Zembla and the Never-Ending Glyphysteria Show
Zembla and the Never-Ending Glyphysteria Show
How a Dutch News Documentary Broke all of the Rules of Decency
Last Monday, Dutch national television viewers were entertained to a documentary called Glyphosate, the PR Machine. It was a documentary meant to show the entire world has been duped by Monsanto PR experts. It doesn’t matter that Monsanto has not existed for the last eight years, that most of the claims were unsubstantiated or that the filming, music and tone was meant to deceive you and interfere with clear, critical analyses. The goal of this shock-jock journalism was to make you angry, lose trust in industry and governments and demand change.
The program, that felt more like an activist lobbumentary, was produced by Ton van der Ham for Zembla and broadcast on the Dutch series, Vara (part of the NPO network) on September 30, 2024.
Manufacturing Doubt
It started with Naomi Oreskes claiming, with her smug, cunning smile: “It’s not that hard to find scientists to do your dirty work.” So says a history of science professor who has been doing the dirty work for law firms like Sher Edling and getting paid for their lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry.
The program leaned heavily on the views of Jennifer Moore, a lawyer suing Monsanto. She tried to make it into a David v Goliath battle with only two women fighting against “40 Monsanto lawyers in a courtroom at any time”. Really now. I would love to see a photo of that and what sort of judge would allow so many wolves to circulate over the bar. van der Ham did not follow up on that outrageous claim but trusted it blindly on the basis of, well, good drama.
Moore’s conclusion: that “Bayer settled for $11 billion is evidence enough that they knew their product was dangerous” is naive and surprising for someone who is supposed to be a well-educated top-class lawyer. van der Ham did not get into the relentless assault of greedy US strip-mall tort lawyers paying off IARC scientists and NGOs to manufacture the “glyphosate is a carcinogen” narrative. Where did that $11 billion settlement go? It didn’t go to the plaintiffs. van der Ham should have looked more closely at the massive diamonds on Jennifer Moore’s fingers.
Oreskes promotes her theme from Merchants of Doubt (2010) to show how the tobacco industry created doubt about the science of the risks of smoking. But what she and a few others from the soft sciences are trying to do is create doubt about the widely-held scientific position that glyphosate is not a carcinogen. Doubt is Oreskes’ product and she is pushing it hard.
Former head of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) monographs program, Kurt Straif, referred to Monsanto’s attack as the longest lasting attack ever on IARC – “more than tobacco or meat consumption …” What he did not divulge is how he and his agency were the ones aggressively attacking anyone who would dare question the IARC methods or conclusions. He claimed he was being intimidated by Monsanto lawyers who wanted to obtain internal IARC documents, but it was IARC that ordered all of the scientists on the Monograph 112 panel (that included glyphosate) to refuse to cooperate with any such requests or any Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. In other words, Kurt Straif refused to be transparent.
The Gary Ruskin Show
Then the journalist’s attention focused on Gary Ruskin, the activist founder of US Right to Know and long-time anti-GMO campaigner. The first comment from him was a humdinger of lies and unfounded claims. Not only did Monsanto know that glyphosate was a carcinogen, he confidently claims, but that it also causes liver disease, is an endocrine disruptor “and other things”. Evidence please.
van der Ham let Ruskin go on about how Monsanto got one scientist to allegedly ghost-write for them. He did not ask Ruskin how many articles he himself had funded academic scholars to ghost-write for US Right to Know (ironically on how Coca-Cola uses academics to publish favorable articles). He had received $300,000 from the Arnold Foundation to try to slam Coke in peer-review journals. What is it that Oreskes said? Oh yeah: “It’s not that hard to find scientists to do your dirty work.”
For much of the lobbumentary, Ruskin wrote his own script and Ton van der Ham was complicit in its execution. He would say that the Reuters work was sloppy journalism (without giving any details) or that the Genetic Literacy Project was an enormously influential site for industry (without actually looking at their finances or headcount). Shouldn’t someone have mentioned that one of the articles by Kate Kelland that they attacked had won a global science journalism award?
