10 Years After

Kiss The Devil

This was mentioned by the professor of my Philosophy as Conversation class last spring:
Boylan said this to two of the station’s on-air reporters, Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, a husband-and-wife investigative reporting team. WTVT is a Fox-affiliated station in Tampa, Florida. The station manager was trying to get Akre and Wilson to falsify their investigative report on Monsanto’s bovine growth hormone (BGH) in the Tampa-area milk supply.

The report showed that studies link Monsanto’s BGH in milk to cancer. So Monsanto pressured Fox News to cover it up, and Fox News ordered WTVT to edit the story to be less damning to Monsanto. Akre and Wilson refused, despite repeated attempts by the corrupt station manager to have the story altered. Boylan even offered to terminate them with full pay if they promised to never speak publicly about their BGH findings. Finally, when Akre and Wilson threatened to report the station to the FCC for falsifying news, they were fired.

They sued WTVT, and on August 18, 2000, a Florida state court jury unanimously determined that Fox News “acted intentionally and deliberately to falsify or distort the plaintiffs’ news reporting on BGH.” The jury also found that Jane Akre’s threat to blow the whistle on Fox News deception by reporting them to the FCC, was the sole reason for the firing. The jury awarded Acre and Wilson $425,000 in damages.

Fox News appealed, and on February 14, 2003 a judge reversed the jury, actually issuing a ruling that it is legal for the media to deliberately lie and distort the news on a television broadcast!

That had been a WTVT defense argument which was rejected by three other judges on at least six separate occasions. So to back up his crooked ruling, the appeals court judge said there is no FCC rule or regulation that specifically makes it illegal to mislead, distort, or falsify the news.

For full details see http://foxBGHsuit.com/ - BGH Bulletin : News of Lawsuit Exposing Media Coverup of Suspected Danger in Milk