Why GM’s safety calamity, an utter Washington failure, isn’t a hot TV topic

Howard Kurtz:

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…

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