A ba apples excuse or few bad apples excuse is a rhetorical attempt to spin misdeeds within a group as isolated to a "few bad apples". The term has been applied to excuses for corporate fraud in the wake of the Enron scandal , for the Abu Ghraib torture and prison abuse case, the Chicago Police Department's response to off-duty officer Anthony Abatte's videotaped beating of a bartender and in a hypothetical sense involving projections about organizational accountability. The term became popular soon after the airing of a Canadian broadcast from the CBC's Fifth Estate television series called "A Few Bad Apples". According to Michael Ignatieff, "The Few Bad Apples excuse is institutions' invariable first response to moral failure and it’s the wrong response."