Detroit – No auto-safety scare is complete without journalistic malpractice.<\/p>\n
News reports on Toyota vehicles’ alleged sudden acceleration have routinely publicized tort-lawyer fantasies of “possessed” cars without investigating the underlying data. But ABC News – in the tradition of 60 Minutes (Audi) and Dateline NBC (GM) rigging cars to fail – tasked a tort stooge with sabotaging a Toyota in order to get the intended, shocking result.<\/p>\n
ABC reporter Brian Ross brought on “automotive expert” David Gilbert from Southern Illinois University to demonstrate an electronic glitch in a Toyota Avalon. What ABC did not explain is that Gilbert is a paid shill for trial lawyers. Specifically, he was paid for his investigation by notorious tort-lobby consultant Sean Kane’s Safety Research & Strategies, which is under contract with at least five law firms currently involved in Toyota litigation.<\/p>\n
By shorting together two normally independent throttle pedal sensors, Gilbert demonstrated that a Toyota Avalon throttle would go wide open regardless of the driver’s input. But, as the technically reliable Autoblog.com explains, this only proved “that Gilbert was able to create a fault condition that could never happen without human intervention. To imply otherwise is unethical on the part of both ABC and Mr. Gilbert.”<\/p>\n
As with global warming, the MSM has abandoned objective reporting on auto-safety issues. And as with global warming, a growing alternative media in talk radio, blogs, and opinion pages have assumed the role of hard reporting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Detroit – No auto-safety scare is complete without journalistic malpractice. News reports on Toyota vehicles’ alleged sudden acceleration have routinely publicized tort-lawyer fantasies of “possessed” cars without investigating the underlying data. But ABC News – in the tradition of 60 Minutes (Audi) and Dateline NBC (GM) rigging cars to fail – tasked a tort stooge […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4194"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4194"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4195,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4194\/revisions\/4195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}