South Dakota Judge Clears Way For "Pink Slime" Lawsuit To Proceed

(AP) -- A judge in South Dakota has cleared the way to trial of a lawsuit claiming ABC News "pink slime" coverage caused $1.9 billion worth of damage to the business of Beef Products Inc., which makes the meat product tagged with the term.Judge Cheryle Gering threw out defamation claims against anchor Diane Sawyer but left standing accusations against ABC News and multiple Emmy award-winning journalist, Jim Avila.Judge Gering, in rejecting ABC's bid to have the case dismissed, said a jury could find the network was pursuing "a negative spin" on the story before conducting any research and that Mr. Avilla had an anti-meat-industry agenda."Looking at the evidence in a light most favorable to the plaintiffs, a jury could determine that there is clear and convincing evidence that ABC Broadcasting and Mr. Avila were reckless," the judge said, and that "they engaged in purposeful avoidance of the truth."Five years in the making, the case threatens ABC News with punishing damages over its coverage of lean, finely textured beef, or LFTB, a component of about 70% of the ground beef found on supermarket shelves in 2012, when the stories ran.Due to a South Dakota food-libel law that triples damages against those found to have knowingly lied about the safety of a food product, ABC News could be hit with as much as $6 billion in damages.The network stands by its reporting."We are pleased that the Court dismissed all claims against Diane Sawyer, " ABC News said in a statement. The Court has not ruled on the merits of the case against the other defendants, and we welcome the opportunity to defend the ABC News reports at trial and are confident that we will ultimately prevail." Decades of First Amendment law back ABC's defense -- its right to report truthfully on a newsworthy subject, what is in the nation's food supply, the company's lawyers say. Every broadcast said the meat product was safe.Beef Products says it was forced to close three of its four plants and erase hundreds of jobs when consumers recoiled. It declined to provide current production figures.The case will play out before a jury in Union County, S.D., where Beef Products is based, and where jobs were lost after the ABC News broadcasts."The American public is hostile to the media. Every news outfit should be very afraid of what a jury will do," said Mary-Rose Papandrea, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law.Beef Products says ABC News whipped up the controversy about the meat product to boost ratings, inflaming consumers' fears and forcing the plant closures."This was fake news," Beef Products lawyer J. Erik Connolly told Judge Gering during arguments in January. "It's perfectly safe. It's perfectly nutritious. It was properly approved by the USDA. There was no news here. There was nothing to rush out and talk about. There was no news."The term "pink slime" was in wide use after a 2009 New York Times story on the product, but it exploded on social media after the ABC News broadcasts. The network focused on the fact ground beef labels made no mention of LFTB, made from defatted beef trimmings in a process involving ammonium hydroxide."Why -- if it is just another additive, a way to put leaner beef in the burgers at a cheaper price, if it is no problem, if it's safe, all those things, why not just label it? Why not just put it on the package?" Mr. Avila asked a meat industry spokeswoman in an interview.Mr. Avila, the judge said, was "rude, agitated and hostile" in his questioning of the Beef Products defender.As the coverage played out, Beef Products endorsed a USDA move to allow voluntary labeling so consumers would know which packages of ground beef had LFTB and which didn't.Beef Products also launched a counteroffensive, mustering governors of big meat-producing states and advisers to persuade others writing on the topic that ABC News got it wrong. Marion Nestle, the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, who wrote about Beef Products' problem in 2012, says she was confronted with "nothing less than a major effort to get me to agree that pink slime is safe, something that was never at issue," she told The Wall Street Journal. "Yes, it's safe, but that does not make it acceptable. What we like to eat has a great deal to do with cultural values, and the unfortunate name, 'pink slime,' made it culturally unacceptable. "Michael Roberts, director of the Resnick Program for Food Law and Policy at University of California Los Angeles School of Law, said Beef Products pioneered a system to produce a safe meat product that reduces the number of cattle that need to be slaughtered. However, he views the lawsuit against ABC as a harbinger for the future of food-policy development and a threat to free discussion. News organizations are supposed to do what ABC News did, he said, by asking questions about what is in the food supply.