Kurtz: Where’s the Coverage of Washington’s Role in GM’s Mess? -- By Jim Geraghty, National Review

Howard Kurtz, now over on Fox News, raises the question about why coverage of GM’s recall has largely ignored the Washington angle:

…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.

Allow me to submit another motive in the media’s disinterest: The massive GM recalls – now more than 6 million vehicles – would require the media to revise a major storyline from a few years ago — the near-collapse, bailout, and resurrection of General Motors, which has largely been covered as an unvarnished success story for the Obama administration. He writes, “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.” That’s true enough as it goes, but the Obama administration somehow missed these multiple massive safety issues while putting together the bailout, which ultimately poured $49 billion into GM, and cost taxpayers $10.5 billion once the last share of stock was sold. Hammer the NHTSA, but at what point does the President’s Auto Industry Task Force look negligent? How did they miss so many consequential lurking safety issues....

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