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 4 of 4)

It was Wilson’s bombastic protest that deserved the oops. His sworn deposition in the Tampa case belied the spin:

“Q—And the $5,000 that has been temporarily withdrawn from the Citizens’ Fund for the Right to Know, what was the purpose of temporarily withdrawing it?

“A—I determined I didn’t want the cash in that account.

“Q—Where did you put the cash?

“A—I think I put it under the mattress.”

Enter the FCC

That hardly exhausts the list of controversies surrounding Wilson and his work. He has been described by Miami-Dade County as using a “set up” to obtain a tape from a lawyer of a public official having sex with a prostitute. He drew an injunction from a federal judge in Florida for stalking people who preferred not to talk to him, including a pregnant young woman. (The injunction was later overturned.) His Web site claims he was a “founding member” of Investigative Reporters and Editors, even though a check with IRE shows he wasn’t.

Wilson also doesn’t hesitate to use “news” for his own personal benefit, a practice explicitly forbidden by most news organizations. In 1998, for example, he proposed an “investigative” article to the Tampa paper I edited, the Weekly Planet, in which he was to uncover what he claimed were abuses by telecommunications companies. But Wilson didn’t disclose to our paper that he owned a phone card business that competed with the telecom firms.

The controversy that has gotten him in the most trouble recently is his report on the Michigan Boys. Several of the local officials and businessmen came from Warren, a suburb of Detroit. Both the chief of police and former deputy mayor, Mike Greiner, hotly dispute the charges of rampant prostitution. Greiner filed a petition asking the FCC to deny WXYZ a renewal of its license, claiming, “Wilson had flown down to Costa Rica before the vacationers were scheduled to arrive to ‘line up’ prostitutes to make a story out of the trip.” Greiner’s allegation was based in part on an article in A.M. Costa Rica, an online news outlet, which had reported, “Wilson went to the beach at Flamingo more than a week ago trying to line up underage prostitutes.”

The FCC has had Greiner’s challenge to WXYZ’s license on its desk since August. Wilson and Akre’s attempt to revoke WTVT’s license has been there since January 2005. Both complaints allege news “distortion,” which would be a violation of the 72-year-old Communications Act’s prohibition against sending a “false signal.” Both are likely doomed because the FCC has—correctly—ruled many times that it shouldn’t be involved in second-guessing news judgments.

To adopt Wilson’s position would mean that a station could lose its license based solely on a subjective assessment that a news source’s statement was false. In almost every dispute—financial, corporate, political—at least one side is being untruthful. By Wilson’s logic, broadcasters’ licenses would be vulnerable unless they determined who was telling the fibs and banned the miscreants from on-air reports.

Greiner’s complaint at least makes the claim that a TV station’s reporter—Wilson—concocted a false story with the intent to deceive viewers. Even so, the aggrieved parties have other recourses, such as defamation litigation. To have the FCC rule on the station’s news gathering would open the door to politicizing all broadcast journalism. The agency’s politically appointed commissioners would become the super-editors of the nation’s news programs. Stations around the country would have to satisfy federal regulators about the soundness of their news gathering.

And the soundness of Wilson’s news gathering? The questions continue to pile up. The “progressive” press, alas, isn’t asking them.