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Comment by Cyberdog | Hacker News Reader

Ha! I sort of remember NBC's hit piece of the late 70s Chevy pickup with side saddle tanks. We owned one of those. Didn't they use a flare or something because it wouldn't ignite otherwise?

It was a model rocket engine that was ignited by the film crew just before impact to ensure that any spilled fuel caught fire. Which it did because they overfilled the tank and used the wrong gas cap for that model year truck. Apology starts around 1:40

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADOwKSal17I

There was a hit piece on a Suzuki I think (anyway second tier Japanese car) some years back[1] and the journalists (actually Consumer Reports of all people) thought the high(er) center of gravity would make it too easy to roll over, but they had a hard time getting it to roll over anyway. So they made it tip and put out the hit piece. (any they made their data fit their presumption)

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_Motor_Corp._v._Consumer....

Sounds like CR wanted to see it fail the tip test because they knew it had a tendency to do exactly that, one of their own staff members experienced it while testing. And Suzuki knew it had a tendency to roll, they documented that internally and settled a number of lawsuits about it.

Definitely not a good look for CR to try and put their finger on the scale like that. And not a good look for Suzuki to make a narrow top-heavy vehicle and then foist it on amateur drivers.

That would have been before my time. The first big instance that I can remember is the Killian Memos controversy during the Dubya administration, where Dan Rather wanted us to believe a document written in a proportional serif font with ligatures and superscripts which happened to match up to Microsoft Word's default typeface at the time was in fact typed on a typewriter in the early '70s.

> Killian Memos

I had never heard of that. Going out on a limb, it is one of those controversies (which still happen all the time today) which is particularly interesting depending on your partisan viewpoint.

It may be 100% valid. But these days it's tough to know what is legitimate malfeasance and what has been hyped up because it's a good way to malign one's political opponents.

Oh, it was 0% valid, and anyone who knows anything about how typewriters work (which you would think Rather, as someone styling himself as an old-school journalist, would know) could tell you in an instant. A partisan viewpoint is exactly the problem here - if you hated Dubya enough, as Rather and the others at CBS apparently did, you were able to punt logic to the curb and believe the story they wanted to believe.

But even if you were ideologically opposed to Bush, this should have been interesting to you too as an example of something not to do. Why not report on the stuff that actually happened and was backed by evidence that wasn't easily-debunkable? Plenty of not-so-flattering things happened during the Bush Jr administration… starting with an unwinnable war in which military contractors made out like bandits.

But I think the yet-still-ongoing three-ring media circus around the Trump administration proved the press learned nothing from this. Oh well. So long as the people instead learn that the press is just as ideologically-driven as anyone - more so, even.

My understanding is that other news organization were furious about CBS's mishandling of the story. There was plenty else about Dubya's actions at the time to report on but when the Killian papers were quickly debunked it pretty much tainted the broader topic as a Bush controversy.

CBS did some investigation but they clearly didn't try very hard to falsify the documents.

Yep. First case of "fake news" being exposed that I distinctly remember.

In which country ? Last i looked they all do that. It increases revenue.

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