Former FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson, gives us a perspective on the media landscape from Johnson to Trump. And investigative journalist, Carey Gillam, explains how, thanks to chemical companies like Monsanto, we’re all probably eating the pesticide, Round Up.
Nicholas Johnson is best known for his controversial term as a dissenting Federal Communications Commission commissioner in the Johnson/Nixon era. His book from that time How to Talk Back to Your Television Set is just as relevant now as it was then, even in the Internet Age with its critique of media consolidation and the manufacturing of news. He currently teaches at the University of Iowa College of Law with an emphasis on communications and Internet law, and since 2006 has posted over 1000 blog essays. He is included in The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law as one of 700 “leading figures in the history of American law, from the colonial era to the present day.”‘
“All television is educational television. The only questions is, ‘What is it teaching?’ And it certainly is not teaching the values of a democratic society with the information that citizens need.”
Nicholas Johnson, former FCC Commissioner and author of the classic How to Talk Back to Your Television Set
Carey Gillam is a veteran journalist, researcher and writer with more than 25 years of experience in the news industry covering corporate America. Since 1998, Ms. Gillam’s work has focused on digging into the big business of food and agriculture. As a former correspondent for Reuters’ international news service and current research director for consumer group U.S. Right to Know(, Ms. Gillam uncovers both the risks and rewards of the evolving new age of agriculture. Her new book Whitewash: The Story of a Weedkiller, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science (https://islandpress.org/book/whitewash) – just out this month – details the harm that pervasive pesticide use is wreaking on human health and the environment.
“For decades, Monsanto has worked very, very hard to manipulate the science, to suppress science by independent researchers that shows harm and to promote or push its own positive science, it’s own science that says it’s safe. And what we’ve seen in the documents that have come out recently – Monsanto’s own internal documents – shows them working to basically put forward fraudulent papers that carry the names of independent scientists that look to be credible and unbiased but actually are written or manipulated or drafted or directed by Monsanto’s people.”
Carey Gillam, author ofWhitewash: The Story of a Weedkiller, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science
Who Owns The Media?/Monsanto’s Whitewash