TAMPA—Two award-winning investigative reporters at the Fox-owned television station in Tampa are blowing the whistle on a story they say WTVT (Ch 13) and its corporate bosses preferred to coverup rather than broadcast honestly and accurately.

The story, documented in a lawsuit the reporters filed Thursday, reveals the widespread use of a controversial bovine growth hormone Florida dairymen have been secretly injecting into their cows.

The suit and information about use of the hormone in dairy cattle are presented in full detail at a special Internet web site. The site can be viewed at http://www.foxBGHsuit.com.

Parsons Takes Shot at Fox

Time Warner Inc. chairman Dick Parsons Friday described Fox News Channel as "crazy people exchanging views," telling a group of minority journalists in Washington he felt that the channel and his own Cable News Network are two different services.

When asked by Univision Anchor Jorge Ramos why CNN was losing the ratings battle with Fox, he was not ready to concede that. He said that Fox was more like talk radio on TV, which meant that its viewers stayed longer because people tended to "come and sit down for an hour or two and listen to crazy people exchange views." CNN actually draws more viewers, he said, but said they were grazers who didn't stay long.

Parsons said he did not feel CNN was liberal, but instead has a bias for the truth. He conceded that journalists are often perceived as liberal because they tend to challenge the establishment. He did not make an overt comparison with Fox, but he did say that his news operation "does not give a corporate slant to its journalism. We don't tell them how to report."

By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 8/6/2004

Matt Wells, media correspondent
Tuesday June 15, 2004
The Guardian

Fox News, the US news network owned by Rupert Murdoch, has been found in breach of British broadcasting rules for an on-air tirade that accused the BBC of "frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Americanism".

Television regulators said the broadcaster failed to show "respect for truth" in a strongly worded opinion item, broadcast on the day the Hutton report was published, which also accused BBC executives of giving reporters a "right to lie".

The Fox presenter, John Gibson, said in a segment entitled My Word that the BBC had "a frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Americanism that was obsessive, irrational and dishonest"; that the BBC "felt entitled to lie and, when caught lying, felt entitled to defend its lying reporters and executives"; that the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan, in Baghdad during the US invasion, had "insisted on air that the Iraqi army was heroically repulsing an incompetent American military"; and that "the BBC, far from blaming itself, insisted its reporter had a right to lie - exaggerate - because, well, the BBC knew that the war was wrong, and anything they could say to underscore that point had to be right".

Ofcom said Fox had breached the programme code in three areas: failing to honour the "respect for truth" rule; failing to give the BBC an opportunity to respond; and failing to apply the rule that says, in a personal view section, "opinions expressed must not rest upon false evidence".

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