French translation

You have probably heard the news today about how a group called Bonus Eventus is some industry campaign group trying to undermine the facts about the threats of pesticides and biotech. You have probably heard how they are funded by the US government. You have probably heard how their members are profiling activists that smear their fine work.

None of this, however, is true.

A research NGO called Lighthouse Reports, that is commissioned by interest groups to do hit pieces against capitalism and Western political institutions, released a report this morning trying to portray this small news monitoring consultancy as the secret weapon behind industry campaigns to blackball activists and undermine their attempts to save the world from chemical poisons.

• The researchers spent a year pouring over sealed court documents, FOIAs and public news items;
• they spent a lot of foundation money (at least $800,000 from the Oak Foundation and the Agroecology Fund);
• they scared a lot of people into thinking there were negative personal profiles trying to sabotage their work (profiles they have never actually seen);

And after a year of looking hard to link this organisation to government funding, to some secret cabal and to espionage work on behalf of evil chemical industry companies, they actually came up with very little. Actually they came up with nothing.

Bonus Eventus is a news monitoring page providing information services to subscribers, managed by a small consultancy based in St Louis. They only share information available in the public domain and present it in an easy way that helps people involved in agriculture and food debates to keep on top of all of the fast-moving events.

So after all of that money and time, these activists couldn’t just say to the interest groups funding their work that their original premise was wrong, that there was no secretive spy ring or members club with secret handshakes, or that these alleged industry saboteurs were not funded by the US government. So these campaigners who called themselves journalists just made shit up and said what they had planned to say a year ago.

It doesn’t matter that nothing in the latest Lighthouse Reports investigation is true. They will just use their well-connected, well-financed network of activist haters to spread these lies until everyone just assumes it must be true. These groups are all aligned with mainstream media groups (now largely funded by the foundations also funding the activist groups) who will just parrot forward the pre-written press kit. When some group claims industry sabotage, government financing and personal smear campaigns (along with the three key words Industry, Lobbyists, Monsanto), this will easily make it to page one, light up the fearometer and get the public outraged at the evils of industry. What editor would ever take the time to read the report, use some basic reason or scrutinise their claims?

This is a case study of how to successfully push bonehead bullshit on other news groups and get the public to buy into your pre-packaged pulp.

A “Private Social Network”?

Margot Gibbs, a Lighthouse Reports activist, tried to portray Bonus Eventus as a private club – a cabal or spy ring – with members trying to block the concerned campaigners from trying to stop the chemical industry from poisoning the public. They want to portray this as a secretive enterprise profiting from operations conducted in the shadows. Apparently there must be some secret handshakes and a special pass to get in via the back door.

In reality, Bonus Eventus is a small news monitoring organisation that provides daily clippings of news on different agricultural science stories or events. This includes NGO campaigns, new innovations, government decisions… They do not have members – it is not a club – but make their money via a subscription service. Bonus Eventus subscribers receive daily emails. I am a subscriber but as such, am nothing more than a beneficiary of their excellent research.

Profile Information or Smear Campaigns?

Part of providing a comprehensive service is to provide easily accessible information on the actors, authors and influencers of the agricultural science debates. As they monitor and distribute publicly available news stories, their database also builds up information from the public domain on the important actors involved. These are the Bonus Eventus profile analyses that the authors got so upset about. The Lighthouse Report thinks that this is spying on activists and organisations, digging up dirt and personal information. But their database does this automatically on all individuals of a certain relevance, not just anti-pesticide campaigners.

Carey Gillam speaks too highly of herself in revealing that Bonus Eventus has a profile on her. As a subscriber, I read it, and it was not that interesting. Sorry Carey. There is also a profile on the Risk-Monger as well but it is not some attempt to smear individuals. The profiles are merely links and information gathered from articles available in the public domain. It is actually very useful and I suggest readers involved in agricultural debates subscribe to Bonus Eventus for this service.

Imagine reading an article from some guy called The Risk-Monger. Wouldn’t you appreciate a few paragraphs summarising who he is and what else he has done? Only people with something to hide would be upset by this service.

But Lighthouse Reports wants you to believe that these profiles are only done to unleash some lobbyist army to attack the activists trying to save the world in the war against the chemical industry. To anyone who actually reads Bonus Eventus (it is clear none of the authors of this report have), their conclusions of these profiles as espionage and personal sabotage are laughable.

What is key to all of this is that Bonus Eventus only distributed information that is in the public domain (and the Lighthouse Report grudgingly admits that). But do the researchers behind this investigation actually understand what that means? Much of the information people the Lighthouse Report relied on for their year-long investigation was not in the public domain. Much of their information comes from a sealed deposition leaked to Carey Gillam by one of her tort lawyer friends. Carey once admitted that boxes of confidential court information was just left outside of her front doorstep one morning – imagine that.

People believed her because they wanted to believe her. We have already established that Carey Gillam is a sociopath who is unaware of the effects of her chronic mendacity.

Gotchya Journalism

This type of Gotchya Journalism is disgraceful. Using sealed documents from court depositions, using them to attack people and then saying the subject of their attacks did not reply to their accusations reveals just how low these activists will go. Jay Byrne could not reply to Lighthouse Reports claims because he was respecting the gag order of an ongoing case. Too bad Margot Gibbs had no respect for the law.

