The Washington Post won lasting acclaim for its bold investigation of the 1972 break-in at Democratic National Headquarters that led directly to the White House and ended with the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.  The reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein under the guidance of legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee is undisputedly a pinnacle of American journalism.  But the “Watergate Affair,” as it was known, proved to be an anomaly whose legacy was lost in a decades-long wave of corporate takeovers that culminated with just five corporations owning roughly 90% of all media outlets.  

In this climate of consolidation, investigative reporters, science writers and ombudsmen began to disappear, and over time the journalistic watchdog became a lapdog.  When Ben Bradlee died last October, Post editors spent page after page reminding readers of the golden moment in American journalism that was Watergate and the central role that the Post played.   But that message was lost on a growing number of skeptics who believe that the Fourth Estate has evolved into what Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges calls a “class of courtiers that captivates us with the hollow stagecraft of political theater” and in the name of journalism “ignores what the corporate state wants ignored.”

One of the biggest beneficiaries of this paradigm shift has been the biotechnology industry, or big bio-tech, whose genetically modification of agriculture (GMOs) swept across the U.S. like a prairie fire during the 90s and now stands poised to dominate world markets.  But the engineering of food is an imprecise technology that has been long on promise and short on delivery.  GE food got a pass thanks to the wishful thinking of greedy politicians at the highest levels of government eager to fast-track it without considering the consequences.  Today, the government, its regulatory agencies and the media simply stand aside while lobbyists buy the influence of revolving door regulators who have the industry’s back and the votes of Congressmen who override or simply sidestep safety and environmental concerns.  

Because of a news diet over-weighted with celebrity gossip, scandals, and endless distraction stories, few Americans until relatively recently knew little about GMOs other than that they are supposedly needed to “feed the world.”  Over the years, many FDA scientists raised safety concerns about the science, and its value.  But political expedience trumped caution, and in 1992 “substantial equivalence” replaced the long entrenched “precautionary principle,” paving the way for commercialization of GE foods, which public interest attorney Steven Druker calls “the greatest fraud in U.S. history.”  In “Altered Genes, Twisted Truth: How the Venture to Genetically Engineer Our Food Has Subverted Science, Corrupted Government, and Systematically Deceived the Public,” Druker documents how the FDA covered up the warnings of its own scientists, repeatedly lied, and deliberately broke the law in enabling GE food to flood the market without any vetting.
Many critics believe that glysopohate, the broad-spectrum systemic herbicide marketed as Roundup that’s key to GE crop production, harms both our health and the environment.  Because of the government-media-industry alliance, however, safety questions have gone unchallenged and GE crop production has exploded. According to the USDA, it now constitute 93% of all soy and 94% of all corn grown in the U.S, most of which is processed into the packaged foods found on grocery stores shelves.

Despite assurances in mainstream newspapers that GMOs are safe, consumers remain skeptical and, according to polls, the vast majority wants them labeled.  But because grocery ads easily account for the lion’s share of the 69% in ad revenue that the Pew Research Center says that the average U.S. newspaper takes in, and critics argue that this guides news coverage and editorial content.  The result has been in blackouts of newsworthy items such as the May 23 March on Monsanto, which took place in 428 cities in 38 countries, and a scarcity of news and op-eds critical of the technology. My own piece on “the myths and truths of GMOs” was finally killed without explanation 13 months after it was assigned vetted and accepted by the Washington Post.  
GMO advocacy is not just limited to editorial pages.  The 47% drop in newspaper ad revenue between 2005 and 2011 and staff cutbacks of 25% between 2006 and 2009 seems to have translated into more clout for advertisers who stuck around.  In the case of biotech, that meant not only running articles favorable to the technology but routinely dismissing critics of it as “anti-science,” often in concert with industry front groups.  
Some journalists have refused to march in lockstep, beginning with award winning reporters Steve Wilson and Jane Akre who set out in 1997 to expose the problems associated with rBGH bovine growth hormone milk in the debut segment of their television show, “The Investigators.” But a fax sent by an attorney representing GMO giant Monsanto that warned of “dire” consequences if the heavily documented, four-part series aired frightened Fox station WTVT in Clearwater, Fl. into pulling it and eventually firing Wilson and Akre.  Their smack down imposed an ominous silence among reporters that foreshadowed broad acceptance of rBGH here in the U.S.  But Monsanto encountered unexpected difficulty in marketing the hormone abroad after Health Canada scientist Dr. Shiv Chopra turned down a $1 to $2 million bribe to rubber stamp and fast track it north of the border and instead went public with his inauspicious findings.  Dr. Chopra’s lost his job and his career of 35 years for speaking out, but because of the uproar from his revelations rBGH was never approved in Canada and elsewhere. Today, the U.S is the only country in the world where it is legal.  Meanwhile, only a handful of mainstream journalists report critically about GMOs.  Earlier this year, Monsanto tried without success to have one of them, Carey Gillam, fired from her job of 16 years covering agriculture for Reuters.