Toyota Responds To ABC News' Attack - Demands Retraction

After all of this is said and done, somebody's going to end up looking stupid, and it's not going to be Toyota.

The L.A. Times most likely will be next.

From the WSJ:

Toyota Demands ABC Retract Report

The Wall Street Journal 03/19/2010

Toyota Motor Corp. has asked ABC News for a public retraction and formal apology for an "irresponsible broadcast" of a report last month that purported to show how electronics problems in Toyota vehicles could lead to unintended acceleration.

In a letter to ABC News President David Westin dated March 11, Toyota said ABC "fabricated" a shot of a Toyota Avalon sedan in the report "to create the false and misleading impression with viewers of a dangerous and uncontrolled acceleration" in the Japanese company's vehicles.

"Regrettably, in its Feb. 22 report, ABC News chose fear-mongering over public service," Toyota General Counsel Christopher P. Reynolds wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

Jeffrey Schneider, a spokesman for ABC News, said the broadcaster received the letter. "Our lawyers are reviewing it and we will respond to Toyota," the spokesman said. ABC is a unit of Walt Disney Co.

In the Feb. 22 report, ABC News cited findings by Southern Illinois University-Carbondale Professor David W. Gilbert, who said he found a way to make Toyotas surge by causing a short in the wires that carry signals from the gas pedal to the engine computer, in such a way that the vehicle's diagnostic system doesn't notice a fault in the circuit.

Toyota said ABC "fabricated a dramatized sequence" in its news report that showed the car's tachometer needle racing up to more than 6,000 revolutions per minute, near the safe limit of the engine's design, while the car was being driven. Toyota said the car was actually standing still and in park when the tachometer hit that level.

On its Web-site posting of the video report, ABC subsequently replaced that part of the video with another shot of the tachometer surging that apparently was taken while the car was moving. In that shot, the needle didn't reach 6,000 rpm. ABC noted the change on its Web site, saying the network taped multiple demonstrations by Mr. Gilbert and that the engine's surge "was comparable" in each of them.

In the letter, earlier reported by media Web site gawker.com, Toyota laid out five criticisms of the broadcast, including not being given the opportunity to review Mr. Gilbert's research or provide a response for the news report.

Here's the original article from Gawker:

Toyota's general counsel is calling on ABC News president David Westin to retract and apologize for a cocked-up story by America's Wrongest Reporter, Brian Ross. UPDATE: ABC News' response is below.

Last month, Ross filed a report featuring a test conducted by David Gilbert, an Illinois professor who claimed to have found a way to induce unintended acceleration in Toyotas without triggering an error code that would allow mechanics to diagnose the problem. The exercise was supposed to prove that it's theoretically possible for Toyotas to accelerate without command and then show no sign of having done so later on.

Ross himself took a little on-camera death ride. And to make it seem even scarier, he took a staged shot of a surging tachometer taken while the car was parked and stitched it in to the piece to make it look like it was happening while he was driving. ABC News later changed the online version of the story after we asked them about the fakery.

The story had other problems, according to Toyota: As the company demonstrated in a lengthy online rebuttal, Gilbert's test almost certainly can't be replicated under real-world conditions. He essentially rewired a Toyota to do what he wanted it to do—accelerate without command and without generating an error code—which is kind of like leaving the gas on a stove on for a few hours and lighting a match to prove that America's kitchens are littered with millions of ticking timebombs. Engineers from Stanford working on Toyota's behalf were able to rewire a Subarus, Honda, Chevrolet, and Ford in the same manner.

And Ross didn't disclose in his report that Gilbert had previously been paid as a consultant by Sean Kane, an investigator working for plaintiff's lawyers in lawsuits against Toyota, and has an agreement with Kane paying him $150 an hour for work "going forward." In the March 11 letter, a copy of which was provided to Gawker by a source close to Toyota, the company says Ross "singularly failed in his basic duty as a journalist to disclose material information about Professor Gilbert that would have directly influenced his credibility with the audience." It also accuses him of "rush[ing] out his report on the eve of important congressional hearings concerning Toyota" and failing to offer the company an opportunity to examine Gilbert's test before responding. Indeed, on February 23, the day after Ross' story aired, Gilbert testified before the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and the death-ride came up.

Read the full letter, which ends with the veiled boilerplate threat that "Toyota reserves the right to take any and every appropriate step to protect and defend the reputation of our company and its products from irresponsible and inaccurate claims," below. A good reporter knows when he gets letters like this that he's doing his job. Unfortunately, Brian Ross is not a good reporter. And he's been off the radar at a particularly sensitive time—Ross hasn't covered Toyota since the furor over his report erupted. An ABC News spokesman says he's in the midst of a "long-planned vacation," and that ABC is "in receipt of Toyota's letter. Our lawyers are looking at it, and we will respond."