WHAT ABC THINKS OF YOU

But the critics want to look deeper than that. What, they wonder out loud, does it mean for journalism that the jury sided with a big corporation that acts only in the interests of its bottom line? How could the jurors have seen fit to punish the reporters, who (whatever excessive zeal they may have brought to the story) were only acting in the public interest? And what does all this mean for the future of the First Amendment?

It always comes back to the First Amendment — even when, as in this case, Food Lion did not sue on grounds of libel (though it insists the story was untrue) but over acts of fraud, trespass, and breach of loyalty. (ABC reporters falsified employment applications and did not properly do the jobs Food Lion had hired them to do.) No matter; the press is always sure that a public rebuke has constitutional implications. How could it not? After all, the case involves the media, and the media are afforded protection by the First Amendment. This explains why, no matter the reason for a court ruling against the press, somebody is bound to worry publicly about a “chilling effect” on the profession (this go-round it was Time’s Walter Isaacson).

Shining unmistakably through various invocations of the public trust and the common weal (Newsweek‘s Jonathan Alter called the decision “scary” for “anyone who ever shops in a supermarket”) is a media obsession with the profession’s status and the way the public sees it. Media people spend an inordinate amount of emotional energy trying to decipher what the public really thinks of the press. At bottom, they are trying to answer what might be called the Kindergarten Question: Do the other boys and girls like me?

There is a time-honored response to the Kindergarten Question: You should spend less time worrying about what others think of you and more time worrying about how you treat others. This is not only good advice in kindergarten, but it affords us a way of looking at ABC’s Food Lion story that reveals exactly why, and in what way, the story was irresponsible.

For what really matters is not what the people Out There west of the Hudson and beyond the Beltway think of the media. What is at issue in the Food Lion case is what the media think of the people Out There. And what do the media think? They think the people Out There are either victims or weaklings or villains.

Let’s put in the plainest possible terms the story that ABC says it went after, the story Primetime Live’s producers hoped to document by going undercover at three supermarkets in North and South Carolina with hidden cameras back in 1992. Primetime Live‘s producers believed that people in rural and suburban America who worked for one of the country’s largest supermarket chains were willing to risk poisoning their customers. They believed that people who worked in these stores — managers, supervisors, and line workers — were willing to countenance this risk, even though the customers at risk were their townsmen, their friends, even their family members. They believed these people managed somehow to fall asleep at night fully aware that deliberate inattention or even active measures (like bleaching old fish) might one day cause the illness or death of someone they knew.

Now, why would someone behave this way? Well, Out There in North Carolina, a job’s a job. If you’re just a worker, you gotta do what you gotta do. And if you’re a manager, there are revenues to think about, and expenses — in other words, you also gotta do what you gotta do, especially when you’re ambitious and your company competes by keeping prices low.

Nor is this all that these media professionals thought of the people Out There. It would seem that, despite a veritable army of food inspectors and public health officials at the federal, state, and local levels, genuine public servants who day in, day out, look for things like rodent infestation and spoiled meat (even in the delis of Manhattan where media professionals send out for lunch) — all that really stands between the people and food poisoning at the hands of their local supermarket are the selfless efforts of public-spirited investigative journalists. Does this sound like an overstatement? It certainly is one — unless, that is, you work for Primetime Live or ABC News, whose stars and chiefs contend that by broadcasting the Food Lion story they were performing an important public service that somehow eluded the people who earn their living trying to make sure that supermarkets aren’t acting in ways that poison consumers. So not only are the Food Lion employees Out There putting the lives of others at risk, so are the publichealth officials and meat inspectors Out There, who just can’t be trusted to do their jobs without Diane Sawyer looking over their shoulders, keeping them honest, and saving the lives of some cracker bargain shoppers who wouldn’t know good meat from bad until they were dying from it.

It’s always possible, of course, that deep down these media professionals think better of their fellow Americans than it seems they do. The Food Lion investigation was questionable from the outset — an obvious put-up job by sources with an ax to grind and pitched to producers who couldn’t smell a rotten story, much less rotten meat.

It’s also possible that what these producers could smell was a ratings opportunity. They could sense a really effective 15-second spot about an investigation into rotten food at a well-known supermarket chain that might draw new viewers to the ratings-impaired Primetime Live, still a very shaky show back in 1993. What is more than possible — what is true — is that their motives were far lower than they would like to believe.

by Richard Starr; Richard Starr is a managing editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD