Fwd: We Paid $3 Billion For These Stations. We'll Decide What the News Is.

[Guest guest]

SSRI-Research , JustSayNo wrote:

Extra! Update, June 1998

 

" We Paid $3 Billion For These Stations. We'll Decide What the News

Is. "

http://www.fair.org/extra/9806/foxbgh.html

 

Steve Wilson and Jane Akre, a husband-and-wife investigative

reporting team

at WTVT, Fox's Tampa Bay affiliate, thought they had a dynamite story:

Despite promises to consumers, supermarkets in Florida were selling

milk

produced with rBGH, a synthetic growth hormone developed by Monsanto

that

boosts milk production. The use of rBGH causes udder infections in

cows,

requiring increased use of antibiotics, but the monitoring of

antibiotic

residues in milk was inadequate, Akre and Wilson found.

 

Most ominously, the Fox reporters found that some scientists believe

that

rBGH-boosted milk contains heightened levels of IGF-1, a hormone

associated

with increased risk of cancer (Science, 1/23/98). Despite Monsanto's

claim

that rBGH is " the most studied molecule certainly in the history of

domestic

animal science, " no thorough studies exist on whether milk produced

with

rBGH is carcinogenic.

 

These are vital facts for consumers in Florida--and around the

country--to

know. But the story never aired on WTVT, and Wilson and Akre are now

out of

a job and suing Fox--because of Fox's efforts to alter their story to

make

it acceptable to Monsanto.

 

On February 21, 1997, days before the first installment of the rBGH

story

was scheduled to air, Monsanto sent a letter to Roger Ailes, the head

of Fox

News. (Ailes was a campaign advisor to Ronald Reagan and George Bush,

and

the executive producer of Rush Limbaugh's TV show.) The letter

questioned

Akre and Wilson's " objectivity and capacity for reporting on this

highly

complex scientific subject, " and charged that the reporters " have

prejudged

the safety of [rBGH] and the corporate behavior of Monsanto. " The

letter

urged Ailes to involve himself directly in an effort to " get the facts

straight " about rBGH, hinting none-too-subtly that the alternative

would be

a massive lawsuit: " 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. "

 

That same day, Akre and Wilson were told that their story was being

postponed, and an endless round of revisions, cuts and conferences

with

lawyers ensued. (The pressure only intensified after Monsanto sent

Ailes a

second letter warning of " dire consequences for Fox News. " ) Fox's

attitude

was made clear by in-house counsel Carolyn Forrest, who reportedly

told Akre

and Wilson, " I don't think this story is worth going to court and to

trial

spending a couple of hundred thousand dollars to fight Monsanto. " Her

position, the reporters say, was that " it doesn't matter if the facts

are

true " ; what mattered was that no story air that could result in a

Monsanto

lawsuit that wouldn't be immediately dismissed.

 

In a memo, Akre and Wilson assured station management that they were

willing

to work with lawyers to produce a balanced and accurate story that

would be

legally unassailable, but insisted that they could not take part in

airing a

program that was false or misleading. In response, the reporters

allege in

their lawsuit against Fox, they were told by station manager David

Boylan:

" We paid $3 billion for these television stations. We will decide

what the

news is. The news is what we tell you it is. "

 

After dozens of rewrites, the journalists and the station still

couldn't

agree on a version of the report that everyone was happy with. Fox

didn't

seem to want to kill the piece, but that appears to have been more

about

fear of bad PR than about a commitment to report the news: At one

point the

station offered to pay Wilson roughly $125,000, if he would just go

away and

never tell anyone how the story had been handled. He turned down the

offer.

 

After Keystone Kops-like personnel maneuvers in which the couple were

variously suspended without pay, suspended with pay and forbidden to

work

out of the studio, Fox eventually notified them by fax that they were

both

fired on November 30, 1997. The station never aired any version of

the story

they had produced.

 

All this has come to light because of Akre and Wilson's lawsuit

against the

Fox affiliate, charging breach of contract and violation of Florida's

whistleblower protection act. How far the suit will get is unclear:

Courts

have been rightly reluctant to second-guess news judgments made by

media

owners. But regardless of its outcome, the filing of the suit has

shed light

on the cowardice and compromise often exhibited by news outlets in

the face

of corporate pressure.

----

--

 

Many of the central documents in the case are on a website posted by

Akre

and Wilson (www.foxbghsuit.com). Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly

has an

excellent summary of the scientific questions about rBGH posted at

www.monitor.net/rachel/r593.html.

 

Please ask your local news outlets to cover the health effects of

rBGH, and

Monsanto's efforts to suppress such questions.