Battle over GM foods

‘Clinton attacks Europe for moving too slowly over GM safety’ said The Independent on 24 July. ‘Blair stands by Clinton in defence of GM food’ said The Daily Telegraph. Marking the end of the G8 summit in Okinawa, these and other headlines were not necessarily contradictory. They were certainly very varied. Do they, perhaps, reflect a shift towards less strident certainty than that which has characterised UK media coverage of GM food over the past two years? Sometimes the style in which the press decides not to cover an issue is as significant as what it does do. On this occasion, for example, the Daily Express and Daily Mail restricted themselves to pedestrian, insidepage reporting of President Clinton and Tony Blair’s comments. Clinton had extolled the health benefits of rice rich in vitamin A, and Blair had talked of biotechnology being as important in this century as information technology in the last. Yet these were the same newspapers which had, as recently as May 17 and 19 respectively, devoted their entire front pages to ‘Storm as GM crops wreck honey’ and ‘The seeds of deceit’. Since Arpad Pusztai’s original claims regarding potential toxicity of GM food (Curr Biol 1998 8:R630), the two mid-market tabloids have produced many memorable screamers, ranging from ‘Mutant crops could kill you’ (The Express) to ‘GM foods: how Blair ignored our top scientists’ (Daily Mail). Another indication of a shifting mood is the appearance of television programmes carefully examining the alleged dangers of GM crops and found them unproven. ‘The attack of the killer tomatoes’ shown by Channel 4 last year, plus a more recent Equinox, eschewed the political correctness of automatic opposition to GM and simply questioned the basis of assertions about the toxicity of such foods and the risks of cultivating them. As with the news desks of newspapers, all media gatekeepers make judgements on story lines they intuitively believe will find favour with their customers. They have little or no time to examine ‘the facts’. So while most journalists reject the idea that they pursue prescribed angles in their day-to-day enquiries (they may be reporting on a pro-hunting speech one day and on an opposing talk the next), the media writ large undoubtedly do have agendas.