Cards on the table

Cards on the table
11/17/08

[donation]

By Joel Thurtell

Reading last weekend’s Detroit Free Press, with a veritable phalanx of columnists weighing in for a bailout of Detroit’s car-makers, was a pretty daunting experience for me.

I’ve taken the opposite view, arguing for the harsh discipline of bankruptcy rather than the taxpayer-risk-prone solution favored the Freep.

Man oh man, the Freep was really on a roll.

Time has come for a little confession: I have a dog in this circus. It’s axiomatic that each of us is motivated by self-interest, so here is mine: I am purely a consumer when it comes to cars. I don’t work for the auto-makers or their union. I don’t work for their suppliers.

It seems fair for me to claim that last spring, when my wife and I deliberated which kind of car to buy, the auto-makers had no direct influence on our choice.

Nor do they have a direct sway over what I write about their pleas for a financial rescue.

I believe we made our decision as independently as we could.

Now I feel like I’m one of the pundits against whom Free Press writers have inveighed as they defend the Big Three against critics — myself included — who fault the American car industry for relying on gas-guzzlers and for producing cars that can’t compare with foreign brands for design, reliability and quality of construction.

Despite a Detroit Free Press article today, November 17, 2008, deriding “halftruths and misrepresentations that are endlessly repeated by everyone from members of Congress to journalists,” I believe my opinions on this subject are far less motivated by self-interest than those of the Freepsters.

The Free Press article claimed to dispel six myths about Detroit’s Big Three, including this one: “MYTH NO.2 They build unreliable junk”

Sorry, Free Press, that is a phony way to argue. MYTH NO. 2 is a straw man, easy to rebut, but not a true representation of the opposing argument.

At our house, we did not make our car-buying decision based on the belief that Detroit cars are “unreliable junk.” However, had we done so, I think we might be pardoned for acting on a prejudice based on two transmission failures with a Chrysler product (one at 12,000 miles) and a dangerous series of uncontrolled accelerations with a Ford Windstar.

But Consumer Reports didn’t have our input.

After studying the car issue of Consumer Reports earlier this year, we decided to buy our new vehicle from the manufacturer that got the top grades from CR for design, quality and reliability. That company happened to be Honda. The car we bought was a CR-V. We bought the CR-V even though Toyota’s similar RAV-4 was rated above the CR-V. Why? Because there’s a Honda dealership less than a mile from our house, while Toyota is a 40-minute round trip from our home. And because Honda overall was rated by CR tops, while Toyota overall was second. What company was in third place? Not an American — Subaru.

Consumer Reports didn’t say the Big Three make “unreliable junk,” and that was not the information we relied upon.

What I could not help but notice in the CR ranking was that there were two tiers of auto manufacturers, with Honda at the top left side of the chart, foillowed by Toyota and Subaru. Ford, General Motors and Chrysler were in the second, or bottom, tier, starting in the middle and with Chrysler dead last for overall quality.

Now, I’m sure it’s true that the Big Three have made enormous improvements since the mid and late 1990s when we bought those cars that caused us so much inconvenience, money and fright.

But they are still in the bottom tier for quality, according to Consumer Reports.

As a retiree, I’m buying a car that I will need to keep for years and years. I’m betting my money on quality. Top quality.

That is my self-interest.

There, my cards are on the table.

Will the Free Press lay its cards out for us to see?

When I read a bevy of Free Press writers all coming down on the same side of an issue, it puts me in mind of the paper’s rush to push Kwame Kilpatrick out of office. Never a dissenting voice at the Freep.

I discerned the paper’s self-interest then as part gloating and part a mania for winning as many journalism awards as possible, including the coveted Pulitzer Prize.

What might be the paper’s self-interest in promoting a bailout for the Big Three?

You won’t read a disclaimer in their news and opinion columns.

Let me place their cards on the table.

Please see Section D of today’s Detroit Free Press, and advertisements paid for by, among others, Shelton Pontiac-Buick-GMC, Liberty Chevrolet, Suburban Chrysler Jeep Dodge, Marty Feldman Chevrolet, Bill Snethkamp Chrysler Jeep Dodge and Al Deeby Dodge.

Whom did the dealers pay?

Why, the advertising department of the Detroit Free Press.

What would happen to those ads if one or more of the Detroit auto-makers went out of business?

Gone like the dodo.

The Free Press cut nearly 40 editorial staffers in the past 12 months through buyouts. Overall, more than 110 employees left the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News in last summer’s round of buyouts. My old paper, the South Bend Tribune, just cut 14 percent of its staff.

Newspapers are in deep weeds. Either through mismanagement, hard times or the onslaught of the Internet, newspapers are not far behind the car-makers in their descent towards Chapter 11.

If banks can get bailouts, so one Free Press pundit argued, why not the Big Three?

And hey, if the Big Three get a bailout, why not the newspaper industry?

They won an exemption from anti-trust laws from Congress back in 1970. Why not a bailout tomorrow?

Don’t be surprised to hear the news media howling for a handout one of these days.

Oh yes, newspapers have a big bruiser of a dog in this circus.

None is barking as loudly as the Free Press.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com