Environment, Inc.
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Environment, Inc.
August 18, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: We're back with On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Jane Akre and Steve Wilson thought they'd struck gold when they landed their six figure jobs for a Fox network station in Tampa. The husband and wife team with 40 years of reporting experience between them were hired to produce hardhitting investigative series for WTTV.
They began work on a 4 part series about the use of the Monsanto-produced drug bovine growth hormone. The makers claim that when injected into dairy cows the drug boosts milk productivity and increases profits for farmers.
Although the hormone had passed FDA approval, it had passed with only minimum testing. Whether the drug was safe for humans was never entirely clear. As a result, Florida supermarkets made a promise to their customers that they would not sell any products with BGH, at least until the drug was proved save.
Wilson's and Akre's report proved that not only were some supermarkets breaking their promise but that Monsanto was not willing to come clean about the potentially dangerous side-effects of BGH on humans.
The on air promotions were relentless. Fox was plugging the series as quote "the mystery in your milk." They were all set to run, and then--
STEVE WILSON: Well on the night before the series was to begin -- it was a Friday night -- the series was set for Monday -- the fax machine spit out a letter from a very powerful New York law firm that Monsanto had hired. The letter told Fox officials, it was addressed to Roger Ailes [sp?] who is the president of Fox Network News in New York, and it said to Ailes essentially that these reporters are idiots. They're scientifically incompetent; they don't understand; and they are going to be shouting fire in a crowded theater essentially and, and causing alarms that ought not to be raised.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And then the pressure came. What happened?
JANE AKRE:Well we got two letters within the scope of a week. The second one predicted dire consequences for Fox News if the series was to run, and we re-wrote the story 83 times in an effort to make it truthful yet to alleviate some of the concerns of our bosses and not one of those rewrites was satisfactory, and at the end of the 9 month re-rev--review process, we were fired.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Exactly one year ago a Florida jury awarded you 425,000 dollars in damages under the state's Whistleblower Law, but you didn't get it.
JANE AKRE: That's right. Fox is appealing the-- verdict because they want to get their good name back! And that is true -- I am quoting the lawyer for Fox: we want our good name back. I was awarded the money as a whistleblower, and essentially what Whistleblower does is if somebody has been retaliated against by their employer for either refusing to participate in an illegal activity or threatening to blow the whistle to the authorities on the illegal activity, then they can file this claim, and in our case, we were successful. And the, the federal authority here would be the FCC which gives broadcasters these free licenses basically to m-- to generate as much money as they can make -- incredible sums are generated -- and in exchange the broadcasters are supposed to act responsibly and they are supposed to be broadcasting in the public interest, and the basis of our suit was that to lie, distort and slant a story is not in the public interest.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now you believe this information was important for the public to know, but did you hype the dangers -- you know in the Fox tradition - in order to get the point across?
STEVE WILSON: You know that's a very good question, because reporters and Fox stations themselves often brag about how they "Foxify" the news. We did not hype this! We simply attempted to report the truth. And that was that despite promises that you have been given that the grocery chains would not buy milk from cows injected with this, they are buying it. They've broken those promises.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:The station claimed that you were, quote, unwilling to be objective in the story. Now you were awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize earlier this year. Do you think as journalists that being aligned with an environmental movement prevents you from being objective?
JANE AKRE: That, that's a question that people raise -are - have you become activists or advocates? And we say in a sense, yes, because we're advocates for people having information! That's what journalism is supposed to do! That's what journalists have a long tradition of doing!
STEVE WILSON: Let me just add, one of the first things they attempted to do when they wanted to buy our silence was to pay us off! -- to give us what we called hush money in exchange for not telling people what the truth was. Now you know I think I could probably agree to keep my mouth shut about how Fox television works because if you have a television you can watch and see for yourself. But it went far beyond that. They wanted to buy our agreement that we would never tell anybody about what was in their milk! So I don't think it's about being an advocate for a position; it's about being an advocate for the public's right to know.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well you've been quoted as saying you don't think you'll ever work in television again. Do you think you've been blacklisted?
STEVE WILSON:I think journalism -- and I'm talking about mainstream journalism now that's, that's run by large corporations -- fewer than ever before as consolidation goes on -- has made it pretty clear that, you know, people are supposed to keep their heads down and their mouths shut. Journalists are not supposed to stand up and challenge the people they work for. Meanwhile the people they work for now are big corporations, and they look at the news now not as a public service but as a product! And if it's going to cost you a whole lot of money in lost advertising because you offended some car maker or some big company like Monsanto, then suddenly it isn't worth it to give people that information, because from a business standpoint you're not going to make as much money doing that!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you think there's a sort of craven spirit that has infected the mainstream press.
