Crimes Against Nature (23 page)

Yet it’s hard to find much mention of this in the press. The Tyndall Report, which analyzes television content, surveyed environmental stories on TV news for 2002. Of the 15,000 minutes of network news that aired that year, only 4 percent was devoted to the environment, and many of those minutes were consumed by human-interest stories — whales trapped in sea ice or a tiger that escaped from the zoo.
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Why is the media barely covering such a vital public policy issue? Why isn’t it informing the public and providing Americans the news they need in order to be effective citizens?

From the birth of the broadcasting industry, the airwaves — from which most Americans obtain their news — were regarded and regulated as a public trust, a communal resource like the air and water. The Federal Radio Act of 1927 required that broadcasters, as a condition of their licenses, operate in the “public interest” by covering important policy issues and providing equal time to both sides of public questions.
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Those requirements evolved into the powerful Fairness Doctrine, which mandated that the broadcast media has a duty to maintain an informed public. Among other things, broadcasters had to air children’s and community-based programming, and the rules were weighted to encourage diversity of ownership and local control. The Fairness Doctrine governed television and radio for most of the twentieth century.
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In the 1960s the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the courts applied the Fairness Doctrine to require cigarette manufacturers to include the surgeon general’s warnings in their TV and radio advertisements, and polluters to notify the public when advertising a polluting product.
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Advertisers of gas-guzzling automobiles, for example, had to provide rebuttal time for public interest advocates to debate the impact of wasteful fuel consumption on our environment and public health.
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According to media commentator Bill Moyers, “The clear intent was to prevent a monopoly of commercial values from overwhelming democratic values — to assure that the official view of reality — corporate or government — was not the only view of reality that reached the people.”
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The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Fairness Doctrine in the Red Lion case in 1969, confirming that it is “the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters which is paramount.”
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Then, in 1988, Ronald Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine as a favor to the big studio heads that had supported his election. The occasion was a case involving a Syracuse, New York, television station that had broadcast nine paid editorials advocating the construction of a nuclear power plant. When the station refused to air opposing viewpoints, an antinuke group complained. The three Reagan appointees who ran the FCC sided with the TV station, applying the same laissez-faire philosophy to the airwaves as the Reagan team did to the other parts of the common. They reasoned that the recent proliferation of cable TV allays the “Supreme Court’s apparent concern that listeners and viewers have access to diverse sources of information.” Broadcasters would henceforth be under no obligation to air views that opposed their own.
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Reagan’s FCC chairman, Mark Fowler, scoffed at critics’ concerns that the loss of the nation’s most popular open forum diminished our democracy. “Television,” he said, “is just another appliance — it’s a toaster with pictures.”
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A horrified Congress reacted with legislation codifying the Fairness Doctrine, but President Reagan vetoed the bills.
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The FCC’s pro-industry, anti-regulatory philosophy effectively ended the right of access to broadcast television by any but the moneyed interests.

As an unregulated part of the commons, TV and radio are today subject to the same dynamic that is polluting our other public trust assets, with behemoths consolidating control of and contaminating the airwaves.

One-sided and often dishonest broadcasting has replaced the evenhanded reporting mandated by the Fairness Doctrine. The right-wing radio conglomerate Clear Channel, which in 1995 operated 40 radio stations, today owns over 1,200 stations and controls 11 percent of the market.
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Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is the largest media conglomerate on the planet, one of seven media giants that own or control virtually all of the United States’ 2,000 TV stations, 11,000 radio stations, and 11,000 newspapers and magazines.
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And, predictably, these media corporations have the White House’s support. Despite congressional mandates for diversity of ownership and local control, the number of corporations that control our media is shrinking dramatically.

This consolidation reduces diversity, gives consumers limited and homogenized choices, and erodes local control. Radio stations play the same music, giving little opportunity for new or alternative artists. North Dakota farmers can’t get local emergency broadcasts or crop reports, and New York City residents no longer have a country radio station. Corporate consolidation has reduced news broadcast quality and has dramatically diminished the inquisitiveness of our national press.

To meet the challenges of the future, the United States needs an open marketplace of ideas. As fewer companies own more and more properties, that marketplace is withering. TV stations are no longer controlled by people primarily engaged in their communities, and news bureaus are no longer run by newspeople. Driven solely by the profit motive, many of these companies have liquidated their investigative journalism units, documentary teams, and foreign bureaus to shave expenses. Americans must now tune in to the BBC to get quality foreign news. Local news coverage is also shrinking, as owners cut corners by consolidating newsrooms. Coverage at the Louisiana Statehouse in Baton Rouge is typical: In 1970 there were five investigative reporters assigned to the Capitol beat. Today there are none. Not a single reporter from a national news outlet is currently assigned to cover the U.S. Department of Interior.

I recently asked Fox News president Roger Ailes why the networks don’t cover environmental stories. Roger is an old friend with whom I spent a summer camping in Africa almost 30 years ago. He is jovial, animated, and genuinely funny, and we loathe each other’s politics. After considering the question for a moment, he said, “It’s because environmental stories are not fast-breaking!” News, it seems, has to be entertaining because that’s what sells.

The networks are contaminating the airwaves with high-profile murders and celebrity gossip, leaving ever-diminishing time for real news. They’ve dumbed down the news to its lowest common denominator. It’s all Laci Peterson and Kobe Bryant all the time. Notorious crimes and sex scandals have little real relevance to our lives, our country, our democracy. At best, they are entertainment; at worst, pornography. The Monica Lewinsky story got such play in part because it was an excuse to deal pornography packaged as news. That stuff may sell papers, but it leaves little room for the asthma stories, for news that really affects our lives.

