As any P.R. hack worth his weight in press releases knows, the most persuasive content is that which doesn’t look like propaganda at all.

If you want to influence a mass audience, for instance, you can try to do what the Pentagon does and subtly bake slanted information into entertainment products such as movies and television shows.  If, on the other hand, you are looking to influence a slightly higher-brow audience, you can embed disinformation in newspapers’ news and opinion pages. And if you are looking to brainwash politicians, think tanks, columnists and the rest of the political elite in order to rig an esoteric debate over public policy, you can attempt to shroud your agitprop in the veneer of science.

While these are all diabolically effective methods of manipulating political discourse, the latter, which involves corporate funding of academic research, is the most insidious of all. But the good news is that the last few weeks provided important reminders about the problem — and why scrutiny of sources is so important.

At the national level, media organizations frothed with news about Stanford University researchers supposedly determining that organic food food is no more healthy than conventionally produced food. In the rush to generate audience-grabbing headlines, most of these news outlets simply regurgitated the Stanford press release, which deliberately stressed that researchers “did not find strong evidence that organic foods are more nutritious or carry fewer health risks than conventional alternatives.”

The word “deliberately” is important here — as watchdog groups soon noted, Stanford is a recipient of corporate largess from agribusinesses such as Cargill, which have an obvious vested financial interest in denigrating organics. Additionally, one of the researchers in question had previously been connected to infamous tobacco industry efforts to pay for skewed science. In light of those inconvenient truths, Stanford may have made the calculated decision to promote the part of the study that denigrated organics and downplay the part of the report that, according to the Los Angeles Times, found “evidence of higher blood levels of pesticide residues among children who ate conventionally grown food” and “antibiotic-resistant microbes more commonly found among conventionally reared chicken and pork.”

In the same week that this all broke, a similar controversy hit local politics in Montana.There, according to the Missoulian, Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer used his bully pulpit to highlight how the University of Montana’s esteemed brand was being used by corporate forces “mounting an effort to convince the 2013 Legislature to change how the state Revenue Department values their property in attempt to lower their taxes.” As the Missoulian’s Chuck Johnson reports, Schweitzer complained to the university president about a study “done by a law professor under contract for Cablevison/Bresnan that criticized how the state values certain types of business property.” That professor, Kirsten Juras, “was hired by the cable company to do the study, and she presented it to a legislative committee in July” after “provid(ing) the company with ongoing drafts of her study” while it was in progress.

In both of these cases, the response to the pushback was predictable — and predictably unconvincing. In Stanford’s case, the Huffington Post reports that officials flatly “denied any such link” between Cargill cash and the way the study was framed, insisting that “the Cargill money went to a department not directly involved in the research.” This retort, though, assumes that money coming to the university in one department cannot affect research and P.R. from another department.