Not just elections? Russia meddles in GMO debate, too

English-language Russian news outlets are publishing high volumes of articles that portray genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, in a negative light. In 2016, Russian news outlets RT and Sputnik published more articles that mentioned GMOs than the Huffington Post, Fox News, CNN, and Breitbart News combined. Russian coverage consistently played on vulnerabilities in the American GMO discussion. And unlike United States-based coverage, which was mixed on pro- or anti-GMO stance, Russian coverage was almost unanimously anti-GMO. In fact, many of the GMO mentions in Russian outlets appeared in stories that were only tangentially related (or completely unrelated) to agriculture and genetic engineering. For instance, a story about Zika virus-infected fetuses included a link that enticed readers to “READ MORE: GMO mosquitoes could be cause of Zika outbreak, critics say.” The researchers categorized those tangential mentions as “click bait.”