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Agricultural giant Monsanto has spent much of the last decade attempting to polish its public image amid campaigns to label genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and horrifying stories about how the company treats anyone who might get in its way. In 2013, it enlisted Ketchum PR ― the public relations firm for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Russian natural gas giant Gazprom and many governments known for human rights abuses ― to help. To reboot the national dialogue, Ketchum created a campaign called GMO Answers, and used social media and third-party scientists to offer a counternarrative to allay concern about Monsanto’s products. HuffPost has acquired 130 pages of internal documents from an anonymous source that detail the campaign and its tactics for enhancing Monsanto’s public image ― tactics that include developing close relationships with one writer in particular that seem to have paid off for the company. (Bayer bought Monsanto in 2018.) At the time Ketchum launched GMO Answers, Tamar Haspel was a blogger and health writer who had written several pieces supportive of the GMO industry on HuffPost and other sites. Haspel posted a piece enthusiastically promoting the new campaign and was one of the first people to submit a question to the GMO Answers website.

Later that year, Haspel, an oyster farmer living on Massachusetts’ Cape Cod, got a new gig writing a food column for The Washington Post. In her column, she has regularly promoted genetically modified foods and downplayed the dangers of chemicals, even quoting from Ketchum and the third-party scientists that agrichemical companies promote to offer a contrary take. Those companies have in turn amplified Haspel’s work and raised her profile. Behind the scenes, Ketchum’s documents show a reporter eager to collaborate with the firm and promote its new campaign ― and Ketchum happy to foster that relationship. (This reporter has donated the130 pages of Ketchummaterial to the Industry Documents Library at the University of California, San Francisco.) Another page discusses GMO Answers’ “earned media” and a plan for “ongoing development of relationships” with Haspel — the only media person mentioned by name — as well as outlets The Motley Fool and Politico. SUBSCRIBE AND FOLLOW Get the top stories emailed every day. Newsletters may offer personalized content or advertisements. Privacy Policy Newsletter Please enter a valid email address Thank you for signing up! You should receive an email to confirm your subscription shortly. There was a problem processing your signup; please try again later Twitter

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Flipboard For many who have been suspicious of Haspel’s relationship with agrichemical giants, the documents are further evidence that she’s too close to the industry she writes about and that her prominent column at The Washington Post provides a perch to spread misleading information about agriculture and the food we eat. At the very least, they offer a behind-the-scenes look at how public relations specialists work to shape public perception through their interactions with journalists. “Tamar tries to sell herself as this simple oyster farmer, but she clearly leans toward industry,”said Michael Hansen, a senior staff scientist at Consumer Reports. “She uses science as a cudgel: ‘Science says X, and anyone who says differently is not being scientific.’”

An Emerging Pattern Haspel began her Post columns in October 2013, promising to “negotiate the schism and nail down the hard, cold facts” about GMOs. These columns have been sympathetic to the agrichemical industry, promoting GMO products and commodity crops, downplaying the dangers of toxic substances and pesticides, and finding fault with organic agriculture. Among them, a column cites the potential of genetically modified mosquitoes to help control dengue fever and GMO cows that could slow the spread of African sleeping sickness. In both examples, there’s no clear evidence that they work — the GMO cow never even seems to have been engineered — but Haspel projects their benefits as scientific fact. Haspel tried to downplay the dangers of glyphosate — the pesticide that many GMO crops have been designed to tolerate and that the International Agency for Research on Cancer has said is a probable human carcinogen — in an October 2015 column. However, she did not disclose that one of her sources, Keith Solomon, was a consultant for Monsanto who had previously been criticized for his work defending another crop science giant, Syngenta, on the pesticide atrazine. After Haspel’s column, Solomon was later accused of having Monsanto ghostwrite studies for him and other scientists on glyphosate. Meanwhile, internal emails show an increasingly friendly relationship between Haspel and Monsanto’s representatives and third-party scientists. In a 2015 email to University of Florida professor Kevin Folta, Haspel wrote that she just promoted a talk by him on Twitter and relayed an anecdote about a panel on science communication: “One of my panelists was from Monsanto (Janice Person), and when I asked the audience what was the last issue on which you changed your mind, one of them said, ‘I think I just changed my mind about Monsanto.’” “It’s possible to make some headway,” Haspel noted, “but I’m convinced it’s by person-to-person interaction.”

Brent Stirton via Getty Images Monsanto agribusiness greenhouses on top of a research building in St. Louis in 2009.

At the time, Folta was putting together one of multiple industry-funded events he has helped organize to discuss GMOs and the pesticide glyphosate. Haspel was one of his favorite speakers, and he emailed her a schedule, to which Haspel responded, expressing excitement about meeting one of the attendees, Monsanto spokesperson Vance Crowe. “Very much looking forward to this,” Haspel wrote. “I’ve wanted to meet Vance Crowe ― very glad he’ll be there.” A few months after the conference, The New York Times exposed Folta in a Sept. 5, 2015, front-page story for hiding his financial ties to Monsanto and becoming part of the company’s lobbying campaign. Haspel later emailed a bizarre apology to Folta: “I am very sorry for what you’ve gone through, and it’s distressing when mean-spirited, partisan attacks overshadow the real issues — both on the science and on the transparency, both of which are so important.” When Ketchum partnered with Scientific American in 2016 to host discussions on science communications, HuffPost reported that Haspel was one of the three journalists chosen to speak on a panel. A January 2016 Haspel column cites Ketchum’s research to suggest that the food movement — a developing concept that essentially argues activists and young foodies are seeking healthier, locally, and more responsibly grown food — isn’t much of a movement at all and that most people aren’t overly concerned about GMOs and pesticides. Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), who runs an organic farm, co-wrote a rebuttal with Anna Lappe, a best-selling food author and co-founder of the Small Planet Institute. Lappe said they wrote the rebuttal not just because Haspel’s writing on organic agriculture is often “ridiculous” and “wrong,” but because the journalist misconstrued the Ketchum study itself. In fact, PR Week reached the opposite conclusion from Haspel’s, deeming the study as evidence that food evangelists could no longer be considered a small group, as their numbers had increased by 10% in just two years. Haspel shot back at her critics in a later interview: “If you want to know what consumers really think and care about, a firm like Ketchum is who you want to hear from, because they live and die by getting it right. I repeatedly asked, ‘Do you have any data that contradicts it?’ In all the controversy, I didn’t see any contradictory data.” Haspel did not respond to several questions, but she sent a statement saying she lists her speaking gigs and has written columns critical of the industry. (Her policy on this is posted on her personal website, as is a list of past speaking engagements.) She noted that the author of this piece has sent tweets critical of her writing and stated, “I’m perfectly happy to have readers infer my views from my writing and public comment; but it has to be the whole body of my work.” “The problem isn’t just about Tamar Haspel,” Lappe said, “but she is a symptom of a broader problem: the lack of robust journalism as industry front groups shape public narratives.”