But Roger Ailes’ response omitted another factor: Environmental stories often challenge a network’s ideology or corporate self-interest. Many major media outlets are controlled by companies that have a vested interest in keeping environmental disasters under wraps: NBC is owned by General Electric, the world’s biggest polluter, with a world record 86 Superfund sites.
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Until three years ago, CBS was owned by Westinghouse, which has 39 Superfund sites. Westinghouse is also the world’s largest owner of nuclear power plants and the third-largest manufacturer of nuclear weapons.
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In 2003, the North American winners of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, known as the “Nobel Prize for grassroots work,” were former Fox TV reporters Jane Akre and Steve Wilson. The two investigative reporters claim that they lost their jobs at Tampa’s Fox-owned WTVT when they refused to doctor a news report that had displeased Monsanto.
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The reporters had visited regional dairies and discovered that Monsanto’s controversial bovine growth hormone (BGH) was being injected into cows by virtually every dairyman in the region.
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The chemical was present in virtually all the state’s milk supply, despite commitments by Florida’s supermarkets not to sell milk tainted by the hormone.
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In various studies BGH has been linked to cancer
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and is banned by many countries, including Canada,
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New Zealand,
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and the entire European community.
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Akre and Wilson’s report said that Monsanto had been accused of fraud in connection with information it had provided to the EPA concerning dioxin, published deceitful statements about food safety, and funded favorable studies about the product from tame scientists.
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The newscast also reported on allegations that Monsanto had attempted to bribe public officials in Canada.
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According to the reporters, WTVT carefully reviewed the team’s four-part investigation for factual accuracy and heavily advertised the series on radio. It planned to release the story during television sweeps week beginning February 24, 1997. The day before the airing, however, the station yanked the shows after Monsanto hired a powerful law firm to complain to Roger Ailes.
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Wilson and Akre testified that the local station manager again reviewed the reports, found no errors, and scheduled them to run the following week. The station also offered Monsanto an opportunity to appear on the show and respond. Monsanto declined the offer and fired off another threatening letter to Ailes. Wilson and Akre claim that the station manager, David Boylan, ordered the reporters to edit the show in a way that was deceptive but favorable to Monsanto.
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“For every fact we intended to broadcast, we had documentation six weeks from Sunday,” Wilson told me. “The station’s lawyer told us time and again, ‘You don’t get it. It doesn’t matter what the facts are, we don’t want to be spending money to defend a lawsuit.’ ”
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According to Wilson, the station was also worried about losing advertisers and had received calls from a grocery-chain and dairy-industry interests.

According to their subsequent lawsuit, Boylan threatened to fire Wilson and Akre “within 48 hours” if they declined to cooperate in the deception. He subsequently softened this position, they testified, offering to lay off both reporters with full salaries for their contract period, provided they agreed to sign a confidentiality agreement.
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For nine months they worked on 83 different drafts of the story — none of which satisfied Fox or Monsanto. Akre testified that the station had tried to force her to say that the BGH milk was safe and no different from non-BGH milk, despite abundant studies that showed otherwise.
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“We told them to go ahead and kill the story,” Wilson says, “just don’t make us lie.”
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Boylan eventually fired the reporters in December 1997, and they sued Fox. In August 2000, following a five-month trial, a Florida jury awarded Akre $425,000 under Florida’s private-sector whistle-blower’s statute, which prohibits retaliation against employees who threaten to disclose employer conduct that is “in violation of a law, rule or regulation.”
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The jury found that Akre had been fired “because she threatened to disclose to the Federal Communications Commission under oath in writing the broadcast of a false, distorted, or slanted news report that she reasonably believed would violate the prohibition against intentional fabrications or distortions of the news on television.”
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But the story does not have an ending that is happy for Akre and Wilson, or for American democracy. On February 14, 2003, the Florida District Court of Appeals reversed the jury verdict. The bizarre decision adopted Fox’s argument that the FCC’s 50-year-old News Distortion Rule, which prohibits the broadcast of false reports, does not qualify as a “law, rule or regulation,” as required by the whistle-blower’s statute, since it had been created over the years in decisions by FCC judges and never promulgated in a rule-making process.
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Five major networks filed amicus curiae briefs supporting Fox’s argument.
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This decision effectively declared it legal for networks to lie in news reports to please their advertisers. Judge Patricia Kelly, the Jeb Bush–appointed district judge who wrote the opinion, next remanded the case to the trial court to determine whether Akre and Wilson should reimburse Fox for $1.7 million in legal fees.
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The argument will take place in August 2004. “What reporter is going to challenge a network that orders him to cover up for polluters or companies that abuse workers or engage in health and safety violations if the station can retaliate by suing the reporter to oblivion the way the courts are letting them do to us?” asks Wilson.
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It should come as no surprise that a virtual media blackout greeted Akre and Wilson’s reception of the Goldman Prize; their story has been largely ignored by the mainstream press. “The news today is far more about the business of journalism than the journalism business,” Akre complained to me.
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Wilson observed that “if you own a newspaper or a printing press, you can lie to your heart’s content. But if you are using the public airwaves, you have an obligation to be fair, accurate, and truthful, even in circumstances where it’s going to piss off your advertisers, embarrass your friends, or hurt your bottom line — otherwise you’re violating the public trust and stealing something vital from the public.”
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