STEVE WILSON: I think it's laziness and cowardice. That's what I think. You know. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
JANE AKRE:There's a great deal of self-censorship, but you certainly wouldn't advocate, Steve, that people do what we do and end up unemployed and-- unemployable! [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
STEVE WILSON: No, I'm not, I'm not saying that's for everybody, [LAUGHTER] except if you're asked to lie. I mean it's like the next step down this road of nobody being able to believe what any of us say! And it's wrong! And nobody should go along with that, although they do!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Steve Wilson, thanks a lot!
STEVE WILSON: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And Jane Akre, thanks to you too.
JANE AKRE: Thank you!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Steve Wilson and Jane Akre, former Fox Network employees, were the first journalists to win a Whistleblower's suit, exactly one year ago this week.
BOB GARFIELD:Ten years ago Tom Knudson wrote a series of articles for the Sacramento Bee that galvanized the environmental movement. The Sierra in Peril series showed an environment under siege from the manmade threats of logging, grazing, suburban sprawl and air pollution.
Knudson's research sparked a public outcry. What followed were legislative hearings, a massive scientific study and eventually a fundamental change in the way the U.S. Forest Service manages its land! Tom Knudson won a Pulitzer and was hailed a hero by the environmental movement.
Now, a decade later, comes a second Knudson series. But unlike the first, this one isn't likely to get him invited to any Sierra Club dinners. The series, titled Environment, Inc., reads like an audit. Knudson cites a litany of over-spending in the country's largest environmental groups, including luxury offices for executives and expensive but ineffectual direct mail campaigns.
Tom Knudson, welcome to the show! Ed Marston [sp?] in The High Country News characterizes your articles as-- an attack! He says - and this is a quote - why when there are so many real problems in the region is Knudson nit-picking a movement that is attempting to save the Western United States?
And furthermore he calls you sort of a turn coat! Are you a turn coat?
TOM KNUDSON:[LAUGHS] I'm a journalist, and I think it's a journalist's responsibility to look at all powerful institutions. We've historically looked at government, industry, unions, police. If you look at the Western landscape, the environmental movement exerts financial and political power. I think that it's just our job as the news media not to pledge allegiance to that movement, altruistic as it may be, but to scrutinize it.
BOB GARFIELD:The whole tempest raises actually some interesting questions, cause you wonder if the fact, the very fact that the environmental movement is so disturbed, even outraged, by your series suggests that they've become accustomed not only to sympathetic reporting but uncritical reporting from the media. Do you think the media in general are sort of in the pockets of the greens?
TOM KNUDSON: We, we have been overly sympathetic. I think there are a number of reasons for that. One is just kind of the nature of the business --it's a business that lives in part on controversy. Environmental groups are a steady and a reasonably easy source of controversy for the press. They're, they're always there for a sound bite when you want them.
BOB GARFIELD: And it won't be an innocuous sound bite either.
TOM KNUDSON:That's another thing that's happened over the past 10, 20, 30 years that kind of bothers me is the, the shrillness, the ad hominem attacks, the hyperbole -- you know they want to get their quote in the Washington Post or the Sacramento Bee or the New York Times and it, it becomes kind of a game. And I just didn't want to play that game any more. I got tired of that.
BOB GARFIELD:Have you suddenly become the darling of the political right? The Republicans trying to woo you as the poster child for finally looking into the evil core of this special interest group?
TOM KNUDSON: Well there was a little bit of that after the stories ran. All of it, you know, unsolicited. Sort of astonishing. I had nothing to do with it, but-- it, it, it has been a peculiar phenomenon to be temporarily popular among that crowd.
BOB GARFIELD: And how about hate mail. Are, are you getting like Birkenstocks thrown through your window?
TOM KNUDSON:It's interesting! You know? I'm getting a little bit of that; some from the Sierra Club; some from elsewhere. But, but what's fascinating is if you sift through the e-mails, there's, there are a number from environmental CEOs who say in effect you know I'll be tarred and feathered for saying this, but your stories were right on! It's time that somebody took a good hard look at what's going on.
These people talk about the influence of marketing in conservation when they go out to dinner at night, and when they talk among themselves. I'm getting the focus because I took that debate public; therefore, you know, there's a bit of a-- the attack the messenger element to this, which is fine. I don't mind that. I think that's what a journalist should do.
But those who are criticizing me should realize that the very issues I raise are very much live issues inside the movement itself.
BOB GARFIELD: Well, Tom Knudson. Thank you very much!
TOM KNUDSON: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Tom Knudson is a reporter for the Sacramento Bee.
