ABC Pokes Its Head in Mouth of Lion Jury

The critic speaketh.

No, not yours truly, but Alan K. Simpson, the press-bashing Wyoming Republican who retired this year from the U.S. Senate. “That’s censorship!” he proclaimed Wednesday night about the ABC News program “PrimeTime Live” having boiled down 45 hours of hidden camera footage to a string of clips for its controversial 1992 segment charging the Food Lion Inc. supermarket chain with perilously unsanitary practices.

Actually, it’s editing, not “censorship,” a distinction seemingly lost on Simpson, whose infantile, sweeping generalizations about reporting excesses--made in this instance on an ABC News “Viewpoint” program hosted by Ted Koppel--are way over the top even for many who regularly find fault with the media.

Does he really think that “PrimeTime Live” should have--or could have--aired its entire 45 hours of tape? Or that any newscast or print publication has room to or should present every shard of information it gathers on every story?

Amazingly, he sounded as if that was exactly what he meant.

Editorial judgment--deciding what a story includes and doesn’t include--is subjective, no question about it. Although professionalism should prevail, one’s biases are part of the process. Yet what’s the alternative?

Simpson was outraged that the media themselves determine the content of stories. Again, what’s the alternative--to hold a public referendum on every story? If the media are not to be the gatekeepers of their material, who then? Embittered ex-politicians like Simpson, whose theories about media reform are so loopy they can’t be taken seriously?

The 90-minute “Viewpoint” program was billed as a forum on such investigative reporting tactics as hidden cameras and microphones, but inevitably narrowed to a debate about the Food Lion case, in which a North Carolina jury recently ordered ABC to pay the chain $5.5 million in punitive damages. The award came after the jury ruled that two “PrimeTime” undercover producers violated the law by using phony resumes to acquire jobs at Food Lion, where they fraudulently worked on behalf of ABC with their spy equipment instead of for their new employers. ABC is planning to appeal the verdict.

Although Food Lion has denied the “PrimeTime” segment’s charges, it did not challenge its authenticity in court, and the disputed program was not shown to the jury.

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The case that Food Lion argued in court was only about breaking the law, not about hidden cameras, a subject that divides even the journalistic community. Here’s one opinion: Hidden cameras and other deceptive practices should be a no-no for journalists except in very exceptional cases when the end does justify the means. And let’s be clear here, those cases do come up from time to time.

Should journalists ever break a law for a story? That’s something that can be assessed only on a case-by-case basis. But once again, one can imagine such an extreme scenario, although very rare.

Earlier Wednesday night, “PrimeTime Live” devoted itself entirely to a rehash of the Food Lion case in a special program that included host Diane Sawyer interviewing the eight jurors. That came after she and co-host Sam Donaldson had run through a litany of other “PrimeTime” investigations that used hidden cameras (“Should we have used hidden cameras to track crooked car repairman? What if the mentally ill were being neglected or children were being abused?”) for two tough media critics--and viewers--in an hour that, more often than not, appeared very self-serving.

Not that ABC has cornered the market on vested interests. Food Lion has distributed to the media its own 15-minute tape on the case that includes “PrimeTime” outtakes that the firm charges prove the show’s reporting was dishonest. Not quite, for the tape was edited by Food Lion.

Or as former Sen. Simpson would prefer, it was censored.

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HISTORY LESSON. O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson are not the only blacks whose names are being trumpeted on television these days. It just seems that way.

First, Simpson. Although many African Americans see him as a murderer, many more, it appears, see him as a martyr whose recent defeat in a Santa Monica courtroom is a metaphor for racism in the United States, this story about a grisly double homicide getting reinvented in some circles as a story about bigotry.

Thus, how ironic that the second set of Simpson verdicts--evoking a response largely along racial lines--should collide with Black History Month, among other things an annual repository (or ghetto, if you wish) for television programs that chart and celebrate positive achievements by blacks.

Whether innocent or guilty of murder, Simpson’s record as a wealthy former football star and second-rate actor hardly earns him status among such achievers of true distinction as the great African American leader and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, for example, or Nelson Mandela, the first black president of South Africa.

Because of withering media attention given his case, however, Simpson is getting lumped with them on TV this month, thereby eclipsing blacks of epic contributions whose heroism and legacies are not in dispute.

As for Jackson, word that he had or was about to become a father had local newscasts all abuzz this week (“This just in to ‘Eyewitness News’!”) and TV hordes speeding to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to get in place for their live exclusives and in-depth team coverage. Always on top of cosmic stories, KNBC-TV Channel 4 even reported that it had spoken on the phone to the mother, Jackson’s wife--although it was unclear she was who she said she was. Well, she was somebody’s wife, anyway.

Yes, nothing inspires a first-rate journalist more than a good old-fashioned baby watch. So roll out those Michael crotch clips. The way camera crews staked out the hospital, you would have thought that Jackson himself was giving birth.