GM Watch's scary starving African icon promises much...

… but don’t hold your breath. The SpinWatch sister site GM Watch has taken down its scary starving African icon that used to lead to the blind page, ‘GM Reality’, whose only content was ‘coming soon’. The page is still up, but seems to have no content.  .. that is a shame because it is the second movement to the first, ‘GM Myths’.

Given that GM Watch was founded in 1998, and worked for some years before that as the Norfolk Genetic Information Network, you might think that they would have found some evidence of ‘GM Reality’ that backs up their argument by now.

Absence of evidence of flying saucers is not evidence of absence of flying saucers, but nor is it evidence of flying saucers, come to that.

Struggling to come up with a single instance of verifiable harm to people from the decades of GM food consumption, Robinson cites the Tryptophan poisoning in Japan. This was a case where a drug company poisoned scores of people with Tryptophan that was genetically engineered. But as has been well-established since, the Tryptophan’s being poisonous was not linked to genetic engineering, but other processes in its fermentation.

Surprising, really, that someone who has dedicated so much of her life to demonstrating the dangers of GM food still cannot find one single instance of harm.

GM Watch's scary starving African icon promises much...

... but delivers little

In the acknowledgements to his preseciently-titled book Don’t Worry it’s Safe to Eat Andy Rowell says ‘some people have offered assistance and help beyond what might be deemed reasonably acceptable’, namely Jonathan Matthews of GM Watch (then called Norfolk Genetic Information Network) who ‘provided invaluable advice and information’ (most of which turned out to be wrong, but that’s another story).

In what sense could one say that Andy Rowell ‘is not and never has been a GM Watcher’?

Andy Rowell speaking to activists at the offices in South Brent, where the company that owns Spinwatch is registered

‘Jonathan Jones is wilfully ignoring the large and growing body of scientific evidence indicating risks and harm from GM food’. http://spinprofiles.org/index.php?title=Jonathan_Jones

As a citation for this claim, Robinson gives a page on another part of the SpinWatch website, GM Watch, here http://www.gmwatch.eu/gm-crops-research-documenting-the-limitations-risks-and-alternatives

But this page, far from showing ‘the large and growing body of scientific research showing the risks of GM food’ as an extensive account of why there is no evidence of risks of GM food, under the heading ‘Are GM foods safe to eat?’.

Insisting that the lack of evidence that GM foods are unsafe to eat is evidence that their threat to safety has only been hidden, the passage goes on to ask about instances of dietary disorder in the US: ‘Is there a link with GM food? No one knows’.

‘Is there a link with the visiting aliens that built the pyramids? No one knows’

‘after an East End Jewish childhood‘

‘born as Jan Ludvik Hoch into a an orthodox Jewish family‘

‘pretending to be a French Catholic, while in fact being Egyptian Jewish‘

‘Kagan came from a family of Jewish woollen manufacturers in Kaunas‘

‘Dershowitz (born 1 September 1938) is an Jewish-American lawyer‘

‘Aaron Weisburd is a Jewish American‘

‘Born into a Jewish family in New York City‘

‘British historian of Iraqi Jewish background‘

‘a leading Jewish figure in Britain‘

‘a prominent Mexican-Jewish journalist‘

‘born into a liberal Jewish family‘

‘born in 1987 as Jacob Liebstein into an Orthodox Jewish family in the village of Molchad‘

‘a German-born Jewish American political philosopher‘

‘disciple of the German-Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss‘

‘born into a Jewish family‘

‘the third son of poor Romanian Jewish parents who had emigrated to the United Kingdom‘

‘Richard Krygier, a Polish-Jewish refugee‘

‘he isn’t Jewish‘

‘son of ‘Boy’ Hart, the Jewish founder of Henry Ansbacher, the bankers. He was regarded as an outsider who would like to be an insider‘

‘an Israeli-American media-mogul‘

‘Drawing mightily upon the memory of her own Jewish family‘

‘raised in a Conservative Jewish home‘

‘the first Jewish candidate for the office of either President or Vice-President of the United States‘

‘Born in Boston, Massachusetts into a Russian Jewish family‘

‘A Jewish intellectual‘

‘born on 26 May 1921 in Breslau, Germany (modern Wrocław, Poland) to a Jewish family‘

‘Both his parents were were Russian Jewish immigrants‘

‘Walter Lippmann, the son of second-generation German-Jewish parents‘

‘Charles B. Wyzanski, Jr. (Exeter, Harvard), is a Jewish member of the upper class. Judge Wyzanski is married to another member of the Jewish aristocracy, Gisela Warburg‘

