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IPFS News Link • MEDIA (MainStreamMedia - aka MSM)

ABC "Pink Slime" Trial Opens With Scathing Attacks on Media Bias, Corporate Secrecy

• http://www.hollywoodreporter.com

The highly anticipated proceeding gets underway with Beef Products Inc. telling jurors that the broadcaster killed much of its business with a series of reports in March 2012.

Where's the beef? The question brings to mind the popular 1980s slogan of the fast-food chain Wendy's that made its way into politics courtesy of a 1984 presidential debate. More than three decades later, that question is again being raised in a high-stakes, politics-infused showdown between Beef Products Inc. and ABC News. 

On Monday, both sides presented opening statements in what could become the biggest defamation trial in American history. With billions of dollars on the line, BPI told jurors how a series of ABC News reports in March 2012 about its product, officially called "lean finely textured beef" (LFTB) and dubbed "pink slime" by critics, is to blame for the loss of 75 percent of its business. ABC, in turn, defended itself with a scathing attack on BPI's product while defending the integrity of its own journalism.

The proceeding, expected to last a couple of months, is happening in Elk Point, S.D., a town with a population of just 2,000. About five dozen people crammed into a makeshift courtroom in the building's basement. According to one local newspaper, the county spent $45,000 preparing this windowless scene of the "pink slime" trial with the expectation that both sides would bring an army of lawyers and the national media trailing closely behind.

Those who attended Monday heard two vastly different stories. BPI's was one of entrepreneurship and destruction. ABC's was about politics and secrecy. 

Dan Webb, a former U.S. attorney and a partner at Winston & Strawn, went first on behalf of BPI.

He took jurors through the story of Eldon Roth, a man who had grown up in South Dakota, never graduated high school, and through his unique mind and expertise with machinery, had founded BPI and created "game-changing technology" to transform the meat industry. BPI's product was at one point found in 70 percent of the ground beef sold in supermarkets. The company was moving 5 million pounds per week. And Webb presented this as a welcome development because consumers got a good source of lean beef at more affordable prices while also benefiting the environment thanks to fewer slaughtered animals.

Then, ABC came along.

"It took 30 years to succeed and it took ABC less than 30 days to severely damage the company," Webb told jurors.

On March 7, 2012, ABC's initial report about LFTB was broadcast on World News, the nightly show then anchored by Diane Sawyer. The report featured interviews with two microbiologists and made what BPI contends were defamatory implications about the safety and nutrition of its product. Subsequent reports that month, including one that featured an interview with a former BPI employee, would lead to the impression in viewer's minds, BPI argues, that its product isn't really beef — nor even meat — and was only approved by USDA regulators through the company's improper conduct.

The number that Webb wants the jury to keep in mind is 350.

That's how many times ABC on various platforms would call LFTB "pink slime," a characterization that BPI contends is evidence supporting the preconceived negative message ABC wished to convey.

"They ignored the proper name," said Webb. "When you have a major news organization that is calling the product 'slime,' witnesses will say they can't imagine anything worse. It connotes something disgusting, inedible."

The jurors were shown a picture of LFTB.

"It physically doesn't look like slime," argued Webb.

The attorney acknowledged that the term wasn't coined by ABC. It actually came from a 2002 email by Dr. Gerald Zirnstein, a former USDA scientist who was one of the individuals interviewed by ABC. But Webb asserted that the "pink slime" term got "minimal coverage" before ABC repeated it ad nauseum on air and to BPI's supermarket customers when reporters at the network aimed to figure out who was carrying the product. BPI's attorney would then lean on the USDA task force approving the product in 1992 in support of the proposition that LFTB was indeed safe and the product's labeling showing protein and iron content for the proposition that LFTB was indeed nutritious. As for other elements like how LFTB is treated with ammonia, Webb framed it as something that's routinely done in agriculture.