All Kobe, all the time

I recently asked Fox News president Roger Ailes why the networks don't cover environmental stories. Roger is an old friend with whom I spent a summer camping in Africa almost 30 years ago. He is jovial, animated and genuinely funny, and we loathe each other's politics. After considering the question for a moment, he said, "It's because environmental stories are not fast-breaking!" News, it seems, has to be entertaining because that's what sells.

The networks are contaminating the airwaves with high-profile murders and celebrity gossip, leaving ever-diminishing time for real news. They've dumbed down the news to its lowest common denominator. It's all Laci Peterson and Kobe Bryant all the time. Notorious crimes and sex scandals have little real relevance to our lives, our country, our democracy. At best, they are entertainment; at worst, pornography. The Monica Lewinsky story got such play in part because it was an excuse to deal pornography packaged as news. That stuff may sell papers, but it leaves little room for the asthma stories, for news that really affects our lives.

But Roger Ailes' response omitted another factor: Environmental stories often challenge a network's ideology or corporate self-interest. Many major media outlets are controlled by companies that have a vested interest in keeping environmental disasters under wraps: NBC is owned by General Electric, the world's biggest polluter, with a world record 86 Superfund sites. Until three years ago, CBS was owned by Westinghouse, which has 39 Superfund sites. Westinghouse is also the world's largest owner of nuclear power plants and the third-largest manufacturer of nuclear weapons.

In 2003, the North American winners of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, known as the "Nobel Prize for grassroots work," were former Fox TV reporters Jane Akre and Steve Wilson. The two investigative reporters claim that they lost their jobs at Tampa's Fox-owned WTVT when they refused to doctor a news report that had displeased Monsanto. The reporters had visited regional dairies and discovered that Monsanto's controversial bovine growth hormone (BGH) was being injected into cows by virtually every dairyman in the region. The chemical was present in virtually all the state's milk supply, despite commitments by Florida's supermarkets not to sell milk tainted by the hormone. In various studies BGH has been linked to cancer and is banned by many countries, including Canada, New Zealand and the entire European community. Akre and Wilson's report said that Monsanto had been accused of fraud in connection with information it had provided to the EPA concerning dioxin, published deceitful statements about food safety, and funded favorable studies about the product from tame scientists. The newscast also reported on allegations that Monsanto had attempted to bribe public officials in Canada.

According to the reporters, WTVT carefully reviewed the team's four-part investigation for factual accuracy and heavily advertised the series on radio. It planned to release the story during television sweeps week beginning Feb. 24, 1997. The day before the airing, however, the station yanked the shows after Monsanto hired a powerful law firm to complain to Roger Ailes. Wilson and Akre testified that the local station manager again reviewed the reports, found no errors, and scheduled them to run the following week. The station also offered Monsanto an opportunity to appear on the show and respond. Monsanto declined the offer and fired off another threatening letter to Ailes. Wilson and Akre claim that the station manager, David Boylan, ordered the reporters to edit the show in a way that was deceptive but favorable to Monsanto. "For every fact we intended to broadcast, we had documentation six weeks from Sunday," Wilson told me. "The station's lawyer told us time and again, 'You don't get it. It doesn't matter what the facts are. We don't want to be spending money to defend a lawsuit.'" According to Wilson, the station was also worried about losing advertisers and had received calls from a grocery-chain and dairy-industry interests.

According to their subsequent lawsuit, Boylan threatened to fire Wilson and Akre "within 48 hours" if they declined to cooperate in the deception. He subsequently softened this position, they testified, offering to lay off both reporters with full salaries for their contract period, provided they agreed to sign a confidentiality agreement. For nine months they worked on 83 different drafts of the story -- none of which satisfied Fox or Monsanto. Akre testified that the station had tried to force her to say that the BGH milk was safe and no different from non-BGH milk, despite abundant studies that showed otherwise. "We told them to go ahead and kill the story," Wilson says, "just don't make us lie." Boylan eventually fired the reporters in December 1997, and they sued Fox. In August 2000, following a five-month trial, a Florida jury awarded Akre $425,000 under Florida's private-sector whistleblower's statute, which prohibits retaliation against employees who threaten to disclose employer conduct that is "in violation of a law, rule or regulation." The jury found that Akre had been fired "because she threatened to disclose to the Federal Communications Commission under oath in writing the broadcast of a false, distorted, or slanted news report that she reasonably believed would violate the prohibition against intentional fabrications or distortions of the news on television."

But the story does not have an ending that is happy for Akre and Wilson, or for American democracy. On Feb. 14, 2003, the Florida District Court of Appeals reversed the jury verdict. The bizarre decision adopted Fox's argument that the FCC's 50-year-old News Distortion Rule, which prohibits the broadcast of false reports, does not qualify as a "law, rule or regulation," as required by the whistleblower's statute, since it had been created over the years in decisions by FCC judges and never promulgated in a rule-making process.

Next Page: "If you own a newspaper or a printing press, you can lie to your heart's content"

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