The More You Watch, the Less You Know

[Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>]

Here's another reason not to watch television: corporate media
conglomerates are getting rid of the few remaining aggressive television
investigative reporters. 

Last year, two such reporters, Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, were added to
the list of road kill on the television superhighway when they were fired
from the Fox Television affiliate in Tampa, Florida (WTVT). 

In a lawsuit filed against the station earlier this month, Akre and Wilson
alleged that Fox executives ordered them to broadcast lies about
Monsanto's controversial bovine growth hormone (BGH) now being used by
many of the nation's dairy farmers. 

The journalists say they were fired from Fox-owned station in Tampa (WTVT)
after completing a four-part series on BGH in the Florida milk supply. 

The series alleged, among other things, that supermarkets in Florida have
been selling milk from cows injected with BGH, despite promises by those
supermarkets that they would not buy milk from treated cows until the
hormone gained widespread public acceptance. 

BGH was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1993 over
the objections of independent scientists who contend that use of the
hormone poses health risks to milk drinkers. Such concerns have led the
European Union, Australia, and New Zealand to prohibit use of BGH in cows. 

Wilson says that just prior to the first scheduled air date (February 24,
1997), Monsanto's outside libel attorney sent a threatening letter to
Roger Ailes, president of Fox Network News. 

As a result of that letter, the series was postponed, and Wilson and Akre
agreed to go back to Monsanto to give the company another chance to
respond to the allegations in the story. 

This drew another letter from Monsanto's lawyer. From then on, things went
sour between the reporters and their bosses. Wilson says the letters were
the beginning of a successful campaign by Monsanto to kill the story. 

A meeting was held at the station March 5, 1997 to discuss the issue, but
Wilson and Akre were not invited. 

"After that, the script was reworked," Wilson says. "Changes were ordered
in the script. We were essentially presented with an order to run the
script in the altered fashion that Fox lawyers suddenly thought was the
way to tell the story." 

Wilson says that Fox first threatened to fire them when they refused to
broadcast what Wilson and Akre considered to be false and misleading
information. 

According to Wilson, on April 16, 1997, WTVT's vice president and general
manager, David Boylan, told Wilson and Akre "you will either broadcast
this story the way we are telling you to broadcast it, or we will fire you
in 48 hours." 

Unlike many of their supine brethren within the industry, Wilson and Akre
stood up to the corporate bosses. Wilson told Boylan, "If you fire us for
refusing to broadcast this information that we have already documented to
you is false and misleading, if you do that, we will go directly to the
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and file a complaint. You cannot
knowingly broadcast news which you know to be false and misleading." 

After threatening to go to the FCC, the station responded by offering
about $200,000 to the reporters if they would agree to a gag order. 

Wilson and Akre refused and were then assigned to re-write the story 73
times over the course of the remaining nine months on their contract. At
least six air dates were set and cancelled by the station. They were fired
on December 2, 1997. 

In the lawsuit filed against the station, Wilson and Akre allege that the
station violated the state's whistleblower statute by firing them after
they threatened to report wrongdoing to federal authorities. 

In a two-page statement, WTVT said that it "ended the employment of the
Wilson/Akre team when it became apparent that their journalistic
differences could not be resolved despite the station's extraordinary
efforts to complete this story." 

The station also denied offering a "hush money" payment to the two
reporters. 

Wilson was having none of the station's explanation. 

"We set out to tell Florida consumers the truth a giant chemical company
and a powerful dairy lobby clearly doesn't want them to know," Wilson
said. "That used to be something investigative reporters won awards for.
Sadly, as we've learned the hard way, it's something you can be fired for
these days whenever a news organization places more value on its bottom
line than on delivering the news to its viewers honestly." 

Focus on the Corporation is a weekly column written by Russell Mokhiber
and Robert Weissman. Please feel free to forward the column to friends or
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