There was no scrutiny at all on anything the anti-industry campaigner said, no research into the Russian money behind US Right to Know or what he really thinks about vaccines. Most of Gary’s funding is hidden behind non-transparent (dark) donor-advised funds so I suppose we don’t have a right to know.
Is this the best the Dutch media can dredge up for such a news program?
Cosmopolitan Zealots
van der Ham’s portrait of a California farmer using glyphosate was disgraceful. Sinister music was framing a short image of water dripping from a spray nozzle at the end of an application as if to imply it was carelessly leaking out. The farmer had a harsh local accent which to the sophisticated Dutch elite (ie, urban greens) translated into: “not very smart”. The poor farmer genuinely thought he was being helpful and informative while he just played into Ton van der Ham’s denigration strategy. In another drone shot, they flashed a tractor with a sprayer nearby a remote country road while a car was passing by.
There was an insidious moment in the Zembla lobbumentary when University of Leiden students were fed lines from Dutch committee hearings on glyphosate that they would cynically categorize into some propaganda framing exercise. Not only has Dutch education become indoctrination, it seems they really have no use for critical thinking. Highlighting some well-expressed arguments from Dutch farmer, Michiel van Andel, these innocent students followed their professor’s lead and blithely dismissed his reasoning by arguing that van Andel’s comments on glyphosate have a high Twitter (X) ranking. More sinister music in the background framed their diminution of what farmers thought. I wish I were making this up.
Oreskes then claims, incredibly, that the industry is recruiting farmers to make the claims that they need pesticides. But where is the proof of this recruitment? I have been saying for more than a decade that farmers have to stand up and fight for their ability to continue farming because the industry is not protecting them. Industry is repeatedly acting against the farmers’ interests. Finally this year they stood up, by themselves, and people rightly listened.
A cosmopolitan zealot like Naomi Oreskes has absolutely no idea where her food comes from.
A Sacrificial Scientist Led to the Slaughter
On the science of glyphosate, the focus was on one insignificant elderly scientist, Kenny Crump, who factors very little in the literature. His name was fed to the journalist by Oreskes because he had also published on other issues from diesel to asbestos but they focused on one irrelevant paper like it meant something. What they did was put an old, unsuspecting caricature of a man on camera and then manhandled him until he stuttered and shook (amplifying the sound at one point to catch the ice rattling in his glass). van der Ham was pushing words like “safe” and “certain” knowing that no respectable scientist could use such emotion-based absolutes about any substance. This is disgraceful hack journalism, manipulation and harassment.
van der Ham somehow ignored the 2400 documents that EFSA had examined to conclude, over 180,000 pages, that glyphosate was not a carcinogen. In his “gotchya moment” when challenging that Crump gave paid testimony decades ago on an asbestos case, van der Ham neglected to mention how many IARC scientists from the glyphosate monograph have been paid by tort lawyers (at least $500/hour) to testify against Monsanto. What a heartless hypocrite.
Pathetic and Biased
At the end of this dreadful excuse for journalism, I wondered what was missing from what could have been an objective analysis.
Actual credible research would have been nice.
There were no scientists from all of the global government risk assessment agencies explaining why they did not accept the activist science behind IARC’s hazard assessment.
There were no critics of the US tort law industry citing how they have invested heavily in fabricating this campaign following Naomi Oreskes’ La Jolla Playbook.
There was no mention of how IARC made more than 30 transgressions against scientific standards and ethical practices in the glyphosate monograph alone.
I wish, in journalism school, they would use this particular program as a case study to teach students what not to do. But they rarely teach journalism in universities any more. Now we only have activists seeking larger microphones who pretend to be journalists. It seems Zembla doesn’t even have a serious editor.
Doubt is Ton van der Ham’s product, and he produced it spectacularly.