The BGH Scandals--The Incredible Story of
Jane Akre & SteveWilson (part 2)

PR Watch
<http://www.prwatch.org>

Volume 7, No. 4
Fourth Quarter 2000

* An Uphill Battle: Our Lawsuit Against Fox by Jane Akre
* Crazy Like a Fox
* The Ruling
* Who Is That Masked Client? by Jane Akre
* Liquid Truth: Advice from the Spinmeisters An Excerpt
from the New Book by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber:
* Hard Science and Fluid Truth
* Bambi Killers
____________________________________________________________________________
An Uphill Battle: Our Lawsuit Against Fox
by Jane Akre

Going to court against a powerful conglomerate like the Fox network is a
daunting experience, and Fox knows how to intimidate people. Prior to our
dismissal, Dave Boylan had flaunted the company's wealth in an attempt to
make us back down. "We paid three billion for these stations," he told us on
one occasion. "We'll tell you what the news is. The news is what we say it
is!"

After Fox local counsel Patricia Anderson lost two major efforts to have the
suit derailed, the network apparently decided it needed bigger, smarter,
meaner lawyers. They turned to William McDaniels and the Washington firm of
Williams and Connolly, the same firm that Bill Clinton used to help him
through Whitewater, Monica Lewinski, and his famous redefinition of the word
"is." Six weeks before the start of the trial, Williams and Connolly camped
out on the top two floors of the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Tampa. Using more
than a dozen lawyers and some of the top firms around the country to help
with various pre-trial chores, Fox staff lawyers flew back and forth between
Los Angeles and Tampa regularly.

On our side of the aisle, of course, there was no money to afford suites at
the Hyatt. About the same time that Williams and Connolly swept into town,
the lawyer we had asked to represent our interests before the jury decided
it was time to demand an up-front payment of $50,000. We simply didn't have
it, so we fired that attorney. Steve decided to represent himself in court,
and I obtained representation from John Chamblee and Tom Johnson, labor
attorneys who operate out of an old house in the downtown area.

Crazy Like a Fox

The Fox legal strategy was woven tightly from day one and helped by a
well-coordinated team effort. They claimed that we had turned our backs on
the story and were using the whistleblower claim as a "tactic." We missed
deadlines, they said, and had told managers and lawyers we were "going to
get Monsanto." They also claimed that we became convinced that rBGH milk
causes cancer, that we became advocates instead of objective reporters of
the controversy.

None of that was true. Our story did bring forth information that had been
suppressed for far too long: that a spin-off hormone in the altered milk has
been linked to tumor proliferation; that consumers did not have the benefit
of labeling at the grocery store shelf because Monsanto had sued two small
dairies to block it; and that the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine,
which reviewed the drug, did not do long-term human toxicity tests. The
cancer questions to this day remain unanswered. The human effects are, in
essence, being tested on consumers in the marketplace.

The Fox effort, though united, was not flawless. Fox news vice president
Phil Metlin told the six-person jury that if he ever learned a news
organization was trying to eliminate risk by using a threatening letter as a
"road map" to craft a story, such news would "make me want to throw up." But
just days later, on the stand, a local attorney for Fox admitted he did just
that, using Monsanto directives to help craft the rBGH story. Metlin
actually turned white. He also didn't score any points with his bosses when
he admitted that he found no errors in our reporting of the rBGH story, and
he saw no reason why our final version of the story could not be aired.

Dave Boylan had to be flown into town for his testimony. On the eve of the
trial, Fox rewarded him with a promotion to general manager of the Fox-owned
station in Los Angeles. The man who had told us "we paid three billion for
these stations, we'll tell you what the news is," lost his bravado on the
stand, shooting quick, nervous smiles at the jurors while checking in with
the defense team after every answer.

During our cross-examination of Boylan, it helped that Steve knew exactly
what had transpired during 1997. Earlier in the trial, it had been estimated
that lost revenue in advertising from Monsanto ads for Roundup or Nutrasweet
could have cost the station about $50,000. Fox bragged that $50,000 was
nothing for an organization of its size, but Steve's relentless interrogation
of Boylan showed that the actual cost of going up against
Monsanto could have been much higher.

"You testified Fox owns 23 stations?" Steve asked.
"Yes," Boylan answered.

