The More You Watch, the Less You Know
excerpts from the book
Corporate Predators
by Russel Mokhiber and Robert Weis
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 WTVT Fox Television affiliate in
Tampa, Florida.
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 the Fox-owned WTVT
in Tampa 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 rewrite
the story seventy-three times over the course of the remaining
nine months on their contract. At least six air dates were set
and canceled 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 whistle-blower 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."
Corporate Predators