Food Lion, ABC and Tricks of the Trade

Is it possible, just possible, that ABC was not alone in using stealth and deception in the Food Lion Inc. case?

For some time, faxes addressed to me have been arriving from an outfit named Media Hotline. Heard of it? Me neither. I assumed it to be a kind of independent media monitor, a lesser-known version of Accuracy in Media (from the right) or Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (from the left).

Written in terse news style, seven of these faxes are in front of me right now. Sent over a two-week period, they give background and describe testimony in the just-ended trial of Food Lion’s suit against ABC over a devastating 1992 “PrimeTime Live” expose, which accused the supermarket chain of selling unknowing consumers spoiled meat, old chicken and fish doused in bleach to kill their bad smell, and cheese that had been sampled by rats.

Although Food Lion publicly rejected the charges, its suit did not challenge the veracity of the “PrimeTime” report, but instead attacked only the newsmagazine’s undercover methods.

It turns out that “PrimeTime” used deception to gain access to Food Lion and gather evidence of alleged wrongdoing. Two of its producers got jobs as food handlers for Food Lion and worked there wearing tiny hidden cameras and microphones. Moreover, they were hired after presenting phony job histories and references, an act of sneakiness that a Greensboro, N.C., jury deemed intolerable and illegal.

The jury found that “PrimeTime” and ABC committed fraud, trespassing and breach of loyalty, and on Wednesday ordered the network to pay Food Lion $5.5 million in punitive damages. ABC is appealing.

Food Lion this week released a tape of “PrimeTime” outtakes that it claimed showed the program falsifying some of its alleged evidence against the food chain. But the tape, as shown on the Fox News Channel, was blurry and inconclusive.

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Now, before returning to our suspenseful mystery about the curious faxes, this commercial on behalf of deception and hidden cameras as legitimate tools of news gathering:

Thank goodness for them. Thank goodness also for journalists who realize that they should be used judiciously and deployed only in the gathering of stories that are truly epic and broadly affect the public well-being, and then only as a final resort.

Unfortunately, the latter is too rarely the case. Because snooping for its own sake is entertaining (witness the durability of the “Candid Camera” format and various blooper shows, for example), there has been far too much gratuitous eavesdropping by news cameras.

“PrimeTime Live,” on the other hand, has a long, honorable tradition of using hidden cameras to uncover abuses ranging from illegal actions in day-care facilities and board-and-care homes to racial discrimination by landlords and real estate agents.

Yet television is so laden with news media and their look-alikes that the sheer weight of them is disorienting and the lines of separation are blurry at times, even to the most sophisticated viewers. Thus, there is a tendency to see media as having one face--a single, grotesque gargoyle representing at once the best work of “PrimeTime,” for example, and the low-brow newscasts and TV tabloids that traditionally use lying and hidden technology for the purpose of titillation.

I recall an instance, not long ago, of a woman being unknowingly televised at her door by a tabloid show, not because the footage was illuminating but merely because she had turned down a request for an interview on camera and the secret lens made the story seem more dramatic. In this case, the deception was inexcusable, the kind of tawdry performance that unfairly taints all media.

ABC News has done a fair and balanced job of reporting the outcome of the Food Lion case. That includes Thursday’s discussion on “Good Morning America” in which jury foreman Gregory Mack said that the verdict hinged not on wee hidden cameras and microphones but on the show’s falsifying of resumes and references to get its producers inside Food Lion. He said the jury understood the importance of investigative reporting to the nation’s welfare. “But we can’t let them [the media] get to a point where they feel they can go above the law,” he said.

Amen. Contrary to the way some of them behave, media possess no divine authority that elevates them above the rest of society.

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Yet this can be a very gray area, for one can envision rare scenarios--and the Food Lion case appears to be one of them--where an end justifies extreme means. In this case, one could argue that the alleged selling of dangerously tainted food was so essential for the public to know about that “PrimeTime’s” fibbing to Food Lion to gain access was warranted. And that without such lying to get the story, it would have faltered.

One can’t help believing, also, that some jurors were as ticked off at the hidden cameras as the phony resumes, and that on some level of awareness they equated such legitimate news snooping with media irresponsibly invading the privacy of innocent victims, such as Richard Jewell.

So, in this case, “PrimeTime” may be taking the fall for other media sins, and if the Food Lion case does, indeed, chill future investigations by responsible reporters, then the nation will suffer for it.

End of commercial.

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Wednesday was also the day I decided to look more closely at those faxes from Media Hotline. Although using information from an unknown source is a no-no in journalism, propagandists know that some of us get lazy from time to time. Yet not intending to immediately write about the Food Lion case, I’d merely glanced at the faxes briefly and put them aside.

Only after carefully checking them this week did I discover that they were tilted very subtlety toward the Food Lion position against ABC and “PrimeTime.” Yet the material gave no indication of just who or what Media Hotline was.

A phone number was listed on the faxes, and I called it.

“Media Hotline,” answered a female voice. “What is Media Hotline?” I asked. “Who are you?” the voice asked, suspiciously. “I’m with the Los Angeles Times,” I said. “So who are you?”

The voice paused, then replied, “We’re Food Lion.”

Food Lion! Et tu? So it also went undercover--trespassing on my turf with a hidden message, in effect, instead of a hidden camera.

I did find an eighth fax in the pile, this one offering a seemingly balanced list of news sources in the Food Lion case. And instead of being from Media Hotline, it identified Food Lion as the sender. But the others? Blotto. Zip.

America has come to expect trickiness from much of the media. Everyone knows we’re scum, capable of anything. But this is really disillusioning. What’s the planet coming to when a supermarket chain, with 1,100 stores that feed the multitudes, stoops so low as to use deception to gain access to a member of the media without revealing itself as the source? And presumably, I was hardly the only journalist to receive these faxes from afar, so there’s no telling if any of the material found its way into other publications or newscasts.

When asked by a TV interviewer about the “PrimeTime” report Wednesday, retiring Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), who regularly savages the press, snarled: “This isn’t journalism. It’s intrusive crap!” Exactly my sentiments about the faxes.

Food Lion needn’t worry, though. Not being litigious, I won’t sue.