The ABC "Primetime Live" Food Lion scandal

The Food Lion supermarket chain was awarded 5.5 million in damages in their lawsuit against ABC TV's "Primetime Live".

Two ABC producers posed as food workers in order to get jobs as food handlers at a Food Lion store. They were assisted by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which provided them with fake references. (The union had previously led an unsuccessful effort to organize the store's workers.)

The producers secretly videotaped the Food Lion workplace with the aid of cameras hidden in their wigs. Using this footage, ``PrimeTime Live'' reported that Food Lion sold tainted meat. The ensuing bad publicity led Food Lion to shut down 84 stores over the next two years, throwing thousands of employees out of work.

Outtakes of the hidden-camera footage showed that the charges leveled against Food Lion were a manufactured fraud! One showed an ABC producer taking chickens whose ``sell-by'' dates had expired and putting them up for sale, then telling another producer to videotape them.

Another outtake showed a producer ignoring instructions from legitimate employees on how to handle food. In another, one producer sells a piece of moldy kielbasa to an ABC employee several times for the benefit of the camera.

One piece of videotape that did air showed a dirty meat slicer, even though it was the undercover producer's job to clean it.

In a glaring example of deception by ABC, a Food Lion employee talked about how she had cooked a batch of out-of-date chicken by mistake. That footage aired. But in the portion of the video tape that had been cut out, the employee related being told by her manager to throw the cooked chicken out, which she did.

Many of the discarded video sequences featured producers' frustration at their inability to come up with incriminating footage. In one case, the ABC team reacts with the word,"shit", when a Food Lion employee starts to clean a meat slicer that had gotten dirty.

The Producer in charge of the Food Lion segment, Rick Kaplan, soon left ABC to take charge of CNN. An Alumni of the Lincoln Bedroom sleep overs, Kaplan issued a directive to the writers at CNN not to use the word "scandal" in connection with President Clinton, and regularly offers suggestions to Bill Clinton on how to handle the media as each new eruption occurs.

The NBC Fuel tank hoax.

NBC news did a story on side mounted fuel tanks on GM trucks.

The claim of the story was that when such a truck was struck, it would burst into flames. GM insisted that it's side mounted truck fuel tanks were more than sturdy enough to survive the average traffic collision.

NBC produced and aired a video segment that showed a vehicle colliding with the side fuel tank of a GM truck at low speed, and the GM fuel tank exploded.

It later turned out that the fuel tank had been rigged with explosive devices by NBC to manufacture the explosion seen in their news report!

TIME article on the NBC hoax.