Punishing the press: the public passes some tough judgements on libel, fairness, and "fraud."(includes sidebar article on consequences of news gathering and reporting following NBC's settlement with Summer Olympic bombing suspect, Richard Jewell)

The 1990s have been a humbling time for journalism, particularly investigative television journalism. An NBC News magazine program had to apologize for fakery in its investigation of General Motors trucks; ABC and CBS both backed down under pressure from tobacco corporations, with ABC settling

Three recent cases have deepened an already pervasive unease among journalists, for each was a reminder that not only are journalists mired in an intense legal struggle but also that their relationship with the public has become dysfunctional. The three investigative projects that came under scrutiny each started with strong public-interest intentions -- one to alert unwary investors, another to warn consumers about unsafe food, and the third to inform travelers about unsafe airline procedures. Two of the three programs received professional awards. But in three states, panels of citizens -- two juries and a news council -- overwhelmingly decided that journalists had gone too far off the track, less in what they covered than how they covered it.

* In Miami, a jury on December 18 gave the year's biggest libel award -- $10 million -- to banker Alan Levan and BankAtlantic Financial Corporation, a bank holding company, in a libel suit over a segment in 1991 on 20/20. The ABC newsmagazine charged Levan, the bank's chief executive officer, with hoodwinking investors into buying bonds that were destined to become worthless. But the judge barred jurors from hearing what the defense considered clinching evidence -- that those same investors had sued Levan to recover their losses. The investors settled with Levan out of court and, because the verdict against him was vacated, the libel judge ruled that the jury could hear nothing about it; Levan was given a clean slate.

* In Greensboro, North Carolina, two days later, another jury found that another ABC News magazine, PrimeTime Live, had defrauded and illegally trespassed on Food Lion supermarkets. Seeking to show that Food Lion was selling dangerously tainted meats, PrimeTime Live sent undercover producers to get Food Lion jobs. The producers faked resumes, were hired, and once inside used concealed cameras to document their exposes. In its first verdict, the jury awarded Food Lion only $1,402 in actual damages, but a month later it imposed punitive damages of $5.5 million -- far short of the up to $1.9 billion Food Lion asked but hardly pocket change. The question of the truth of what ABC broadcast in 1992 -- whether Food Lion in fact endangered the health of those who ate what it sold -- never came up. This was not a libel trial, in which Food Lion's first hurdle would have been to prove the broadcast false. Food Lion ingeniously chose instead to accuse ABC of fraud in the reporting process. (Food Lion insisted outside the courtroom that the story on ABC was libelous but after the broadcast reformed its food-handling practices.)