ACDC News

Issue 06-12, July, 2006

Color me spoiled. A news report we have added to the ACDC collection describes new food labels that change color to signal the freshness of packaged meat in the local supermarket. Food Quality Sensor International Inc. is reported to be testing these labels in California and Nebraska. On average, they add a penny to the packaging costs for each dollar of meat sold.

Title: Food label would bypass sniff test

"It is likely there is a book to be written about language and rural advertising in the United States as well," Battistella observed. We suspect the idea could also apply usefully to many countries.

Title: Advertising in rural India

Development journalism - an oxymoron. "Developing countries need good journalism and good journalists, period," according to the communications director of the International Development Research Centre. Jean-Marc Fleury argued in a report we added recently:

"Development, after all, is not something thrust upon people, but a process in which people engage, in which they are both actors and beneficiaries. For people to act effectively, they must be informed. And that is the role of media and journalists in both developed and developing worlds. This, however, is not what some are calling 'development journalism.'"

Fleury called for: (a) better training of journalists for this challenge and (b) greater effort to make the results of developing country research better known around the world. We in the Center share the goal of helping address both those needs.

Title: Development journalism or just good journalism
Posted at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/trust/2015/story/2004/06/printable/040609_jean_marc_fleury.shtml

Embed journalists everywhere. "Embed them where people live, work, play, and pray," Aly Colón argued in Poynteronline. "Embed them in neighborhoods, urban areas, rural areas, corporations, nonprofits, hospitals, families, retirement communities, conservative centers and liberal lodges." What does the author think might happen?

•  It would reframe the way journalists gather information and tell their stories.
•  Journalists would gain more intimate knowledge by focusing on the personal, ordinary, everyday experiences of those they observe.
•  They would craft stories in which persons portrayed would recognize themselves and the situations depicted.

Could it be said that specialized reporters, such as agricultural journalists, already are embedded in the spheres they cover? Could they use that concept more fully? What risks and potentials are involved?

Title: Embed journalists everywhere
Posted at: http://www.poynter.org/content/content_print.asp?id=25265

Communications and the three faces of science fraud. One can see the role of communications in three "faces of science fraud" described by David Schubert of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. His commentary in the San Diego Union-Tribune examined the creation or manipulation of data to achieve specific ends related to biotechnology and other scientific endeavors. The three faces he identified:

• Increasing pressure on politicians and regulatory agencies to reduce regulatory requirements.
• Companies employing their own scientists to publish manuscripts in an attempt to discredit the consensus of scientists and feed public relations campaigns.
• Regulatory agencies such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration "forced to bend the facts of science to fit the political agenda" of the day.

Title: Three faces of science fraud
Posted at: http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060216/news_lz1e16schuber.html

The Internet - "a weapon on the table" for "biotech war." "Either you pick it up or your competitor does, but somebody is going to get killed," according to an agri-marketing source cited in a 2002 Guardian Unlimited (UK) commentary. George Monbiot described successful efforts by Monsanto to position biotechnology more positively on the Internet.

Title: Covert biotech war
Posted at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,842999,00.html