Big Meat buys off academics

This has been well-known for a while, but there's new documentation out there.

Due to limited public funding for academic research, industry-funded studies on food and agriculture are common. And while researchers often strive to avoid bias and funding does not always impact research quality, evidence suggests industry-funded studies are more likely to produce results that reflect well on the funder.

In the paper, Viveca Morris and Dr. Jennifer Jacquet reveal a broader pattern of how the livestock industry, which has long had close affiliations with land-grant universities, has infiltrated universities to block climate scrutiny. The researchers trace the origins, funding, and political function of the “corporate capture of academic institutions”—especially focusing on the CLEAR Center, founded in 2018, and AgNext at Colorado State University, founded in 2020. As the authors argue, these leading academic centers wield their academic credibility to “maintain the livestock industry’s social license to operate.”

“They’re conducting industry-funded public relations and communications campaigns on climate change issues that benefit their agribusiness donors,” said Morris, the executive director of the Law, Ethics & Animals Program at Yale Law School. This effort extends far beyond industry-funded research to more actively shape policy, effectively acting like a lobbyist through frequent testimonies and meetings with policymakers, among other strategies.

Even if this is legal, “having a university—without transparency, without even telling the public that an industry donor is involved—acting as a PR arm of an industry group is impossible to justify with the university’s mission,” added Morris. - Civil Eats

One successful method with which Big Oil drives the "narrative"

It would be a lot harder without corporate media's ready and cheerful (if degraded) compliance.

This practice became the namesake of one of the best-known types of fallacies, the red herring fallacy. As a philosophy professor, this is how I explain the fallacy to my students: If the argument is not going your opponent's way, a common strategy — though a fallacious and dishonorable one — is to divert attention from the real issue by raising an issue that is only tangentially related to the first.

If our collective philosophical literacy were better, we might notice that this fallacy seems to be working spectacularly well for the fossil-fuel industry, the petrochemical industry, and a bunch of other bad actors who would like to throw us off the trail that would lead us fully to grasp their transgressions. We shouldn't keep falling for it. - Salon

Big Meat copies Big Oil propaganda techniques

And on the public dime, no less.

This technique of using statements that are technically true but omit crucial information and therefore are misleading, is called paltering — and it’s an old favorite of the fossil fuel industry.

In fact, it’s not the only tactic the (National Cattlemen's Beef Association) has borrowed from Big Oil. Increasingly, as NCBA and other agribusiness trade associations like the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) and U.S. Farmers and Ranchers in Action try to convince the public that animal agriculture is sustainable, they are turning to the fossil fuel industry’s tried and true playbook for greenwashing.

Like fossil fuel trade associations, these agribusiness trade associations are financing and promoting the work of third-party academics; fomenting uncertainty and doubt in cases where the evidence is already clear enough to act upon; and using slick PR and ad campaigns to present the industry as part of the solution to climate change, rather than a contributor to it.

At the bottom of each of NCBA’s “Beefing Up Sustainability” ads is a logo with “Beef Checkoff” written on it. This logo marks the biggest difference between the fossil fuel industry’s PR machine and that of animal agriculture: The animal agriculture industry’s efforts to minimize their products’ climate impact are paid for from a pot of public funds to which all beef and pork farmers and ranchers are required to contribute. - DeSmog