Exposing Sensationalism of Eatery Expose

Restaurant filth is a great menu item during the local news ratings wars to bring in new viewers and to keep the regular viewers who delight in seeing a hidden-camera expose--whether it’s honest or deceptive. It’s a slam-dunk for a consumer reporter; I’ve done it myself half a dozen times.

That being said, the recent series on KCBS-TV Channel 2 was irresponsible and sensationalistic. It’s no coincidence that it was done during sweeps, when stations vie for ratings to try to boost their advertising rates for the rest of the year.

As almost everyone who reports on consumer issues knows, the ingredients for a such a series are always there: The county or city never has enough inspectors, and it’s a given that there isn’t a restaurant without a roach, or mice or rat droppings. You’ll always find workers who do nasty things like taste the food they are serving, sneeze, fail to wash their hands--or even worse.

KCBS tapped into the scenario like a bug in search of food. In this case, the bug was a hidden camera carried by a newsperson posing as a worker at several L.A. eateries that had been cited previously in health inspections.

But what I saw on the TV screen did not look like honest journalism because it picked restaurants that had proven serious problems, chose the most sensational pictures and left the impression that this could be typical conduct in restaurants all over Los Angeles. It used disgusting pictures picked out of hours of tape to repulse and fascinate the audience as it also destroyed the reputation of many restaurants and sickened or scared many people, I’m sure, from going out to eat.

It showed pictures of truly gross activities in restaurant kitchens--nose-picking, finger-licking, etc. Over those shots, it mentioned a lot of restaurants, some of which had nothing to do with the pictures being shown.

The series also stayed clear of the big national restaurant franchises. Why? Could it be because the station wanted to stay clear of any current or potential sponsors of CBS programs?

The initial reports were not able to get detailed responses from the owners of most of the cited restaurants, especially the ones in the county’s ethnic areas.

Many of these are mom-and-pop operations whose owners are new to the U.S., and they sometimes don’t understand the local sanitary codes. The series also didn’t focus enough on where some of the blame belongs: on a beleaguered and understaffed inspection system that fails to educate restaurant owners or watch over eateries properly.

What’s more, the series did not show restaurant-goers how to protect themselves. It speculated in a most terrifying way about what could happen to them if they ate in these restaurants.

It painted L.A.’s restaurants with the same broad stroke, indicting them all by association. It hurt a lot of honest owners and their employees in the many establishments that play by the rules. All in the name of garnering higher ratings.