August 18, 2001
BOB GARFIELD: We're back with On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Jane Akre and Steve Wilson thought they'd struck gold when they landed their six figure jobs for a Fox network station in Tampa. The husband and wife team with 40 years of reporting experience between them were hired to produce hardhitting investigative series for WTTV.
They began work on a 4 part series about the use of the Monsanto-produced drug bovine growth hormone. The makers claim that when injected into dairy cows the drug boosts milk productivity and increases profits for farmers.
Although the hormone had passed FDA approval, it had passed with only minimum testing. Whether the drug was safe for humans was never entirely clear. As a result, Florida supermarkets made a promise to their customers that they would not sell any products with BGH, at least until the drug was proved save.
Wilson's and Akre's report proved that not only were some supermarkets breaking their promise but that Monsanto was not willing to come clean about the potentially dangerous side-effects of BGH on humans.
The on air promotions were relentless. Fox was plugging the series as quote "the mystery in your milk." They were all set to run, and then--
STEVE WILSON: Well on the night before the series was to begin -- it was a Friday night -- the series was set for Monday -- the fax machine spit out a letter from a very powerful New York law firm that Monsanto had hired. The letter told Fox officials, it was addressed to Roger Ailes [sp?] who is the president of Fox Network News in New York, and it said to Ailes essentially that these reporters are idiots. They're scientifically incompetent; they don't understand; and they are going to be shouting fire in a crowded theater essentially and, and causing alarms that ought not to be raised.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And then the pressure came. What happened?
JANE AKRE:Well we got two letters within the scope of a week. The second one predicted dire consequences for Fox News if the series was to run, and we re-wrote the story 83 times in an effort to make it truthful yet to alleviate some of the concerns of our bosses and not one of those rewrites was satisfactory, and at the end of the 9 month re-rev--review process, we were fired.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Exactly one year ago a Florida jury awarded you 425,000 dollars in damages under the state's Whistleblower Law, but you didn't get it.
JANE AKRE: That's right. Fox is appealing the-- verdict because they want to get their good name back! And that is true -- I am quoting the lawyer for Fox: we want our good name back. I was awarded the money as a whistleblower, and essentially what Whistleblower does is if somebody has been retaliated against by their employer for either refusing to participate in an illegal activity or threatening to blow the whistle to the authorities on the illegal activity, then they can file this claim, and in our case, we were successful. And the, the federal authority here would be the FCC which gives broadcasters these free licenses basically to m-- to generate as much money as they can make -- incredible sums are generated -- and in exchange the broadcasters are supposed to act responsibly and they are supposed to be broadcasting in the public interest, and the basis of our suit was that to lie, distort and slant a story is not in the public interest.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now you believe this information was important for the public to know, but did you hype the dangers -- you know in the Fox tradition - in order to get the point across?
STEVE WILSON: You know that's a very good question, because reporters and Fox stations themselves often brag about how they "Foxify" the news. We did not hype this! We simply attempted to report the truth. And that was that despite promises that you have been given that the grocery chains would not buy milk from cows injected with this, they are buying it. They've broken those promises.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:The station claimed that you were, quote, unwilling to be objective in the story. Now you were awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize earlier this year. Do you think as journalists that being aligned with an environmental movement prevents you from being objective?
JANE AKRE: That, that's a question that people raise -are - have you become activists or advocates? And we say in a sense, yes, because we're advocates for people having information! That's what journalism is supposed to do! That's what journalists have a long tradition of doing!
STEVE WILSON: Let me just add, one of the first things they attempted to do when they wanted to buy our silence was to pay us off! -- to give us what we called hush money in exchange for not telling people what the truth was. Now you know I think I could probably agree to keep my mouth shut about how Fox television works because if you have a television you can watch and see for yourself. But it went far beyond that. They wanted to buy our agreement that we would never tell anybody about what was in their milk! So I don't think it's about being an advocate for a position; it's about being an advocate for the public's right to know.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well you've been quoted as saying you don't think you'll ever work in television again. Do you think you've been blacklisted?
STEVE WILSON:I think journalism -- and I'm talking about mainstream journalism now that's, that's run by large corporations -- fewer than ever before as consolidation goes on -- has made it pretty clear that, you know, people are supposed to keep their heads down and their mouths shut. Journalists are not supposed to stand up and challenge the people they work for. Meanwhile the people they work for now are big corporations, and they look at the news now not as a public service but as a product! And if it's going to cost you a whole lot of money in lost advertising because you offended some car maker or some big company like Monsanto, then suddenly it isn't worth it to give people that information, because from a business standpoint you're not going to make as much money doing that!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you think there's a sort of craven spirit that has infected the mainstream press.
