Presswatch /Keep On Truckin
Eastland, Terry
A ccording to consumer activists and plaintiffs trial lawyers, GM C/K pickup trucks have long tended to catch fire in side-impact collisions. So NBC News's "Dateline NBC" decided to "investigate."...
...concluded that unscientific demonstrations should have no place in hard news stories at NBC...
...Soon enough, Gartner resigned in disgrace and the network is now struggling to recover whatever is left of its reputation: "Dateline NBC" featured twoside-impact collisions...
...L et's review the segment from the top...
...Here is a classic case of what Lehigh University's Carole Gorney terms "litigation journalism...
...Stone Phillips and Jane Pauley's weak apology tries to excuse NBC for not telling viewers about the rocket engines underneath the trucks on the grounds that "consultants at the scene told us the devices did not start the fire...
...Gillen reports that Chrysler and Ford thought about putting the fuel tanks outside the frame rail but didn't do so because of the leakage potential...
...Gillen next turns for comment to Jim Butler, the lawyer representing the Moseleys...
...Or that's how it was supposed to work...
...She notes that more than a hundred Moseley-like lawsuits have been filed against GM, that most have been settled out of court, and that the terms of the settlements have been kept confidential, at GM's request...
...GM denies the trucks have any such "fatal flaw," she says, introducing the segment with this imperative: "Watch Michelle Gillen's investigation and you decide...
...This unscientific demonstration," the apology continued, "was not representative of an actual side-impact collision...
...But GM thought otherwise...
...Another bad vehicle, indeed a death-mobile...
...Gillen briefly presents GM's side of the story—by interviewing a GM official and a private attorney hired by GM—before voicing consumer groups' complaints that GM has failed to alert truck owners to the alleged defect...
...Gillen says that "Dateline NBC" hired the Institute for Safety Analysis to conduct the tests, and she interviews the institute's Bruce Enz...
...NBC President Michael Gartner publicly defended the segment as "fair and accurate" and accused GM of trying to divert attention from its problem trucks...
...Clearly believing GM guilty of making a bad product,,Gillen and the co-anchors discuss whether the trucks will be recalled...
...Gillen shows footage from these tapes, which GM released last fall...
...To describe this alleged flaw, Gillen interviews Byron Bloch, whom she identifies as a "safety expert" hired by families to testify in lawsuits against GM...
...They may have "a fatal flaw—a gas tank in the wrong place...
...The first statement was false, the second so incomplete as to be false...
...was NBC's heavy, unskeptical—and unacknowledged—reliance on a group of people who as a professional matter are either directly or indirectly involved in product liability litigation against companies like General Motors...
...NBC's contractor for the demos had strapped under the trucks incendiary devices (detonated by remote control) to guarantee a fire once gasoline spewed from the gas tank...
...But Michelle Gillen didn't tell viewers about this newfangled accessory (available only on models serviced by NBC), nor did she report that the gas cap for the truck in the crash that resulted in fire was the wrong cap for the truck's filler tube and that the tank itself was filled to overflowing—conditions that helped the cap come off and the gas to spill out when the crash occurred...
...What she does not say is that Bloch is trained in neither auto safety nor engineering...
...The 56 seconds of "unscientific demonstrations" were merely the most sensational part of the 15-minute segment, but hardly the only defective moments...
...Gillen ends her piece by returning to the Moseley case, raising the question of whether deaths such as Shannon Moseley's are not preventable...
...Waiting To Explode...
...Nonetheless, it is sobering to remember, as a GM spokesman put it to me, that very few other companies would have had the resources (at least $2 million in GM's case—which NBC is repaying) to defend themselves...
...This leads into the show's "unscientific aemonstrations...
...In its apology, NBC admitted as much and said the show should have informed viewers about the incendiary devices, theuse of which "was a bad idea from start to finish...
...She indicates that this individual, whom she says GM describes as a "disgruntled employee," now testifies against the pickup...
...Immediately there was fire, the flames licking up between the truck and the car...
...The program also scanted GM's side of the story...
...While this mother of two baby girls who died in a "pickup fire" cannot say how much she received in damages, she does discuss, tearfully, the crash-and-fire itself, a horrible event...
...That's our new policy...
...The Moseley case, which went to trial after the program was aired, saw the plaintiffs awarded more than $100 million, a judgment now on appeal...
...Oh, my...
...Private" in this case means Naderite...
...It was pure agony...
...Gillen did say: "At impact, a small hole was punctured in the tank" and the crash "forced gasoline to spew from the fuel cap...
...Gillen does not tell viewers that Enz is not an engineer and that he is a frequent expert witness against not only GM but also other auto makers...
...Jane Pauley chimes in to say there are now "serious questions whether the GM pickups should be recalled...
