Food Lion case
http://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/joseph-c-goulden/ mostly book rev (spy?)
wiki punked
Goulden, Joseph C. (1997). "ABC's Food Lion Lies: A Study in TV Deception". aim.org. Accuracy in Media. Archived from the original on October 17, 2008. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
Goulden, Joseph C. (1997). "ABC's Food Lion Lies: A Study in TV Deception". aim.org. Accuracy in Media. Archived from the originalon October 17, 2008. Retrieved 11 July 2016.
later:
Food Lion verdict reversal has lessons for both sides
Commentary
Senior vice president, the Freedom Forum
Executive director, First Amendment Center
11.15.99
When ajury awarded $5.5 million to Food Lion in a lawsuit filed against ABC News, it changed the rules of American newsgathering.
That 1997 federal court jury award was subsequentlyreduced by a judge to $315,000, but the message was clear: A jury was ready to severely punish illegal or unethical newsgathering even if the reporting was in the public interest.
Now a new decision from the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has reduced the award once again, giving Food Lion just $2 in damages, but reasserting that the nation's news media are not above the law.
The case stems from a 1992 "Prime Time Live" report that some Food Lion stores engaged in highly questionable food handling practices, including therepackaging and sale of spoiled meat. Documentation for the report was obtained by two ABC reporters who applied for jobs with Food Lion and taped the company's employees with hidden video cameras.
Food Lion chose not to challenge the truthfulness of the reporting. In order to prevail, it would have had to prove the reporting was false or that ABC acted in reckless disregard of the facts, a difficult burden.
Instead, Food Lion attacked the gathering of the news, charging that by lying on their applications and proving fake references, the ABC reporters engaged in fraud and trespass. The original jury verdict shocked many in the news media because it punished the process of reporting rather than the report itself. Food Lion had found a way to bypass the press' constitutional protection, winning a verdict without challenging the facts of the case.
That suggested to many editors and news executives that undercover reporting could no longer be a part of their newsgathering arsenal. Although not a common practice, there's a long history of courageous and public-spirited reporting in which reporters misrepresented their identities. Bending the rules was justified by the overall benefit to the public.
As a brief filed by news organizations in the appeal of the case noted, "The jury's verdict in this case casts a long bone-chilling shadow over the future of undercover reporting, which has played an integral role in the history of American journalism."
That "bone-chilling shadow" has been tempered considerably by the new decision by The Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The appellate court certainly didn't exonerate ABC News. The court's decision points out that thepress has to obey the same laws as the rest of society, absent some showing of a substantial impact on the First Amendment right to gather news.
The court found that the reporters were indeed guilty of trespass and of violating a breach of loyalty as Food Lion employees."We are convinced that the media can do (their) important job effectively without resort to the commission of run-of-the-mill torts," the court wrote.
But there's a world of difference in damages recoverable for "run-of-the-mill torts" and damage to reputation. Food Lion had sought to recover millions of dollars for damages to its business without proving the falsity of the news report that harmed its image.
The court refused to accept that approach, noting that "such an end-run around First Amendment strictures is foreclosed."
The decision — which may be appealed by Food Lion — holds lessons for both the press and potential plaintiffs.
For the news media, there's a reminder that the First Amendment doesn't give reporters a license to break the law. Juries — drawn from a general public that doesn't hold the news media in high regard anyway — can and will punish illegal conduct.
For companies like Food Lion, there's a different lesson. If you're the subject of an unflattering investigative piece, you may well want to protect your reputation in court, demonstrating that the reporting was false.
But if there's some merit to the reporting, you may find a public apology and renewed commitment to quality control a better strategy than an "end run" around the First Amendment. For its substantial investment in litigation, Food Lion walked away with $2 and years of news coverage linking the supermarket chain to tainted meat. Payback may not be worth the price.
http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=6635
wowmedia res ctr: shepard bros, bozell
February 1997 http://archive.mrc.org/medianomics/1997/mn19970201c.asp |
:{Issue Review: Food Lion vs. Prime Time Live
Muckraking -- or Muckfaking?}:
A North Carolina jury set off a media firestorm last month when it fined ABC News $5.5 million in punitive damages for its news gathering techniques in a 1992 under- cover Prime Time Live story about Food Lion. The case brought out into the open a long-simmering debate about the propriety of using hidden cameras and deception to get stories.
