The Independent (London) | September 14, 1999
Can two reporters take on Murdoch and win? Two sacked TV journalists are seeking revenge - and they want the world to know.
They seemed like a television dream team. She is a former CNN anchorwoman. He is a three-time Emmy-Award winner and, according to Penthouse magazine, "one of the most famous and feared journalists in America," owing to documentaries he made that blew the whistle on Chrysler's defective door latches and Ford's fire-hazard ignition switches.
But within a year of hiring Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, Rupert Murdoch's Fox 13 TV station in Tampa Bay sacked the wife-and-husband team. Why is not clear. But the reporters are now suing the network under Florida's Whistleblower Act, claiming they were fired for refusing to broadcast statements which they considered to be untrue about bovine growth hormone, which is manufactured by [Monsanto], a major Fox advertiser.
Fox denies the allegations and is defending the action. It has twice asked for postponements of the trial, now due to begin 11 October. And the giant corporation recently added President Bill Clinton's personal legal counsel, David Kendall, to its team of a dozen defence lawyers on a case that promises to illuminate aspects of the startling concentration of ownership in the US media and the extent to which this could be skewing TV news coverage.
The story begins in June 1996. That's when Rupert Murdoch celebrated his acquisition of US citizenship with a shopping spree in which he added 13 major US stations to his Fox network. Fox, which is part of Murdoch's vast News Corp, then owned 22 US stations, reaching more than 50 per cent of American viewers.
One of his purchases was Tampa Bay's WTVT. The former [CBS] station was known for its in-depth news reporting and loyal middle-aged, upper-income audience. Akre and Wilson were hired to add some tiger to the tank of its news machine in what looked like an attempt to boost ratings before Fox imposed its formulaic regime of titillation and sensational if-it-bleeds-it-leads news coverage.
Akre and Wilson were quick to impress their new colleagues. Within weeks they unearthed a little-known fact: Florida's entire milk supply comes from cows that have been injected with BGH.
Synthetic BGH, sold under the brand-name Posilac, boosts the milk production of cows by up to 30 per cent. It was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1993 and, according to Monsanto, one-third of US dairy herds are now injected with the product. But Posilac is banned in Canada, Britain and most European countries owing to suggestions from scientific researchers, contested by Monsanto, that it might be linked to cancer.
In a two-month investigation, which raised a range of concerns, she and Wilson found that Florida grocers had broken their pledge not to buy milk from hormone-injected herds. Akre had photographed cows being injected with Posilac at seven out of seven local dairies chosen at random.
The news managers at WTVT, now known as Fox 13, were sufficiently impressed to buy thousands of dollars of radio advertising in the run-up to the scheduled broadcast, on 24 February 1997. But at the last minute, Monsanto hired a lawyer to approach Roger Ailes, head of Fox News in New York stating that the programme was inaccurate and unsubstantiated. Within hours, the documentary was pulled "for further review".
The journalists' court documents say that they were "concerned about the threatening nature of the Monsanto letter, particularly the part which read 'There is a lot at stake in what is going on in Florida, not only for Monsanto, but also for Fox News and its owner'."
As Britons know from the GM foods debate, Monsanto is a fierce litigant with deep pockets. Known to some as the "[ Microsoft] of microbiology", it is the world's largest agrochemical, second-largest seed, and fourth-largest pharmaceutical firm.
Still the Tampa Bay station did not back down. According to the journalists' lawsuit, the general manager of Fox 13, a former investigative reporter, and the station's lawyers scrutinised the broadcast frame by frame and found that "nothing in the {Monsanto} letter raised any credible claim to the truthfulness, accuracy, or fairness of the {documentary} reports." The station then set a new date for broadcast, a week after the initial one.
But Monsanto's lawyers now sent Ailes, who served as director of media relations for Republican president George Bush, a second and more hostile letter, and the Tampa station pulled the BGH broadcast again, this time for good.
Soon afterwards, Fox fired Tampa Bay's general manager and news manager. And the new management offered Akre and Wilson more than $150,000 in exchange for their resignations and a promise not to publish details about Posilac or how the stories were handled by Fox.
The pair refused. And in the next six months their employer demanded that they rewrite their script 73 times. Furthermore, the journalists claim that the new managers threatened to fire them if they did not include information that they believed to be false: that milk from Posilac-injected cows is the same and as safe as milk from untreated cows.
Monsanto insisted that this statement be aired. But the journalists presented scientific evidence suggesting this was not true. Fox 13, however, having taken legal advice, eventually sided with Monsanto and when the journalists refused to back down, it suspended them for "insubordination", then terminated their contracts in December 1997. Six months later, the station hired a less experienced reporter to prepare another broadcast, one that contained the Monsanto statement.
"I'm not aware of any precedent to our case," Steve Wilson told The Independent. "It's no secret in journalism that stories are sometimes killed. What is so unusual and egregious about our case is that this is the first time I know of that a newspaper or broadcaster has opted not to kill a story but to mould the story into a shape that the potential litigant and advertiser would like."
David Boylan, the general manager at Fox 13, however, says that the dismissal of Wilson and Akre had "nothing to do" with the newscast about BGH or chill letters from Monsanto. Fox categorically denies that it ever asked for false information to be included and says that the reporters were not willing to be objective. Echoing court documents filed by Fox, Boylan says they are just two disgruntled former employees who were released for their "contentious, argumentative, ad hominem, and vituperative conduct and their refusal to abide by {Fox 13's} established policies and procedures."
Journalists who know Wilson agree that he can be difficult. Steve Cohen, Wilson's former news director at the CBS flagship station WCBS in New York from 1978-1982, says, "He was one of a generation of reporters who were shaped by the Watergate scandal: he cares about getting bad guys. Not a lot of senior television managers today share that concern. They care about targeting a particular demographic and that's all."
But why did Fox change its mind? Wilson suspects concern over advertising revenue. The documentary would have embarrassed Florida dairy farmers and supermarkets for allegedly breaking their public promises not to sell the hormone-injected milk.
In addition, Monsanto is a client of Actmedia, a major advertising company owned by Murdoch. And Fox stations everywhere sell commercial time to Monsanto for products such as Roundup, its hugely popular herbicide, and foods and drinks containing NutraSweet, the leading brand of aspartame artificial sweetener.
Whatever happens in court, Akre and Wilson seem to be winning the public relations war. Their website (www.foxbghsuit.com) has registered thousands of hits, major US magazines such as Penthouse and The Nation have covered their story, and the pair have been showered with awards for courage and journalistic integrity. And as the trial date approaches, executives at Fox might be regretting that they didn't simply allow the journalists' original documentary to be broadcast, and then perhaps forgotten.