...While NBC's apology ended the lawsuit, it was in fact incomplete...
...Characteristically, lead prosecutor Gillen begins by retailing a heart-wrenching story that has led to a product liability lawsuit...
...She says GM repudiated the memo in 1983, calling such leaks "theoretical," yet decided that same year to reposition the fuel tank inside the frame rail, something not accomplished until 1988...
...As the Manhattan Institute's Walter Olson pointed out in the Washington Post, government statistics show that GM pickups actually have a good safety record...
...General Motors has performed an enormous public service...
...What little they are able to say makes them look, well, guilty...
...In a two-hour press conference on February 8, the auto maker set forth its findings and announced it was filing a defamation lawsuit against the network...
...Talk about transforming a story: Not GM's trucks but NBC's shoddy journalism now dominated the news...
...Indeed, such programs as NBC's help inspire new lawsuits and settle old ones on terms more favorable to the plaintiffs...
...Gillen then interviews a former GM engineer who used to defend the C/K pickup in court cases but says GM kept from him and the courts videotapes of crash tests of the truck done between 1981 and 1984, which show fuel tank leakage...
...The GM official denies to Gillen that GM would ever do anything it thought was dangerous...
...Shannon Moseley was a 17-year-old high-schooler who died when his new GM pickup—a gift from his parents—was hit on the side by a drunk driver...
...GM's explanation, as Gillen reports it: so it could offer a truck carrying more fuel...
...Or so the viewer might have thought...
...In exploding "Waiting to Explode...
...Why, Gillen asks, did GM put the fuel tank outside the frame rail...
...was the title of its infamous 15-minute "news feature" that ran last November 17...
...But the very next day, "Dateline" c6-anchors Stone Phillips and Jane Pauley came on to read one of the most remarkable apologies in the history of American journalism...
...Alas, NBC is willing to defend all but those 56 seconds, for the apology also announced: "We believe we presented in the balance of the segment all sides of the controversy over the safety of the GM trucks...
...T he most conspicuous defect of "Waiting to Explode...
...She neglects to identify Butler as a well-known plaintiffs' lawyer who works on a contingency basis...
...Gillen also interviews Clarence Ditlow, whom she identifies as the executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, "a private consumer watchdog group...
...And bear in mind that some juries have not found for the plaintiffs in GM pickup truck cases...
...could never have been "balanced"—unless the issue had been presented dryly and without drama, an impossibility for ratings-driven television...
...Observe that the "top safety experts" are pitted against an auto manufacturer defendant, and that you the viewer are invited to sit as juror, with NBC acting as district attorney...
...Not so the explanations offered by defendants, who, unlike the plaintiffs, must watch what they say lest it be used against them in court...
...171...
...Gillen then interviews one plaintiff whose case has been settled...
...Gillen interviews a GM official, who attributes the fire in such crashes to reasons other than fuel-tanklocation, such as substance abuse...
...And here is a dispute worth resolving: Enz and Bloch told NBC that the filament of a broken headlight caused the fire, but Automotive News reports that GM scientists, after viewing the crash video in super–slow motion, believe the fire started near the rockets...
...the second collision caused no fire...
...Stone Phillips advises that certain pickup trucks made by GM may not be as "rough and rugged" as people think...
...In fact, these "consultants"—Enz and Bloch—would have had an interest in keeping the public unaware of the incendiary devices, so as not to diminish the credibility of the crash testing...
...He was burning alive," the police officer who was on the scene of the accident tells Gillen...
...Televised stories about little-guy victims necessarily evoke sympathy...
...And: "We have...
...These people stand to make a lot of money from such lawsuits—as litigators, researchers, and expert witnesses...
...In what correspondent Michelle Gillen described as an "unscientific demonstration" conducted by "outside experts" in a field near Indianapolis, Indiana, a car was shown smashing into the side of a 1977 GM truck...
...Gillen in turn says that Moseley's parents did not know when they bought the truck what (they claim in their lawsuit) GM did know—that people were burning to death in the pickups because of "an alleged design flaw," namely, the location of the gas tank outside the frame rail of the truck, as opposed to inside it...
...Top safety experts" attribute more than 300 deaths to this defect...
...Gillen also interviews Butler, the Moseleys' lawyer, who says GM made the truck that way so that it could sell more trucks: you can have a bigger fuel tank outside the frame rail than inside it...
...such lawyers often net a third or more of huge damage awards...
...Ditlow says the pickups need to be recalled...
...Of course, there is an important sense in which "Waiting To Explode...
...Her lawyer tells Gillen that everyone would have survived had there been no fire...
...She then reports on a 1978 GM memo from a safety engineer who said that moving the fuel tank inside the frame might eliminate potential gasoline leakage resulting from a collision...
Vol. 26 • May 1993 • No. 5