But this was only one aspect of the Food Lion/ABC News case. There were also serious questions about whether or not ABC News producers, working undercover at Food Lion grocery stores, had misused hidden cameras to create a sensational story rather than simply reporting the facts. In their frenzy to defend the use of hidden cameras, reporters didn't seem to care about these alleged inaccuracies. Reporters simply ignored them.
After the jury verdict, most in the media were quick to defend ABC. But they only wanted to talk about the issue of hidden cameras, not the accuracy of the report. CBS's Dan Rathersaid it was "important to note that the truth of the report was never at issue in the lawsuit, not even challenged, only the journalistic techniques."Newsweek's Jonathan Alter insisted that "this is an alarming case because what it suggests is that you can do a report that issubstantially accurate and still be penalized for it." The lesson NBC Nightly News Anchor Tom Brokaw drew from the whole affair was that reporters "have to work a little harder at getting the public to understand just what we do and why we do it."
Alter's Newsweek colleague, Evan Thomas, asserted: "It was pretty scary for the press because the story was basically right." National Public Radio's Nina Totenberg said hidden cameras were "a time-honored way of getting a story you can't get otherwise." And Time Managing Editor Walter Isaacson claimed that it was "a very valuable, important story that ABC did and the truth of the story was never contended in court."
These reporters were merely repeating what ABC News President Roone Arledge had established as the journalistic party line: "From the beginning, Food Lion has never been able to attack the story itself. They have gone about attacking us because of the way we gathered it."
But was the story really entirely accurate? Despite the claims of the press, Food Lion did -- vehemently -- challenge the accuracy of the story, just not in court because, they said, proving libel is almost impossible.After viewing ABC's 45 hours of outtakes for the story, the grocery chain put together a video which showed some practices they don't teach in journalism school. It shows an ABC producer working in the meat department and speculating that the "sell-by" date on some chicken had expired, then putting the chicken on sale anyway and telling a cameraman to film it. The outtakes also showed a producer, after filming a dirty meat slicer, muttering obscenities when a Food Lion employee cleaned up the slicer.[note no evidence]
ABC's editing techniques were also called into question. While ABC aired video of a Food Lion employee complaining she had cooked chicken she thought might be spoiled, for instance, Food Lion's tape showed that in therest of the conversation the employee said a manager had told her to throw the chicken out.This last part didn't make it into the Prime Time Live segment. ABC also aired footage of an employee working quickly and saying that he runs out of time each day. But the outtakes show that when the producer then asks whether "they" give him enough time to do his work, he replies, "Oh, yeah. We get enough time." Again, only the first part, without the employee's clarification, made it into the segment. And the outtakes show that ABC edited some footage to make an employee's horse play look like an example of unsafe working conditions.
These are serious charges. When ABC decided to devote both its February 12 Prime Time Live show and a special 90-minuteViewpoint show to the Food Lion case, many observers expected the network to answer these objections, point by point. They were disappointed. The entire Prime Time Live show -- with the exception of a brief response from Food Lion -- was about whether journalists should be able to use deception to get a story and whether hidden cameras themselves are ethical. ABC's Ted Koppel, host of the Viewpoint special, did his best to keep that show focused on the same issues. In two and a half hours of airtime devoted to the case, ABC never answered or even discussed Food Lion's criticisms specifically.
ABC didn't want anybody else talking about its accuracy, either. When theFox News Channel aired Food Lion's video of ABC's original footage, the network was furious. ABC Television President David Westin said, "I find it outrageously unfair that a news organization would proceed that way. The tape that Food Lion presented is a gross distortion of what actually occurred." Asked about the incident on CNN, Sam Donaldson told Larry King: "I think [Fox] was irresponsible." But at no point did ABC actually bother to discuss any of these alleged "gross distortions" in the Food Lion tape.
