Special Report - Online activists are silencing us, scientists say Reuters March 2019

Not sure what you mean, but maybe I should have phrased my question differently, as in with quotation marks, or as in rhetorical.

 

Here's more on the Kelland/Monsanto story, for anyone that's interested. I thought the last couple of paragraphs were particularly relevant, (and they support what @JaimeS just wrote about why Reuters turns a blind eye)...

"And finally, in an odd exclusion, the story fails to disclose that Kelland herself has at least tangential ties to Monsanto and friends. Kelland has helped promote an organization called the Science Media Centre, a group whose aim is to connect certain scientists such as Tarone with journalists like Kelland, and which gets its largest block of funding from corporations that include the agrichemical industry. Current and past funders include Monsanto, Monsanto's proposed merger partner Bayer AG, DuPont and agrichemical industry lobbyist CropLife International. Kelland appears in a promotional video for SMC touting the group and authored an essay applauding the SMC that appeared in a SMC promotional report.

As a Reuters reporter for 17 years (1998-2015), I know the value of an "exclusive." The more such scoops a reporter garners, the more bonus points and high praise from editors. It's a system seen in many news agencies and it works great when it encourages dogged, investigative journalism. But powerful corporations like Monsanto also know how eager reporters are to land exclusives and know that handing favored journalists cherry-picked information with the promise of exclusivity can serve their public relations needs quite well. Follow up the hand-fed story with a press release from an industry-funded outlet and calls for an investigation from the industry group American Chemistry Council and you have propaganda gold."​

 

You don't have to quote GM Watch. The story originally came from Le Monde 31 Jan 2019 (paywall, and in French of course).

https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/arti...pecialiste-des-infos-en-kit_5417225_3244.html

 

First tweet using archive.today link:
https://twitter.com/user/status/1105972934202535937

 

Good find!

 

Please stop it with the conspiracy theories already - it's not helpful. Kelland did seem to handle the glyphosate story responsibly. Sometimes journalists get it right, and sometimes they get it wrong.

 

Those bullet points are a great summary of where we are. Love it.

 

I've got no idea whether Kelland's other work has problems with it or not, but I think it's well worth sticking to the areas where we're 100% certain that we're right.

 

For the SMC's tenth anniversary hoo-hah, Kate wrote a testimonial about how helpful the organization was when she covered the Japan nuclear accident. Basically, she acknowledged outsourcing her independent editorial judgement to the SMC. Why bother finding your own sources when the SMC provides better ones?:

"The SMC made that happen. We could not have done it without them. Yes, we could have gone through the same motions, and certainly we could have made the same number of phone calls and asked the same questions every day. But I have no doubt that the people we would have talked to would have had less credibility and fewer answers. Our sources would have been less intelligent, less scrutinised, and less newsworthy."

 

Imagine what it's like to wake up on the other side of the earth with 160 posts to read and counting!

 

I don't think looking at Kelland's other work is conspiracy mongering, though I would agree to stick to the facts.

 

Exactly how the Franco - Prussian war started. Bismarck selectively edited a telegram to make it insulting.
Some things don' t change.

 

This link will show you all the tweets that link to the article. A lot of people have done so:
https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets.../special-report/science-socialmedia/&src=typd

 

@Arnie Pye

Incredible that TB is still studied as being caused by personality flaws - and these people get funding? Taxpayers' dollars? And, teach their theories, and effect public policy? Let's hope not with this last one!

But good grief!

 

I agree. The article comes across as being very poorly written because it's choppy and there's no flow to it. My first thought was to wonder if the lawyers had done some extensive pruning of anything that might be construed as being too libellous.

 

@Barry

Thank you for your comment re the deconditioning portion of PS theory of ME being the biomedical part. I am aware of their theory.

Amazing that on the one hand they have said all the symptoms of ME are just due to deconditioning, and
on the other, have also denied any of these
symptoms exist for pwME.

They seem to say whatever, whichever way the wind blows, as long as they stick within the PS parameters.

 

"Shaken by the Reuters article, IARC defended the integrity of its scientific approach. Its rules, explained the agency, require that it does not consider unpublished results, "be they those of the AHS or any other study". Its expert groups base their work exclusively on openly published studies, most of which appear in scientific journals and have thus passed through the filter of peer review.

The update of the AHS was finally published in November 2017.

After the recent revelation of this correspondence between the lobbyist and Kelland, Christopher Wild, at the time the director of IARC, reacted on Twitter on January 28. Noting that the journalist had won a prize for her "misleading" article, the researcher asked if it would be withdrawn.

But in response to Le Monde's questions, Reuters said it was "convinced that the article constitutes a complete, fair and accurate representation of the facts, including in the attribution of the cited legal documents".