‘Attended the 2004 Yom Haatzmaut as a ‘dignitary’ along with ‘a veritable Who’s Who of British Jewry.‘

‘the son of a salesman and Jewish mother‘

‘His father was a synagogue attendant and his grandfather was a rabbi‘

‘Both his parents are Jewish immigrants‘

One of many lists of prominent Jews SpinWatch keeps under the tag of 'the Israel lobby'

Strathclyde University Professor David Miller struggles to deny that ‘SpinWatch harbours anti-Semitic views’, pleading that the long posting by the notorious Jew-baiter Kevin McDonald was put up by accident, and that the ‘volunteer’ who did it is no longer a contributor (but surely the ‘volunteer’ is the same contributor who wrote most of the pages about prominent Jews on the SpinWatch site, and still a prolific poster?).

What Miller cannot explain is why it is that SpinProfiles (now renamed ‘Powerbase’) has such a preoccupation with Jews. The answer is that the quest for secret conspiracies by malevolent forces is written into SpinWatch’s whole way of working.

The approach of listing sinister agents of influence and asserting their hidden connections; the ambition to cleanse the public realm of lying and corruption; the belief that one’s fellow citizens are in the grip of powerful mind control; the puritanical belief that filthy lucre is corrupting the state  – these are all the paranoid fixations of conspiracy theorists.

And the original conspiracy theory, as everyone knows, is the theory that the Elders of Zion are pulling the strings to lead us into war and destruction.

David Miller’s anti-business viewpoint might be tempered by Karl Marx’s central insight that ‘Capital is a social, not a personal power’ – except that that is one of Marx’s teachings that Miller has jettisoned. Instead Miller favour’s the approach of writing down the names and addresses of all those who are making more money than him, burning with militant anti-capitalism.

Very funny, but not a good model for a public interest project

Miller’s model is the 1980s anarchist fantasy Written in Flames: a pamphlet that lists all the names and addresses of business leaders, with the not-too-subtle meaning that we should firebomb them, in revenge for the left’s many defeats. B.S. Johnson’s novel Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry has the same theme of the loser’s dream of violent revenge. But Miller is too much of a coward to take direct action, preferring the poison-pen method of listing the particulars of those people he imagines are the secret cabal that runs the world, with the dream of ‘exposing’ them.

Led by the paranoid-delusional Miller, SpinWatch is a loaded gun, already being waved in the direction of the ‘greedy bloodsuckers’ that feature in the anti-Semitic propaganda of the 1920s. But once the conflict in the Middle East is thrown into the mix, the gun goes off.

Other leftists, like the Socialist Workers Party, are cautious about blaming the Jewish lobby for US policy in the Middle East, but SpinWatch knows no such restraints. It draws up lists of prominent and influential Jews here , here and here.

At SpinWatch they think that it is Jews who have subverted American foreign policy, pushing it towards war.  If that seems surprising, read SpinWatch’s page on ‘Neoconservatives’. According to the SpinWatchers, the neoconservative movement is primarily responsible for the American’s belligerent policy in the Middle East, and, as they argue, Neoconservatism ‘remains largely Jewish in its composition’ (which just is not true – unless Ronald Reagan is Jewish). The Neoconservatives’ motives are explained wholly in terms of their Jewishness: they ‘were propelled by resentments against WASP elites—the men who had ignored the Holocaust, they felt, and “frozen out” Jews from the establishment.’

Gerry Healy, of the Workers Revolutionary Party

Under the guise of ‘anti-Zionism’ all of the listing of prominent and influential Jews seems to make sense. Other leftists would be cautious about drawing up lists of Jews, remembering the shameful record of the Workers Revolutionary Party that collected the names of prominent British Jews for Colonel Gadaffi.

This is the group-think at SpinWatch: if someone calls you anti-Semitic, then you must be doing the right thing, or as Miller writes: ‘this is the sort of unsavoury claim that groups linked to the Centre for Social Cohesion frequently resort to’. A search of the site for the phrase ‘anti-Semitism’  shows that it is almost always used in the context of countering “alleged” charges of anti-Semitism, or of defenders of Israel ‘playing the anti-Semitic card’. Miller writes ‘our websites oppose anti-semitism just as we do other forms of racism such as Islamophobia’ – which is a bit like saying ‘we are against anti-semitism, but moving quickly on, we are a lot happier talking about other forms of racism, such as Islamophobia’.

As far as SpinWatch is concerned, there is no anti-Semitism: there is only playing the anti-Semitic card. And there are Jews of influence, dragging the good people of Scotland, England and America into their infernal wars.

