Testimony Offered In Defamation Trial Paints ABC News As Being Skewed

A handful of testimonies offered Monday in the defamation trial brought by Beef Products Inc. against ABC News and Jim Avila — all of them by video — sought to paint a picture of ABC’s research efforts on lean finely textured beef (LFTB) as being skewed so heavily in favor of portraying the product as “pink slime” that evidence and interviews that did not support that narrative were dismissed from consideration.Convincing the jury that ABC News personnel were negligent in the extreme is important to BPI’s $1.9 billion worth of allegations of product defamation. Under South Dakota’s product disparagement law, damages could be triple the original amount if BPI were to prevail.In the first videotaped testimony, David Theno, a food safety expert who helmed Jack in the Box’s recovery after its deadly 1993 E. coli outbreak and consulted with BPI on its operations, told of a phone call he received from Jim Avila as the network prepared to begin airing its series of reports.Describing Avila, who had placed the call, as “abusive” and “denigrating,” Theno described how Avila called him for information, but when Theno disagreed with Avila’s framing of the product as inferior in quality and nutrition, Avila became hostile. He said Avila called Theno a “shill” for BPI and said he had no credibility, then hung up the phone. Avila hung up on Theno again when Theno called him back, thinking the call had been dropped by his wireless carrier.The second time Theno called Avila back, he said he questioned Avila’s “integrity as a journalist” if he wouldn’t at least listen to his [Theno’s] information, at which point Avila said “f*** you” and hung up a third time.Theno acknowledged in his video testimony that by the time he made his second call, he was angry, and acknowledged that the exchange was like “two guys on a playground.”But, “he didn’t have to use my side of the story but I thought he ought to at least hear my side of the story,” Theno said, in the video.Subsequent videotaped testimonies from a series of ABC producers — who typically conduct most of the research on television news reports, and feed it to the on-air personnel — were less lurid but potentially damaging.Examining mostly a series of internal ABC emails, BPI attorney Erik Connolly, from Winston & Strawn in Chicago, illustrated how the network’s producers had taken to routinely referring to LFTB as “waste” and “fat” and “slime” and “s***” before they knew anything about the product or the process by which it is made.Connolly called attention to internal emails in which ABC producers celebrated the “public outcry” the reports generated, but when questioned, they said they did not think about the effect the reports would have on retailers or on BPI or its employees.He also entered into evidence emails from Avila to ABC staff promising that his reports would “include evidence of influence or corruption at USDA,” as Connolly stated it in court.He asked producers about an interview that was conducted for the story but never aired. The practice is not unusual, but Connolly pointed out that the interview in question also did not follow with the “pink slime” narrative. Other evidence, such as opposing statements from the American Meat Institute, also were not used until several days of reports had aired and were truncated.Connolly also asked each producer about their understanding of the origins of meat and of beef, in particular, and their understanding of the term “beef trimmings.” They knew that LFTB was beef before they began their reporting, he noted.Videotaped testimony is expected to continue on Tuesday. This is the second week of what is expected to be an eight-week trial.