The Monsanto Company has made headlines for all the wrong reasons in recent days, but which of those headlines you’ve actually seen depends on whether or not you get your news from sources considered to be mainstream.
Because of the sheer magnitude of a new study published by the World Health Organization on the chemical glyphosate, the most recent Monsanto-related headline managed to find its way onto most of the United States’ biggest news websites.
‘WHO Report Links Ingredient in Roundup to Cancer,’ the The New York Times’ website reported on March 20, with similar stories appearing on NBCNews.com, FoxNews.com, and The Wall Street Journal‘s website among other mainstream giants (CNN.com has ignored it so far).
But a bombshell news story affecting America’s 8th largest city and the Monsanto Company went completely ignored by all five of these top media outlets and more, raising plenty of questions as to why.
A Tale of Two Headlines: Monsanto’s Roundup (with the active ingredient glyphosate) on the left, San Diego Bay on the right.
San Diego Sues Monsanto (But Who Actually Noticed?)
The headline ‘The City of San Diego is Suing Monsanto for Poisoning its Marine Life and Polluting its Bay’ and similar variations have been published on countless “alternative” and non-mainstream news outlets, and yet the mainstream media’s main audience has been kept in the dark.
Unless they happened to see it on their Facebook feeds or on lesser known websites and social media, odds are that most Americans haven’t heard about the lawsuit, which alleges widespread, ongoing contamination of one of America’s most beautiful areas from a company notorious for committing similar acts in other cities and leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.
The San Diego lawsuit was not even covered on the websites of CNN, The New York Times, Fox News, NBC News, and the Wall Street Journal (or even on the website of the city’s biggest newspaper, The San Diego Union-Tribune, which has reported on San Diego Bay contamination in the past but not on the lawsuit against Monsanto).
And though mainstream websites that began as alternative outlets like Yahoo! and HuffingtonPost are usually much more diligent at covering the issues of genetically modified food and the agrochemical industry fairly, neither has covered the San Diego lawsuit story.
Altogether these represent the most popular online news outlets in the country (along with ABC News and The Washington Post which did not publish a story either), and yet they still have yet to cover the landmark San Diego lawsuit.
Why they omitted the San Diego story is anyone’s guess, but one thing’s for sure: Monsanto dodged a major bullet when America’s top online news outlets completely ignored a story that would have added up to a double whammy of bad publicity that any company would leave any company reeling, let alone one that already has a reputation for this sort of thing.
Thanks for reading! Don’t forget you can also post on the Facebook pages of these news outlets asking why they refused to cover the San Diego story; this approach has been successful in the past.
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About Nick Meyer
