ABC's Food Lyin' - ABC-TV's shameless attack on Food Lion supermarkets may herald a new era of tabloid TV.

FOOD Lion appears to have won its much-publicized lawsuit against ABC-TV, but the final ruling is unlikely to be more than a slap on the wrist for the network. The real significance of the case could be that punitive damages will become simply part of the cost of doing business for tabloid TV shows, which can afford to pay them, and woe betide any future Food Lion that has the misfortune of landing in the videotape viewfinder of one of those programs.

ABC's PrimeTime Live did a segment on Food Lion in 1992 that devastated the nation's fastest-growing, lowest-priced supermarket chain, many of whose stores are located in low-income, minority neighborhoods. Millions of viewers saw disgruntled former Food Lion employees tell Diane Sawyer their horror stories: cheese put back out for sale after the rat bites were trimmed away; out-of-date meat and fish soaked in bleach to remove the foul smell, then redated for sale.

Naturally, customers fled Food Lion in droves. Its stock, a Wall Street favorite, crumbled, and earnings reached twenty-year lows. The chain closed 84 stores in 1994 and laid off 3,500 workers. Expansion plans to the West and North for the North Carolina-based chain were scotched. And millions of consumers, many poor, were deprived of the chance to save hundreds of dollars a year on their groceries.

But although ABC had two of its producers get jobs at two different Food Lions and hide video cameras in their wigs, they were unable to get any footage of rats or of bleached fish or ham. Furthermore, there are suggestions that much of what appeared on the air was not only carefully edited but intentionally distorted, and may even have been staged by the ABC producers.

This becomes apparent from the videotape that PrimeTime Live chose to leave on the cutting-room floor. Unfortunately, virtually no reporters have shown any interest in reporting on the 45 hours of ABC undercover videotape that didn't make it onto the air.

The motive for fabrication was certainly there. One of the producers, Susan Barnett, after several days of work as a deli clerk at a Myrtle Beach Food Lion, is obviously very frustrated at not being able to get a story.

As she sees a Food Lion employee start to clean a meat slicer, she can't conceal her disappointment. "Oh damn," she says. Then as it really sinks in, she says a long, drawn-out "Sh -- ."

The PrimeTime Live report charged Food Lion with unsanitary conditions, but Miss Barnett is heard telling a fellow employee, "You're the fanatic cleaner. I notice every time you guys turn around you're cleaning something."

On another occasion, an emphatic "Damn!" is Miss Barnett's comment as she carries out an order to throw out some outdated chicken. "Does this chicken go back in the cooler?" She asks a grey-haired supervisor.

"No," the supervisor responds firmly.

Miss Barnett tries again to coax her to put the old chicken out for sale: "So, you want to leave it out?"

The supervisor says, "Throw it out."

Again and again, Miss Barnett tried to get outdated or spoiling food put out for sale. As a manager is throwing a cake away, Miss Barnett protests: "What's wrong with that?"

Again she gets a firm answer: "Out of date. Too far to reduce."

The other producer, Lynne Dale, who worked as a meat wrapper in a Food Lion in North Carolina the next month, is also clearly frustrated. "I'm really bad at this job," she tells the two ABC technicians after getting into their undercover van in the Food Lion parking lot.

"You're really bad at this job?" one of them asks back.

"I really don't know what the f -- I'm doing," Mrs. Dale replies.

Then a technician asks her, "Did you get anything?"

She answers with a long "Umm . . ." then decides to turn off the tape machine. Did she turn it off because she didn't want it recorded that she didn't get anything, or because she had just been doing something she really should not have been doing?

But the most ominous exchange on the tapes comes on May 6, 1992. For some reason Mrs. Dale has left the store at 9:30 A.M. The videotape is blacked out, but the audio can be heard clearly. "I'm gonna lose my job," she nervously tells one of the technicians.

Right before the tape cuts off, the technician is heard telling her, "Throw that tape away."

Food Lion is convinced that what Mrs. Dale had just been doing was removing a 10-inch wire from the water heater to make it impossible to clean the store's meat department that day.

