Instapundit quotes LA Times Tim Rutton...

Instapundit posted a link to LA Times media guy Tim Rutton who wrote this:



"The Los Angeles Times had its Staples Center scandal; the Washington Post Janet Cooke's fabricated Pulitzer Prize-winner; the New York Times had Jayson Blair; and USA Today, Jack Kelley. In each instance, the organization immediately and exhaustively investigated what had gone wrong and put the findings in their entirety before their readers. CNN did precisely the same thing after its so-called Tailwind scandal, as did NBC in 1992, when its "Dateline" newsmagazine was caught broadcasting staged events."



No NBC's Dateline did not come close to "immediately and exhaustively investigated what had gone wrong and put the findings in their entirety before their readers" (viewers in NBC's case)



The deal was NBC loaded GM trucks with explosives and then filmed them, showed them going boom on Dateline, and claimed that GM trucks had unsafe gas tanks. Except they didn't. And NBC got caught, but of course they didn't want to admit it...from my long and winding post below:



"No mention was made of the fact that NBC had attached toy-rocket engines to the truck's fuel tank and then detonated the rockets by remote control at the moment of impact. Nevertheless, even when this fact became known, Michael Gartner, president of NBC at the time, said: "The segment that was broadcast on 'Dateline' NBC was fair and accurate." Harold Pearce, GM's executive vice-president and general counsel, didn't think so. He called the NBC program "outrageous misrepresentation and conscious deception."





"The truth about the fake news came about due to the investigative journalism of Pete W. Pesterre, editor of Popular Hot Rodding magazine, and GM itself. For reasons unrelated to the faking of the story, Pesterre had criticized the "Dateline" show in an editorial. A reader called him and told him of a firefighter, fire chief Glen R. Bailey Jr., who was at the scene and thought the test was rigged. GM hired its own investigators who asked NBC to let them look at the trucks used in the tests. NBC refused. The investigators checked 22 junkyards before they found the trucks, but the fuel tanks were missing."



more below if you're so inclined...