"Could Monsanto pull advertising off all 23?"
"Yes."

"And the Fox News Channel?"
"Yes."

"And the Sky Channel in Europe?"
"Yes."

"It could extend beyond $50,000?"
"It could," Boylan admitted.

Thump, Thump

Fox attorney Bill McDaniels earned the nickname "Thumper" from our team
because he made an audible noise with his foot whenever he got nervous.
There was a lot of thumping during the presentation of our case,
particularly when Ralph Nader took time from his presidential campaign to
serve as an expert witness. Fox had tried unsuccessfully, through
objections, to have Nader eliminated as a witness.

Nader told jurors what the FCC has repeatedly said, that it is "a most
heinous act" to use the public's airwaves to slant, distort and falsify the
news. "A reporter has a legal duty to act in accordance with the
Communications Act of 1934 and in addition to their professional
responsibility to be accurate, not to be used as an instrument of deception
to the audience," Nader said.

McDaniels also objected vehemently to Walter Cronkite's inclusion as an
expert on our side. The Fox counsel said, "Mr. Cronkite is not an expert in
the pre-broadcast review of a story." I couldn't believe my ears. For thirty
years Cronkite was the managing editor of the CBS Evening News. During
Cronkite's deposition, McDaniels had asked the 83-year-old anchorman whether
he was a lawyer and suggested to Cronkite that he couldn't be an expert in
the pre-broadcast review of a story unless he was an attorney.

In his deposition, Cronkite said that an ethical journalist should resist
directives that would result in a false or slanted story being broadcast.
"He should not go a microinch towards that sort of thing. That is a
violation of every principle of good journalism," Cronkite said.

The Ruling

The jury awarded me with $425,000 but gave nothing to Steve, who had been
forced to act as his own attorney. Steve repeatedly showed dogged
determination in questioning many of the witnesses and getting them to admit
some of the most damaging things that ultimately undermined the Fox defense.
In the end, we suspect Steve received no award because of what seems to be
an erroneous instruction from the judge to the jury. The jurors were told,
incorrectly we believe, that in order to find for each of us, they must
determine there was no other reason each of us was fired other than the fact
we resisted orders to lie on the air and threatened to blow the whistle to
the FCC. In any event, we view the verdict as a win for both of us. Our
trial was never about money. It was about a reporter's duty to resist and
blow the whistle loud and strong when pressured to lie and distort the news
over the public airwaves.

Fox immediately announced that it would appeal. On October 12 and again on
November 3, the network argued to the judge that he should vacate the jury's
verdict. During the trial itself, McDaniels had claimed that Fox merely
wanted "to get our good name back" and repair the damage to its credibility
which we had inflicted by telling our story on our website and speaking to
groups around the world. During the Motion to Vacate, however, McDaniels
seemed to toss the network's credibility in the garbage by making an
argument that any legitimate news organization would be embarrassed to
voice. "There is no law, rule or regulation against slanting the news," he
told the judge.

The judge denied Fox's Motion to Vacate, but years of appeals lie ahead.
Every indication we have received suggests that the network plans to
continue its efforts to wear us down with time-consuming, tedious and
expensive legal maneuvers. They have the financial wherewithal to do this,
whereas we have been out of work for three years with no immediate job
offers on the horizon. Somehow we will have to find a way to house and feed
ourselves and our daughter while simultaneously continuing to wage a
full-time battle against a media giant.

Fox will appeal first to the 2nd District Court of Appeals, then the Florida
Supreme Court and eventually the U.S. Supreme Court, if it is willing to
hear the case. All the while, we won't see a cent of our winnings.

And despite our victory, it is possible that Fox's army of lawyers will
eventually succeed in their effort to overturn the verdict on some legal
technicality. Frankly, our struggle is still a hardship shouldered almost
entirely by our single family. Put that up against the $600-an-hour Williams
and Connolly lawyers who fly first class, stay in luxury hotels, and have
legions of legal minions to research and churn out unending briefs for us to
answer. Alas, friends, this is the way the system works.
_________________________________________________________________________

Who Is That Masked Client?
by Jane Akre

We didn't think much about it at first. A young man sat in the back of the
courtroom during our five-week trial, taking careful, thorough notes.
Finally Steve approached him and asked who he was, fully expecting the young
man to say he was from a local law school or college. Instead he fessed up,
identifying himself as Ian Davis, an intern representing the Public
Strategies PR firm, based in Austin, Texas. The most famous member of Public
Strategies is President Clinton's former press secretary, Mike McCurry, who
heads its lobbying arm in Washington, D.C. (Other Public Strategies clients
include Anheuser-Busch, ARCO, Bristol-Myers Squibb, the Edison Electric
Institute, Lockheed Martin, Reuters and Southwest Airlines.)

