‘Clinton attacks Europe for moving too slowly over GM safety’ said The Independent on 24 July. ‘Blair stands by Clinton in defence of GM food’ said The Daily Telegraph.Marking the end of the G8 summit in Okinawa, these and other headlines were not necessarily contradictory. They were certainly very varied. Do they, perhaps, reflect a shift towards less strident certainty than that which has characterised UK media coverage of GM food over the past two years?Sometimes the style in which the press decides not to cover an issue is as significant as what it does do. On this occasion, for example, the Daily Express and Daily Mail restricted themselves to pedestrian, inside-page reporting of President Clinton and Tony Blair’s comments. Clinton had extolled the health benefits of rice rich in vitamin A, and Blair had talked of biotechnology being as important in this century as information technology in the last.Yet these were the same newspapers which had, as recently as May 17 and 19 respectively, devoted their entire front pages to ‘Storm as GM crops wreck honey’ and ‘The seeds of deceit’. Since Arpad Pusztai’s original claims regarding potential toxicity of GM food (Curr Biol 1998 8:R630), the two mid-market tabloids have produced many memorable screamers, ranging from ‘Mutant crops could kill you’ (The Express) to ‘GM foods: how Blair ignored our top scientists’ (Daily Mail).Another indication of a shifting mood is the appearance of television programmes carefully examining the alleged dangers of GM crops and found them unproven. ‘The attack of the killer tomatoes’ shown by Channel 4 last year, plus a more recent Equinox, eschewed the political correctness of automatic opposition to GM and simply questioned the basis of assertions about the toxicity of such foods and the risks of cultivating them.As with the news desks of newspapers, all media gatekeepers make judgements on story lines they intuitively believe will find favour with their customers. They have little or no time to examine ‘the facts’. So while most journalists reject the idea that they pursue prescribed angles in their day-to-day enquiries (they may be reporting on a pro-hunting speech one day and on an opposing talk the next), the media writ large undoubtedly do have agendas.Meanwhile, the international reverberations of what was originally a purely UK furore (contrasting with countries such as the USA, where GM crops had been widely accepted) continue apace. The Guardian illustrated the scale of this through a news feature accompanying its Okinawa summit material.Entitled ‘Global battle rages over GM crops as biotechnology revolution ploughs on’, this contrasted the thousands of varieties now being tested around the world with the countless skirmishes being fought by activists determined to stop trials. On the one hand a global market of $3 bn, swelling to $25 bn by 2010. On the other hand, a ‘‘shift in public perception [that] has cost hundreds of millions of dollars in lost markets’’.John Vidal began not with generalities but with a vivid example. ‘‘When Professor Howard Atkinson and colleagues at Leicester University genetically modified a potato to be pest-resistant without the use of chemicals, it was decided to test it in Bolivia, one of the world’s poorest countries and the place where the potato originated,’’ Vidal explained.The work was part funded by the UK Department for International Development, and the trial approved by the Bolivian government. Nevertheless, local reaction came as a bitter surprise to Atkinson. Activists, instead of welcoming the experiment as an attempt to alleviate malnutrition, went to a village near the proposed site and, Atkinson says, gave the local people ‘‘misinformation’’. The trial has now been delayed for a year.In addition to the media, many different factions and individuals have contributed to the irrationality that has characterised the GM food debate. The most obvious are Greenpeace and other NGOs. Less obvious are scientists and even bodies such as the British Medical Association (Curr Biol 1999, 9:R466).But what of those researchers and organisations that naively failed to anticipate either likely public reaction or the highly professional opportunism of lobby groups? Why did the biotechnology community not realise the need to launch this technology with foods having clear nutritional, environmental or economic value for consumers here and elsewhere? Why choose instead products whose only apparent benefits were to commercial companies and whose cultivation could be portrayed as ‘genetic pollution’?Above all, who, ten or more years ago, was informing media gatekeepers about the potential rewards of GM potatoes and rice?The answer, of course, is no-one — just as no-one foresaw fears aroused by brief TV coverage of a few experiments by Arpad Pusztai in Aberdeen escalating into global summitry. Things may now be changing, but much has been lost.