Blowing the Whistle On Your Own Station.

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.