In 1992, two ABC News producers falsified their résumés and references and applied for jobs at two Food Lion supermarkets—one in North Carolina, the other in South Carolina. Hiding cameras in their wigs, they filmed a wide range of health violations carried out in the supermarket’s meat department. Six months later, a segment aired on PrimeTime Live, anchored by Diane Sawyer, showing Food Lion employees washing old meat and fish in bleach to get rid of the smell, disguising expired chicken in barbeque sauce and rewrapping it, and selling cheese that had been gnawed by rats. These tainted products were then placed on store shelves, often at a reduced price. The segment also included interviews with former store employees who confirmed the unsanitary practices.

Food Lion’s bottom line took a hit and the company sued ABC News in North Carolina court three years later. Despite claims that the story had been false, the company did not sue for libel. Instead, it alleged fraud, breach of the duty of loyalty, trespass, and unfair trade practices under North Carolina law. In essence, Food Lion hoped to prove that the information in ABC’s report was misbegotten because producers had lied on their job applications. Therefore they should not have gained access to the inner workings of the grocery stores in the first place.

The judge instructed the jury to behave as if the information in the report was accurate Nonetheless the following year, in 1997, the jury found ABC News guilty of fraud, trespass and disloyalty. In addition the jurors assessed $5.5 million in punitive damages for the fraud charge, $1,400 in compensatory damages, and a $2 slap on the wrist for breach of loyalty and trespass.

The high price tag attached to the fraud charge generated a firestorm of coverage. The concern among media watchers was the precedent could water down riskier coverage of corporate malpractice, preventing smaller newsrooms from engaging in such reportage. After ABC appealed, the case through the legal system. A U.S. District court found the damages excessive and reduced them to $315,000. When both ABC News and Food Lion appealed that decision to the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, the fraud charges were thrown out altogether. All that remained was the $2 fine for breach of loyalty and trespass remained.

In the end, ABC News may have lost but in reality it had won. Nevertheless, an important question remained: To report matters of public interest, what means are justified? By exposing malfeasance and health risks for customers, ABC claimed the footage was newsworthy.

“If large organizations were allowed to stop hard-hitting investigative journalism,” ABC News president Roone Arledge said after the initial trial, “the American people would be the losers.”

Food Lion may have fallen victim to its own business model. Founded in 1957 by Ralph Ketner, who, alongside a business partner, called up names from the phone book to ask for $50 and $100 investments to start his first store, the chain relied on large inventories and razor-thin profit margins, as well as a less expensive non-unionized workforce, to keep prices low. The strategy worked, and Food Lion became a major regional brand.

The pressure to keep costs down may have led to Food Lion’s shady back-room practices. In her on-air narration, Diane Sawyer characterized the unsavory dealings as “what can happen when the pressure for profits is great and you break the rules.”

The court proceedings turned those words around on Sawyer, however, as they were lobbed at ABC News to describe its own falsifications. The insinuation was that ABC sensationalized the news, misleading its viewers in the interest of greater profits. Moreover, Food Lion’s lawyers asked, having demonstrated a willingness to lie in service of news gathering, who was to say that ABC didn’t lie in its reporting? In court a Food Lion lawyer said of one of the producers who donned a hidden camera: “She's lied to get in there. She's lied to her fellow employees. Who can say whether she's going to tell the truth about the dates on a piece of meat?" Jurors were ultimately led to believe that ABC didn’t have to lie to gather its information, although it’s not clear how it would have attained hard proof—in this case, the video footage—without it.

Producers from ABC came upon the story when disgruntled Food Lion employees from the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) tipped them off. This, too, contributed to the slant of the report, Food Lion’s lawyers argued. The UFCW held a grudge, Food Lion claimed, because Food Lion was in direct competition against unionized grocery chains. Of course, journalists are regularly tipped off to potential stories by interested third parties, and most sources that speak with journalists have their own interests. Even so, Food Lion weaponized UFCW’s involvement to cast aspersions on ABC’s reportage. On top of that, Food Lion was given no real voice in the final story, as the organization and ABC News could not agree to terms for an interview with an executive.