The plumber who worked on the unit testified last month that he had checked the same heater three days earlier. Then, on his May 6 visit, "I . . . saw immediately that there was a wire missing. It had not just been disconnected, it was removed." He said: "I don't ever recall seeing this except on this occasion," and he added, "I felt somebody removed it."

Disabling the water heater would not have been hard, entailing only the removal of two screws from a cover plate to get at that wire. Miss Dale denied in sworn testimony having done it.

But if ABC has nothing to hide, why did it originally leave out key segments of the tapes when ordered to provide Food Lion with copies? Why did the copies provided by ABC, which owns the best in high-tech video equipment, seem to be copies of copies of copies, at least one segment re-recorded on used tape? Why were multiple "cutting signatures" found on the tapes?

Whether or not ABC staged anything, it certainly engaged in misleading editing. An employee washing up at a sink seems to be slipping on a grease-covered floor, which suggests dirty, unsafe work conditions. But ABC made sure its viewers didn't see that the man and the woman beside him were smiling. When you view the whole tape you see that it wasn't grease. The employee had spilled soapy water on the floor and was fooling around, doing a kind of Michael Jackson "moonwalk," as his colleagues laughed.

ABC showed a female employee complaining that some marinated chicken was out of date, the implication being that it went out for sale. What ABC didn't show was the same women seconds before saying, "I dumped it," and seconds afterward saying, "I went and told Mr. Alexander [the manager]. He told me to dump it and go back and get fresh chicken."

The fact is that Food Lion -- which is not unionized -- is superior to most other supermarket chains in the country, not just in price but in the freshness of its products and the helpfulness of its employees. The quality of the stores is why the company's sales, earnings, and stock price have rebounded tremendously after what could easily have been a mortal blow from ABC in 1992.

The Capital Research Center, in a November 1995 report, quoted government investigations in Maryland which found almost no difference between Food Lion and its unionized competitors on sale of outdated meat, dairy, and grocery products. But in categories of sanitation and vermin control, Food Lion was much better than the unionized chains. Three competing unionized chains had between 6 and 22 times as many incidents as Food Lion in three categories of sanitation and vermin offenses. Food Lion compared well in a Virginia study too.

Paradoxically, it is really this success that has caused Food Lion its problems. The chain became a huge threat to the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which targeted it for punitive action as far back as the early 1980s. Douglas Dority, the UFCW's international president, said of "the non-union chains -- the Food Lions" during a 1990 conference, "We must either reduce these chains' market share . . . or we must put them out of business. There is no other option."

And the union has been trying to destroy Food Lion through a corporate smear campaign by its front groups. Diane Sawyer acknowledged that it was "the Government Accountability Project, a kind of support organization for whistle-blowers," that suggested that ABC investigate Food Lion. GAP is actually a spinoff of Washington's far-left Institute for Policy Studies. But ABC never mentioned that GAP was working closely with the UFCW.

Lynne Dale said in a deposition that every one of the former Food Lion employees on the program was referred to her by either GAP or the UFCW. Moreover, neither she nor Susan Barnett would have been hired by Food Lion at all without the falsified job references provided through the UFCW and the temporary jobs the union helped them get in order to train them.

Miss Barnett used to be with a Naderite activist group in Chicago, the Better Government Association. She got the Food Lion idea from GAP. Miss Dale, independently, was urged to look at Food Lion by Washington publicist Neel Lattimore, now press secretary to Hillary Clinton. It is clear that the two producers and the union were interested in exactly the same thing: a program that would hurt this large, non-unionized company.

Food Lion wisely sued for fraud and trespassing, not libel, because current libel law has "proven to be an almost impenetrable bullet-proof vest for the media," as one Food Lion lawyer put it. Next, both ABC and Food Lion are likely to appeal, with a good chance that the case will reach the Supreme Court. That's when the real question will be answered: Does the First Amendment allow tabloid "journalists," in the course of doing a hatchet job, to break laws against trespassing and fraud that everyone else must keep?