, Dow Chemical, and DuPont, shifted their investments from chemicals to food and pharmaceuticals. The investigative journalists conclude that "government regulators are not presently functioning to safeguard the public's best interest." As an obvious example of abuse, they cite the story of one regulator, a former Monsanto attorney, who helped draft an FDA policy and later left the FDA to return to work for Monsanto.

Trust Us, We're Experts also considers the effect of big money on universities and scientific journals, describing instances in which tobacco companies paid 13 scientists $156,000 to write letters to influential medical journals. Chapter 9 looks at the concept of "junk science," a self-serving term coined by corporate attorneys, lobbyists, PR firms, and industry-funded "think tanks" to discredit scientific and medical studies that might threaten corporate profits.

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Before reading this book, I was an enthusiastic supporter of biotechnology and genetically modified (GM) foods. Now I'm not so sure. Last summer, I debated GM foods with a fervent opponent. I argued that they could provide vitamin A in rice for developing nations, and produce bananas that could be used as vaccines for children in the third world. I still find these goals desirable, but I'm now more skeptical. I ascribed distrust of GM foods to ignorance or technophobia. After reading this book, I fear that my enthusiastic support resulted partly from ignorance - not of the science, but of the politics.

This book, which is well researched and includes 33 pages of footnotes and references, is an excellent primer for readers not familiar with the manipulation of public opinion. A major strength is its help in directing readers to relevant information, and instruction on how to investigate problems affecting local communities.

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http://www.prwatch.org/news/2007/03/5899/shaping-message-distorting-science

Shaping the Message, Distorting the Science
by Sheldon Rampton — March 27, 2007 - 3:13pm

Mr. Rampton goes to Washington

I've been asked to deliver testimony this Wednesday before the Committee on Science and Technology of the U.S. House of Representatives, which is holding a hearing titled "Shaping the Message, Distorting the Science: Media Strategies to Influence Science Policy."

http://www.prwatch.org/books/experts.html

If you want to know how the world wags, and who's wagging it, here's your answer. Read, get mad, roll up your sleeves, and fight back. Rampton and Stauber have issued a wake-up call we can't ignore."
--Bill Moyers

Trust Us, We're Experts
How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future
by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber

Now In Paperback!
Publisher: Tarcher/Penguin

Bookstore price: $14.95 U.S./$21.99 Canada
ISBN 1-58542-139-1

Ask for it in your local bookstore or order it directly. To order by mail, send $20/book (includes postage & handling) to: CMD, 520 University Avenue, Suite 260, Madison, WI 53703.

We count on the experts. We count on them to tell us who to vote for, what to eat, how to raise our children. We watch them on TV, listen to them on the radio, read their opinions in magazine and newspaper articles and letters to the editor. We trust them to tell us what to think, because there's too much information out there and not enough hours in a day to sort it all out.

We should stop trusting them right this second.

In their new book, Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future, Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber offer a chilling exposé on the manufacturing of "independent experts." Public relations firms and corporations have seized upon a slick new way of getting you to buy what they have to sell: Let you hear it from a neutral "third party," like a professor or a pediatrician or a soccer mom or a watchdog group. The problem is, these third parties are usually anything but neutral. They have been handpicked, cultivated, and meticulously packaged to make you believe what they have to say--preferably in an "objective" format like a news show or a letter to the editor. And in some cases, they have been paid handsomely for their "opinions."

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