In previous stories ABC News had used hidden-camera footage to great effect, catching abuse of the mentally ill and children at daycare centers, and revealing politicians accruing undue benefit from lobbyists. Diane Sawyer pointed to these instances in defense of her news outfit’s tactics.

But the hidden camera itself became something of a symbol. The technique, very much in vogue at the time of the Food Lion case, smacks of extra-dramatic reporting. The grainy quality of the medium adds a sordid patina to the film’s subject. This, in turn, highlighted ABC News’s sneakiness in gathering the footage. But Food Lion was no innocent victim. It had created a managerial environment that pressured lower level employees to place profits over sanitation. This was emphasized in a disturbing memo from 1989 to store managers, which implored: “We need to look in the dumpsters, get the good product out of it back into the store, and sell it.”

Hidden camera footage retains its they-don’t-want-you-to-know veneer to this day. In 2016, anti-abortion activists used hidden cameras to bait Planned Parenthood workers in Texas into conversations that seemed to show they were offering human fetal tissue for sale—a crime in Texas. A court later ruled that the activists were fraudulently using falsified documents to gain their access, and that the perceived sins of the Planned Parenthood workers were due to highly creative editing. The edited footage, in other words, purported to show something that the raw footage did not support. The trickery to get in the door was thus not justified.

That’s a lesson every journalist who mulls using hidden cameras must take to heart. The ends must justify the means. If they don’t, you could end up in legal hot water.

Meanwhile, more than two decades later, ABC News and Diane Sawyer again found themselves dragged into court over maligning meat. This time it had to do with a segment—or in this case a series of segments—on “pink slime” that was once again anchored by Diane Sawyer.

In 2012, ABC reported on a South Dakota-based company called Beef Products, Inc., which had been lowering the fat content of its ground beef by mixing in the trimmings of the cow, including lean bits derived from muscle and connective tissue. The reporter quoted a former USDA microbiologist who had taken to calling the additive “pink slime.” ABC claimed in its report that 70% of the meat consumers purchase at supermarkets contained this “pink slime,” as well as much of the meat sold through fast food restaurants.

Starting with Diane Sawyer touting ABC’s “startling investigation,” the network aired eleven segments on “pink slime” over a month. It was a big hit as the news was picked up by newspapers, TV news, online news and social media. Not surprisingly, Beef Products, Inc. experienced a steep dropoff in business, losing about 60% of its revenue. McDonald’s, Burger King and Taco Bell cancelled orders. Hundreds of thousands of people signed petitions to keep “pink slime” out of school lunches. As a result, Beef Products, Inc. closed three of its four meat processing plants and laid off 700 workers.

ABC didn’t rely on undercover producers falsifying their resumes and secreting cameras in their wigs. But the end result was the same: A blockbuster series of segments that were popular with viewers, and a company suffering the economic consequences. So Beef Products did what Food Lion did more than 20 years earlier. It sued ABC. What was different was the amount—a whopping $5.7 billion—and the thrust of its suit. It claimed that ABC News had defamed its meat.

Now, there’s no question that “scraps of slaughtered cow that have been pulverized, defatted, subjected to ammonia steam to kill pathogens, and congealed into a filler for ground beef,” as Mother Jones put it, is unappetizing. The fact that consumers were not aware of this is disturbing. What’s more, Beef Products’ invocation of a South Dakota law “that gives agricultural companies the ability to sue when their products are criticized” sounds ridiculous on its face. Besides, beef producers in Texas had tried to sue Oprah Winfrey claiming she had disparaged meat and they lost.

So you might think there is no way that ABC could lose this case but here is what Stephen Brill, founder of The American Lawyer magazine, had to say about it in a column for Reuters:

In the end, Disney, which owns ABC, settled the “pink slime” case for $177 million in August 2017. While that sounds like a lot of money, it’s a drop in the ocean for Disney, which boasts a market cap of almost $60 billion. As for Diane Sawyer, who anchored the two segments leading to the most famous meat lawsuits in journalism history, she retired before “pink slime” settled.

Click here to view the original ABC Primetime segment on Food Lion. It runs about 25 minutes. (Note: There will be knowledge check questions based on its content.)