The Akre-Wilson BGH/Fox Saga.

• Author: Akre, Jane
• Position: Investigative reporting on synthetic bovine growth hormone

If you were with us at Fontbonne College you already know about the lawsuit we filed against Fox Television on April 2, 1998. After hiring us to do hard-hitting investigative reporting for the network's WTVT in Tampa, we were both ultimately fired for refusing to lie and distort what we learned to be the truth about synthetic bovine growth hormone (rBGH). As we have charged in our suit, pressure from a big-name New York lawyer hired by Monsanto caused Fox to fold like a cheap tent.

Stories that offend advertisers or bring threats of lawsuits from big companies are sometimes just swept under the rug. Not in our case. Fox lawyers and managers decided if they could just force us to air a more Monsanto-friendly Version of our rBGH stories, they could have the best of both worlds--the appearance of a tough investigative team without the headaches that sometimes come with telling the cold, hard truth.

Twice we turned down lucrative offers to go away with our pockets filled with nearly $200,000 of Fox cash which we clearly saw as hush money. (Terms of the proposed settlements required us never to tell what we learned about rBGH or how Fox covered up that news.) 83 times we wrote and re-wrote the rBGH story but none was ever acceptable for broadcast. Even after we were told we were being suspended without pay for threatening to tell the Federal Communications Commission what was going on, we kept right on writing and re-writing. Finally, just before Christmas 1997, they lowered the boom and warned us to keep quiet about rBGH because Fox owned that news.

It was April 2 of last year that we filed our suit and posted every bit of it including videotape on the World Wide Web (at www.foxBGHsuit.com).

As we've found out during the pre-trial discovery process, Fox loathes the fact that the story we couldn't put on the air in Tampa is now available in great detail for anyone in the world to see.

The power of the Internet is nothing short of amazing. We've heard from folks as far away as Norway, Botswana, Europe and Canada where genetic engineering is facing its toughest tests. What do they know that's been kept from most Americans?

Gaining momentum

When you report a story, you work hard to get the facts straight. No one wants to later discover even one little thing that was inaccurate. With the stakes very high on our rBGH story, that fear was always in the back of our minds. But even as pre-trial depositions continue in our lawsuit, we are finding our...