Davis said he didn't know which client he was taking notes for. He didn't
know what aspect of the trial he was supposed to focus on. He didn't know
how long he would be there. In fact the intern said he was just working a
summer job with the group. That's why you can imagine how surprised I was
when, the other day, I called the Austin office of Public Strategies to find
out if Monsanto was a client, and Ian Davis answered the phone. He is still
just an intern, he said, and he still didn't know who his client was.
_________________________________________________________________________

Liquid Truth: Advice from the Spinmeisters

An Excerpt from the New Book by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber: Trust Us,
We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future

In 1992, the food industry's International Food Information Council (IFIC)
retained Dr. G. Clotaire Rapaille, "an international market research
expert," to research "how Americans relate to food biotechnology and genetic
engineering." IFIC, an ardent enthusiast for the use of biotechnology in
agriculture, wanted to know how it could overcome consumer apprehensions
about the new technology.

A "core team" was assembled to aid in the research, consisting of
representatives from the Monsanto Agricultural Company, NutraSweet, Kraft
General Foods, Ajinomoto, Du Pont and Calgene. Other research sponsors
included Frito-Lay, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, and the M&M/Mars
candy company. The goal of the research team was to "develop actionable
strategies, messages, and language that will express information positively
about the process and products--without stirring fears or negative
connotations."

Dr. Rapaille is a Jungian psychologist who uses a technique that he calls
"Archetype Studies" which claims to delve into the "primordial cause for ...
opinions, attitudes or motivations." As his report to IFIC explained, "For
each element in the world, there is a first meaningful experience called the
Imprinting Moment. The Archetype is the pattern which underlies this
Imprinting Moment. The Archetype is completely preordained by the culture,
and it is common to everyone in a given culture. ... The Archetype is the
Logic of Emotion that forms the Collective Unconscious." Discover these
Archetypes, Rapaille's theory promised, and "You can 'read' the consumers
like a book, and you can understand their unconscious 'logic.'"

Rapaille's process for uncovering Archetypes was similar in most respects to
what another advertising or PR person might term a "focus group," but
Rapaille liked to refer to them as "Imprinting Groups." Each group consisted
of 20-30 everyday Americans, which Rapaille's team of "Archetypologists" led
through a series of "relaxation exercises and visualization" aimed at
eliciting their innermost feelings about biotechnology.

The result of these exercises, the team concluded, was that the biotech
industry stood at a crossroads. "In one case, we have tremendous public
support--we can be viewed as farmers bringing new varieties and improved
foods to consumers. But if we do not position ourselves and our products
correctly, we can just as easily be viewed in the same class as Hitler and
Frankenstein."

The difference depended on which "imprint" provided the Archetype for public
perception of the new foods. And the public would choose its Archetype based
largely on the food industry's choice of words.

"In communicating about food biotechnology and genetic engineering, we now
know a variety of 'trigger' words that will help consumers view these
products in the same vein as farming, hybrids, and the natural order, rather
than as Frankenfoods," the study concluded. In the category of "words to
use," Rapaille suggested terms such as beauty, bounty, children, choices,
cross-breeding, diversity, earth, farmer, flowers, fruits, future
generations, hard work, heritage, improved, organic, purity, quality, soil,
tradition and wholesome.

"Words to lose" included: biotechnology, chemical, DNA, economic,
experiments, industry, laboratory, machines, manipulate, money, pesticides,
profit, radiation, safety and scientists.

