But for a 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, yet an X ray showed it hadn't; NBC consultants set off explosive miniature rockets beneath the truck split seconds before the crash -- yet no one told the viewers.
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 by those 57 seconds." Gartner also faced nonjournalistic pressures. GM's top management had sent word it would sue via the top management of NBC's parent company, General Electric, a big GM supplier.
Dateline co-anchor Jane Pauley, who shared the awkward duty of apologizing on air, told the staff in a pep talk the next day that she took "perverse pride" in the readiness to admit failings. But most journalists and, for that matter, most news consumers seemed to agree with former NBC News president Reuven Frank, who said, "This is the worst black eye NBC News has suffered in my experience, which goes back to 1950."
How could NBC go so far wrong? One veteran correspondent was not surprised. "The whole atmosphere" has been so competitive and overeager, he said, that the network was "an accident waiting to happen." More details may emerge from NBC's investigation, but it is already clear that employees fell into some familiar traps:
1. CHOOSE A SEXY TOPIC AND SELL IT SEXILY. Video newsmagazines are proliferating because they are cheaper, and thus more profitable, than comedy or drama. But to beat the tabloid "news" and talk shows, network magazines increasingly concentrate on crime, celebrities and scandals -- and on graphic visual imagery. Gartner says NBC would have had a perfectly sound, valid and sensible 14-min. story about the controversy without a crash. But the producers felt the story would be stronger with one.