by Jane Akre The truth is, only Monsanto really knows how many U.S. farmers are presently using their recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH). The company persistently refuses to release sales figures but claims it has now become the largest-selling dairy animal drug in America. The chemical giant's secretive operations were part of what made the story of rBGH such a compelling one for me to explore as an investigative reporter.
In late 1996, my husband Steve Wilson and I were hired as investigative journalists for the Fox-owned television station in Tampa, Florida. Looking for projects to pursue, I soon learned that millions of Americans and their children who consume milk from rBGH-treated cows have unwittingly become participants in what amounts to a giant public health experiment. Despite promises from grocers that they would not buy rBGH milk "until it gains widespread acceptance," I discovered and carefully documented how those promises were quietly broken immediately after they were made three years earlier. I also learned that health concerns raised by scientists around the world have never been settled, and indeed, the product has been outlawed or shunned in every other major industrialized country on the planet.
Clearly, there is not "widespread acceptance" of rBGH, not in 1996 when I began my research, and not today. By any standard, it was a solid story, but little did I know that it would become the last story of my 19-year broadcast journalism career and the heart of a dispute that could nearly destroy me and my family.
Even if you ask directly,
"How much of your milk
comes from cows injected
with an artificial growth hormone?"
we discovered that you
are still likely to be misled
or lied to today.
Steve helped me gather and produce a TV report based on the information we discovered. The investigation began with random visits to seven farms to determine whether and how widely rBGH was being used in Florida. I confirmed its use at every one of the seven farms I visited, and then I discovered what amounted to an ingenious public relations campaign that seemed to have succeeded in keeping consumers in the dark. Remember those Florida grocers who promised consumers that milk from hormone-treated cows would not end up in the dairy case until it achieved widespread acceptance from consumers and others? I learned that behind the scenes, those grocers and the major co-ops of Florida's dairymen had pulled the wool over the eyes of consumers with what amounted to a clever "don't ask, don't tell" policy combined with some careful wording to answer any inquiries about the milk.
In an on-camera interview, the president of one of the two giant dairy co-ops in the state said that he had written a letter to dairymen on behalf of grocers requesting that farmers not inject their cows with the artificial growth hormone. But in response to my questions, the co-op president made a startling confession. He admitted he did nothing but write the letter!
"Did the dairymen get back to you?" I asked.
"No."
"What was their response?"
"They accepted it, I guess. They didn't respond."
To this day, any consumer who calls to inquire gets essentially the same well-coordinated response from a big Florida grocer or their dairy supplier: "We've asked our suppliers not to use it (rBGH)," they say. It is a truthful but incredibly misleading statement that nearly always produces the desired result, leading consumers to the false conclusion that their local milk supply is unaffected by rBGH use.
Even if you ask directly, "How much of your milk comes from cows injected with an artificial growth hormone?" we discovered that you are still likely to be misled or lied to today.
Steve recently made an inquiry to the dairy co-op that supplies the milk served to our daughter and her classmates in their school cafeteria. First he was told there was "0%" artificial BGH use. Then a woman in the dairy's Quality Assurance department offered the assurance that rBGH is not used at all "as far as we know." Pressed further, she said the co-op "does not recommend it because cows do just fine without," but ultimately admitted that the co-ops "have no authority to check whether it is or is not being used."
Steve pressed further: "Couldn't you just ask the dairy farmers who supply your milk whether or not they're injecting their cows?"
A long silence followed. Finally, the reply: "I suppose we could, but they could just lie to us."
Lawyered Up
After nearly three months of investigation that took me to interviews in five states, we produced a four-part series that Fox scheduled to begin on Monday, February 24, 1997. Station managers were so proud of the work that they saturated virtually every radio station in the Tampa Bay area with thousands of dollars worth of ads urging viewers to watch. But then, on the Friday evening prior to the broadcast, the station's pride turned to panic when a fax arrived from a Monsanto attorney.
The letter minced no words in charging that Steve and I had "no scientific competence" to report our story. Monsanto's attorney described 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."
And to make sure nobody missed the point, the attorney also reminded Fox News CEO Roger Ailes 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, WTVT decided to "delay" the broadcast, ostensibly to double-check its accuracy. A week later after the station manager screened the report, found no major problems with its accuracy and fairness, and set a new air date, Fox received a second letter from Monsanto's attorney, claiming that "some of the points" we were asking about "clearly contain the elements of defamatory statements which, if repeated in a broadcast, could lead to serious damage to Monsanto and dire consequences for Fox News."
Never mind that I carried a milk crate full of documentation to support every word of our proposed broadcast. Our story was pulled again, and if not dead, it was clearly on life support as Fox's own attorneys and top-level managers, fearful of a legal challenge or losing advertiser support, looked for some way to discreetly pull the plug.
The station where we worked had recently been purchased by Fox, and we soon discovered that the new management had a radically different definition of media responsibility than anything we had previously encountered in our journalistic careers. As Fox took control, it fired the station manager who had originally hired us and replaced him with Dave Boylan, a career salesman devoid of any roots in journalism and seemingly lacking in the devotion to serving the public interest which motivates all good investigative reporting.
Kill The Story, Kill the Messenger
| 
Dave Boylan, station manager at Fox WTVT, asked, "What would you do if I killed your rBGH story?" |
Not long after Boylan became the new station manager, Steve and I went up to see him in his office. He 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 your rBGH story?" he asked. What he really wanted to know was whether we would tell anyone the real reason why he was killing the story. In other words, would we leak details of the pressure from Monsanto that led to a coverup of what the station had already ballyhooed as important health information every customer should know?
