Friday, January 28, 2005

Faux New admits it

Two TV journalists have challenged the broadcast license renewal of WTVT Fox-13 asserting it deliberately broadcast false and distorted news reports.

...

The challenge stems from what the reporters describe as a year-long experience working at the station where they resisted their managers who, they allege, repeatedly ordered them to distort a series of news reports about the secret use of an artificial hormone injected in dairy cattle throughout Florida and nationally.

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The reporters charge in a release distributed Monday that station executives demanded the reports be falsified and slanted to avoid a threatened lawsuit by the hormone maker Monsanto, as well as potential loss of advertising from the dairy industry and others who objected to the reports.

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In 1998, the two filed a civil court lawsuit seeking employee protections under the state Whistleblower Act that resulted in a $425,000 jury award to Akre.

That verdict was overturned in 2003 when an appellate court accepted Fox's defense that since it is not technically against any law, rule or regulation for a broadcaster to distort the news [emphasis added], the journalists were never entitled to employee protections as whistleblowers in the first place.

Full story here.

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