Jonathan Greenberg: Ten Grassroots Lessons From Monsanto's Swift-Boating of the Prop37/Label GMO Campaign
Eight years later, more than $45.6 million was spent using Swift Boat tactics to defeat Prop 37. Multi-billion dollar corporations financed a relentless barrage of deceptive, fear-mongering ads, all of them bankrolled by tax-deductible contributions from the world's largest pesticide and junk food companies. The top three funders alone, Monsanto (who brought us, and declared safe, Agent Orange and DDT), Du Pont, and Dow Chemical (of Bhopal fame), spent almost double the $8.7 million that the advocates of Prop 37 raised.
The Swift Boat style ads uprooted the Label GMO narrative from consumers "Right to Know," to the No on 37 Campaign's carefully-crafted, fear-inducing slogans of a "Deceptive Labeling Scheme," and "Shakedown Lawsuits," and 'Higher Grocery Bills." With Monsanto-financed junk science, "experts," data, and a million dollars a day of TV ads, No on 37's propaganda successfully "re-educated" millions of Californians.
Despite a poll at the beginning of this year finding that 91 percent of Americans support labeling genetically modified (GMO) food, Prop 37 was defeated on Election Day by a vote of 53 percent to 47 percent.
Although I have collaborated with funders, volunteers and few staffers of the California Right to Know Prop 37 campaign, the views expressed here are solely my own. I write this a veteran communications professional who created and funded the http://www.KnowGMO.org effort of "People Powered Media to Counter Deceptive Corporate Ads."
No comments:
Post a Comment