And here we have, then, another interest group with skin in the game: law firms. So many paraquat cases against Syngenta have failed to make it past the bellwether court stage because the scientific evidence is just not there (regardless how many times the activists repeat their own studies in the media). The tort lawyers had to give up on scientific evidence linking paraquat to Parkinson’s and change tactics. The court case that involves Bonus Eventus is claiming that the news monitoring site has tried to distort information on the safety of the pesticide. If the tort lawyers actually had serious evidence to win this case, would they have tasked these activist writers with a year-long investigation to strengthen their claim? Maybe if they can paste Bonus Eventus in such a negative light on front pages across the world, the jurors would convict.

In a US court of law, perception matters, facts don’t.

And how much of the $800,000 in funding from the Oak Foundation and the Agroecology Fund that financed the Lighthouse Reports investigation actually came from tort law firms via the dark, donor-advised funds that these foundations could then use? How unlimited foundation funding is helping spread activist bullshit on this type of investigative research will be the topic of a later Firebreak report.

Lighthouse Ethics?

In a recent Firebreak article, I revealed an email that Lighthouse Reports’ lead author, Margot Gibbs, sent to the target of her one year investigative assault.

It contained flat-out lies, methodically covered up, as well as critical omissions of basic information that any journalist with an ounce of integrity would know needed to be revealed before any media interview.

• She did not reveal the nature of the NGO, Lighthouse Reports, pretending it was a media organisation;
• She did not reveal the organisations funding her year-long investigation or who funds the Lighthouse Reports;
• She did not reveal that she was approaching the meeting with a pre-set agenda;
• She tried to portray Carey Gillam as a reporter, failing to identify her employment with the Environmental Working Group, an anti-chemical NGO with a clear conflict of interest in any media activity;
• She tried to cover up her deception by using Carey Gillam’s guardian.com email address. And Carey never corrected this deception.

All of these are clear violations of standards of journalistic integrity. Not that it matters though. The people involved in this campaign have shown themselves many times in the past to be activist zealots. A zealot will say and do anything to win a campaign and get their way. And they don’t care about the consequences.

Carey Logic

The report had a wonderful glimpse into the mind and logic of Carey Gillam. She argues that a US government agency, USAID, made one-off funding available for a non-profit group, IFPRI, to promote the advantages of biotech for agricultural development. Apart from this, IFPRI, for over six years, had made use of the Bonus Eventus monitoring service. They paid for this service as it aided their work. Therefore, Carey concludes: Bonus Eventus was paid by the US government and American taxpayers.

• Did USAID fund Bonus Eventus? No.
• Did these activists spend a year pouring over FOIAs trying to prove this? Yes.
• Did Lighthouse Reports still make that conclusion without any evidence? Yes

Of course Carey’s logic and reasoning is as leaky as a sieve, but if you are an activist and you want to get some money from the Soros-funded Open Society to publish some non-news in the Guardian under their special fund (which you aspire to claim as your employer), you would look at this logic as reason enough as all you need is the smallest justification for your claim. Wash, rinse, repeat ad infinitum and people will believe you. They already want to believe such conspiracy theories so Carey knows such claims won’t be challenged.

As weak as their rationality is (ie, stupid), Margot Gibbs decided that this was their strongest argument and chose to lead the entire Lighthouse Report on Carey’s logic. This shows how little people in the Lighthouse Reports group respect the intellect of their readers. I suppose they think their little band of militants just want to be angry so they look at some sort of raw meat to throw into the pits.

An $800,000 Nothing Burger

In the end, that raw meat is a pure nothing burger. But this is a good case study in how activist campaigns manipulate the truth, manipulate the media and manipulate basic rules of reason and logic. They will use the force of their network in media groups around the world to try to push their report through on purely emotional, biased and rhetorical tactics. And most groups will see the story and run with it. As Goebbels said, the “bigger the lie…”, so the trick is to keep repeating their bullshit until it becomes fact.

In the end, no matter how much they lie, and work to spread their lies, these are the facts:

• Bonus Eventus merely monitors and shares news stories already in the public domain
• There is no secret group or membership, only subscribers who appreciate the news monitoring service
• There is no smear campaign against certain activists, only a wide collection of profiles from their publicly accessible database of news items
• They are not funded by any government agencies or taxpayer money
• They are not part of some secret cabal or industry spy ring
• The NGO that published the report is not a media or news group – they write for clients and are paid by foundations and interest groups which they rarely publicly reveal
• Carey Gillam is not a journalist or correspondent for the Guardian (no matter how much she so desperately wants to leave those rottweilers at EWG)

These activists literally wasted a year investigating Bonus Eventus and found nothing (but because they had spent so much of the Agroecology Fund and Oak Foundations’ funding, they had to publish something). It is ridiculous and I would laugh at this if I didn’t feel so much for the people working at Bonus Eventus. I fear that the chemical industry, in their weakness and inherent incapacity to make a stand, will run for cover and stay clear of this useful service in future. Cowards!

As a concluding note, I strongly recommend that people involved in the agricultural science debate subscribe to Bonus Eventus. They do incredibly good work, are comprehensive and honest. If they could trigger people like Stéphane Foucart and Carey Gillam, it is a sign they are doing good work.

Image source: LeMonde. It is curious in their presentation of how groups like Bonus Eventus distort activists’ work against pesticides, for their key image, they put Séralini front and centre.

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