Why I don't pay a lot of attention to news stories, on the internet and other places.

[Bronzeage]

This story and several dozen duplicates were on the internet yesterday.

GM orders halt to Chevy Cruze deliveries, won't say why

GM has ordered all dealers to hold their Cruze vehicles on the lot until a safety related repair. This is standard procedure and it's actually required by Federal law. The mystery is why, but a better question is, why the sinister headline.

From the article:

"I have no details," GM spokesman Alan Adler said. "I'm sure somebody knows" why the order was issued, but neither he nor other GM spokesmen would provide further information.

I found this strange, because I know why. It took me a few minutes to find that

"General Motors is announcing Safety Recall 14079 today. Please see the attached bulletin for details." This was yesterday.

The bulletin is not very exciting.

General Motors has decided that a defect which relates to motor vehicle safety exists in some
2013-2014 model year Chevrolet Cruze vehicles, equipped with a 1.4L turbo engine (LUV). The
interconnecting tubular bar on the front right axle half shaft on some of these vehicles may not
meet GM specification and could fracture and separate...

This information was to be found in the inbox of every GM dealership's service department, Friday morning. It gives all the details, including:

Dealers are to service all vehicles subject to this recall at no charge to customers, regardless of
mileage, age of vehicle, or ownership, from this time forward.

Customers who have recently purchased vehicles sold from your vehicle inventory, and for which
there is no customer information indicated on the dealer listing, are to be contacted by the dealer.
Arrangements are to be made to make the required correction according to the instructions.

Some news stories claimed vehicles already sold would not be covered by the recall.

It all leaves me to wonder, if a guy in Baton Rouge can find all this on a Friday night, why can't USA today? They had all day.

 

[Zeluvia]

Curious. Why did the GM spokesman not know about it? Or at least be able to take a few minutes to look it up and call the reporter back. So, the GM spokesman brushed off the reporter, who then made it sinister in payback?

bleh. A lot of news sucks like this lately though, and internet searching for more truthiness is fun

 

[Bronzeage]

The most likely answer is that this particular recall is an ordinary safety recall, of which there are many issued in a year. It was identified in house and dealt with by standard GM procedures. No one in the engineering department thought it was particularly newsworthy.

I think you are right about the spokesman. It's Friday and he wants to get out early. The reporter wants to see his byline on the front page(where is the front page on the internet?) and adds his own editorial comment to the headline.

 

[TV and credit cards]

You'd think the ease of availability of information the internet brings would have made news more worthy. It seems the opposite is true. Just the amount of grammatical errors is telling. Time was, to see any was a rare occurrence. Now, they seem to be everyday.
Just push the story out there, accuracy and completeness be damned.

 

[Underseer]

You'd be surprised at how many "news" stories could be corrected by five minutes on Google.

I mean, shouldn't that be something the reporter checks out while researching the story in the first place? Why doesn't someone check this stuff out both before and after the article is written?

 

[Bronzeage]

You'd think the ease of availability of information the internet brings would have made news more worthy. It seems the opposite is true. Just the amount of grammatical errors is telling. Time was, to see any was a rare occurrence. Now, they seem to be everyday.
Just push the story out there, accuracy and completeness be damned.

The internet came along with the computer, and the computer brought it's own generation of systematic errors. One of these is the reliance on editing software. Misspellings are reduced, but homonyms and words out of place increase, because no one actually proof reads the text which will appear to the reader.

Sometimes, it's funny. In my city, we celebrate Mardi Gras with parades and parties. The parades are organized by social clubs known as "Krewes". In New Orleans, a krewe is a high society organization. In Baton Rouge, some of the krewes are decidedly down market. The Krewe of Spanishtown is one such organization. Their animal mascot is a pink flamingo. I won't go into the social significance of the pink flamingo, but associating anything with a pink flamingo immediately removes it from the social register.
One year, someone had a truck load of pink top hats manufactured for people to wear while the rode in the parade. A small beenie baby style pink flamingo sat on the brim of the hat. This flamingo had a large pink penis and scrotum. It was great fun and everyone has a good laugh.

The biggest laugh came exactly a year later. The local newspaper printed a story about the parade and the editor went into the archives to find a suitable photo. There is a big difference between a thumbnail on a monitor and an 10x12 color photo on the front page of the magazine section. The press manager clicked a button on his monitor and about 30,000 newspapers, each including the flamingo and his genitals, were printed and loaded on trucks and headed to people's door steps before a human eyeball ever saw a copy.