Slate’s William Saletan Shows How It’s Done Son

There’s been no shortage of journalists of late flacking for the pesticide and junk food industries regarding genetically engineered foods, aka Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). This coincides with the massive industry PR push behind the Safe and Affordable Food Labeling (SAFE) Act, ie. the Deny Americans the Right to Know (DARK) Act, which will stop states from requiring disclosure of GMO foods. Easily fooled and blind to their bias, these journalists focus on irrational or fringe elements in the movement to label GMO foods, celebrate commercially insignificant examples of GMOs, and cover up that over 90 percent of GMO food acreage is engineered by chemical companies to survive huge doses of weed killer. Rather than sound the alarm that the pesticide industry’s new 2,4 D herbicide-tolerant GMO crops were recently greenlighted for planting this spring by industry-friendly regulators, these journalists fail to even mention these same crops are destined for our dinner plates this fall.

William Saletan of Slate, prominent spoon-fed banger of drums in support of war in Iraq, recently stepped up to show fellow media lackeys how best to swallow and regurgitate pesticide and junk food talking points on GMOs, and advised Americans they don’t need to know what they eat and feed their families. In his article, “Unhealthy Fixation” Saletan states:

“If you’re like me, you don’t really want to wade into this issue. It’s too big, technical, and confusing. But come with me, just this once. I want to take you backstage, behind those blanket assurances about the safety of genetic engineering. I want to take you down into the details of four GMO fights, because that’s where you’ll find truth. You’ll come to the last curtain, the one that hides the reality of the anti-GMO movement. And you’ll see what’s behind it.”

He then spends 5,000+ words discussing genetically engineered virus-resistant papaya that represents less than 0.001 percent of GMO crop acreage worldwide, and beta-carotene-enriched genetically engineered rice that represents exactly zero percent. Only at the end of the article does Saletan devote any attention to the real concern driving the modern GMO labeling movement: that pesticide companies are engineering major food crops to survive huge volumes of the toxic weed killers they sell. And even then he lays down pesticide industry spin that glyphosate — the main herbicide GMOs are engineered to tolerate whose use has skyrocketed on food — is “safer,” even though the World Health Organization determined earlier this year that glyphosate is a “probable carcinogen” (which he alludes to only by hyperlink without explicitly stating and interfering with his argument.) Even more egregiously, he fails to state that the pesticide industry’s next generation “stacked” herbicide-tolerant GMO crops also tolerate huge amounts of 2,4 D, an older herbicide and known toxic component of Agent Orange, along with glyphosate.