A Grain of Truth: The Media, the Public, and Biotechnology (review)

A Grain of Truth: The Media, the Public, and Biotechnology. By Susanna Hornig Priest. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. Pp. xi+140. $65/$19.95.

This book begins with a provocative assertion. Referring to agricultural biotechnology, Susanna Hornig Priest writes that "the lack of opportunity for informed public debate about these revolutionary technologies and their social and economic impact is a serious failure of democracy. It is a failure that makes our claim to being a free society with a free press somewhat hollow" (p. 3). The rest of the book contains a series of case studies in which Priest, who teaches journalism at Texas A&M University, tries to expose the roots of this failure. Individual essays discuss, among other issues, resistance in the United States to bovine growth hormone as a means of boosting milk production, the contrast between media coverage of agricultural trade and patent issues in India and the United States, and the controversies over animal cloning and "terminator technology," which is intended to prevent farmers from using part of their harvest as seed the following year. (The latter two issues did provoke significant media coverage and public debate. Priest argues that this occurred because these technologies appeared to threaten values or institutions that Americans hold sacred: individual autonomy and the family farm.)

Priest argues that the American media, in their coverage of biotechnology, are subject to the "hegemony" (p. 4) of large institutions, principally the biotechnology industry and a biotech-friendly scientific establishment. She notes that most reporters lack time or any incentive to swim against the tide and become expert critics of biotechnology. Priest does not try to prove that media coverage creates public opinion; indeed, she shows that the American public has remained wary of some technological developments despite positive or minimal press coverage.

This is all familiar territory in the world of media criticism. But Priest goes on to make a more intriguing and original argument. The narrow and resolutely nonideological perspective of American media coverage, she says, ultimately did the biotechnology industry more harm than good. Media coverage did not mold public opinion, but it did mold a false perception of public opinion. It blinded biotech companies to a thriving undercurrent of public disquiet, at home in the United States and even more so abroad, which erupted with great force in the anti-GMO backlash of recent years.

For historians of technology, the book is a source of stimulating observations on the role of the media within the broader social context of technological innovation. This slim volume, however, is suggestive, rather than definitive. (Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any definitive treatment of this broad and amorphous topic.) It also gives short shrift to a number of important factors in the public relations equation.

Priest's emphasis on the hegemonic role of pro-biotechnology institutions, for instance, leads to a corresponding neglect of other institutions, including environmental organizations and advocacy groups that are critical of the biotechnology industry. Priest believes that the views of such groups, when included at all in press reports, are discounted and delegitimated. Yet organized critics of agricultural biotechnology have had considerable though sporadic success shaping the vocabulary and the content of media coverage during the past two decades. While Priest undertakes a critical analysis of the rhetoric employed by industry representatives, she fails to pay similar attention to campaigns mounted by industry's opponents. Priest also pays little attention to the contradictory roles played by biotechnology's enthusiasts, who have portrayed their inventions--depending on whether they were trying to pacify regulators or stir up investors--either as entirely innocuous or profoundly revolutionary.

Priest ends the book with a plea for more vigorous public debate over the moral, socioeconomic, and ecological implications of biotechnology. In her view, the forces that conspire to delay or suppress that debate--including most North American media coverage--undermine democracy itself. Yet...