The Strange Case of Steve Wilson

How a fraudulent crusader snookered the left-and is threatening the First Amendment

John Sugg from the May 2006 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

But by the late 1990s, both he and Akre were out of television and making a living selling phone cards, according to court records. WTVT, one of Florida’s most respected news stations, offered Wilson a return to broadcast news in 1996, and he and his wife joined the station as a team. Akre earned $70,000 a year for reporting and some anchoring; Wilson received $45,000 for part-time work as an investigator.

In 1997 Wilson and Akre began preparing a piece on a controversial Monsanto milk additive called recombinant bovine growth hormone, or rBGH, which had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1993. The hormone has been blamed over the years for a variety of real or imagined offenses, from early puberty in girls to prostate cancer. Probably the fairest assessment about the product is that there is mixed scientific opinion, pitting activists against researchers whose funding often comes directly or indirectly from agribusiness companies and their trade associations. The FDA’s scientists judged that the additive posed no health threat.

On balance, the weight of evidence appears to back Monsanto. In October 2003, after more than a decade of intense public debate, The Washington Post summed up the issue this way: “Could hormones meant to make cows give more milk lead to early puberty, as some parents fear? On its face, it sounds plausible enough. But government and pediatric health experts say there are no scientific data to back up such an association.…There is also no evidence that milk from hormone-treated cows contains harmful amounts of antibiotic residue or promotes cancer.”

Wilson and Akre contended that their investigation uncovered the dark secrets of rBGH—notwithstanding that by the time the reporters turned their attention to the issue, more than 2,000 articles had been written on the subject. Their reporting did not contribute to the scientific debate, but it did disclose some moderately interesting Florida angles, such as grocery stores’ refusal to disclose to consumers the use of the chemical.

Prior to broadcast, Monsanto wrote to Fox’s cable news boss, Roger Ailes, arguing that the reporting was palpably biased against the company and warning about the “enormous damage that can be done.” The letter stated that the reporters “have prejudged the safety of” rBGH, and it insisted that Ailes personally ensure the duo “get the facts straight.”

The planned four-part piece, which Fox argued in court was not breakthrough journalism, never aired. Wilson and Akre claimed Monsanto’s rant caused the station to pressure them to broadcast lies—which were basically Monsanto’s defense of its product. WTVT executives countered that they were merely demanding fairness. Wilson and Akre stalled for nine months, producing no other significant work. They constantly rewrote the rBGH script and then, according to the litigation, torpedoed the series every time it neared completion. The reporters claimed they rewrote the script 83 times. They had to bend ordinary mathematics and the English language to get that total: If they added a few words to each part of the series, they called that four rewrites of the project.

By late 1997 the station was fed up and decided not to renew the reporters’ contract. Wilson and Akre filed suit in May 1998.

The left-wing press bit hard. Norman Solomon, one of the left’s most prolific media critics and a founder of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), said in a 1999 interview in The Humanist, “Monsanto went ballistic and the Fox hierarchy pulled the plug on those reporters.”

Actually, in 1998 WTVT went ahead and aired a report on rBGH, sans Wilson and Akre. A new investigator, Nathan Lang, recounted the same story that Wilson and Akre had pursued but included Monsanto’s arguments. Lawrence Grossman, a former president of NBC News, described the segment in the Columbia Journalism Review as “a strong and effective three-part investigative series on the subject,” one that was “hardly any different in substance from the versions that Akre and Wilson and the station had been battling over.” In a distinct break with professional courtesy, Wilson tried to prevent the show from airing by threatening Lang, who testified that Wilson came to his home and “indicated that I had the option to either agree with [Wilson] or [Wilson] would characterize my stories as lies.”

Wilson’s and Akre’s lawsuit claimed they were canned for threatening to spill the beans to the FCC about the station’s “news distortion,” a violation of a Florida “whistleblower” law that protects people who report civil or criminal violations by companies. At a trial in the summer of 2000 the couple called such notables as Ralph Nader and Walter Cronkite, who didn’t seem to know much about the specifics of the dispute but served as effective flypaper in attracting the nation’s left-wing, anti-corporate activists and media outlets.

A jury dismissed all claims by Wilson in August 2000 but gave a limited verdict to Akre, ordering Fox to pay her $425,000. In a complicated decision, the jury sided with Akre by agreeing that she was a whistleblower because she had threatened to go to the FCC over portions of the series she believed to be a violation of the 1934 federal Communications Act. Wilson and Akre had argued successfully in their trial that they shouldn’t have to prove news “distortion,” but only that they believed distortion occurred. Jury instructions made six references to that “belief standard.” (Wilson and Akre would neglect to include the believed in most of their subsequent descriptions of the verdict.) How the jury managed to decide for Akre but reject Wilson’s claims was never explained. Wilson, who had represented himself, claimed his aggressiveness repulsed the jury. The Fox lawyers say Akre made a sympathetic plaintiff when she discussed her daughter and described how Fox had ruined her career.

Florida’s Second District Court of Appeal ruled the case had “no merit from its inception” and reversed Akre’s win. Last year, in the final chapter of the legal case, Wilson was ordered to pay WTVT $156,000 in legal bills.

Hook, Line, Sinker

The court’s repudiation of the couple did nothing to slow their momentum in becoming media martyrs. Dozens of left-leaning commentators described the gist of the ruling as “the media can legally lie.” The Web site Biotalk, a promotional vehicle for the film The Corporation, proclaimed: “Appeal court judges ruled that falsifying news isn’t actually against the law. So they denied Jane her whistleblower status.”

In fact, the court ruled the couple’s case didn’t fall under the state’s definition of whistleblower, which involves threatening to expose a violation of a law, rule, or regulation. The court was never asked to rule on whether the media can lie; nor would that have been in any way appropriate in what was merely an employment dispute.