A Brief History
On February 8, 1993, General Motors Corporation announced a lawsuit against NBC’s Dateline “news” show for falsely portraying Chevrolet pickup trucks as fire hazards!
Digging Deepr
Digging deeper, we find the announcement accompanied by a 2+ hour rebuttal to the November 1992 show where Dateline showed Chevrolet trucks exploding from side impacts.
It turns out, however, that Dateline could not get the trucks to burst into flame by broadsiding them with another vehicle, so they used explosives to make their “news” happen! The show generated much disgust and hatred toward General Motors and encouraged lawsuits against them, although sharp-eyed viewers could see that the Chevrolet truck exploded before it was hit!
NBC settled the lawsuit the next day, which ought to be a clue as to just how guilty they were! Dateline has since run into more allegations of unscrupulous journalism, and other egregious examples of unethical reporting in the press are not uncommon.
The CBS show 60 Minutes purported to have evidence of an Audi automobile experiencing sudden acceleration. It later turned out, however, that the car had been modified and rigged to accelerate on its own. Still, sales of Audi’s products plummeted!
The harm unscrupulous “news” organizations do is not limited to commercial sales. Another shameful excuse for reporting took place when 60 Minutes edited an interview with the commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps out of context to make him appear to be racist.
A more recent example took place when the George Zimmerman shooting of Trayvon Martin story broke, and NBC rearranged the 911 tapes to make it sound like Zimmerman had not been obeying the police dispatcher. Incredibly, the media also saw fit to enrage the public by showing altered video and photographs of Zimmerman with the bloody wounds to his head removed to make him look uninjured! Did this purposeful incitement of the public force a trial that prosecutors could not hope to win, wasting millions of dollars of tax money and ruining Zimmerman financially?
A really heinous example of unethical and even illegal activities by journalists became public when the story that the British News of the World and its sister companies had been hacking telephones and computers to spy on royal family members and celebrities. News tycoon Rupert Murdoch has escaped (for now) criminal conviction, and it appears Piers Morgan (of America’s Got Talent and of his own CNN interview show), who was an editor for News of the World, also escaped prosecution.
How many other times has the public been manipulated by major media? Perhaps we will never know the extent. We do know of at least one more atrocious wrongdoing of the free press, and that concerns the phone of a kidnapped and murdered girl. A journalist employed by Murdoch’s news empire hacked that phone and kept emptying the voicemail queue so that the media could keep receiving new messages from the police, causing the police to wrongly believe the victim was still in possession of her phone!
Question for students (and subscribers): Have you ever owned a General Motors vehicle? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more on the history of General Motors, see…
Davis, Michael W R. General Motors: A Photographic History. Arcadia Publishing Library Editions, 1999.
Jacobs, Timothy. A History of General Motors. Smithmark Pub, 1992.
