Thread: Farm Broadcaster Ousted after Ripping Monsanto’s Goon Squa

CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER

Farm Broadcaster Ousted after Ripping Monsanto’s Goon Squads
22 Corporate Crime Reporter 18, April 30, 2008

If you have heard of Learfield Communications, it is probably from listening to college football and basketball games.

The Jefferson City, Missouri based Learfield is one of the nation’s largest broadcasters of college sports.

But it also produces news programming heard throughout the farm belt.

Learfield was started 35 years ago by Clyde Lear and Derry Brownfield.

Lear went on to be the chairman of the company. He bought out his friend and partner Brownfield in 1985.

Brownfield went on to do market news reports for the Learfield news division until 1997 or so, when he started broadcasting a daily call-in show called The Common Sense Coalition.

Derry Brownfield would broadcast The Common Sense Coalition from the studios of Learfield Communications.

Learfield would subsidize the program and allow Brownfield to use its studios and satellite hook-up.

Monsanto happens to be a big advertiser of the Learfield news division – to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Brownfield happens to think that Monsanto is an evil corporation.

Therein lies the rub.

For weeks, Brownfield had been ripping Monsanto on air for its policies of enforcing its seed patents against farmers.

On the April 16 show, Brownfield’s topic was seed industry concentration in America.

His guests were Fred Stokes, president of the Organization for Competitive Markets, and Michael Stumo, general counsel of the group.

Stokes and Stumo were promoting a new project to study corporate concentration in the seed industry.

Monsanto is the dominant player in the global seed industry and has a reputation for playing rough.

On air, Brownfield quoted from a newly published Vanity Fair article titled “Monsanto’s Harvest of Fearâ€

MONSANTO IS EVIL. THEY WANT TO DRIVE OUT NATURAL SEED SO EVERYONE HAS TO BUY GM SEED FROM THEM. THEY WANT TO CONTROL FOOD AND GET EVEN RICHER. AND WHAT EFFECT WILL EATING GM CROPS HAVE ON OUR HEALTH. IF THERE ARE HEALTH ISSUES YOU CAN BET MONSANTO WONT TELL US ABOUT THEM. THEY ARE SO EVIL. IN FACT SOME FARMERS REFER TO THEM AS "MONSATAN".