jpg3196@tahoma.UUCP (James P. Galasyn) (01/13/90)
Reprinted out of boredom from the Chicago Trib, 12/2/89.
A story produced for NBC's TODAY show, saying that General Electric
Corp. used shoddy nuts and bolts in airplane engines that it builds, was
edited to delete all references to GE, it was confirmed Friday.
The editing was confirmed by several people at NBC, including a Chicago
reporter who did the piece. NBC is owned by General Electric.
The three-minute story, which aired Thursday, summarized a three-part
series done by Chicago's WMAQ (Channel 5), which NBC owns, and the
station's investigative reporter, Peter Karl. The series aired last week.
Karl's series focused on faulty nuts and bolts used in a wide range of
important construction including bridges, airplane engines, nuclear
missile silos and the NASA space program. It suggested that of the 200
billion bolts used anually in this country, as many as 60 percent are
substandard and lack proper certification.
The series included mention of a California company that is under
investigation for falsely certifying the safety of critical parts sold
to the airplane and aerospace industries. Almost every airplane engine in
this country is affected, including those made by Pratt & Whitney and
General Electric.
WMAQ had its series checked by libel attorneys before it ran. It
not only was broadcast in Chicago, but also by NBC stations elsewhere,
including in Denver, Cleveland and Seattle.
The section of Karl's story that was edited by TODAY stated:
"The victims are some of the largest industries in America. Recently,
General Electric engineers discovered that they have a big problem. One
out of three bolts from one of their major suppliers was bad. Even more
alarming, General Electric accepted the bad bolts without certification of
compliance for more than eight years."
In both the series and the non-edited TODAY piece, no comment was
included from General Electric. According to Karl, he sought repeatedly
to get comment from the company's engine-making division in Cincinnati,
General Electric Engines, in preparing his series, but it never responded.
His three-minute version was sent to New York late Wednesday. Concerns
about the mentions of General Electric were raised and, unknown to Karl,
the piece was edited, prompting anger among producers and staff members
in New York and Chicago.
"I can't believe that NBC would pull any reference to General Electric
without talking to me first," Karl said. "I just think that, as an
organization, this places us in a very difficult position."
NBC has repeatedly maintained that its relationship to General Electric
does not affect its news coverage. [gag -jpg]
Tom Brokaw stated in a recent Chicago speech that when GE is mentioned
in any news story, the broadcast goes to extremes to make sure the
mentions aren't deleted due to the relationship. [cynical snort -jpg]
By late Friday, Karl said he had not been given an explanation of why
his piece was edited.
Tom Ross, a senior vice president at NBC, told The Tribune Friday night
that "The reason it was pulled was that the TODAY show made an editorial
decision on the grounds that the matter was underreported."
Ross said that Karl has been asked by TODAY to do another piece on
the same subject, but to include mention of General Electric.
BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!
Reproduced here out of further boredom from the Independent Harbors News,
June 15, 1989.
On January 11, I was listening to a local radio program, Carol
Hemingway, KGIL, AM/1260, on my portable cassette player, when I heard
those immortal (or one might even say immoral) letters, GE. No sooner than
the G was out of Carol's mouth was my finger on the record button. I must
say I had no idea what I was about to hear.
What was unfolding before my ears was a dastardly tale about the
taxpayers being bilked for millions and millions of dollars and the
Justice Department's involvement in keeping it from the public. According
to Carol's guest, an attorney from Cincinnati named Jim Helmer, GE had been
certifying internal jet engine components at its jet engine manufacturing
plant in Seattle that HAD NOT been tested. These components are pressure
relief valves that are designed to prevent explosions.
In late May, 1988 lower level personnel discovered that the testing
equipment designed to test these pressure relief valves were broken.
They reported the discovery to Anthony DiVencenso, a 30-year man who was
the plant manager. DiVencenso contacted the home office in Cincinnati,
informed them of the situation, and started his own investigation.
