ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, January 31, 1997 TAG: 9701310026
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SIDNEY ZION
NO MATTER how rotten the meat they sold in that Food Lion store in North Carolina, it couldn't stink half as much as the $5.5 million verdict the jury dropped on the American Broadcasting Cos. for exposing the swindle.
This was investigative reporting at its best and food marketing at its worst, and if this abomination stands up on appeal, it's Kaddish for the First Amendment. And maybe for the jury system too, which has made the British essayist G.K. Chesterton look bad since the killer of Rabbi Meir Kahane was acquitted of murder and O.J. Simpson hugged Johnnie Cochran.
Chesterton said: ``I'd rather be judged by 12 fools than one fool.'' I believed this all my adult life, both as a trial lawyer and a reporter. After the jury verdict in Food Lion vs. ABC, I'm not so sure. Although I must say that the judge wasn't exactly Brandeis, either, because he allowed an end run around the First Amendment.
In case you missed the story, a North Carolina jury hit ABC with punitive damages for committing ``fraud'' on the Food Lion chain by sending in reporters who filed false resumes to get jobs in the stores, and by using hidden cameras to prove that rotten meat was being sold.
The federal judge, Carlton Tilley, instructed the jury to accept the truth of the ABC allegations, which were shown on ``PrimeTime Live.'' If Food Lion had sued for libel, truth would be an absolute defense, and since the market chain didn't challenge the accuracy of the TV show, the case would have been history before it began; there'd have been no lawsuit.
But Food Lion's lawyers figured out a way around the libel laws and thus around the First Amendment. True or not, they said ABC had violated the common law, which disallows fraud and trespassing.
That's good lawyering but not good judging. By permitting this dodge around free speech, Judge Tilley allowed the jury to run rampant with its feelings against the media. Ben Hecht wrote, long before television had become the great media force: ``It will turn us into furniture.'' Now furniture has turned its guns on the TV set.
It's difficult to imagine a finer role for television reporting than what ``PrimeTime'' did in the Food Lion story. Every copy boy knows that pieces like this are icebergs. You can't exactly announce yourself and get the story.
In the New York Daily News last week, we ran a piece about an FBI sting that busted the Gambino crime family in Brooklyn.
The FBI sends in an agent who befriends a mafioso and sets up a social club that becomes a center for fencing stolen goods, complete with hidden cameras, leading to headline arrests.
How different is this from what ABC did? Only that it's the government rather than the press. And the government has no First Amendment, just a warrant from a judge. When did that become more important than the Bill of Rights?
But the First Amendment lies dead here at the hands of judge and jury in Food Lion vs. ABC.
And the ghosts of great reporters past turn like a reverse macarena. Nellie Bly, who exposed the snake pits of psychiatric clinics. Upton Sinclair, who went into the Chicago meat factories in order to ``reach the heart of America'' and instead ``reached their stomachs.'' Sinclair was responsible for the Pure Food and Drug Act.
Geraldo Rivera at Willowbrook changed the world for the mentally retarded. Pierre Salinger as a young reporter in San Francisco went into the prisons as a con and showed us what madness happened ``inside.''
Now this judge and jury in North Carolina say nothing could be finer than to stop it all.
Sidney Zion is a columnist for the New York Daily News.
- Knight-Ridder/Tribune
LENGTH: Medium: 72 linesby CNB