GM’s Safety Scandal & Coverup Ignored By Corrupt Media – Even After GM Cars Killed At Least 13 People

Why is the corrupt media in the United States completely ignoring the safety scandal and coverup by automaker GM that has caused the death of at least 13 people, and the recall of 2.6 million vehicles?

The answer is because of the next election, which Democrats are slated to lose very badly.

Obama and the Democrats completely own GM (Government Motors) and all of it’s problems, and if GM cars are killing people, the backlash could start to come back to hurt Obama and the Democrats.

The bottom line is that people died because GM’s failure to fix what amounted to a 57-cent problem in their cars, but GM was more interested in saving the few pennies than saving people’s lives.

The corrupt media arm of the Obama administration seems to have decided that reporting about the GM negligence, which allowed their cars to kill people, may negatively affect their savior, and would further harm Democrats in the next election.

The General Motors safety debacle is about everything that’s wrong with Washington.

And yet somehow it hasn’t caught the imagination of television news.

Apparently, at least 13 people dying from a car defect that was covered up by a giant American automaker and has led to a recall of 2.6 million vehicles doesn’t hold a candle compared to, say, a missing Malaysian airliner.

But the federal government is complicit is more ways than one.

GM, you’ll recall, had to be rescued by the taxpayers in 2009, and the federal stake was so large that the company was dubbed Government Motors when it went through bankruptcy. But bankruptcy rules require a disclosure of all liabilities as well as assets. By hiding the defect in its cars, GM may have committed bankruptcy fraud.

Beyond that, the utter failure of the National Highway Transportation Safety Agency to crack down on the defective ignition switch is an embarrassing failure. But regulatory agencies are a journalistic backwater, drawing a fraction of the coverage lavished on the White House, Congress and politics.

Even so, with GM’s CEO and the acting NHTSA chief scheduled to be hauled before a Hill committee today, you’d think there would be a drumbeat on the air. Yet if there have been many great cable segments on the subject, I’ve missed them.

My theory is that in a television culture that thrives on heroes and villains, it’s hard to know who to blame.

You can’t single out President Obama because the government’s failure to act stretches back to the Bush administration, so it doesn’t make for a left/right slugfest.

You can’t fault Mary Barra, the new GM boss, because she didn’t know about the cavalier disregard for safety until she was promoted into the top job.

You most certainly can blame a Beltway culture of coziness between the regulators and the regulated—but that’s an old story and perhaps too abstract.

Let’s drill down here with the help of the New York Times, which has done consistently strong reporting on the subject.

What’s the NHTSA track record?

“Federal regulators decided not to open an inquiry on the ignitions of Chevrolet Cobalts and other cars even after their own investigators reported in 2007 that they knew of four fatal crashes, 29 complaints and 14 other reports that showed the problem disabled air bags, according to a memo released by a House subcommittee on Sunday.

“Then in 2010, the safety agency came to the same decision after receiving more reports that air bags were not deploying.”

Now we get to the mutual back-scratching that corrodes each administration. Many former top NHTSA officials “now represent companies they were once responsible for regulating, part of a well-established migration from regulator to the regulated in Washington…

“When David J. Friedman, acting administrator of the highway safety agency, testifies before House and Senate panels on Tuesday and Wednesday, a central question will be why the agency failed to push for a recall.

“To critics, the agency’s failure to act is another example of how it is not as effective as it could be. One reason often cited is a shortage of investigators. Another is that former agency employees join law firms and help defend automakers and other companies being regulated.”

Why be too aggressive in your job if there’s a bigger payday looming when you leave the government? Some people may die in the process, but hey, that’s the cost of capitalism.

And maybe we shouldn’t let Mary Barra off the hook so easily. She got a ton of good press when she became GM’s first female chief executive after working her way through the ranks for decades. Then came her first major test.

“Only weeks into her tenure as chief executive of General Motors, Mary T. Barra has been increasingly consumed by a crisis over the recall of 1.6 million defective cars linked to 13 deaths.

“Ms. Barra, a trained engineer and an employee at G.M. for more than 30 years, learned of the defect on Jan. 31 — the first time, the company said, that any senior executive had been told of the problem since it surfaced more than a decade ago.

“She has remained publicly silent on the issue and has declined all requests for interviews.”

In other words, she refused to put herself out there and deal with the media scrutiny in what will likely be her worst crisis, apologizing to GM customers in recorded videos. After learning of the problem on Jan. 31, she finally held a news conference two weeks ago.

So Mary Barra initially didn’t step up. The government didn’t step up.

It’s time for the media, at least, to do their job.

Stand Up To Government Corruption and Hypocrisy – usbacklash.org