A Grain of Truth

This book begins with a provocative assertion. Referring to agricultural biotechnology, Susanna Hornig Priest writes that "the lack of opportunity for informed public debate about these revolutionary technologies and their social and economic impact is a serious failure of democracy. It is a failure that makes our claim to being a free society with a free press somewhat hollow" (p. 3). The rest of the book contains a series of case studies in which Priest, who teaches journalism at Texas A&M University, tries to expose the roots of this failure. Individual essays discuss, among other issues, resistance in the United States to bovine growth hormone as a means of boosting milk production, the contrast between media coverage of agricultural trade and patent issues in India and the United States, and the controversies over animal cloning and "terminator technology," which is intended to prevent farmers from using part of their harvest as seed the following year. (The latter two issues did provoke significant media coverage [End Page 215] and public debate. Priest argues that this occurred because these technologies appeared to threaten values or institutions that Americans hold sacred: individual autonomy and the family farm.)

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