Commentary

I’m wondering if there’s any money to be made offering remedial journalism classes for big city reporters, kind of a “Covering Food and Agriculture 101?” And I’m not talking “lifestyle,” “restaurant evaluation” or just plain old recipe coverage, I’m talking how farming operates in the real world.

The reason I ponder such things — and I am known for pondering stuff most people never even think about — is because I’ve watched this week general media reporters botch up ag-related coverage.  Far be it from me to accuse anyone in the media of a bias, as in covering a story in a certain way to make a point. No, I prefer to think those who practice my previous profession just don’t get it when it comes to ag writing or, for that matter, covering the food business per se.

I had a journalism professor who was the avenging angel of business journalism, a man who dedicated most of his career to fostering among nascent journalistas a love for covering profits and losses, boardroom shenanigans, and, believe it or not, he used to preach to us that “business can be sexy!”

Well, if IBM can be sexy, life on the farm, in a feed mill, a meat plant or a processing facility can be sexy.

To give a kind unsexy example, I tracked the coverage this week of an announcement by FDA that out of more than 600 samples taken at the Iowa egg farms involved in the salmonella recall, preliminary results showed four had popped positive as matches to the suspected strain making folks sick in 17 states. Of those four, two were feed samples taken from the egg farm’s company-owned and operated feed mill.

FDA said “there’s no cause-and-effect relationship” between the feed samples and the outbreak, but major media outlets across the country ran stories about “the likely cause” and “feed is the culprit.” Several major outlets reported the samples were from “feed sold to the farms” when in fact the feed was manufactured by the farm, with some ingredients purchased on the outside.

I spoke with one FDA official who admitted when he saw the lineup of reporters for the briefing, he recognized them as “food reporters,” and said, “These folks are going to draw a straight line connection when there is none.”

Another example is FDA’s announcement late last week of a scientific review panel to look at the application by a biotech company for approval of genetically modified salmon eggs, fish roe that will produce fish that will reach market weight in half the time as conventional salmon. Nearly every reporter wrote that FDA was about to approve transgenic salmon — not eggs, but the fish. The company in question doesn’t raise fish, but that fact was lost in the media frenzy.

My point is if you’re going to write about an endeavor as arcane as production agriculture you have to understand it. You have to know the difference between a commercial feed mill selling to hundreds of customers and the guy who’s integrated and makes his own feed for his own animals. And if you’re going to write about fish eggs, you really need to know the which comes first, the egg or the adult fish.

Maybe it would help if every group put together a primer for their industry, kind of “The ABCs of Animal Production” or “The Basics of Growing Crops.”

Or maybe we need journalism schools, recognizing not every general assignment reporter can be an expert in all things, that teaches budding journalists to least ask the right questions.