Detroit \u2014 As we reported here two weeks ago, tort cronies at ABC and Congress have been using a trial lawyer-paid academic to claim that Toyota electronics are causing episodes of \u201cinstant acceleration.\u201d The MSM finally caught up to the news Monday \u2014 but not because they were curious. Toyota had to report it for them at a news conference.<\/P>
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Of course, Toyota\u2019s own paid engineers should not be taken as gospel truth either \u2014 except that their findings confirm those of independent studies (here and here).<\/P>
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The Toyota engineers found that the tort stooge, Prof. David Gilbert of Southern Illinois University\u2013Carbondale, had \u201cre-enacted\u201d Toyota\u2019s defect by stripping insulation from wires connecting the accelerator pedal to the throttle \u2014 then connecting them to nearby wires normally too far apart to touch. It\u2019s a procedure that can be duplicated on many vehicles.<\/P>
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\u201cDr. Gilbert\u2019s demonstration is not evidence of a design flaw or a safety risk,\u201d engineer Chris Gerdes of Stanford put it diplomatically. \u201cDr. Gilbert provides no evidence that his scenario occurs in the real world.\u201d That\u2019s sugarcoating it. What ABC did was fraudulent.<\/P>
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ABC reporter Brain Ross demonstrated \u201cinstant acceleration\u201d in a Toyota Avalon, reports Gawker.com, \u201cby splicing in staged footage to make it look scarier.\u201d Oh? Please go on.<\/P>
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\u201cOne of the things that makes it look scary,\u201d continues Gawker, \u201cis that when the acceleration occurs, Ross\u2019 piece cuts to a close-up shot of the Toyota\u2019s tachometer spiking up to 6,000 RPMs in the course of a second. But . . . the tachometer footage is faked.\u201d<\/P>
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Faked.<\/P>
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\u201cABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider confirmed to Gawker that the tachometer shot was indeed taken from the parked car and spliced into Ross\u2019 death ride.\u201d In other words, Ross took footage of a parked Toyota revving to 6,000 RPM \u2014 then falsely portrayed the shot as having occurred while he was driving the car. ABC insists this was necessary because the actual footage was too \u201cshaky.\u201d<\/P>
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As for Gilbert, the Wall Street Journal \u2014 in a typical dispatch \u2014 doesn\u2019t get around to informing its readers that he is a paid shill for the tort lobby until graph 16. Gee, maybe that should be in the lede?<\/P>
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After CBS\u2019s faked \u201crunaway acceleration\u201d in Audis in the \u201880s and NBC\u2019s rigged \u201cexploding gas tank\u201d GM pickups in 1992, you would think the MSM would learn. But today\u2019s left-wing journalists see themselves as watchdogs of industry, not government. As a result, they will even stoop to Ross\u2019s tricks to turn the public against a company. They are expensive tricks. An AP analysis estimates Toyota\u2019s legal costs could accelerate to $3 billion or more.<\/P>
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There is much hair-pulling these days about the loss of investigative resources as Big Media downsizes. But as the Toyota case (and Climategate) proves, the real investigative journalism is often being done by non-MSM sources.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Detroit \u2014 As we reported here two weeks ago, tort cronies at ABC and Congress have been using a trial lawyer-paid academic to claim that Toyota electronics are causing episodes of \u201cinstant acceleration.\u201d The MSM finally caught up to the news Monday \u2014 but not because they were curious. Toyota had to report it for […]<\/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\/4314"}],"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=4314"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4315,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4314\/revisions\/4315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}