As soon as I saw the interview, I knew it was dynamite. So I wrote a piece flagging up the amazing 45-second volley of exchanges, and the video quickly went viral.

According to Newsweek:

“The Internet went wild this week when a video emerged of a man named Patrick Moore bombastically offering to drink a controversial Monsanto herbicide then quickly refusing when a French journalist offered him a glass of the stuff. By Friday morning, the video was trending on Facebook and many news outlets sounded the alarm: ‘Watch a Monsanto Lobbyist Claim a Weed Killer Is Safe to Drink but Then Refuse to Drink It,’ read Time’s headline.”

Monsanto distances itself from Moore

Because Time, like many others, jumped to the understandable conclusion that he must be in Monsanto’s employ, the company was forced to issue a public statement putting as much distance as it could between themselves and Moore. No, Moore was not an employee. No, it was not a good idea to drink their glyphosate weedkiller. This of course only served to spread the story still further.

In the resulting furore, a lot of attention has been focused on Moore and his curious background. Newsweek, for instance, noted his (long gone) Greenpeace past, his vocal denial of man-made climate change, and his controversial work for Asian Pulp & Paper, an Indonesian company derided for, among other things, “threatening endangered Sumatran orangutan and tiger habitats”.

But almost no attention has been given to the journalist who so brilliantly exposed the hollowness of Moore’s claims. I decided to put that right by interviewing him and finding out exactly how the Moore interview came about.

What Paul Moreira had to tell me puts Moore in an even worse light than the video that went viral. It also gives the lie to the distance the industry is now trying to create between itself and Moore.

Who is Paul Moreira?

Moreira began his journalistic career back in 1985 when he went to work for Radio France Internationale. Three years later he went freelance, working for publications like Politis, Current and Libération-Magazine, as he covered the Romanian revolution, the end of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the war of the favelas in Brazil.

In 1995, he moved into television, eventually becoming a leading investigative journalist for Canal Plus, and the work of Moreira’s team won several prestigious awards. In 2006, he left in order to produce his own films – films like Iraq: The Agony of a Nation, which won the award for best documentary at the 47th International Television Festival of Monte Carlo. His production company Premières Lignes has become renowned for its hard-hitting documentaries, including his recent one on GM crops, from which the interview with Moore was taken.

Outside environmental circles, Moore often gets a pretty easy ride from journalists who take at face value his confident statements and his easy narrative of the no-nonsense ecologist who rejects the agenda-driven claims of the green movement. But in Moreira, Moore came up against not just a highly experienced and canny investigative journalist, but also one who was well-informed about the issues under discussion.