GMO coverage in the media today is where climate change reporting was from the late 1980s until the early 2000s, a period when many news stories contained what is known as “false balance.”
That is to say that mainstream media articles on climate science generally gave the impression that the evidence for global warming was still being debated by scientists, when it wasn’t. But many stories on climate science findings included the opinions of climate skeptics who represent a tiny minority in the field. Thus there were two sides in a given story, what later became known as “false equivalence.”
We see something similar today with stories about GMOs, which tend to have health related angles, because of the various GMO labeling initiatives proposed in numerous states. Although there is an overwhelming scientific consensus that genetically modified foods pose no harm to public health, that is not the impression you would get from the tenor of many stories, be they at some respected journalism outlets such as Reuters or on popular TV talk shows such as Dr.Oz. Indeed, much of this coverage suggests that the safety issue is still an open question, debated hotly by scientists, when this is not true at all. Similar to the coverage of the climate change ‘controversy’ more than a decade ago, many sloppy or biased reporters pass off a smattering of outliers and GMO opponents as legitimate scientific experts.
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