Word: gm
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...network admits rigging a crash-and-burn of a GM truck...
...puff of smoke, it all might have turned out differently. Last week General Motors Corp. might still have been reeling from a $105.2 million jury verdict, awarded to an Atlanta couple whose son died when his GM truck exploded in a collision. NBC News might have been touting itself for having exposed the danger of GM's controversial "sidesaddle" gas tanks in a riveting Dateline NBC segment. Instead the network singed its reputation, and the car company won in the court of public opinion the safety battle it had lost in the courthouse...
Dateline's report on Nov. 17 featured 14 min. of balanced debate, capped by 57 seconds of crash footage that explosively showed how the gas tanks of certain old GM trucks could catch fire in a sideways collision. Following a tip, GM hired detectives, searched 22 junkyards for 18 hours, and found evidence to debunk almost every aspect of the crash sequence. Last week, in a devastating press conference, GM showed that the conflagration was rigged, its causes misattributed, its severity overstated and other facts distorted. Two crucial errors: NBC said the truck's gas tank had ruptured...
There was plenty of sarcastic speculation about what happened between Monday afternoon, when NBC was defiantly dismissing GM's charges, and Tuesday morning, when it drafted an abject apology largely on GM's terms. NBC News president Michael Gartner says he simply realized that he had goofed by speaking first and asking questions later: "The more I learned, the worse it got. Ultimately I was troubled by almost every aspect of the crash. I knew we had to apologize. We put 225,000 minutes of news on the air last year, and I didn't want to be defined...
...country," says Don McWhorter, president of Banc One in Columbus, Ohio. The Arkansan took office when cyclical trends were about to cause a long-overdue quickening of the recovery (which, in fact, began in the closing months of the Bush Administration). For example, despite the well-publicized losses at GM, IBM and Sears, corporate profits in general are soaring. Low interest rates have reduced the cost of paying off debt, and downsizing programs have made many companies more competitive. Says Hugh Johnson, financial strategist for the New York investment firm First Albany: "The stock market is telling you that with...