The CRS presence and the 8 Bové cars are enough in themselves, surely ?

Our local spokesman for Monsanto is longtime Senateur for Avranches Jean Bizet.

The rest of us know already what thoses spokespeople will say; the voice of the manifestants is NEVER heard.

Heartening to hear it!

That’s what’s so often lacking in dissections of mainstream media shortcomings.

[W]hat is lacking … is the richer, subtler, contextualised coverage of proceedings. That is where alternative journalists and alternative journalism can shine and where it is sorely needed.

Absolutely – but the real challenge seems to me to be to incorporate the same approach back into a comprehensive attempt to report news, in the conventional sense of daily developments. A sort of redefinition of the paradigm you describe Reuters and its rivals filtering their inputs and outputs through. That way it might be possible to conceptualise a transferable throughput model…

In non-corporate babble, we need to figure out what ought to make news and why, and how at the same time to make its coverage as convincing as possible. So I think you’d ultimately need to feature Monsanto – not in that cloying “give them a chance to put their point of view” kind of way that pseudo-objectivity suggests, but in a “this is what i’m publishing so what have you got to say for yourselves” kind of doorstep. The point wouldn’t be to air it all either – but to try and make your report address the strongest criticism they could make of it. That’s how really powerful news gets made, in my view.