A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine on GE crops and technology was met with cheers from the biotech industry, but little meaningful scrutiny by the mainstream media. Initial media reports boiled the message down to “GMOs Are Safe” and “healthy,” some even claiming that the study “proves” the safety of genetically modified crops.

Aside from the obvious—that the headlines oversimplify the NAS findings in a way that spins favorable for the biotech industry—the media also overlooked the influence, as reported by Food & Water Watch, of the biotech industry on the National Research Council (NRC), the research arm of NAS.

According to F&WW, NRC takes millions of dollars in funding from biotechnology companies; invites sponsors like Monsanto to sit on high-level boards overseeing NRC’s work; invites industry-aligned, pro-GMO scientists to author NRC reports; draws scientific conclusions based on industry science; and operates at times as a private contractor for corporate research.

A NAS spokesman defended the report, telling the Washington Post that NAS didn’t appoint anyone from the biotech industry to the committee, didn’t use any money from the industry to fund the study and that all committee members were required to disclose any potential conflicts of interest.

Biased or not, and despite the positive spin by most media outlets, the report’s “conclusions” left plenty of room for doubt on a range of issues, from safety, to improved yields, to damage to the environment. On many issues, the committee, made up of 20 scientists and policy experts, couldn’t—or wouldn’t—commit. Instead the experts produced a 400-page report full of equivocations, and of recommendations the committee knows will be ignored, but not much clarity.

Here are three takeaways from the NAS report.

1. GMOs are safe, but…

Media spin aside, here’s how the Washington Post summed up the NAS findings on whether or not GMOs are safe:

    No “substantiated” evidence exists that genetically engineered crops have caused health problems in humans or damaged the environment, but it’s too soon to be making broad statements, positive or negative, about laboratory-based manipulations of crop genomes, an elite panel of scientists concluded in a report Tuesday.

Saying there’s no evidence that GMOs harm human health or the environment isn’t the same thing as saying GMOs are safe, a fact the committee chair admitted at a press briefing, according to a UPI report:

    “Absence of evidence is not absence of effect,” Dr. Fred Gould, a professor at North Carolina State University and chair of the Committee on Genetically Engineered Crops, told UPI. “We’re very clear to point out that with very subtle long term health effects, it’s really difficult to point out such a thing.”

What the report actually says is that it’s too soon to make that determination. Maybe that wouldn’t be the case if GMOs had been required to undergo pre-market safety testing 20 years ago. Instead, they were unleashed, untested, into the environment and into the food stream, on the basis of proprietary industry-funded testing.

The NAS also overlooks the fact that there is massive published evidence in the public domain that GMOs and the toxic chemicals that always accompany them are dangerous—to human health, to animals, the environment and climate stability.

The report also warns against making “sweeping generalizations.” Again this summary from the Washington Post, which sounds more equivocal than the media headlines would lead you to believe:

    Every newly introduced plant should undergo safety testing regardless of how it was created, the report states. But, it also says, the fact that previous GE crops have not caused health or environmental problems does not mean that all prospective GE plants should be presumed to be benign.