The Media Commons by Patrick D Murphy

Author:Patrick D Murphy [Murphy, Patrick D]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Media Studies, Political Science, Public Policy, Environmental Policy, Nature, Environmental Conservation & Protection
ISBN: 9780252099588
Google: hKuzDgAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2017-03-29T02:41:03+00:00

Remaking Monsanto

To appear less like a lumbering monstrosity, feared and chased by the peasants of the global village for reasons ranging from charges of environmental injustice and bio-prospecting to being a merchant of a biological Pandora’s box, the company has work hard to craft a new public image as a sustainable food producer. Monsanto actually began to pursue this path in earnest in the mid-1990s. According to Robert B. Shapiro, Monsanto’s chairman and CEO from 1995 to 2000, the biotech company had a long history of considering environmental issues in its economic, technological, and competitive planning, but it wasn’t until 1994, when an offsite meeting of a group of twenty-five “critical thinkers” led to a more deliberate focus on sustainable development (Magretta 1997). The embrace of sustainability created the opportunity for Monsanto to attempt to exorcize its ghosts, with the “original” industrial chemical and pharmaceutical Monsanto spinning off in 2000 to merge with Pfizer and Solutia to become “Pharmacia Corporation.”13 Through this reformation of the company, the agricultural and biotech assets, operations, and liabilities were transferred to the “new” Monsanto, which now concentrated on the development of hybrid corn and other row crops, along with its keystone product, Roundup herbicide. From 2008 through 2012, Monsanto’s image makers made the decision to promote the company as a “new” “food company” dedicated to producing seed for farmers. That tagline has been subsequently revised, and Monsanto now defines itself as a “sustainable agricultural company” committed to meeting the “needs of a growing population, to protect and preserve the planet we all call home, and to help improve lives everywhere.”14 While the terminology has been adjusted over the past few years, and these semantic modifications will likely continue, the aim remains the same: recasting the company as a progressive problem solver serving humanity through biotechnology, while distancing itself from the “old” and controversial chemical company from days of yore.

Given the company’s past product line, this is no small task and therefore perhaps no surprise that the new, sustainability-driven Monsanto has invested heavily in elaborating a sophisticated, interlaced media network to help reshape its image. Like Coca-Cola, Comcast, and Google, information about Monsanto’s activities and commitment to the environment is available online through a multiplatform universe of blogs, social media, videos, journals, “webisodes,” and so forth. And like similar strategies of large corporations using media to reach out to its imagined publics, the Monsanto mediascape includes mission and vision statements, sustainability reports, educational materials, and overviews of environmental policies and practices. However, what separates Monsanto from most other companies attempting to attach their brand identity to environmental responsibility is that Monsanto’s challenge isn’t just about grafting its image onto progressive ecological activities; rather, they seek to establish a credible narrative that what it actually makes is not only environmentally responsive but vital for a planet in crisis. As I show in the rest of this chapter, Monsanto has done this by drawing heavily from the Limits discourse as well as the more problem-solving-centered Sustainable Development discourse to set up a Promethean solution.

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