Is the Russian media waging an anti-GMO campaign?
In an attempt to cast doubt into the minds of Americans about the safety of GMOs and agricultural practices in the United States, Russia’s major news outlets have focused their efforts on portraying GMOs in a negative light, according to Iowa State University researchers Shawn Dorius and Carolynn Lawrence-Dill.
In an attempt to cast doubt into the minds of Americans about the safety of GMOs and agricultural practices in the United States, Russia’s major news outlets have focused their efforts on portraying GMOs in a negative light, according to Iowa State University researchers Shawn Dorius and Carolynn Lawrence-Dill.
“Our preliminary investigation suggests that two Russian state-news agencies (RT and Sputnik), a) promote more GMO news than the several U.S. news agencies we considered, and b) that the coverage of GMOs in Russian state news was far more negative that what we observed in U.S. news,” commented Dorius to IFT.
In a draft of the study, Dorius and Lawrence-Dill report that English-language coverage of GMOs in the Russian news media, “fits the profile of the Russian information warfare strategy described in recent military reports. This raises the question of whether Russia views the dissemination of anti-GMO information as just one of many divisive issues it can exploit as part of its information war, or if GMOs serve more expansive disruptive purposes.”
Compared with the U.S. media, Russian news agencies RT and Russian News (Sputnik) generated an overwhelming amount of coverage that “strongly implicates Russian News as a central, if largely unknown, purveyor of anti-GMO information,” say the researchers. “Our analysis found that RT and Sputnik produced more articles containing the word ‘GMO’ (53%) than the other five news organization combined. RT accounted for 34% of the articles we scraped, followed by Sputnik (19%), Huffington Post (18%), Fox News (15%), CNN (8%), Breitbart News (6%), and MSNBC (<1%).”
In their initial reviews of Russian News, Dorius and Lawrence-Dill identified three notable features of Russian News coverage, namely, that articles reflect similar concerns to those observed in user comments on U.S.-based news reporting, that GMOs were almost always presented negatively, and that many articles mentioning GMOs had little to do with genetic engineering but introduced the topic tangentially, as click bait.
“GMO click bait occurred in articles focused on topics generally considered negative or distasteful to most people, an indication that the insertions were designed to create latent associations between GMOs and negative emotions,” write the researchers in the study. “For example, in an RT article entitled ‘Complex abortion debate emerges over Zika virus-infected fetuses,’ GMO click bait appears near the end via a link to ‘READ MORE: GMO mosquitoes could be cause of Zika outbreak, critics say.’”
If the campaign is successful, it could help serve Russian economic and political interests. Agriculture is the second largest sector of the Russian economy, according to the researchers, who point out that “Russia appears intent on presenting itself as the healthier and more environmentally responsible alternative to genetically modified U.S. agriculture: a position with clear implications for trans-Atlantic relations. Anti-GMO messaging is a wedge issue not only within the United States, but also between the United States and its European allies, many of whom are deeply skeptical of GMOs. In short, stirring the anti-GMO pot would serve a great many of Russia’s political, economic, and military objectives.”
In addition, if Russian propaganda is successful, it may hold a more serious threat. Speaking with IFT about the implications for food science, Dorius said, “If public opinion were to become strongly critical of biotechnology, that might lead to decreases in biotech research funding, changes in food regulations, and changes to the larger food production system.”