In a memo accompanying the completed study, IFIC's Libby Mikesell and Tom
Stenzel summarized the lessons learned. "The technology in biotechnology has
'scary' overtones in connection with life in any form. S Biotechnology may
not be the optimal term to use in our discussions," they wrote. "Clotaire
recommends that we 'sandwich' the word genetic between other words that
create an association with tradition and nature. Some possible terms he
suggested were 'biogenetic gardening,' 'natural genetics' or 'natural
genetic gardening.' He composed this sentence as an example of how to use
the terms: New genetic discoveries allow us to be successful gardeners of
the 21st century and to accomplish cross-breeding at a highly sophisticated
level, fulfilling a vision of the gardeners of the 19th century."

It is worth noting that many of the terms in Rapaille's list of "words to
lose" are straightforward characterizations of the actual scientific process
used in developing genetically engineered foods, while many of the "words to
use" are vague, pleasant-sounding euphemisms designed to obscure the details
about everything that is new and unique about the process.

It is also worth noting the irony in IFIC's choice of someone like Rapaille
to help design its strategy for defending biotech foods. Whatever dangers
biotechnology may or may not present to the public, it is undeniably an
example of modern science in action. When talking among themselves,
biotech's promoters frequently invoke the name of science, characterizing
their opponents as irrational, fear-driven technophobes.

"We all are frustrated by the public's emotional response to scientific,
factual issues," stated the IFIC report. Yet Rapaille's advice to IFIC was
not only calculated to evoke an emotional response and to avoid any mention
of science, his very methodology for arriving at his analysis is at best a
parody of the scientific method.

Hard Science and Fluid Truth

The power that science wields in modern society is a reflection of its
ability to create knowledge that is as close to infallible as any product of
human endeavor. Reasonable people may disagree in their opinions about
Shakespeare or religion, but they do not disagree with the laws of
thermodynamics. This is because the theories of science, especially the hard
sciences, have been developed through methodologies that require
verification by multiple, independent researchers using clearly defined,
replicable experiments. If the experiments do not bear out a hypothesis, the
hypothesis must be rejected or modified.

The very prestige that science enjoys, however, has also given rise to a
variety of scientific pretenders--disciplines such as phrenology or eugenics
that merely claim to be scientific. The great philosopher of science Karl
Popper gave a great deal of consideration to this problem and coined the
term "pseudoscience" to help separate the wheat from the chaff. The
difference between science and pseudoscience, he concluded, is that
genuinely scientific theories are "falsifiable,"--i.e., they are formulated
in such a way that if they are wrong, they can be proven false through
experiments. By contrast, pseudosciences are formulated so vaguely that they
can never be proven or disproven.

"The difference between a science and a pseudoscience is that scientific
statements can be proved wrong and pseudoscientific statements cannot," says
Robert Youngson in his book, Scientific Blunders: A Brief History of How
Wrong Scientists Can Sometimes Be. "By this criterion you will find that a
surprising number of seemingly scientific assertions--perhaps even many in
which you devoutly believe--are complete nonsense. Rather surprisingly this
is not to assert that all pseudoscientific claims are untrue. Some of them
may be true, but you can never know this, so they are not entitled to claim
the cast-iron assurance and reliance that you can have, and place, in
scientific facts."

"You always try--
you always serve the truth.
But again--but the truth
is often, you know,
is often not necessarily a solid.
It can be a liquid."
--public relations counselor John Scanlon

Judged by this standard, many of the "social sciences" --including the
psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Jung and others--are actually
pseudosciences rather than the real thing. This does not mean that Freud and
Jung were charlatans or fools. Both were creative thinkers with fascinating
insights into the human psyche, but a research methodology that derives its
data from the dreams of mentally ill patients is a far cry from the orderly
system of measurements that we associate with hard sciences like physics and
chemistry.

Regardless of their scientific limitations, theories of human psychology
figure prominently in the thinking of the public relations industry. What is
more important than their actual effectiveness is the seemingly
authoritative justification that they provide for the PR worldview--a belief
that people are fundamentally irrational and that therefore a class of
behind-the-scenes manipulators is necessary to shape opinion for the
public's own good. But this belief is at odds not only with the ideals of
democracy but also with the fundamental and necessary ideological
underpinnings of the scientific method itself. Before scientists can reach
any conclusions whatsoever about the elements in the periodic table or the
space-time continuum, they have to first believe that "the truth is out
there" and that their investigations will take them closer to it.

The public relations worldview, however, envisions truth as an infinitely
malleable, spinnable thing. For consultants like Clotaire Rapaille, the
truth is not a thing to be discovered but a thing to be created, through
artful word choices and careful arrangement of appearances.

