When Dateline Rigged a Pickup Truck to Burn and Then Apologized on Air

There is a rule of thumb in television that goes like this: when the crash test will not catch fire on its own, do not install a rocket. I say it as a joke, and I wish I did not have to say it as a history. In November 1992 a national news program set out to prove that a certain pickup truck could burst into flames when hit from the side, and when the truck declined to burst, the producers gave it a little help. A few months later, the network that aired the segment read an apology on live television, and the executive who ran its news division was gone within weeks.

It is a good story for a lot of reasons. It is funny in the way a train wreck is funny. It is a business story, about what happens to a company when a network decides it is a villain. And it is a lesson in the difference between two kinds of media failure that get lumped together and should not be: getting a fact wrong, and faking the evidence.

The segment

On November 17, 1992, the NBC newsmagazine Dateline NBC broadcast a report called "Waiting to Explode," anchored by Jane Pauley and Stone Phillips. Its subject was General Motors pickup trucks of the 1970s and 1980s, the C/K series, which carried their fuel tanks outside the frame rails, along the sides of the truck bed. Critics, including safety advocates and lawyers who had sued the company, argued that the position of those "side-saddle" tanks made the trucks vulnerable in side collisions. This was not an invented controversy. The trucks had been the subject of lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny for years, and people had died in crashes involving them.

The centrepiece of the segment was a crash test. Footage showed a truck being struck from the side by another vehicle and then erupting in flames, which seemed to prove the case. The segment told viewers that GM trucks were prone to catastrophic fires, and the pictures made the claim feel like a demonstration, not an opinion.

That is the power of television, and the reason I am going to spend time on it. A picture does not feel like an argument. It feels like the thing itself. When a reader sees a paragraph that says a truck can catch fire, the reader knows someone is claiming it. When a viewer sees a truck catch fire, the viewer sees it with his own eyes. A faked image does not present itself as a claim. It presents itself as reality.

How the truth came out

Here is where the story turns. General Motors did what a large company with a lot at stake does: it went looking for what had really happened. Its investigators tracked down the vehicles used in the test and examined them. They found something that was not supposed to be there. Attached near the fuel tank of the test truck were model-rocket engines taped to the truck, there to ignite a fire if the simulated crash did not. The program's test had not simply recorded a fire. It had helped produce it.

There were other problems. GM said that the fuel cap on the test truck had not been fitted properly and that the tank had been filled in a way that would exaggerate spillage in a collision. The consultants NBC had used were not neutral laboratory technicians: they were people who worked with attorneys suing the company. None of that proved that GM's trucks were safe, and I want to be clear about that. It proved something else: that the demonstration the public saw was not an honest sample of what a side-impact collision does to one of these trucks.

On February 8, 1993, GM held a news conference in Detroit and laid out its case, with video and photographs, accusing NBC of staging the test. The company also filed a defamation suit. The next day, on February 9, 1993, the broadcast itself reversed course. Stone Phillips and Jane Pauley read a statement on the air in which NBC acknowledged that the test had used incendiary devices, that this was not disclosed to viewers, and that it should not have happened. The network apologised to its viewers and to GM, agreed to reimburse GM for the cost of its investigation, and the suit was settled.

In the first week of March 1993, the president of NBC News, Michael Gartner, resigned. The program's executive producer also left, according to the reports at the time, and other staff were dismissed or reassigned. The network had acknowledged the failure and paid a price in careers, and I will give it credit for that. The apology was prompt once the evidence was undeniable.

Two kinds of failure

Now I want to pull the camera back and make a distinction that I think is the most useful thing in this whole story. When people complain about media failures, they tend to pile everything into one heap marked "bias" or "fake news." That heap hides what matters. There are at least two very different failures here, and the second is more serious.

The first failure is a wrong fact. A reporter says a bridge was built in 1952 and it was built in 1954. A reporter reads a source's number wrong. A reporter relies on a person who turns out to be mistaken. This happens to everyone, in every line of work, and the remedy is a correction. The measure of a good outlet is how quickly and plainly it corrects.

The second failure is a staged picture. A producer arranges the event so that the camera captures what the producer wanted it to capture, and then presents it as what happened. This is not a mistake. It is a manufacture. It involves a decision, made by a person who knew what was going on, to put something false in front of the viewer in the form of evidence.

Why is the second worse? There are five reasons, which I will count.

1. It is deliberate. A wrong fact can be innocent. A rigged demonstration cannot be accidental, because someone has to attach the rocket.
2. It bypasses the viewer's defences. A reader can question a claim. A viewer cannot easily question a film of an event, because the film looks like observation.
3. It contaminates the true part. Because the truck's design was a legitimate subject, the staging did harm to the case against the truck's real flaws. If safety advocates were right, the fake test made it easier for GM to dismiss all of it. A lie in the service of a good cause hurts the cause.
4. It poisons the next honest piece. Every faked demonstration teaches the viewer to doubt demonstrations. The next real crash test, in the next honest report, will be met with a shrug.
5. It shows a culture, not an accident. Someone had to approve the idea. Others had to go along with it. A newsroom in which that happens has a problem with its incentives: a need for a good picture that outweighs a need for a true one.

None of this, I should add, is an argument against re-enactments, which are legitimate when they are labelled. A documentary that says "this is a re-creation" is giving the viewer what the viewer needs to know. The failure in 1992 was concealment. The viewer was told, in effect, "this is what happened," and it was not.

