Case Study: Going Undercover at Food Lion

Case Study: Going Undercover at Food Lion

In 1992, ABC’s “PrimeTime Live” investigated allegations that the Food Lion grocery chain was selling spoiled meat. ABC reporters first interviewed employees and former employees of the chain who spoke in detail about the allegations. Next, ABC journalists submitted employment applications in which they lied about their job history. Hired by Food Lion, they used hidden cameras and microphones to document what they said were unsanitary and deceptive practices in the meat departments. ABC showed the edited tape in a documentary during sweeps week six months later.

Food Lion sued – not for libel, but for fraud and trespass – even though the chain maintained that the tapes were deceptively edited. When the case went to trial in North Carolina four years later, the judge told the jury to assume that ABC’s allegations were true. The jury awarded Food Lion $5.5 million for fraud and trespass. American Journalism Review said in a 1997 article about the case: “The jury wanted to send a message to journalists: ABC had crossed the line, and not simply because it used hidden cameras.” The article quoted jury foreman Gregory Mack: “You didn’t have boundaries when you started this investigation. … You kept pushing on the edges and pushing on the edges. … It was too extensive and fraudulent.”

On appeal, the judgment against ABC was first reduced and then thrown out altogether.

ABC News chairman Roone Arledge wrote an op-ed article in the New York Times defending the network’s use of deception in the Food Lion case. He said the network was “following a great tradition of American journalism.” Not a single institution investigated by ABC, he wrote, “would have volunteered to tell all if a reporter had shown up with a camera.”

Questions for class discussion:

· If you were in charge of ABC News, would you have permitted your journalists to falsify employment applications and use hidden cameras and microphones to investigate Food Lion? Use the three-step test.

· How was ABC’s defense affected by the fact that the network waited six months to show the documentary?

· If you would have rejected the deception, would you have accepted it if ABC could get the same videotape without lying on employment applications?

Also read the summary of the case by Professor Louis W. Hodges.

Food Lion and ABC

Louis W. Hodges
Washington and Lee University

Knight Professor, Emeritus

Producers at ABC News received a number of allegations, including signed affidavits, that the Food Lion supermarket chain was engaging in questionable, possibly dangerous, food-handling practices and in unfair labor practices in some of its stores. The sources of the allegations were current and former Food Lion employees, and the documents were given to ABC by the Government Accountability Project, a consumer watchdog group in Chicago.

ABC executives determined that the allegations, if true, were serious and should be investigated. In order to do so, two PrimeTime Live field producers obtained unskilled, entry-level jobs in Food Lion stores, one in a deli in South Carolina and one in meat departments in North Carolina, where Food Lion’s corporate offices are located. Their job applications were completely fictitious about their true identity and past work experience.

The two producers worked at Food Lion, in three stores, for a total of approximately 14 days. Both were equipped with cameras, concealed under wigs, with which they surreptitiously recorded about fifty hours of tape. They “saw, and captured on tape, scene after scene of Food Lion employees re-wrapping, re-labeling, and putting back out for sale meat and fish that had passed their sell-by dates.” A worker complained, for example, that old chicken had been put in a marinade that had not been changed for days. A market manager and two meat cutters explained that they do not always disassemble the meat saw for required cleaning, because it takes too much time or is too hard on the saw. Cameras caught a worker putting old ground meat back into the grinder with fresh meat. (Jeffress, Washington Times Magazine, June 1997)

In addition to the secret taping, ABC personnel interviewed dozens of current and former Food Lion employees on camera and on-the-record. They told, among other things, of Food Lion supervisors retrieving discarded meat from garbage dumpsters and putting it back out for sale. They told of instances in which they were ordered to trim and repackage cheese that had been gnawed by rodents. They told of rinsing old fish in Clorox bleach to remove the “slime” and bad odor.

On November 5, 1992, PrimeTime Live broadcast a report on Food Lion using several minutes of video tape made without the knowledge of the people being taped. Some analysts have argued that the report could have been done effectively without deception and surreptitious dealings. Others argue that SOME report could have been done without deception, but it would have been ineffective.

Was this elaborate deception, including lying, morally justified under these circumstances? If so, why? If not, why not?