Who's funding Jon Entine and the Genetic Literacy Project's pro-GMO propaganda and character assassination smear jobs?

Wednesday, April 06, 2016 by: J. D. Heyes
Tags: Jon Entine, character assassin, funding sources

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(NaturalNews) A leading consumer watchdog group is calling on a leading shill for chemical and biotech corporations to divulge publicly who he is funded by, in a bid to bring more transparency to his public relations activism.

The watchdog, U.S. Right to Know, or USRTK, says Jon Entine, exposed by Natural News editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, for allegedly traumatizing his daughter and attacking his wife, just recently smeared Columbia University's school of journalism, accusing it of "smearing Exxon," while engaged in "advocacy journalism," and hiring "an activist" as dean of the school.

In response to this more recent journalistic hit job, USRTK is pressing Entine to "reveal in full detail his funding and ties to the industries he defends in his writing."

"Who is funding Jon Entine and the Genetic Literacy Project?" asked Gary Ruskin, co-director of U.S. Right to Know. "Will Jon Entine disclose his funders? If not, what is he hiding?"

In a recent New York Post article, Entine attacked award-winning journalist Susanne Rust, an investigative editor at the Columbia Journalism School, while failing to mention that Rust and her co-author, Meg Kissinger, revealed previously undisclosed industry ties with Entine's group, STATS, in a 2009 Milwaukee Sentinel piece, which reported that, "STATS claims to be independent and nonpartisan."

Professional character assassin

However, the article continued, "a review of its financial reports shows it is a branch of the Center for Media and Public Affairs. That group was paid by the tobacco industry to monitor news stories about the dangers of tobacco."

Previously, the Genetic Literacy Project has declared that it is "affiliated with the non-profit Statistical Assessment Service (STATS)." But the GLP has since removed all references to its STATS relationship from its website, USRTK reported.

Entine's NewYork Post byline referred to him as a senior fellow at STATS, while Entine himself has referred to STATS as "the organization that houses the Genetic Literacy Project, where I work."

Indeed, USRTK reported further, Entine is the executive director of the agrichemical industry front group GLP, which is flooded with funding from unknown sources and routinely attacks journalists, activists and scientists who raise legitimate questions about the health and environmental risks of genetically modified and engineered foods and herbicides.

"Entine's New York Post article is his second recent foray into the arena of climate politics, defending oil companies and attacking climate change heroes," USRTK said in a press release. "On February 1, Entine penned an attack on Harvard Professor Naomi Oreskes, co-author of Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming."

'Ties to Monsanto'

Entine has become an influential voice in the bio-agricultural industry, USRTK reported, noting that the watchdog group has filed Freedom of Information Act requests that revealed Entine's ties to New York Times reporter Amy Harmon, Washington Post food columnist Tamar Haspel, and journalist Keith Kloor, who is a proponent of GMO foods.

"In 2012," USRTK stated, "Entine claimed he had 'no idea' that Syngenta was funding the organization (American Council on Science and Health) that published his book defending Syngenta's herbicide, atrazine, according to reporting by Tom Philpott in Mother Jones."

In short, Entine's career has been built around defending chemical, fossil fuel, nuclear power and pesticide industries, the watchdog said.

As Adams has also noted:

"Jon Entine has professional ties to Monsanto, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Proctor & Gamble and other similar corporations. [1] He is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a research fellow at George Mason University, and was a paid lecturer at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Entine is a key 'attack operative' for the biotech industry well known for authoring wildly defamatory character assassination articles to target GMO skeptics and scientists who disagree with the biotech industry's contrived safety claims."

(Photo credit: Commons.WikiMedia.org)

Sources:

Twitter.com/NewsRoomAmerica

NYPost.com

NYPost.com

JSOnline.com

USRTK.org

TruthWiki.org

NaturalNews.com