How The Atlantic got scammed by Monsanto shill Kevin Folta: Hit piece on the Food Babe used an exposed liar as its primary source... Will the publisher issue a retraction and apology?

Monday, September 14, 2015
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Tags: The Atlantic, Kevin Folta, bad journalism

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(NaturalNews) Before Univ. of Florida professor Kevin Folta was exposed as a Monsanto puppet and academic prostitute, he was widely quoted in mainstream media's attack stories on clean food activists like the Food Babe.

The Atlantic, in particular, bought into the Kevin Folta cover story hook, line and sinker. In this hit piece by James Hamblin, published in February of this year, The Atlantic gave Folta full rein to accuse the Food Babe of all sorts of dishonesty and hucksterism, all while Folta himself proclaimed he had absolutely no financial ties to Monsanto.

As we now know, Kevin Folta was lying. But The Atlantic didn't question his lies, and they printed them as fact. Even more, The Atlantic still doesn't question his lies and has so far refused to retract their stories citing Kevin Folta as their primary source.

"The most insane thing I've ever heard" - Kevin Folta responding to accusations that he has financial ties to Monsanto

From an article entitled The Food Babe: Enemy of Chemicals: (emphasis added)

[The Food Babe], likewise, accuses Folta of conflicts of interest through ties to Monsanto, specifically due to his involvement with a project called GMO Answers. He admits to having industry friends and open lines of communication with biotechnology companies, and he has spoken at Monsanto. He understands the job of the academic scientist to include helping farmers optimize whatever seeds they have "whether they come from Monsanto or Johnny's Organic Seeds in Vermont" -- where he'd also gladly speak. But he denies financial ties.

"I didn't work for 30 years in this business as a public scientist, at half the salary of what I could earn working for industry, so that I could sell out for some company," he explained. "She has called me a professor who works for Monsanto, which is the most insane thing I've ever heard. I work for the state of Florida. But she had to play that card to discredit me, because I'm hitting a little too close to home with her whole scam."

Got all that? Folta accuses the Food Babe of running a "scam" while insisting he's no scammer at all. He has no financial ties to Monsanto whatsoever, he claims. It's even "the most insane thing I've ever heard," he insists.

Fast forward to last week. The U.S. Right to Know campaign acquires Kevin Folta's university emails via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Those emails reveal Kevin Folta to be a paid-off academic prostitute for Monsanto, complete with him telling the Monsanto operatives, "I'm glad to sign on to whatever you like, or write whatever you like." (From Kevin Folta's emails, Oct. 23, 2014.)

Hilariously, this is not long after he personally sent an email to Vani Hari (the Food Babe), insisting, "I work as an independent, public scientist. Companies have no control of my research, my results or my opinions."

Among his many "benefits" from Monsanto, Folta even gets trips to Hawaii where all the hotel rooms are "prepaid by Monsanto." Wow. Must be nice.

In the same document dump, another university-related Monsanto shill declares, "It's a pleasure shilling with you." That was written by Camille (Cami) D. Ryan, B.Comm., Ph.D., Independent Research Consultant and Public Speaker, Professional Affiliate, Department of Bioresource Policy, Business & Economics College of Agriculture University of Saskatchewan Canada.

As Natural News reported last week, "Folta's email correspondence revealed that he accepted a $25,000 grant from Monsanto last year and was told that the money 'may be used at your discretion in support of your research and outreach projects.'"

Even The New York Times couldn't ignore the blatant academic fraud of Kevin Folta and his repeated lies to the media. As published last week in the NYT:

Dr. Folta is among the most aggressive and prolific biotech proponents, although until his emails were released last month, he had not publicly acknowledged the extent of his ties to Monsanto.

...A few weeks later, the Council for Biotechnology Information — controlled by BASF, Bayer, Dow Chemical, DuPont and Monsanto — asked Dr. Folta and other prominent academics if they would participate in a new website, GMO Answers, which was established to combat perceived misinformation about their products. The plan was to provide the academics with questions from the public, such as, "Do GMOs cause cancer?"

"This is a new way to build trust, dialogue and support for biotech in agriculture that will help explain in an independent voice what GMOs are," an executive at Ketchum wrote to Dr. Folta.

But Ketchum did more than provide questions. On several occasions, it also gave Dr. Folta draft answers, which he then used nearly verbatim, a step that he now says was a mistake.

The Atlantic relies on a Monsanto prostitute as their primary source, then fails to retract their defamatory "hit piece" articles on clean food activists

In other words, Kevin Folta lied to The Atlantic while flinging false accusations that James Hamblin worked into a hit piece on the Food Babe. The whole time, Folta was a Monsanto puppet, a fact that The Atlantic failed to ever mention.

Now maybe Hamblin, the author of the story, made an honest mistake. I'm not accusing him of being a Monsanto operative. It's reasonable to suspect that he's just a little too inexperienced in this realm to know when he's being exploited by a trained Monsanto operative. But if it was an honest mistake, then shouldn't the publisher apologize for it and correct the record?

Sadly, when Folta is now exposed as a total liar via his own recorded emails that he desperately hoped no one would uncover, The Atlantic does nothing. No retraction, no apology to the Food Babe, no updating of their article, nothing. Journalistic malpractice, anyone?

I ask all of you this simple question: How can The Atlantic even pretend to be engaged in journalism when they are so easily hoodwinked by a Monsanto operative, and then after the truth comes out, The Atlantic refuses to correct their own published stories based almost entirely on a proven academic liar!

Much like Kevin Folta himself, The Atlantic has some serious explaining to do if they hope to retain any semblance of journalistic credibility. How were they so easily scammed by a Monsanto operative? And why didn't they correct their story when the truth came out?

Join Natural News in calling for The Atlantic to issue a retraction and an apology to The Food Babe

In the world of science, when a scientist is found to have lied about his research, the academic journals retract the published studies. Now that Kevin Folta has been exposed as a Monsanto operative who falsely denied having ties to Monsanto, Natural News is publicly calling for The Atlantic to issue a retraction of all their stories quoting Kevin Folta -- stories in which The Atlantic utterly failed to ferret out the truth that Folta was secretly serving as a Monsanto attack dog while exploiting the trust (and perhaps gullibility) of The Atlantic editors to accomplish that task.

The Atlantic got hoodwinked. They got suckered. They got conned by the very guy accusing the Food Babe of running a con. Yet the Food Babe is running no con at all; she's an advocate for something we should all agree on: CLEAN FOOD. You know, the kind of food that doesn't contain cancer-causing glyphosate, an herbicide frequently used alongside GM crops.

So The Atlantic owes the Food Babe a serious apology. In fact, if they had listened to the Food Babe and believed her, their story would have printed the truth instead of Monsanto's lies and propaganda disguised as statements from an "independent academic professor" who has now been exposed as a fraud.

Join me in tweeting The Atlantic at @TheAtlantic

Or visit their Facebook page and join thousands of others who will soon be posting demands for The Atlantic to retract their Monsanto propaganda stories and issue an official apology to Vani Hari (the Food Babe).

Click here for The Atlantic's Facebook page.

After all, The Atlantic made a huge mistake. A monumental error in judgment. They wrongfully accused a woman who is tirelessly working for clean food, and in doing so, The Atlantic allowed its magazine to be hijacked by Monsanto via a corrupted academic prostitute. If that's not something they feel they need to correct and apologize for, then they aren't journalists in the first place.

If The Atlantic doesn't retract the articles and apologize to the Food Babe, then it's pretty clear that they are designating themselves as yet another Monsanto front group in the world of fake media, where printing lies that appease the corporate masters is far more important than printing the truth.