Quote Of The Day: Why We Fight Edition

In yesterday’s housekeeping post, more than a few readers took TTAC to task for writing flame bait, and then expecting readers not to flame the site, its authors or fellow commentators. A commentator compared us to a seedy bar that expects its patrons to behave like ladies and gentlemen. Compliments on the metaphor, mate, but there’s a reason why TTAC has a ‘tude. It’s the same reason I started this site some nine years ago: the mainstream automotive press are, in the main, craven toadies living in the pocket of the industry that they cover. As a trained journalist, I can see it in the questions my colleagues don’t ask. The obsequious way they timidly point out slight flaws in vehicles, marketing or executives—-and the scurry back to the party line, hoping not to get swatted by the objects of their non-ire for daring to point out that not everything is sunshine and roses, really. With me or without me, this site’s raison d’etre: tell the the no-holds-barred truth about cars. If TTAC’s boisterous or (yes) bombastic in its editorial content, please, look what we’re up against. I present to you Automotive News publisher and editorial director Keith Crain’s revelatory masterpiece: “ Whatever Happened to Ethical Behavior” [sub].

Last week, Fortune magazine published a “kiss and tell” story by Steven Rattner about his experiences as part of the U.S. auto task force, a post he resigned last summer. He followed up with a speech and several interviews . . .

Rattner’s article and his public statements are conduct unbecoming any past or present federal official. It is wrong for him to take advantage of private meetings and private information about people and companies and blast them in public. No journalist seems to have noticed his complete lack of ethics while they chase a juicy story . . .

Regardless of what you think of General Motors and their past and present executives, no one who was regulating them and making decisions that determined the life or death of the corporation should be discussing the information and the conversations that he had.

Automotive News (AN) is a tremendous provider of information on the business of making cars. Hardly a day goes by when we don’t blog one of their stories, or chase down a story based on their heads-up. We rely on AN’s hard data for the accuracy of much of our own coverage.

But when the publisher of an industry news source chastises another reliable source (Fortune) for publishing the truth about the biggest story in American automotive history, you’ve got to wonder what the insiders at AN are hiding.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the hippies were right about one thing: if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Whatever else you might say about TTAC or its inherently unbalanced posting policy, you can’t accuse us of that.