Federal appeals court: Oprah guilty of melodrama but not libel

The Associated Press

02.09.00

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NEW ORLEANS — A federal appeals court said today that Oprah Winfrey "melodramatized" the mad cow disease scare but did not give false information about it or defame cattle producers.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a verdict handed down two years ago by a federal jury that rejected cattlemen's claims against the talk show host, her production company and vegetarian activist Harold Lyman.

The judge at the trial had ruled that the case could not be heard under Texas' "veggie libel" law, and was instead a conventional business-defamation case. That meant the cattlemen had to show that Winfrey or her show deliberately or recklessly made false statements which hurt their business.

The appeals court refused to rule on the scope of the "veggie libel" law, which was designed to protect food products from false disparagement. However, one of the appeals judges, Edith H. Jones, wrote that she believes cattle are covered under the law.

She said the law specifically covers aquaculture, and "an act designed to protect ... a relatively new Texas industry could not have meant to exclude cattle raising, which is intimately bound with Texas' history and current economy."

The ruling affirms people's right to speak their opinions and reaffirms that "editing is what editors are for, and not for judges or the legal system," said Charles L. Babcock, Winfrey's attorney.

Calls to attorneys for the cattlemen were not immediately returned.

On the show's April 16, 1996, episode, Lyman said that including processed cattle in cattle feed — a practice later banned — could spread mad cow disease to people in the United States. The brain-destroying disease has never been found in cattle in the United States but is suspected of killing 23 people in Britain.

Winfrey at one point said during the show that the information "just stopped me cold from eating another burger!"

Cattle prices and cattle futures dropped drastically after the show aired.

The three-judge panel of the appeals court said that Lyman's claims, which Winfrey described during the show as exaggerated, were based on facts and therefore could not be challenged under business-disparagement law.

"Stripped to its essentials, the cattlemen's complaint is that the 'Dangerous Food' show did not present the mad cow issue in the light most favorable to United States beef," the court said. "This argument cannot stand."

"This is the latest in an unbroken string of victories against industry plaintiffs who have invoked food-libel laws to silence food critics," said Ronald Collins of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which filed an amicus brief in support of Winfrey. The brief presented to the Fifth Circuit was also signed by the Society of Professional Journalists, the Association of American Publishers, and the Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression.

"The Oprah-Lyman victory," said Collins, "was based on very narrow statutory grounds. And while it is an important win, it is a costly one, which would have bankrupted most other defendants. That is why these laws need to be repealed or struck down — because they punish the innocent for exercising their First Amendment rights."