In the media jungle, the lion weeps tonight.

• Author: Napoli, Lisa
• Position: Media exposure of Food Lion Inc.

Seemingly unstoppable when competing against giants such as Winn-Dixie and Kroger, Food Lion Inc. met its match when it got on the wrong end of a camera no larger than a tube of lipstick.

The Primetime Live segment that aired Nov. 5 shocked television viewers with a series of accusations made by several former employees. Among their charges: Food Lion workers had used fingernail polish to change package expiration dates, pulled produce out of dumpsters for resale and doused outdated fish with Clorox to remove odors.

But it was the hidden-camera footage that stuck in viewers' minds, in particular a shot of an employee extending the life of outdated chicken with barbecue sauce.

Primetime Live got what it wanted: near-record ratings and increased awareness that Food Lion's legendary ability to stretch a penny may at times sacrifice food quality. But how the ABC show got the story raised obvious ethical problems, in and out of journalism, while sparking a lawsuit by the Salisbury-based supermarket chain.

A key reporter on the story was producer Lynne Litt, who went undercover as a Food Lion employee. Her application for a job, company spokesman Mike Mozingo says, included a statement that she wanted to make a career in the chain -- an outright lie since she was on the ABC payroll. Once at work in stores in Longview and Hickory, she used the tiny video camera to record some things that Food Lion President Tom Smith doesn't touch upon in his commercials.

"The whole notion of clandestine cameras and finding a story by rigging the whole thing seems to be a hard way to approach journalism," says John Adams, dean emeritus of the UNC School of Journalism at Chapel Hill.

Adams' views are shared by several state media executives. "We don't even like to use unnamed sources," says Ben Bowers, executive editor of the News & Record of Greensboro. "I think it would have to be an extreme situation for us to |misrepresent ourselves~. That is just not our modus operandi."

Joe Goodman, managing editor of the Winston-Salem Journal, notes, "If reporters are in the truth business, it doesn't further their cause to lie just to get the story. Isn't that a monumental contradiction? We just can't lie. Maybe you can hem and haw and shuffle a little and give the right answers to the wrong questions and bend the truth a little, but you can't flat-out lie."

Ron Miller, assistant vice president of news and programming for WBTV, Charlotte's CBS affiliate, stresses that there...