SpinProfiles and Neocon Europe are projects that, under the guise of academia, are used to carry out campaigns of smear and harassment by creating selectively produced profiles of people and groups with different political outlooks, often ignoring facts that do not support their agenda.

Meanwhile Shiraz Maher writes on Standpoint:

The problem is with SpinProfile’s apparent obsession with “Jewish power” or, if you will, “the Jewish lobby”.

Maher goes on to ask the pertinent question, how is it that some people are subject to unattractive accounts of their lives, while others, with much more influence, are ignored. The answer, as Maher makes clear, is that those who SpinWatch disapproves of, either for their role in the ‘Jewish lobby’ or other crimes, are singled out.

SpinWatch’s editor has critics on the further left, too, like Dr Mark Harvey of the Socialist Workers’ Party, who dismisses him as

a maverick conspiracy theorist at the University of Strathclyde called David Miller, whom nobody on the left takes seriously.

Sadly, it is a judgement on SpinWatch that is all too familiar, as Peter MacMahon wrote in the Edinburgh Evening News, back when the website was first launched

Instead of providing objective analysis of what has become known as “spin”, the site consists mainly of anti-establishment polemics based on largely unsubstantiated assertions which read like they have been written by student union bar Marxists. … And the author of this conspiracy theory nonsense is a professor of sociology at Strathclyde University.

Mandeville's 'Fable of the Bees' first showed that a life without interests is no life at all

Is ‘spin’ lying? If so, like Plato’s Republic, a world without spin would have to be ruled by a ‘philosopher king’ who would ‘never willingly tolerate an untruth, but hate it as he loves truth’ (The Republic, Penguin, 1978, p 278). Just as SpinWatch editor David Miller imagines a Scottish assembly and a Westminster Parliament untainted by ‘interests’, so Plato thinks that the ‘guardians’ of the city ‘must be told that they have no need of moral and material gold and sliver, because they have in their hearts the heavenly gold and silver given them by the gods’ (Ibid., p 184).

Not surprisingly, Plato took a dim view of democracy, ‘a splendid garlanded procession of insolence, license, extravagance, and shamelessness’: ‘They praise them all extravagantly and call insolence good breeding, license liberty, extravagance generosity, and shamelessness courage’. (Ibid., 380). Our comic Plato, the editor of SpinWatch, lacks the honesty to say that he loathes democracy for the same reasons – that it rests on the powers of persuasion and argument, spin, in fact.

Maybe lying is just too broad a definition of Spin. Does Miller not have a point that the Public Relations (PR) industry plays a greater role today?

In A Century of Spin Miller and William Dinan record the growth of the PR industry, but their command of the evidence is poor. First they note the growth of PR firms from 46 to 2230 between 1967 and 1994. But the increase might represent the break up of larger firms or the outsourcing of PR functions. They give a better indication by looking at the growing numbers working in PR: 3318 in 1986, 6578 in 1998, 7605 in 2005.

That looks like a big shift. But thought of as a share of the workforce it is less impressive – in fact it is a growth from 0.022 per cent of the UK workforce, to 0.046. A growth, but overall, insignificant. In the preface to A Century of Spin, Miller and Dinan ‘fessed up: ‘we struggled with how best to present and explain all of this and we grappled with what it all meant’ (p 11). You don’t say?

The fear of hidden financial interests has long been a mainstay of reactionary thinking

Miller and Dinan looked at the growth of PR in Scotland, too. In Open Scotland they discovered a ‘dramatic growth of press officers in Scottish governmental bodies over the past thirty years’, from 15 in 1970 to a grand total of 81 in 2000 (p 137). Miller and Dinan asked business executives what PR their companies were planning for the new Scottish Parliament. But the answer they found was that just two per cent had contracted PR firms, while 54 per cent had done ‘nothing’ – ‘the authors were surprised by the results of their survey given the anticipated growth in Scottish corporate communications’ (Open Scotland, p 199 – around the same time, of course, Miller and Dinan’s own sector, Higher Education, has massively expanded ).