The Cincinnati plant got back to him in short order, told him to stop
the investigation, go home, sit by the phone and wait for them to
contact him. Several weeks later DiVencenso was notified that he was
being transferred to, of all places, Cincinnati.
On June 2, 1988 legal counsel Robert Anderson of GE's Group Government
Compliance System wrote the Inspector General of the Depart of Defense,
informing him that the testing equipment designed to test the pressure
relief valves used in F-404 jet engines had not been operational since
sometime in 1983. Anderson went on to say that the test used to check the
valves had not been performed "prior to July 1987" and "operators may have
falsified internal test records." In addition, "as many as 2,200 F-404
engines" may have been involved. (The F-404 engine is used in the F-18
Hornet, the $30 million Navy fighter plane.) The test was reinstated in
July of 1987 according to Anderson's letter.
After DiVencenso got to Cincinnati, he contacted Attorney Helmer and an
investigation was begun. In the course of Helmer's investigation it was
found that not only were the F-404 engines suspect, but also thousands
of other jet engines contained these falsely certified parts.
Blackhawk helicopters, military transport aircraft, and the work horse
of domestic shuttle flights, the Boeing 737, all use engines with these
unvalidated valves, according to Helmer. The Army ordered an additional
72, UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters, for the fiscal year 1988. Cost: 6
million per unit.
Helmer said that the Department of Justice made a criminal investigation
into the charges about the falsification of testing certificates on the
untested valves and then ordered the Federal Court in Cincinnati to seal
the case, effectively concealing it from public scrutiny. However on
Friday, January 6 he had convinced the judge that it was in the public's
interest that this investigation be unsealed, and so the case is now a
public record.
But the biggest bombshell was Helmer's statement that the Boeing 737
belonging to British Midland Airways that crashed on January 8, killing 47
people on board, was equipped with GE jet engines that contained these
untested valves. Helmer went on to say that on Sunday, January 8, his
office was flooded with calls from the English, Italian and West German
press, and that on Monday you couldn't pick up an English newspaper without
this story leaping off the front page at you. Carol Hemingway had made a
comment that NBC would probably not have covered this story and Helmer
agreed, saying that NBC is owned by GE. He also said that he was contacted
by the two other networks, CBS and ABC.
After hearing this incredible story, I began to monitor the nightly
network news broadcasts to find out more about it. For two weeks after
January 11, there was absolutely no mention of this particular aspect of
the British Midland crash. What the networks did mention was the usual
stuff about the checking for cracking in the fuselage or the engine
supports, or the possibility that the pilot MIGHT have shut down the wrong
engine in a state of panic. Faulty wiring was also mentioned as were
things only an aeronautical engineer could love, but not word one about
what might have gone wrong INSIDE the engine.
The local paper of record parroted the prevailing stories on the local
and network newscasts, and likewise no mention of this angle. After
about two weeks of the "regular" stuff, I called the L.A. TIMES and spoke
to a reporter by the name of Art Berman and asked him if he knew when
and/or if the TIMES had any plans to run this story about the untested
parts winding up in the British Midland Airways 737 jet engine. He said to
me he didn't know anything about it so I began to tell him about the story.
He was interested in what I was saying and started asking me questions
about it.
I wasn't prepared for this, as past experience has taught me to
expect a series of clever explanations as to why a story wasn't printed, or
why the facts about a story were left out, or why the story was printed the
way it was. I told him that I had the whole story on tape and would get it
and call him back with the most important details. When I got back on the
line 15 minutes later, he told me that he had done some checking and had
discovered that one of the wire servies had run a piece about the jet
engines but didn't detail anything.
So I gave him the attorney's name, the name of the plant manager, the
location and legal description of the lawsuit, when the case was sealed and
unsealed. I couldn't believe how interested Berman was in what I was
telling him. He told me he would check into it. Feeling like the cat that
ate the canary, I hung up and waited for the explosion.