STEVE WILSON: I think it's laziness and cowardice. That's what I think. You know. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
JANE AKRE:There's a great deal of self-censorship, but you certainly wouldn't advocate, Steve, that people do what we do and end up unemployed and-- unemployable! [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
STEVE WILSON: No, I'm not, I'm not saying that's for everybody, [LAUGHTER] except if you're asked to lie. I mean it's like the next step down this road of nobody being able to believe what any of us say! And it's wrong! And nobody should go along with that, although they do!
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Steve Wilson, thanks a lot!
STEVE WILSON: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And Jane Akre, thanks to you too.
JANE AKRE: Thank you!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Steve Wilson and Jane Akre, former Fox Network employees, were the first journalists to win a Whistleblower's suit, exactly one year ago this week.
BOB GARFIELD:Ten years ago Tom Knudson wrote a series of articles for the Sacramento Bee that galvanized the environmental movement. The Sierra in Peril series showed an environment under siege from the manmade threats of logging, grazing, suburban sprawl and air pollution.
Knudson's research sparked a public outcry. What followed were legislative hearings, a massive scientific study and eventually a fundamental change in the way the U.S. Forest Service manages its land! Tom Knudson won a Pulitzer and was hailed a hero by the environmental movement.
Now, a decade later, comes a second Knudson series. But unlike the first, this one isn't likely to get him invited to any Sierra Club dinners. The series, titled Environment, Inc., reads like an audit. Knudson cites a litany of over-spending in the country's largest environmental groups, including luxury offices for executives and expensive but ineffectual direct mail campaigns.
Tom Knudson, welcome to the show! Ed Marston [sp?] in The High Country News characterizes your articles as-- an attack! He says - and this is a quote - why when there are so many real problems in the region is Knudson nit-picking a movement that is attempting to save the Western United States?
And furthermore he calls you sort of a turn coat! Are you a turn coat?
TOM KNUDSON:[LAUGHS] I'm a journalist, and I think it's a journalist's responsibility to look at all powerful institutions. We've historically looked at government, industry, unions, police. If you look at the Western landscape, the environmental movement exerts financial and political power. I think that it's just our job as the news media not to pledge allegiance to that movement, altruistic as it may be, but to scrutinize it.
BOB GARFIELD:The whole tempest raises actually some interesting questions, cause you wonder if the fact, the very fact that the environmental movement is so disturbed, even outraged, by your series suggests that they've become accustomed not only to sympathetic reporting but uncritical reporting from the media. Do you think the media in general are sort of in the pockets of the greens?
TOM KNUDSON: We, we have been overly sympathetic. I think there are a number of reasons for that. One is just kind of the nature of the business --it's a business that lives in part on controversy. Environmental groups are a steady and a reasonably easy source of controversy for the press. They're, they're always there for a sound bite when you want them.
BOB GARFIELD: And it won't be an innocuous sound bite either.
TOM KNUDSON:That's another thing that's happened over the past 10, 20, 30 years that kind of bothers me is the, the shrillness, the ad hominem attacks, the hyperbole -- you know they want to get their quote in the Washington Post or the Sacramento Bee or the New York Times and it, it becomes kind of a game. And I just didn't want to play that game any more. I got tired of that.
BOB GARFIELD:Have you suddenly become the darling of the political right? The Republicans trying to woo you as the poster child for finally looking into the evil core of this special interest group?
TOM KNUDSON: Well there was a little bit of that after the stories ran. All of it, you know, unsolicited. Sort of astonishing. I had nothing to do with it, but-- it, it, it has been a peculiar phenomenon to be temporarily popular among that crowd.
BOB GARFIELD: And how about hate mail. Are, are you getting like Birkenstocks thrown through your window?
TOM KNUDSON:It's interesting! You know? I'm getting a little bit of that; some from the Sierra Club; some from elsewhere. But, but what's fascinating is if you sift through the e-mails, there's, there are a number from environmental CEOs who say in effect you know I'll be tarred and feathered for saying this, but your stories were right on! It's time that somebody took a good hard look at what's going on.
These people talk about the influence of marketing in conservation when they go out to dinner at night, and when they talk among themselves. I'm getting the focus because I took that debate public; therefore, you know, there's a bit of a-- the attack the messenger element to this, which is fine. I don't mind that. I think that's what a journalist should do.
But those who are criticizing me should realize that the very issues I raise are very much live issues inside the movement itself.
BOB GARFIELD: Well, Tom Knudson. Thank you very much!
TOM KNUDSON: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Tom Knudson is a reporter for the Sacramento Bee.
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