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W. Schneider, the news station's senior vice president, said in a brief statement Thursday. "We will contest it vigorously."
• Webb expressed confidence Thursday that the company would win. The lawsuit filed in a Union County Court in South Dakota cites network reports that said the product was made with "low grade" meat, including "scraps" and "waste." ABC News also allegedly said the beef was made from connective animal tissue, when, in fact, it's made from muscle, according to the lawsuit.
• Company officials have long insisted that the product is safe and healthy, and blamed the closure of three plants and roughly 700 layoffs on what they viewed as a smear campaign.
• The lean, textured beef trimmings were the subject of many media reports earlier this year, and also have drawn comments from television chefs and food commentators. This year's social media uproar prompted Beef Products to suspend operations at plants in Amarillo, Texas; Garden City, Kan.; and Waterloo, Iowa. Beef Products' plants in Iowa and Kansas each produced about 350,000 pounds of lean, finely textured beef per day, while the one in Texas produced about 200,000 pounds a day.
• Nick Roth, director of engineering for BPI, said the company is "absolutely dedicated to rebuilding," but he conceded that it's going to be hard to get back to where they were before the controversy. Company officials said there are no plans to file for bankruptcy at this time.
• "The U.S. places great importance on free speech and the value of open public debate," Hamilton said. "A jury may have a very difficult time finding the news stories involved here were defamatory, or that there was any intent to harm the company."
• South Dakota is one of 13 states that have enacted a food-disparagement law, but there's virtually no history of the laws being used in lawsuits, said Neil Hamilton, a Drake University professor and director of the Agricultural Law Center in Des Moines, Iowa.
• Food-disparagement laws are also in place in Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas. Hamilton said the most recent state to approve a law was North Dakota in 1998, and the issue has since received little attention.
• One of the most high-profile cases involved Oprah Winfrey, who was sued in 1998 by a group of Texas ranchers for a show in which she swore off eating hamburgers because of mad cow disease. The Texas law forbids false and disparaging remarks about agricultural products. A jury eventually sided with Winfrey and another defendant, animal welfare activist Howard Lyman.

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