A month later, nothing. Another month, still nothing. finally on
Tuesday, March 21, page 26, upper right hand corner, 3 paragraphs about
GE settling out of court for four lawsuits, totalling $3.5 million. The
story I have been writing about got a whole paragraph -- 28 words informing
the taxpayers they have been snookered.
It's not quite finished yet. I spoke to Art Berman on three separate
occasions, I then spoke to Doug Jehl in the Washington Bureau, as Berman
told me he had turned the information over to him, but Jehl didn't seem
to know or remember the information I had given to Berman. I also gave the
full story to Assistant National Editor Jim Bell with whom I spent a half hour
on the phone.
I made two calls to Ralph Vartabedian, most recently the week of March
13-18, because I was told that he handled aviation-related stories.
Vartabedian informed me that because the story was not "in his backyard"
he wasn't going to do anything with it and suggested I call the Cincinnati
papers.
I then mentioned that there was a little something about the story that
had to do with "his backyard." An attorney with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher,
the law firm that represents the L.A. TIMES, became a GE director in 1986
-- William French Smith, Ronnie Reagan's first attorney general.
Vartabedian asked me if I thought the reason the TIMES wasn't running
the story was because it's a "conspiracy" or something? I replied that
I didn't suggest it was a "conspiracy," only that it was an interesting
point.
Vartabedian just couldn't fathom that a regular old person would go to
all this trouble to try to get a story like this printed. He insisted that
I was an interested party with something to gain by having this printed. I
asked him if being a concerned citizen wasn't enough? I told him that I
was fed up with being ripped-off and that I was sure that a lot of people
felt the same way. It's we, the people, who pay for the cost overruns, and
we have a right to knowabout this kind of thing.
Obviously he didn't think so, as he's written nothing about this
aviation story. In the Tuesday, March 21 issue, the TIMES ran two stories,
one on GE and one on the British Midland Airways crash. In the first, GE
settled out of court for a mere $3.5 million on four separate federal
"lawsuits alleging fraud in military contract."
In the second story the British Aviation Department determined that the
pilot shut off the wrong engine. In either story there was no connection
made between GE's testing procedures and British Midland crash. The
British Midland story revealed further: "Immediately after the crash
officials said it appeared both engines on the 12-week-old aircraft had
failed -- against odds of several million to one." I guess those odds
might apply if all the components were tested as GE policy requires. So
why is GE on my mind?
I figure I've spent an easy three and a half hours on the phone to these
various TIMES people plus all the secretaries and assistant whoevers, not
to mention the time put into the television news departments and not a word
about the GE-British Midland crash connection.
So GE settles out of court for $3.5 million on four lawsuits. I wonder
how much GE made on all those untested valves? I wonder how those GE
inspectors who certified those untested valves sleep at night? I wonder
how many 737s and F-18s and Blackhawk helicopters have crashed because of
these untested valves? I wonder how many crashes have been written off due
to "pilot error?"
I wonder if British Midland Airways or any of the victims' heirs will
sue GE? INFACT, an activist organization that is currently sponsoring a
boycott of all GE products, has described 22 lawsuits against GE since 1911
ranging from bribery of a foreign official to defrauding the US government.
It's reassuring to know that the Justice Department cares enough about us
(we who pay the salaries of the people who work at the Justice
Department) not to want us to worry about such trivialities as jet
engines and tax dollars -- so they make sure we don't find out about such
things. And they did! As for the crew over at the TIMES, never let it
be said they didn't do the least that they could do.
But the Aliens who run the show are too stupid and too poor to cover up
a penny-ante conspiracy like this. Warren and Iverson are obviously
subversive drug-using Noriega-sympathizers who should be garroted with
an American Flag, by Christ.
Obviously Boeing is not related to these opinions at all, because they
are the apotheosis of Ethical Conduct(tm).
Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, murdered President Kennedy.
.
DEATH . .. The United States is not mining
. . . the harbors of Nicaragua.
. . . . Caspar Weinberger, 4/8/84
. .. . . . .
. . . . . ..
. . . . . . .