https://truthout.org/articles/corporate-front-group-smears-list-of-its-enemies-as-deniers-for-hire/
[links in online article]
Corporate Front Group, American Council on Science and Health, Smears
List of Its Enemies as “Deniers for Hire”
By Rebekah Wilce,
Center for Media and Democracy
Published February 2, 2019
The industry front group American Council on Science and Health (ACSH)
has created a clunky new website containing an intriguing list of its
enemies.
You may find a few folks you know vilified there.
DeniersForHire.com was created in 2016, according to a proxy-cloaked
WHOIS listing. The site was funded by ACSH and edited by Cameron
English, who currently works for the Genetic Literacy Project (GLP). GLP
is another industry front group, run by chemical company PR agent Jon
Entine, who has long partnered with ACSH to defend the agrochemical
industry. Entine blogs frequently on the ACSH site.
The “deniers” site hyperbolically states as its goal “to expose and
neutralize anti-science activist threats to humanity” and features
profiles of those who have been thorns in the side of the chemical
industry and related groups: scientists, journalists, lawyers, policy
experts, and non-profits. Among the “threats to humanity” is New York
Times Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eric Lipton.
On the site, ACSH adopts language used by pro-science, consumer, and
environmental groups to smear pro-science, consumer, and environmental
groups. The term “deniers,” for instance, invokes the phrase “climate
change denier.”
The website also calls the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) a “dark
money group” even though the group spends zero money in campaigns and
elections. It calls the Organic Consumers Association — which has long
pushed for strict organic standards disavowing GMOs, radiation, and
sludge — an “industry front group.”
Smeared by the site are scientists Tyrone Hayes, Stephanie Seneff, and
Gilles-Éric Séralini; New York Times reporter Danny Hakim and columnist
Mark Bittman; well-known food and science writer Michael Pollan;
nutrition and food studies professor Marion Nestle; public interest
groups like US Right to Know, Greenpeace, Natural Resources Defense
Council (NRDC), Sierra Club, the Environmental Working Group, and Union
of Concerned Scientists; past and present CMD staff, and many other
individuals ACSH does not like.
Greenpeace Research Specialist Connor Gibson says of the site:
“Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. I’ll take it as a
compliment to those of us who expose industry hacks posing as
independent experts that industry shills are attempting to mimic good
opposition research in an attempt to get the spotlight off of themselves.”
“Deniers for Hire” Site Created by Industry Front Group
Where the “Deniers for Hire” site now says, at the bottom of each page,
just “copyright 2018 | MH Newsdesk Lite by MH Themes,” it once stated
more clearly, “funded by the non-profit pro-science consumer advocacy
group American Council on Science and Health,” as revealed by archives
of the site on the WayBack Machine.
ACSH has long been notorious as an industry front group, funded by the
seed and chemical giant Monsanto, among others. Ralph Nader was quoted
in a 1991 book on corporate front groups as saying, “A consumer group is
an organization which advocates the interests of unrepresented consumers
and must either maintain its own intellectual independence or be
directly accountable to its membership. In contrast, ACSH is a consumer
front organization for its business backers. It has seized the language
and style of the existing consumer organizations, but its real purpose,
you might say, is to glove the hand that feeds it.”
ACSH solicits funding from corporations and has defended a number of
dubious products over the years, including DDT, asbestos, and Agent
Orange. ACSH has been known to call environmentalists and consumer
activists “terrorists.”
Gary Ruskin, Co-Director of US Right to Know said the website “seems
typical of ACSH’s work: attacks on those who question or criticize
powerful corporations, brimming with hyperbole and errors of fact.” He
called it “wholly unsurprising,” “standard corporate PR tactics” of an
“increasingly desperate” agrochemical industry.
Ties to Jon Entine’s GLP
Cameron English, whose biography calls him “the editor at Deniers for
Hire, a project of the American Council on Science and Health,” later
went on to be “Senior Agricultural Genetics and Special Projects Editor”
at GLP run by PR flack Jon Entine.
GLP is another industry front group, one which companies like Monsanto
use “as platforms of support for industry spokespersons” in order to
discredit such targets as the World Health Organization, according to a
2018 US Congressional report.
Entine is a former producer with NBC and ABC News, whose books attacked
the idea of socially responsible investing and the precautionary
principle (Let Them Eat Precaution). He went on to join the American
Enterprise Institute and has been “cultivated” by corporations like
Syngenta (maker of pesticides, genetically engineered crop varieties,
and more) as a trusted “third party” to accomplish items on their public
relations wish lists.
The GLP website is owned by Entine’s PR firm, ESG MediaMetrics,
according to its WHOIS data. The website for ESG MediaMetrics has been
removed, but archived versions of the firm’s site show that its clients
include Monsanto, the Vinyl Institute, and Merisant, a Monsanto spin-off
that manufactured artificial sweeteners.
Both ACSH and GLP are listed as “industry partners” in internal Monsanto
documents. And the targets of ACSH’s “Deniers for Hire” “are also
targets of the GLP,” according to GMWatch (another target of the site).
US Right to Know’s Ruskin told CMD of being targeted by the site, “We
laugh about it… It’s just what happens these days when you try to stand
up for consumers or public health.”
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https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Council_on_Science_and_Health
The American Council on Science and Health (ACSH), was founded in 1978
by Elizabeth M Whelan, a demographer who turned herself into a
nutritionist/publicist with the Nutrition Department at Harvard
University, and her elder mentor/teacher Professor Frederick Stare.
Stare had earned himself the reputation of being Doctor Sugar for his
vocal advocacy of sugar and cereal interests through the Nutrition
Department of Harvard's School of Public Health.
Stare also mentored Dr Carl C Seltzer, a physical anthropologist from
the Peabody Museum, who became one of the tobacco industry's principle
early scientific lobbyists by claiming to be a 'heart specialist'.
Whelan (who was anti-smoking) obtained the backing of the American
Chemical Association to create the ACSH, and Stare joined her at the top
to give the new organisation some scientific authenticity. They
described the ACSH as "a consumer education consortium concerned with
issues related to food, nutrition, chemicals, pharmaceuticals,
lifestyle, the environment and health."
There are now many recent documents which confirm that ACSH actively
solicits funding from corporations on specific issues -- anti-GMO
labeling, for example -- that benefit from it taking positions favorable
to those corporations.
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader once said of ACSH,
A consumer group is an organization which advocates the interests
of unrepresented consumers and must either maintain its own intellectual
independence or be directly accountable to its membership. In contrast,
ACSH is a consumer front organization for its business backers. It has
seized the language and style of the existing consumer organizations,
but its real purpose, you might say, is to glove the hand that feeds it.
Numerous ACSH publications (that do not disclose the corporations that
have funded the organization) take positions attacking public concerns
about various corporate products and practices, such as genetically
modified foods (GMOs), pesticides, herbicides, and more, and have sought
to downplay concerns raised by scientists and consumers. However, the
tobacco industry has never been an ACSH client, and Whelan has very
cleverly used her anti-tobacco stance to gain some credibility among
health professionals and some activist groups. All of the tobacco
connections were conducted by her partner, Fred Stare.
Some of the products ACSH has defended over the years include DDT,
asbestos, and Agent Orange, as well as common pesticides. ACSH has often
called environmentalists and consumer actvists "terrorists," arguing
that their criticisms and concerns about potential health and
environmental risks are threats to society.[2]
ACSH has been funded by big agri-businesses and trade groups like
Kellogg, General Mills, Pepsico, and the American Beverage Association,
among others.
[more in online article]