"Given a choice, do you serve your client or the truth?" a reporter asked
John Scanlon, one of today's leading spinmeisters, during a 1991 interview.

"You always try--you always serve the truth," Scanlon replied. "But
again--but the truth is often, you know, is often not necessarily a solid.
It can be a liquid. . . . What seems to be true is not necessarily the case
when we look at it and we dissect it and take it apart, and we turn it
around and we look at it from a different perspective. . . . Whose truth are
we talking about, your truth or my truth?"

John Scanlon specializes in representing high-profile clients, especially
clients embroiled in controversy. In 1997, the trade publication Inside PR
ranked him as the number two expert in the world at "crisis management"--the
PR field that specializes in helping clients fend off scandals and repair
bad reputations. In 1999, for example, he represented famed fellatrix and
self-proclaimed liar Monica Lewinsky as she embarked on a media tour to
promote her book, Monica's Story. Lewinsky too, it seems, had a version of
the truth to tell, as did the president whose sexual relationship with her
depended on what your definition of "is" is.

Scanlon's other assignments have included PR for CBS when it was sued for
libel by Vietnam-era general William Westmoreland. Later, he squared off
against 60 Minutes when he went to work for the Brown & Williamson tobacco
company in its effort to discredit tobacco-industry whistleblower Jeffrey
Wigand, whose story was dramatized in the recent movie, The Insider.Scanlon
also represented Ivana Trump during her divorce from The Donald. "What we
did was quite scientific," he said. By "scientific," however, he meant
something quite different from what a particle physicist would mean. "I mean
we sat down with Mrs. Trump, with Ivana early on with her attorneys and
talked about what was the specific critical message that she wanted to
communicate. I mean, we had a very, very clear position." But having a
"very, very clear position" is an entirely different thing than seeking the
truth, which is what an actual scientist would be doing.

It would be nice to imagine that Scanlon's fluid attitude toward the truth
is some kind of aberration, but it is not. Richard Edelman, his one-time
boss at Edelman Worldwide, goes even further. Not only are there different
versions of the truth, "In this era of exploding media technologies,"
Edelman says, "there is no truth except the truth you create for yourself."

One of the rules of PR is that spin cannot be a demonstrable lie, a point
driven home in every PR textbook. "Never lie to a reporter" has become an
industry mantra. Fortunately, there is a loophole. Spin is the art of
appearances, not substance. When there is no truth except what you create
for yourself, lies become unnecessary, even irrelevant. To lie is to respect
reality enough to falsify it. The practitioners of public relations do not
falsify the truth, because they do not believe that it even exists.

Bambi Killers

The PR industry's preoccupation with imagery over substance was evident
again in its reaction to the May 1999 release of a Cornell University study
showing that pollen from Monsanto's genetically-engineered Bt corn could
drift onto milkweed plants and poison Monarch butterflies.

The Monarch is "sort of the Bambi of the insect world," according to Marlin
Rice, a professor of entomology at Iowa State University in Ames. "It's big
and gawdy and gets a lot of good press. And you've got school kids all
across the country raising them in jars." The Bt-Monarch controversy came on
the heels of other recent studies showing that Bt crops kill non-target
beneficial insects such as lacewings and ladybugs, kill beneficial soil
microorganisms, damage soil fertility, and may harm insect-eating birds.
However, it was the image problems associated with killing Bambi that sent
industry spokespersons scurrying to counter the damage. Discoveries like
this could end consumer complacency "in an instant," worried one source
quoted in PR Week, which described the Cornell study as "a wake-up call" for
industry.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of PR Week's response to the Monarch
butterfly study is the narrow range of options that it considered possible
for the public relations industry. "Are we only limited to a defensive role
in talking about GE foods?" it asked, answering that PR pros can also make a
positive case by arguing that biotechnology is "needed to adequately feed a
growing world population." The choice, in other words, was between playing
defense or offense for the biotech team.

"The law of unintended consequences means studies like the butterfly study
are likely to surface, focusing on something company researchers may never
have considered," PR Week admitted, but rather than take such "unintended
consequences" seriously, it advised public relations professionals to treat
them as "brush fires" to be "quickly dealt with."