Others of have been more discerning. "These hidden camera investigations are costly, and it's hard for producers to go back to the office and say the sorts of things newspaper reporters tell their editors all the time: `the story didn't really pan out,'" argued William Powers, Senior Editor of the New Republic. "Unlike newspapers, the networks don't have subscribers who will be back for the next edition no matter what, and they can't bury a less than fab story on page B-19. They have to draw in a large audience for every show, or risk losing ratings and advertisers. And they do so by painting broad, sensational strokes," Powers asserted.
There's also another issue that neither ABC, nor its journalistic defenders addressed. If ABC thought they were truly exposing a health hazard, why did it wait six months, until a "sweeps" period, to air the Food Lion segment? Was ABC putting profits ahead of public safety, as it accused Food Lion of doing? This issue wasn't mentioned until near the end of the Viewpoint segment -- by Food Lion's Chris Ahearn -- and no one at ABC answered the criticism. None of ABC's defenders within journalism addressed the topic, either.
The ABC vs. Food Lion case has implications for the First Amendment, and it's legitimate for reporters to discuss and defend the use of hidden cameras. But this wasn't the only issue. The case also raises fundamental questions about the accuracy of television magazine reporting, questions which ABC News and much of the rest of the media have chosen to supress.
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The landmark Food Lion case | Reporters Committee for Freedom of ...
https://www.rcfp.org/browse-media-law-resources/.../landmark-food-lion-case
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Food Lion fraud award against ABC thrown out | Reporters Committee ...
https://www.rcfp.org/browse-media-law...law/.../food-lion-fraud-award-against
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Food Lion | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_Lion
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History · Former Banners · Store brand · Slogans
YIKES, DIANE SAWYER'S DOWNSTAIRS! WHEN ABC'S PRIMETIME ...
archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1996/12/23/.../index.htm
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The Food Lion Case: Are Journalists Above the Law? | Cato Institute
https://www.cato.org/publications/.../food-lion-case-are-journalists-above-law
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Revisiting the Food Lion Case | The New York Times
www.nytimes.com/1997/02/17/opinion/revisiting-the-food-lion-case.html
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Food Lyin'? | PBS NewsHour
www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business-jan-june97-lion_1-15/
2.
===https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_Lion
Primetime Live controversy
In the 1990s, Food Lion gained a degree of notoriety when it was the subject of an ABC News investigation. ABC had received a tip about unsanitary practices at Food Lion. Two ABC reporters had posed as Food Lion employees, and witnessed the unsanitary practices at Food Lion. Much of what they had seen was videotaped with cameras hidden in wigs that they were wearing. The footage was then featured in a segment on the news magazine Primetime Live, in which Food Lion employees described unsanitary practices, which included bleaching discolored, expired pork with Clorox and repackaging expired meats with new expiration dates, and the use of nail polish remover to remove the expiration dates from dairy item packages.
The company responded by suing ABC for fraud, claiming that the ABC employees misrepresented themselves; for trespassing, because the ABC employees came on to Food Lion property without permission; and for breach of duty of loyalty, the ABC employees videotaped nonpublic areas of the store and revealed internal company information. During the court battles between Food Lion and ABC, over 40 hours of unused footage were released that helped Food Lion's case. In the unused footage, two undercover producers are seen trying to encourage violations of company policy; however, employees resisted and correctly followed sanitary practices.[34]
Food Lion was awarded US$5.5 million by a jury in 1997. The award was later reduced by a judge to $316,000. The verdict was then largely overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Virginia. According to the court: even though ABC was wrong to do what they had done, Food Lion was not suing for defamation, but rather for tort as a way to get around the strict First Amendment standards for defamation. Food Lion did this because at the time of the lawsuit they were unable to prove that ABC acted with malice--- which would be required to prove defamation.[35] However, the appellate court upheld the finding that the producers involved breached their duty of loyalty as employees to Food Lion, and had trespassed, including a nominal $2 fine.[36]
Fall 1999 issue of *The News Media & The Law*, page 3.
The News Media and The Law, Fall 1999