Monsanto Internal documents—130 pages of them—reveal how in 2013 (the year following the California ballot initiative to require labels on GMOs), the poison-maker hired Ketchum PR―the public relations firm for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russian natural gas giant Gazprom and many governments known for human rights abuses―to help the company “reboot” its image.
In a blog post published that same year, the CEO of another big PR firm, Edelman, said:
“We have some clients that pay us $100,000 or so per year, some clients that pay us more than $100,000 per week and many clients that pay us $100,000 or so per month.”
Monsanto’s “reboot” campaign encompassed a massive effort to discredit scientists, journalists and anyone else critical of Monsanto and GMOs.
We can only imagine what a campaign like the one Monsanto hired Ketchum to run cost—and how much influence it bought.
But just imagine how much good all that money could do in the world, if it were put to better use?
Organizations like ours will never have the staff or financial resources to run a comparable counter-campaign to the ones run by companies like Monsanto.
But with your support, we’ll keep up the pressure on Monsanto, and the media, to tell the truth.
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