VOICES: TELEVISION
Blowing the Whistle On Your Own Station

BY LAWRENCE K. GROSSMAN

To understand why television stations find serious investigative reporting so costly, time-consuming, hard to do, and on occasion intimidating, take a look at the experience of Fox-owned WTVT in Tampa, Florida, and its former investigative reporters Jane Akre and Steve Wilson. Wilson and Akre are a husband and wife news team who left the station at the end of 1997 amid a cloud of charges, countercharges, and lawsuits. Before Fox bought WTVT from New World Communications, the two reporters had been hired by the previous management as "sweeps people," according to WTVT's news director, Phil Metlin. Akre also functioned for a while as a weekend anchor.

At the station, they spent months working on a major investigative series about the alleged health hazards of synthetic bovine growth hormone, an enormously profitable drug that is injected into cows to enhance their production of milk. Made by Monsanto and marketed under the name Posilac, the drug is given to millions of cows every other week to increase the quantity of their milk by as much as 30 percent. Although it is approved by the Food and Drug Administration, some scientists and environmental and consumer groups, including the Center for Food Safety, charge that BGH-produced milk may cause breast and prostate cancer in humans and that the drug tends to produce infections in cows that require treatment with antibiotics. Traces of the antibiotics can remain in the milk, which, in turn, diminishes their effectiveness in combating infections in people. Canada and the nations in the European Union prohibit the use of these milk-enhancing drugs.

WTVT heavily promoted the Akre-Wilson milk-contamination pieces for the February 1997 sweeps week. Before they were even completed, however, Monsanto's law firm sent a tough protest letter to Fox News's chairman, Roger Ailes. The letter said Monsanto was "alarmed and deeply concerned" over the coming "assault" on the company's integrity and the integrity of its product. It charged that the journalists had "no scientific competence" and were planning to broadcast "recklessly made accusations." A follow-up letter threatened "dire consequences for Fox News" if it allowed the reporters' "pejorative and defamatory characterizations" to be broadcast.

In the face of those threats, with production of the series still not finished, and with the station's news management raising content questions of its own, WTVT decided to delay the broadcast of Akre's and Wilson's stories. Throughout much of 1997, news director Metlin, together with an army of news editors, station executives, and lawyers, worked with the reporters to try to produce what one lawyer called a fair, accurate, balanced, and verifiable story that would protect the station from "risk or harm caused by inaccuracy, carelessness, lack of balance, or perceived bias." The shots that Monsanto had fired across the station's bow obviously struck home.

Akre and Wilson were convinced that a frightened and intimidated WTVT was forcing them to make misleading alterations and gut their stories to protect Monsanto. They told colleagues in the Tampa press that the station had caved in to corporate pressure and was trying to silence them. They told the station they would blow the whistle to the FCC about how they were being forced to distort their news reports. On the other hand, the people at WTVT trying to work with the correspondents regarded them, especially Wilson, as combative, contentious, insulting, and unprofessional. The Fox lawyer participating in the editorial review complained to them that they were stating "in almost every way possible that you are fed up with our process of legal and editorial review."

Despite many attempts over many months, no version of Akre's and Wilson's investigative pieces ever succeeded in achieving agreement from both the two reporters and the station management, which had the ultimate responsibility for their content. At the end of 1997, WTVT terminated Akre's and Wilson's contracts and the two filed a novel, and for journalists unprecedented, lawsuit against the station. They sought damages under "Florida's Private-Sector Whistleblower Act." The reporters claimed they had been fired because they threatened to tell the FCC that WTVT was forcing them to produce what they believed to be distorted and misleading news.

A month after Akre and Wilson filed their suit, WTVT did broadcast what seemed to this observer to be a strong and effective three-part investigative series on the subject, produced by a different reporter, Nathan Lang. His series was hardly any different in substance from the versions that Akre and Wilson and the station had been battling over the previous year.

After a five-week trial in state court, the jury awarded Akre $425,000 on the whistleblowing charge and awarded Wilson nothing. It was a surprising and strangely inconsistent verdict since both husband and wife had presented essentially the same case based on what seemed to be the same facts at the same trial. Both sides are appealing.

Why did the jury say yes to Akre and no to Wilson? After reading the mountain of briefs, transcripts, depositions, script versions, and court documents, I decided that had I been a member of that jury I probably would have reached the same conclusion, odd as it was. Wilson, who served as his own lawyer while Akre had counsel represent her, came across as overly aggressive, a zealot rather than a dispassionate reporter. The jury probably figured that Wilson was eligible to be fired on grounds other than whistleblowing.

Here was a supposedly righteous David, whose suspicion of his bosses' motives, fear of censorship, and passion about what he saw as a major health threat interfered with his professional obligation to present a solid report that all involved could feel comfortable with. But here, too, was the supposedly powerful Goliath -- Rupert Murdoch's Fox -- unquestionably worried about the "dire consequences" it would suffer if any part of the story were the slightest bit off. The seemingly contradictory, almost Solomonlike verdict actually provided a kind of rough justice.

Meanwhile, Akre and Wilson have won a good deal of sympathetic press coverage for their underdog plight thanks in large part to their Web site (www.foxBGHsuit.com), which states their case and asks for support and contributions. (However, they still have not filed any complaint with the FCC.) The once powerful Monsanto has merged with Pharmacia, a drug company. Its business plan to become the kingpin of the biotech industry has turned into what The New York Times recently called a "debacle." The Center for Food Safety and others have intensified their efforts to get the FDA to reverse its approval of the bovine growth hormone. For WTVT news director Metlin, the entire experience "continues to hurt." And Akre and Wilson fear they have become unemployable in TV news. Serious investigative reporting on television, so hard to pull off, remains an endangered species.

Lawrence K. Grossman, a former president of NBC News and PBS, is a regular columnist for CJR.