Russian Sites Promote Anti-GMO Articles, Study Finds

RT and Sputnik publish stories about GMOs more often than US outlets, and typically portray them in a negative light.

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PIXABAY, JCESAR2015

Russian government-funded news websites RT and Sputnik are publishing articles that question the safety of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) at a rate that far outpaces US news sites, according to a preprint posted to SocArXiv Tuesday (February 27). The study is under peer review.

While examining how GMOs are portrayed in US media, the researchers found that the US versions of RT and Sputnik produced more articles with the word “GMO” than five American websites—Huffington Post, Fox News, CNN, Breitbart News, and MSNBC—combined. RT produced 34 percent of the articles about GMOs across the seven sites, and Sputnik produced 19 percent. Fox News accounted for 15 percent of coverage, and MSNBC for less than 1 percent.

“Compared to a wide range of American news media, ...

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