It was suddenly and unmistakably clear that Boylan's biggest concern was the concern of every salesman, no matter what product he peddles: image. He understood that it could not be good for the station's image if word leaked out that powerful advertisers backed by threatening attorneys could actually determine what gets on the six o'clock news--and what gets swept under the rug.
Boylan was in a jam. If he ran an honest story and Monsanto's threatened "dire consequences" did materialize, his career could be crippled. On the other hand, if he killed the story and the sordid details leaked out, he risked losing the only product any newsroom has to sell: its own credibility.
To resolve this dilemma, Boylan devised the sort of "solution" that you might expect from a salesman. He offered us a deal. He would pay us for the remaining seven months of our contracts, in exchange for an agreement that we would broadcast the rBGH story in a way that would not upset Monsanto. Fox lawyers would essentially have the final say on the exact wording of our report, and once it aired, we were free to do whatever we pleased--as long as we forever kept our mouths shut about the entire ugly episode.
As journalists, Steve and I wanted to get the story on the air more than anything. A buyout, no matter how attractive, was out of the question. Neither of us could fathom taking money to shut up about a public health issue that absolutely and by any standard deserved to see the light of day.
The remainder of 1997 was a tense standoff, with the station unwilling to either kill the story or to run it. Fox attorney Carolyn Forrest was sent in to review our work, with a mandate from Fox Television Stations President Mitch Stern to "take no risk" with the story. "Taking no risk" meant cutting out substance, context and information. Boylan told us to "just do what Carolyn wants" with the story, but what Carolyn really wanted to do was destroy it. We rewrote the story, rewrote it, and rewrote it again, trying to come up with a version that would both remain true to the facts and satisfy the station's concerns about airing it.
Meanwhile, Behind the Scenes
Monsanto hadn't stopped with the threatening letters. In January, I had interviewed Roger Natzke, a dairy science professor at the University of Florida. Everything had gone well. We got a tour of the "Monsanto dairy barn" at the Gainesville dairy compound where Posilac had been tested in the mid-1980s. Natzke gave the product a glowing report and admitted he promoted its use to farmers through Florida's taxpayer-supported agriculture extension offices. After spending a few hours with us, Natzke gave us directions to a good lunch joint.
Natzke must have forgotten about this relatively pleasant exchange when, one month later, he called the station to complain about my reporting techniques. "She's not a reporter" was part of the phone message submitted to my boss alongside the words "St. Simon's Island." What does that mean? I asked. The assistant news director, apparently not seeing any connection or conflict, told me that Natzke had just returned from a weekend at the island resort with Monsanto officials.
The same week that Natzke called and the Monsanto threat letters arrived, Florida farmer Joe Wright wrote a complaint letter to the station. This time we were not shown the correspondence. Only in the light of our lawsuit did the station have to produce it in "discovery" one year later. The pieces of the puzzle behind the Monsanto pressure began falling into place.
Wright, who had spent five minutes on the phone with me a month earlier, informed the station that "Ms. Acre's (sic) work is gaining notoriety in our dairy industry. . . .The word is clearly out on the street that Ms. Acre is on a negative campaign based on everyone's assessment of the numerous interviews she has already conducted." Wright had reached these conclusions after attending the 22nd Annual Southern Dairy Conference in Atlanta, a "Who's Who" of the dairy industry where our report was the topic of intense discussion. Following the conference, he went to Dairy Farmers Inc., a dairy promotion group, which helped draft his letter of complaint to my employers and discussed filing a food disparagement suit against the station should the story air.Behind the scenes, a much more stealthy attack on us and our story was launched by the Dairy Coalition, a pro-rBGH group formed around the time of Posilac's FDA approval. Its director, Dick Weiss, took a call from Steve in 1998 and--not realizing exactly who Steve Wilson was--bragged that the Dairy Coalition had "swamped the station" with all sorts of pressure to have the story killed. As he recounted the story, Weiss laughed like a college kid who had just pulled the best prank in the frat.
Getting the Boot
Nearly a full year passed as we wrangled over this important public health story. After turning down the station's buyout offer, we ended up doing 83 rewrites of the story, not one of which was acceptable according to Fox lawyers, who were fully in charge of the editing process. "It was like being circus dogs jumping through hoops," Steve said.
At the first window in our contracts, December 2, 1997, we were both fired, allegedly for "no cause." However, an angry Carolyn Forrest made a major legal mistake when she wrote a letter spelling out the "definite reasons" for the firing, and characterizing our response to her proposed editorial changes as "unprofessional and inappropriate conduct." But as Steve commented when he read the letter, just what is the "professional and appropriate" response that reporters should make when their own station asks them to lie on television?
On April 2, 1998, we filed a whistleblower lawsuit against Fox Television. Under Florida state law, a whistleblower is an employee, regardless of his or her profession, who suffers retaliation for refusing to participate in illegal activity or threatening to report that illegal activity to authorities. We contended that we were entitled to protection as whistleblowers, because the distortions our employers wanted us to broadcast were not in the public interest and violated the law and policy of the Federal Communications Commission.
Three months after we were fired and six weeks after we filed our lawsuit, the station finally got around to airing an rBGH story, filled with many of the same lies and distortions that Steve and I refused to broadcast. The reports, aired by a young and inexperienced reporter, looked to us like nothing more than damage control instigated by Fox attorneys.