The business of it

There is a layer here that the people who study the media business like to point out, and it deserves a sentence. A newsmagazine has to fill an hour, week after week, with segments that command attention. The most attention comes from conflict, and the best conflict has a villain, preferably a large corporation, and a visual that proves the villain's guilt. The format rewards drama. A report that says "the evidence on this truck is mixed" is less likely to run than one that shows a truck exploding. Combine a ratings incentive with an anti-corporate template, and the pressure to find the exploding truck is intense.

That is not an accusation against the individuals. It is an observation about incentives, and incentives are how institutions get things wrong without anyone intending to. It is the same observation I would make about any newsroom, on the left or the right. The format of the exposé, with its hero reporter and its corporate villain, is a story template just as the one in The Duke Lacrosse Case and the Rush to a Verdict the Facts Never Supported was. When the facts do not cooperate with the template, there is a temptation to help them.

The business lesson also cuts the other way. General Motors was a very large company, and it won because it did the thing any wronged party in a free society should do: it gathered evidence and published it. It did not ask the government to shut the program down. It did not ask for a regulation. It put its video on the screen at a news conference, and the facts did the rest. The market in information corrected the error within three months. That is more than most other mistakes in public life can say.

A word on libel law

GM filed a defamation suit, and it is worth thinking for a moment about how the law treats such cases. Since New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964, a public official who sues for libel has to show that the statement was made with "actual malice," meaning knowledge that it was false or reckless disregard for whether it was false, and the Court later extended similar protection to public figures. A large corporation is not an official, but the standards in such cases still matter, and the rules for corporations in defamation cases vary. I will not wade into the doctrinal weeds. The point is that a rigged test is the textbook case of knowledge: a producer who attaches an igniter knows what he is doing. A case about a staged event does not turn on a hard argument about what the defendant knew. It turns on a rocket.

That is part of why the matter ended in a settlement and an apology, not a long trial. When the evidence of deliberate staging is physical and photographed, the defence is mostly a matter of how large a check to write.

The steelman and the answer

A defender of the segment would say the following. The underlying concern was real. People had been burned in side-impact crashes involving these trucks. A public-interest report is not invalidated because one part of the demonstration was flawed, and an apology to a very large company should not make us forget that the company itself was under scrutiny from regulators and juries. The producers, the defenders say, were trying to illustrate a hazard that had been documented in other ways.

That is partly true, and it is the best argument for the report's goals. I would add that the public interest in the trucks' safety was never in doubt, and that scrutiny of a manufacturer is part of what a free press is for. Nothing in this post says otherwise.

But the argument fails at one point. If the hazard were as clear as the producers believed, they did not need a rocket. The honest report would have shown the real evidence, the accident records, the documents, the testimony, and let it speak. The decision to stage the demonstration was an admission that the real evidence did not look as dramatic as the story demanded. You do not fake what you can show. And once you have faked one thing, the audience has no way to know what else in your report is real.

The Founding yardstick

The Founders understood that liberty depends on the quality of public information, and they understood that a free press carries the burden of earning belief. The Founding generation's case for press freedom was never a case for a press that could fabricate. It was a case that truth must be permitted to circulate and falsehood must be answered. The tradition that came out of the Zenger case, in which a New York jury in 1735 acquitted a printer who published criticism of a governor, held that truth was a defence. See John Peter Zenger and the Jury That Defended American Press Freedom in 1735. The point of that tradition is that truth is the thing being protected. A rigged demonstration is the opposite of the thing the First Amendment protects. It is a falsehood dressed as a fact.

The commandment says you shall not bear false witness, and a broadcast is witness on an enormous scale. A network with the reach of NBC bears more responsibility than any one citizen for the accuracy of what it presents as seen with its own eyes.

What a viewer can do

You are not powerless in the face of this. Here is a short list.

• Ask what the picture shows and what it does not. A single test is an anecdote in the form of a film. How many tests were run? What did the others show?
• Look for the disclosure. Responsible outlets tell you when a scene is a re-creation, a reconstruction or a simulation. Silence is a warning.
• Distrust the perfect visual. Real events are messy, and a demonstration that goes exactly as the argument requires deserves a second look.
• Watch for the response. An outlet that checks its own work, as the 1993 apology eventually showed, deserves more credit than one that stonewalls; see The Corrections Page Is the Most Honest Part of the Paper, So Read It.
• Treat a faked image as a different offence from a wrong fact. Trust is recoverable after the second kind much more easily than after the first.

For more on how the business of news shapes what gets aired, see Why Fox News in 1996 Proved There Was an Audience Nobody Was Serving, and for another case of a network trusting a prop, see The Night a Network Bet Its Reputation on Memos Typed Like a Word File. The media watch page is where to follow a story's changes.

The case in brief

1. On November 17, 1992, NBC's Dateline aired a crash test of a GM pickup that appeared to prove the trucks burst into flames, though incendiary devices had been used to help start the fire and the use was not disclosed.
2. GM investigated, held a news conference on February 8, 1993, and filed suit; on February 9 the program apologised on air, the suit was settled, and the head of NBC News resigned in March.
3. A wrong fact is an error that a correction repairs; a staged picture is a deliberate manufacture that bypasses the viewer's defences and discredits the honest part of the case.
4. The format of the corporate exposé, which rewards a villain and a visual, creates pressure to help the facts along, and the cure is disclosure, not regulation.
5. GM's remedy was to produce evidence and publish it, which is how a free society corrects a falsehood.

What you can do: the next time a news report shows a dramatic demonstration, look for the sentence that says how it was produced, and if there is none, ask the outlet by email or comment what it was.