YAKIMA CBS Inc. and three of its Washington state affiliates have asked that a lawsuit filed by apple growers because of the Alar scare be moved from state to federal court.
Lawyers for the network and its affiliates said the issue involved freedom of speech and should be heard in federal court.
''As the state court action arises from CBS' broadcast of a '60 Minutes' segment about a newsworthy issue and thereby implicates serious First Amendment concerns, this court should be particularly sensitive to the jurisdictional issues raised by this notice of removal,'' the motion said, and the lawsuit ''threatens to chill First Amendment rights.''
Such removal motions are common when out-of-state defendants want to take a case away from the area where the alleged problem occurred.
The motion to remove was filed Dec. 27 at federal court at Spokane. It will be decided by U.S. District Judge Robert McNichols of Spokane, said plaintiffs' lawyer Cameron DeVore. A federal judge at Yakima asked to be removed from the case.
The class action lawsuit was filed Nov. 28 in Yakima County Superior Court in the heart of the nation's apple-growing region. Growers here contend they were economically harmed by the Alar scare.
The lawsuit was filed by 11 growers who seek unspecified millions of dollars from the television companies and the Natural Resources Defense Council, which issued the Alar report.
The lawsuit contends unfair business practices, especially product disparagement, caused reduced revenues for apple growers.
The suit seeks to represent the approximately 4,700 growers of red apples in Washington. The industry has estimated losses from the Alar scare at more than $100 million.
The NRDC is a non-profit consumer group based at New York City.
The ''60 Minutes'' report by Ed Bradley was broadcast on Feb. 26, 1989, and was an exclusive release of the NRDC report called ''Intolerable Risk: Pesticides In Our Children's Food.''
The NRDC report concluded that Alar, which was sprayed on trees to improve the appearance and shelf life of apples, increased the cancer risk in children.
The report was hotly disputed. But Alar, the marketing name for the chemical daminozide, was voluntarily removed from the market by Uniroyal Chemical Co. last October. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency later banned it altogether.
Other defendants in the suit are the Columbia Broadcasting System; Fenton Communications Inc., a Washington, D.C., public relations firm that assisted the NRDC; and CBS affiliate television stations KIRO of Seattle, KREM of Spokane and KIMA of Yakima.
