A federal jury in Manhattan heard charges about fiction masquerading as fact on Monday, at the opening of a trial in which HBO faces libel claims over a report on child labour in India.
The trial is the culmination of years of litigation over the report on "Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel," which first aired in September 2008.
The report accused British sporting goods company Mitre Sports International of turning a blind eye to the use by contractors or subcontractors of underaged workers for the production of Mitre-branded footballs in India.
In his opening statements Lloyd Constantine, a lawyer for Mitre, said the evidence would show that children depicted in the report as stitching Mitre footballs for 5 cents per hour or less were induced to pretend on camera that they were child labourers.
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Gumbel's Real Sports programme "is supposed to report real news, not fiction," Constantine told the jury, as he went over segments of the report that he described as "concocted" or "flat-out lies."
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Mitre, which is owned by the London-based Pentland Group, has called the report a "hoax" and a "hatchet job," aimed at tarnishing the reputation of a company at the forefront of global efforts to eradicate child labour.
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The premium channel is better known for entertainment than news. But HBO also has a reputation for producing top-notch news documentaries and that reputation could take a hit if it is found guilty of "staging" any part of a news report.
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U.S. District Judge George Daniels said during jury selection early on Monday that the trial was expected to take up to four weeks.
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© Thomson Reuters 2015
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