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more kinds of legal charges against ABC’s newsgathering methods than GM did against NBC’s.
Therefore, news coverage devoted greater space to explaining Food Lion’s claims. Second, the
length of the conflict appears to influence media distraction. In the Food Lion-ABC case, there
were four different court rulings, from pre-trial through appeals, over the seven year life of the
lawsuit, each providing additional news pegs for the rest of the media. By the end of the case,
ABC’s charges against the grocery chain were all but forgotten amidst the First Amendment
issues raised by the lawsuit. By contrast, the GM case was settled in a matter of months after the
report aired, before legal papers were even served on NBC. There was less media distraction
here even though NBC admitted its newsgathering methods were unethical and apologized for
the report’s claims against GM. This suggests that the longer the controversy, the greater is the
likelihood of media diversion from the substance of the original story, regardless of whether
investigative reporters’ own news organizations admit mistakes or stick by their story. Third, the
nature of the news organization’s response obviously has some impact, but a counter-intuitive
one. Although NBC quickly retracted its story, media coverage of the dispute was less distracted
from the claims against GM’s trucks than it was from ABC’s charges against Food Lion, which
ABC defended. This implies a paradox: the more that a news organization fights back against
targets’ attacks on newsgathering methods, the more likely it may be to distract media attention
from its own investigative reporters’ findings.
Another set of factors may be considered external to the muckraker-target relationship.
The response by victims and their advocates appears to have some influence on subsequent
coverage as well. One reason that reporting on the GM-NBC affair maintained greater focus on
the problems with GM’s trucks is that consumer safety groups continued to petition government
to recall the vehicles, helping to keep the story alive. Although the United Food and Commercial
Convention