KCRA & the Safeway Meat Scandal (19)
Russ Ward may have presented all he could within his air time restrictions, but his story didn't begin to touch on all the information we had. I was disappointed with it.
I didn't expect Paul Thompson to be wild about it, either. For one thing, it hadn't really given Safeway a fair shake in confirming the link between meat labeling and the lettuce dispute.
Thompson surprised me. He said the story had valuable elements that our own film would lack--namely, the 15 seconds or so of unidentified meat on a table, and the statement by Congressman Rosenthal.
I had reasons to doubt his sincerity and candor.
If Thompson had wanted film of meat, we could have gotten plenty of our own earlier in the day. Granted, it would not have been the exact samples that had allegedly been mislabeled--but then, in Ross Ward's story, it wasn't clear what was being shown anyway. And if KCRA had acted soon enough, we might have been able to go to the Bay Area and film some of the specific samples in question--as well as the lab itself, and maybe attorneys for both sides. In any event, we could have gotten enough film of local Safeway meat counters to cover the information we already had.
As for the cut of Rosenthal, I still refuse to believe our viewers needed to be told that mass deception perpetrated on an already-suffering populace is a bad thing.
I do know that Paul Thompson got a story that was much briefer than anything KCRA News would have been likely to put together. It was also somebody else's story--untouched, as it were, by our own fine little hands. I can't help wondering what sort of appeasement value Paul might have seen in this, in a potential morning-after confrontation with Safeway.
