Hatchet Job by the New York Times

Very little irritates me more than a bully and that is exactly what the New York Times has stooped to. Many of us understand that we live in a time where dirty politics and smear campaigns have been raised to an art form.

Rupert Murdoch's empire is built on baseless sensationalism and loud mouthed info-tainment where truth is the only issue that has any liberal treatment. The reality is that corporate media pursues a corporate agenda and profits are the bottom line.

It is a cultural malady, that the election results in Iowa suggest, most Americans have had enough of. Corporate front groups and their astro turf grass root, fronts and frauds fill every niche of cyberspace and dominate mainstream media.

These faux friends of the average citizen, create serious challenges for genuine efforts to be heard, and to contradict any agenda that impacts the real bottom line, corporate profits, the life blood of Wall Street.

It is bad enough that big business is given the default platforms. Paid pundits and OpEd sections are available for corporate spin, while citizens fight with little more than the conviction of their beliefs to challenge the corporate domination.

It is a challenge that is taken on with great personal sacrifice and individual effort. It embodies all the qualities of the "can do spirit" that all the Presidential candidates have taken to applauding.

Apparently that's great for the sound bites, but not for the principles in practice at the New York Times. They have taken up the attack style of the Swift Boat campaign with an article on January 9, 2008.

Who did the global power of the NY Times see fit to go after? Who's credibility did they attack?

They went after a mother who dared to suggest that the agribusiness %$#@ is contributing to the food allergies her children live with. This mother dared to take matters into her own hands and fill the need she and other parents deal with daily, trying to protect children too young to understand the life threatening reality of food allergies.

The reality of the food situation has transformed the quintessential American child's lunch of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with milk and cookies into killers that have school cafeterias a place that needs individuals with EMS training to work in.

She committed herself to creating tools to promote education, awareness and make life with these food challenges a bit easier on a very practical level with little lunch bags and allergy alert tags. She took proactive steps to engage some food makers to develop products these children can eat so her children and others aren't dropping dead in the school lunch rooms.

The mother in question is Robyn O'Brien founder of Allergy Kids. There's little doubt that when she granted the interview to the New York Times she expected that "The Paper of Record" would do a reasonable job of representing the issue of childhood food allergies with an eye to informing the public.

What she got was a FOX News rendition of fair and balanced that amounts to a little more than a hatchet job in defense of agribusiness. The Times used the only tools agribusiness has by misrepresenting the character of their critics and sowing seeds of doubt.

There's no doubt in my mind she must have been shocked by the cheap attacks and spin that constituted the second half of the article. Few individuals in America can actually imagine how far agribusiness will go to discredit their critics. Nor can they dream how every small voice advocating for pure foods can find themselves in the cross hairs of the agribusiness attack machine.

Since I have devoted much of the last decade to tracking the Monsanto and agribusiness supporters, as well as their cowardly, covert smear and spin techniques that are included in the article, this seemed like a perfect opportunity to expose how relentless and biased this attack on pure foods and critics of agribusiness is.

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