Page 261 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

There are very powerful financial incentives for being ‘first’ and
for being extreme. . . . What you tend to see is these stories start
to grow . . . to take on a life of their own.”
That’s a sad commentary on the state of the news media
today—but there’s ample evidence of Anwyl’s point. ABC’s ma-
nipulation of footage in its Toyota story was reminiscent of CBS’s
alteration of an Audi and NBC’s packing of a GM pickup truck’s
tank with explosives. Indeed, the Los Angeles Times reporters were
finalists for the industry’s premier award, the Pulitzer Prize—
this despite the fact that based on our review of their coverage,
it seems that the reporters failed to ask basic questions about ve-
hicle mechanics, component design, and the incidence of sud-
den unintended acceleration (SUA) around the world and never
wrote a single story that actually investigated an alleged incident
in detail. Shoddy reporting has a real cost, and not just to the di-
rect victims, notes Anwyl: “In the United States, popular opinion
can create policy very easily. . . . If those opinions are ill formed,
that creates risk. Where media scrutiny becomes intense, does it
create the appropriate sort of actions?”
But it wasn’t only the news media that drove public atten-
tion to phantoms and rumors. The U.S. government, particularly
Congress, deserves its share of the blame. Journalist Ed Wallace
suggests that if Congress were serious about uncovering facts, it
would have interviewed real experts:*

Even in the hearings in Congress, it appeared that most
witnesses were tied to safety advocates, litigation attor-
neys, and traumatized victims; that’s like trying a case

* Ed Wallace, “The Toyota Witch Hunt”; http://www.businessweek.com/life
style/content/feb2010/bw20100225_403524_page_3.htm.

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