The American Journalism Review asks,
is automotive journalism fundamentally corrupt? Car manufacturers pay for lavish trips and grant extensive seat time in their most desirable cars – in exchange for good reviews. Journalists who write critical reviews are blacklisted. Among the worst offenders is Porsche, who
blacklisted journalist Jack Baruth after lukewarm (or simply balanced)
print and
video reviews of the Porsche Panamera in 2009. Since then, Baruth, who owns three Porsches, has taken to compiling lists of Porsche’s deadly sins (
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6, but
not 7),
fabricating Porsche test drives,
bashing fellow automotive journalists who he sees as being
too soft on Porsche, and
borrowing privately-owned cars in order to write reviews. Baruth writes mostly for
The Truth About Cars, which guards the independence of its writers so fiercely that its reviews of the Prius, for instance, ranged from the
unremittingly hostile to
defensively positive to
relatively balanced. But what about journalistic independence in mainstream outlets, which often rely on freelancers who simply don't have the funds to be functionally independent of car manufacturers, and which don't want to displease advertisers?
posted by Dasein
on Oct 3, 2011 -
85 comments
