AS IS ALWAYS THE CASE following a jury verdict against a news organization, media critics have rushed to explain what precisely it meant last month when 12 women and men in Greensboro, N.C., ordered ABC to pay $ 5.5 million to Food Lion. Obviously the jury meant to punish ABC’s Primetime Live for being deliberately dishonest when its reporters went undercover on a story accusing the supermarket chain of deliberately selling rotten meat.

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?