[ Posted Tuesday, May 28, 2002 ]

Fox and the Hounds
A Fox News reporter found scary evidence linking a Monsanto product, commonly found in milk, to cancer. So why did her boss threaten to fire her?

BY JANE AKRE | The four-part series took my photographer and me to five states and produced fifty videotapes yielding more than sixteen hours of pictures and sound. My husband and collaborator, Steve Wilson, was brought in to help produce the piece that was scheduled to run February 24, 1997, during a "sweeps" period. Station managers were so proud of our work that they saturated virtually every Tampa Bay–area radio station with thousands of dollars' worth of ads urging viewers to watch what we'd uncovered about "The Mystery in Your Milk."

But then, our Fox managers' pride turned to panic. Friday evening before the scheduled airdate, Steve and I were called to the news director's office. "Read this," he said, handing us a fax. It was a letter from a New York law firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, addressed to Roger Ailes, president of Fox News in New York. It was written on behalf of the firm's client, Monsanto Company, and John Walsh, the lawyer who authored the letter, minced no words.

Walsh charged in a letter that would later become a key piece of evidence in the dispute, that Steve and I had "no scientific competence" to report our story. Monsanto's attorney went on to describe our news reports, which he had ostensibly never seen, as a series of "recklessly made accusations that Monsanto has engaged in fraud, has published lies about food safety, has attempted to bribe government officials in a neighboring country and has been ‘buying' favorable opinions about the product or its characteristics from reputable scientists in their respective fields."

He charged that we had conducted ourselves unethically in the field. And to make sure nobody missed the point, the attorney also reminded Fox News' chief that our behavior as investigative journalists was particularly dangerous in the "aftermath of the Food Lion verdict."

He was referring, of course, to the then recent case against ABC News that sent a frightening chill through every newsroom in America. The Food Lion verdict showed that even with irrefutable evidence from a hidden camera documenting the doctoring of potentially unsafe food sold to unsuspecting shoppers, a news organization that dares to expose a giant corporation could still lose big in court.

Confronted with these threats, Fox decided to "delay" broadcasting the story, ostensibly to double-check its accuracy.

"Are you pulling the story because of the letters?" I asked Daniel Webster, the news director.

"Yes," he said.

One week later, the station's general manager screened our reports. We were lucky. General Manager Bob Franklin was a former investigative journalist himself. After he found no major problems with the story and we all agreed we could minimize legal risk in the wake of their lawyer's letter by offering Monsanto another interview, a new airdate was set. But Monsanto turned down the interview offer and directed John Walsh to write another threatening letter to Ailes in New York.

This time there was no room for interpretation. Walsh wrote in a letter dated February 28, 1997, that some of the points of the story "clearly contain the elements of defamatory statements which, if repeated in a broadcast, could lead to serious damage to Monsanto and dire consequences [italics mine] for Fox News."

Never mind that I carried a milk crate full of documentation to support every word of our proposed broadcast. And never mind that we refuted all claims that we had acted improperly in our newsgathering and reporting. Our story was pulled again.

This time, if not dead, we knew our broadcasts were clearly on life support as Fox's own attorneys and its top-level managers, all of them anxious to avoid a legal challenge or lost advertising revenue, looked for some way to make the whole thing quietly go away.

Kill the Messenger
Our story was pulled shortly after Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation formally closed the $3 billion deal to control WTVT and several other stations he added to his empire in early 1997, making the former Aussie (now a naturalized U.S. citizen) the owner of more American TV stations than anyone else.

And it was not long after our struggle to air an honest report had begun that Fox fired both the news director and the general manager. Put in charge of the newsroom—and presumably the fate of our story—was an assistant news director once quoted as telling a reporter in another newsroom she ran, "This is not the TV news business—this is the entertainment business."

And who had Fox chosen to ride herd on journalism leadership of that caliber? The new general manager was brought in from High Point, North Carolina. Dave Boylan had climbed his way into his first general manager's job at the Fox-owned station there and in a few short years had overseen revenue growth that impressed his corporate masters at Fox in Los Angeles. The GM job in Tampa, a big step up, was his payback.

We were not completely surprised to find Dave to be "salesman" all the way. He seemed sincere when he looked us in the eye and promised to look into the trouble we were having getting our rBGH story on the air. But when we returned a few days later, his strategy seemed clear.

"What would you do if I killed the story? Would you tell anyone?" he asked.

"Only if they ask," was Steve's response.

Dave started to sweat. Here were two reporters who clearly didn't know how the game was to be played. He knew the local media writers had heard the radio ads for the milk series, and it wouldn't look good for the station's image if word leaked out that powerful advertisers, backed by lawyers threatening to sue, could actually determine what gets on the six o'clock news—and what gets swept under the rug. And Dave knew it wouldn't look good for Dave.

To resolve this dilemma, Dave called us into his corner office again a few days later. This time, he was much firmer.

He went on to explain that if we didn't agree to changes that Monsanto and Fox lawyers were insisting upon, we'd be fired for insubordination within forty-eight hours. Steve made it clear that those changes would result in broadcasting what we knew to be false and misleading information to the public. We pleaded with Dave to look for himself at the facts we'd uncovered, many of which conclusively disproved Monsanto's claims, both about its product and about our work to uncover the truth.

We reminded him of the importance of the facts about a basic food most of our viewers consume and feed to their children daily. This was news, we told him. His reply: "We paid $3 billion for these television stations. We'll tell you what the news is. The news is what we say it is!"

There wasn't much to say after that.

"Is this a hill you're both willing to die on?" Dave asked.

I could see the disappointment and anger on Steve's face. Before we got up from Dave's plush couch and left his office, Steve was firm but respectful when he made it clear we would neither lie nor distort any part of the story. And if insisting upon an honest report ended up costing us our jobs, Steve told him we'd be obligated to report that kind of misconduct to the Federal Communications Commission.

Forty-eight hours came and went. Dave never called, not until about a week later when he invited us back to lay out the deal. We'd be paid full salaries and benefits through the rest of the year in exchange for an agreement that we would drop our ethical objections and broadcast the rBGH story in a way that would not upset Monsanto.

"Will you do the story exactly the way Carolyn wants?" Dave asked. Carolyn Forrest, the Fox attorney based in Atlanta, would have the final say on the exact wording of our report. And after the carefully sanitized version aired, we would be free to do whatever we pleased—as long as we forever kept our mouths shut about the entire episode, Monsanto's influence, the Fox response, and we could never ever utter a public word about what we'd learned about the growth hormone.

Fox made it clear we would never be free to report the story for any other news organizations, not for any broadcast or print media, even if they weren't Fox competitors. Never, anywhere, not even at our daughter's PTA could we utter a word about how our milk has changed in what many believe is a dangerous way.

As journalists, Steve and I badly wanted to get the story on the air so the public could make its own judgment. But a buyout, no matter how lucrative for us personally, was out of the question. Neither of us could fathom taking hush money to shut up about a public health issue that absolutely and by any standard deserved to see the light of day.

After asking for and receiving the deal in writing, we politely declined the offer—and told Dave we'd decided to just hold onto the written document that laid out his deal.

Getting the Boot
No case better illustrates why lawyers should never be in charge of the editorial process of reporting the news. Lawyer Carolyn Forrest's mandate was to protect the station against litigation, to "take no risks" that the station would ever have to stand up for the truth in court. Ours was to work, first and foremost, in the public interest to find and broadcast as many facts as we could reasonably report.

Forrest could never understand why we insisted on investigating Monsanto's glowing claims about its product. "While some say this, Monsanto says that" was her approach. Just let the viewers sort it out.

She and a lot of lawyers like her cannot understand the difference between a reporter, especially an investigative reporter, and a stenographer. A reporter's obligation is always to explore the claims made by all voices in any story, critics and proponents alike. If a claim doesn't hold water, we have the obligation to show why not.

But none of that mattered to our friends at Fox who like to boast about news that is "fair and balanced," different than all the others. "We report, you decide" is their motto. During one May phone review of the latest script, after we had faxed her more documentation, Forrest finally leveled with us. "You guys just don't get it. It doesn't matter whether the facts are true. This story just isn't worth a couple of hundred thousand dollars to go up against Monsanto."

So, we suggested, just kill the story. We fully recognize that the employer has the right to set whatever litigation risk level it chooses. In the end, no story was preferable to a story that was slanted and distorted. But the lawyers and Fox managers knew killing it would be a "major PR problem," as the local counsel wrote in his notes that also were turned over later during the discovery process. After all, Fox had already spent thousands of dollars on radio ads promoting the series, which were running the weekend before the scheduled airtime. Local newspaper media critics were anxiously awaiting the series. What would the station tell them if the story suddenly disappeared?

So write and rewrite we did. Eighty-three versions of the rBGH story and not one of them was acceptable to Fox lawyers. Instead, what we got was an offer for more hush money. Fox's general manager presented us with an agreement, crafted by Fox counsel, that would give us a full year of our salaries and benefits worth close to $200,000 in no-show "consulting jobs" with the same strings attached: no mention of how Fox covered up the story and no opportunity to ever expose the facts Fox refused to air.

Poor Dave Boylan was so exasperated when we turned down his second hush money offer, he just wagged his head and said, "I don't get it. What is it with you two? I just want people who want to be on TV!" And the sad truth is that today, many newsrooms are full of people like that who call themselves journalists.

At the first window in our contracts, December 2, 1997, we were both finally fired, allegedly for "no cause." But then, an angry-but-gloating Carolyn Forrest wrote a letter spelling out "there were definite reasons" for our dismissals. She went on to characterize our resistance to broadcasting the story as she directed as "unprofessional and inappropriate conduct."

As Steve commented when he read the letter, just what is the "professional and appropriate" response for a reporter when a station directs him or her to deliberately lie on television?

The Forrest letter would prove a major tactical error for Fox and the basis of our lawsuit.

Last summer, with Walter Cronkite testifying on Akre's behalf, in a case not very widely reported, a Florida jury ruled that Fox News "acted intentionally and deliberately to falsify or distort the plaintiffs' news reporting" and unfairly terminated their employment when they threatened to report the station to the FCC, violating the state's whistleblower law. Akre was awarded $450,000 in damages. Fox is appealing the decision.

Jane Akre has spent more than 20 years as a network and local television news reporter. She and her husband Steve Wilson received the Society of Professional Journalists' Ethics in Journalism Award for their struggle with this story.

From Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, edited by Kristina Borjesson. Copyright 2002 Prometheus Books. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.