False alarm: how the media helps the insurance industry and the GOP promote the myth of America's "lawsuit crisis."

Washington Monthly, Oct, 2004 by Stephanie Mencimer

After 50 years and hundreds of millions of dollars spent convincing the public of a litigation crisis, the tort reformers have largely succeeded. There's very little that journalists won't repeat and readers won't swallow about the evils of the civil liability system.

The lying florists

In November 2002, viewers of "60 Minutes" learned that Fayette, Miss., was the nation's capital of "jackpot justice," a place where "plaintiffs' lawyers have found that juries in rural, impoverished places can be mighty sympathetic when one of their own goes up against a big, rich, multinational corporation." In the story, Morley Safer interviewed a local florist who had received a multi-million dollar settlement in a diet-drug lawsuit. The unnamed florist alleged that trial lawyers were bribing jurors to give big awards. "The jury awarded these people this money because they felt as if they were going to get a cut off of it," he told Safer.

During the broadcast, Safer interviewed Wyatt Emmerich, the publisher of a newspaper in Jackson, who explained a few big verdicts there by saying, "Look at the jurors. These are disenfranchised people. These are people who've been left out of the system, who feel like, 'Hey, stick it to the Yankee companies. Stick it to the insurance companies. Stick it to the pharmaceutical companies.' The African Americans feel like it's payback for disenfranchisement. And the rednecks, shall we say, it's like, 'Hey, you know, get back at' revenge for the Civil War. So there's a lot of resentment, a lot of class anger, a lot of racial anger. And it's very easy to weave this racial conflict and this class conflict into a big pot of money for the attorneys." The day after the program aired, the legislature passed new restrictions on lawsuits.

Tiny Jefferson County's national reputation as a "judicial hellhole" came in part from intense publicity from the American Tort Reform Association, which every year publishes a "study" purporting to identify various jurisdictions around the country it deems too plaintiff-friendly and in need of reform. At the time of the "60 Minutes" episode, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute for Legal Reform was spending millions nationally on advertising and lobbying for restrictions on citizens' rights to sue. At least $100,000 of that had recently gone into an advertising campaign in Mississippi to push for a cap on damages in lawsuits against corporations. Those facts weren't included in the story. Meanwhile, the florist, Beau Strittman, retracted his comments about the payoffs, telling the AP, "I just said it as a joking statement." CBS spokesman Kevin Tedesco said the network could not comment on the segment because several jurors have sued CBS for libel over the broadcast.

It wasn't the first time "60 Minutes" got duped in an anti-lawsuit segment. Back in 1986, the show profiled the owner of a ladder manufacturing company who claimed his company had been hit with a $300,000 jury verdict in a suit by a man who fell off a ladder because he set it in a pile of manure. The business owner claimed the lawsuit alleged the company should have warned buyers of the dangers of setting ladders in dung. The real lawsuit had nothing to do with manure; the ladder had broken with less than 450 pounds on it, even though it had a safety rating that said it could support up to 1,000. Tedesco says the show never ran a correction.