Fine for TV3 show over cafe mix-up

Jackie Wilkinson and Rod Williams may take <i>Target</i> to court. Photo / Greg Bowker

The makers of TV3 show Target may face court action after falsely accusing a cafe of selling food with a high faecal coliform reading.

The Broadcasting Standards Authority yesterday fined TV3 broadcaster TVWorks $10,000 and ordered it to pay legal costs of $28,068.75 to Ponsonby's Cafe Cezanne following the error in June last year.

The cafe owners say that will not bring back customers who were put off by the mistaken report.

Jackie Wilkinson, who owns the cafe with her husband Rod Williams, said they were considering legal action. "What happened to us was horrendous and the effect on business was huge. This will go some way to repairing our reputation."

She said that while many of the cafe regulars had come back, the potential new customers needed to keep the business thriving had been lost.

The mistake happened after an employee of the consumer affairs show mislabelled chicken sandwich samples taken for an undercover camera segment - looking at the hygiene standards of Auckland cafes - and another employee failed to check them.

Executive producer Laurie Clarke, of production company Top Shelf, said the company would abide by the decision, although it had already broadcast two apologies.

The authority criticised an apology a week after the original broadcast for implying that, despite the mix-up, there was a chance the contaminated sample was from Cafe Cezanne.

"Due to a human error by a former Target staff member coding the results, we cannot confirm which cafe produced this high faecal coliform count," said the apology.

The BSA said by this time Top Shelf had been handed two receipts proving unequivocally that the cafe was not the culprit.

Till and laboratory receipts showed the sample could not have come from Cezanne because the sandwich was purchased there on a different day.

Mr Clarke said Top Shelf "absolutely did not know" at the time of the first apology that the sample was definitely not from Cezanne. The company made a second apology in March, completely clearing the cafe.

The authority ruled that was not enough and ordered TV3 to broadcast another apology and a summary of the BSA's decision on Target and publicise the decision on radio stations and in a newspaper advertisement.

It said the company should have realised something was wrong even before the original item was broadcast.

"The authority cannot emphasise enough how serious this is.

"A damaging report of a small business was broadcast not only as a result of a significant breakdown in Target's processes but also because the producers of the programme apparently refused to properly consider information supplied by the complainants in the days immediately prior to the broadcast.

"Even a cursory examination of the information available to the production company would have highlighted that something was seriously wrong," said the ruling.

Mr Clarke said the company had reviewed its procedures to make sure the error was not repeated. Top Shelf would have to pay the fines for TV3, he said.