Not Ready For Prime Time

On the day of the Republican Debate in Myrtle Beach last month, our web content manager e-mailed me to inform me a lady had posted some videos to scnow.com that blasted Food Lion for selling bad products, and, in essence, invoked the infamous "Prime Time Live" controversy involving that same grocery store from the early 1990s.
In case you don't remember, about 15 years ago, it seems ABC News got wind that Food Lion was selling "green meat," and simply bleaching or cleaning off the gunk and putting it out for sale. ABC employees gained employment with the store, and secretly taped what was going on, and then blasted it wide open for all to see.
The problem is, ABC got in trouble, because they sent their folks in under false pretenses, and therefore, it was tantamount to trespassing.
It's a landmark case of what NOT to do in terms of investigative journalism.
Trust me, we learned about it in Journalism school.
But everyone remembers the story because Food Lion, one way or the other, got busted.
Okay..back to our story.
Tina Herring, who lives in St. Pauls in Robeson County, claims she got sick off some Food Lion brand shrimp she bought on sale last summer. She investigated even further, convinced that the shrimp shouldn't have been sold in the first place, because they may or may not have been included on all those whacky Asian product recalls from last year.
Instead, the only think she could prove was that Food Lion was using temporary packaging labels to cover up "Product of Thailand" and "Product of China" with temporary labels reading "Product of India." She was convinced this was to cover up a product that could have been tainted.
Whether or not that last part is true remains to be seen, and is flatly denied by anyone involved in this investigation.
To see and read the rest of this story, you can find the story on scnow, and watch it Tuesday night on News13 at 11:00.
Our web folks decided to take the video off of our website, because it was basically video of Herring blasting Food Lion without their side of the story, and we didn't want it to be viewed out of context.
We still have the video, but for now, you'll have to view it on YouTube.
The point of all this is: this isn't "Prime Time Live," Part II. We uncovered some interesting and valuable consumer information here, and at last check, Tina Herring has taken her story all the way to Washington, D.C. and the Food and Drug Administration.
We hope you are able to learn something from this story.
I sure did.

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