A Farewell to Facts: Is Fighting Fake News a Losing Battle for Agriculture?
February 20, 2020 Like much of the country, I spent a good part of the fall following the impeachment proceedings. All politics aside, the thing that stuck in my mind from this was when one observer asked, “Do facts matter anymore?” upon finding out how entrenched the general public seemed to be in its views on the whole affair.
This observation made me laugh a little in an ironic way. If this person had been covering modern agriculture, he or she would have probably been less surprised by this “let’s ignore the facts” trend. In many ways, our industry has been coping with this attitude from the general public for almost a quarter of a century now.
As evidence, look no further than biotech crops. Although these important yield-boost providers have been in use since the mid-1990s, many regular people and certain government officials continue to reject them. They have done this despite mountains of facts from the scientific community and key regulators that altering crops using genetic modification is safe for human consumption. Indeed, in the history of biotech crops, not a single case of injury or death from their use has been verified.
A more pronounced example of “ignoring the facts” in agriculture comes from the ongoing debate regarding glyphosate. Even though the herbicide has been in use since the early 1970s and has been labeled as safe by hundreds of scientific and regulatory-based studies, much of the general public across the globe has rejected these claims. Instead, they’ve embraced suppositions, half-truths, and outright lies when considering glyphosate. Because of this, several countries now ban glyphosate use (or plan to), and the juries in a few U.S. lawsuits have awarded millions of dollars in damages to people who claim that using the herbicide gave them cancer.
As for why I believe that this “ignore the facts” movement has been able to gain such a hold on the general public, it seems to boil down to one reason: the internet. When I was growing up, people got their facts from traditional sources — newspapers, television, and radio — usually once per day. The journalists who distributed these facts to the public were gatekeepers, sorting through all the available information and only reporting on these details that could be verified as true.
Loading ...Now, the internet, in theory, is set up as a gateless community, reporting news on a 24/7/365 basis. But with the gatekeepers gone, all kinds of “facts” can be presented to anyone who might seek them out, regardless of whether there is any proof to back them up. People can typically find dozens (or hundreds) of stories that support whatever view they have on a topic. If there are other (or real) facts that conflict with these views, they can be easily dismissed as “uninformed” or “part of the corporate world’s efforts to put down the common man.”
A dozen years ago I wrote a column saying that if modern agriculture wanted to fight back against misinformation with the general public, it needed to present its case “using cold, hard facts.” However, this approach will probably no longer work. The fact that facts don’t seem to matter anymore in 2020 is perhaps the scariest fact of all.
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