Still, no need to let facts get in the way of a good story – or a hysterical panic. Miller and Dinan endow ‘Spin’ with magical powers over the people:

Corporate spin is an important means by which corporate power is defended and extended … the management of perceptions, beliefs and ultimately behaviours … the cutting edge of corporate power in its campaign to stifle democracy (Thinker Faker, Spinner, Spy, 2007, pp 1, 3, 18)

 Their charge that Spin threatens democracy is all the more comic since their prescription is to give unelected commissioners power over elected parliaments. Still, anyone who argues with the SpinWatch case had better watch out. The belief that Spin is not as important as Miller and Dinan say is itself an example of spin:

This misrecognition is no accident. It is part of the project of corporate spin and the public relations industry to deny, dissemble and disguise their own work. Thinker, Faker… p 1

 There is, of course, quite a literature on the growth of business consultancies – but those remain a closed book to Miller and Dinan. Worse, the scholarly view is that such consultancies are not a sign of powerful corporations, but rather that they are predatory upon insecure executives and public sector managers.

This article is part of the corruption portal

The one thing about the SpinWatch editor and Strathclyde University Professor David Miller that stands out above all others. And that is that he always goes along with whatever delusion the media is selling.  Has any man ever been so willingly spun this way and that? Whether it is the ‘aids epidemic’, ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia, ‘genocide’ in Rwanda, ‘media violence’ and video nasties, law and order, the ‘BSE plague’, the supposed dangers of ‘Frankenfood’, the threat posed by MMR, or corruption in parliament – Miller has bought into every panic. Far from studying the media critically, Miller parrots every crank newspaper panic without thinking. He is the Strathclyde Professor of tabloid ranting, wrong about everything, but never once going back to try and work out why, just blustering on to the next received opinion.

Still, when you look at Miller’s research grants, you can see that going along with the panic of the day has been a lucrative business. His funding applications show a bloodhound’s sense for ‘following the money’:

1989-1992 AIDS Media Research Project, funded by the ESRC AIDS programme

But media analyst Miller missed the main story, that the government had exaggerated the risk of AIDS. Instead, he argues that AIDS education is an instance where spinning the truth is justified (Message Received, p 30) 

Professor David Miller

1992-1994 Food Panics in the Media project funded by the ESRC Nation’s Diet Initiatives

Miller concluded that the threat of contracting ‘human BSE’ (CJD) led people to distrust official sources (Message Received, p 139). But in fact there was no such threat. The CJD epidemic was an hysterical panic that never appeared.

 1996-1998 Media and Expert Constructions of Risk Project funded by the ESRC Risk Programme

Around this time Miller was actively promoting a media panic over Video Nasties, and then crime more generally. His central contribution was to call into question the whole notion of a ‘moral panic’, that is to make ‘risk’ a natural not a social category.

 1998-2001 Political Communication and Democracy’, Funded by the ESRC ‘Media Culture and Media Economics’ Programme.

This was the point that Miller started to get out of media analysis and into political sociology, by coat-tailing the ‘cash-for-questions’ media storm.

 1999-2001 Political Communication and the Scottish Parliament funded by the ESRC Devolution programme.

‘The new constitutional settlement of 1999, we thought, might herald a moment … of new solutions to the need for wide engagement in democracy at the Scottish level’, thought Miller, naively (Open Scotland, 2001, vii).  But ten years later he bemoaned that  ‘the tentacles of corporate Scotland stretch into every institution of the state’ (Neoliberal Scotland, 2010, p 116)

 2001 Global Media Monitoring Project coordinated by the World Association of Christian Communication

A cynical boilerplate piece of media analysis of images of women structured for no other purpose than to shake money out of the church tree.

 2000-2003 Corporate Public Relations in British and Multinational companies, funded by the ESRC.

This was the grant that Miller put into his own private company, the ironically named, Public Interest Investigations.

 2003 and 2004 Miller got money both from the Scottish TUC and the Water Customer Consultation Panels in Scotland.

In 2004, an unexplained grant of £45,000 from the Scottish Executive, to this unremitting critic of Holyrood spin and corruption – around the same time that he was accusing First Minster Jack McConnell of profiting from a £1.5 million PR campaign to promote Scottish fisheries. ‘The tentacles of corporate Scotland’ stretch far indeed.

In 2007 Miller was again caning funds from the ESRC, this time to research ‘environmental advocacy’.

2008 Miller cadged £4,500 from the public service workers’ union Unison to ‘review public services’, and again got more from the ESRC to investigate the use of the Freedom of Information Act – with the support of the Scottish Information Commissioner.

In 2009 Miller was raiding the funds of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council for work on ‘science communication’ (this from a man who thinks that the Royal Society is a sinister conspiracy).

At the same time the ecumenical Miller got more funding from the ESRC in a project in partnership with the Scottish-Islamic Foundation, and £12,000 from a workgroup on teaching about terrorism.

Miller’s true talents are in playing whatever anxiety is going, the better to raid the public purse.