A federal jury found that ABC's "PrimeTime Live" had committed fraud and trespassing in its undercover investigation of the Food Lion supermarket chain, and awarded the company $5.5 million in damages. Two ABC producers had lied about their professional backgrounds 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.

While the legal issue centered on the ABC producers' lying to Food Lion when they got their jobs and whether news reporters are allowed to break laws when reporting a story that others must adhere to, videotaped outtakes of the hidden-camera footage were more damning, suggesting grounds for a charge of libel. 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 another producer 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 producer's job to clean it. In another, an employee talked about how she had cooked a batch of out-of-date chicken; in the excised footage she said she brought the matter up with her manager, who directed her to throw the chicken away, which she did. Many of the discarded sequences featured producers' frustration at their inability to come up with incriminating footage. After several days of work as a deli clerk, one producer saw a Food Lion employee start to clean a meat slicer. "Oh damn," the producer exclaimed, followed by a long, drawn-out "Sh**."

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