The Los Angeles Times still remains one of my favorite newspapers, but every day I have more doubts about its future. The story that catches my eye today is, once again, not about news, but about speculation about a possible future, in this case, $200 per barrel petroleum. The story seems to me to be intended to create alarm more than to inform. It presents shallow information such as the following announcement about the lag time to get more buses on the street to handle more riders:
Quickly adding capacity to meet demand from new riders wouldn’t be easy, because new buses cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take up to two years to deliver.
The last time I checked General Motors had plenty of unused manufacturing capacity. So does Ford. During World War II Ford built airplanes for the war effort:
It was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that inspired Ford to begin a tremendous, all-out manufacturing effort. To the west of Dearborn, the giant Willow Run plant was built to produce B-24 Liberator bombers on an assembly line that was a mile long. The first bomber rolled off the line in May 1942, beginning the effective production of several hundred aircraft a month. Bombers were produced at the rate of one plane per hour, thereby confounding Ford’s critics, who had called the plant undertaking ‘Willit Run.’ By the end of the war, Ford had built 86,865 complete aircraft, plus 57,851 airplane engines, thousands of engine superchargers and generators, and 4,291 military gliders.
This is from Ford’s web site:
From 1942 to 1945, Ford Motor Company completely shut down civilian vehicle production to dedicate all its resources to the Allied war efforts as a leader in the “arsenal of democracy.”
The U.S. Air Force invested $2 million in facilities and equipment in return for the company’s promise to build the Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber. By the war’s end, Ford Motor Company had built more than 8,600 B-24s.
If Ford could switch to airplanes on short notice I suspect they could build buses today in place of F-150 pickup trucks. Since the topic of the Los Angeles Times story is things that haven’t happened yet, why not talk about the possibility of the automotive industry pitching in to build buses?
I think this kind of emotionally-charged reporting on things that haven’t happened is part of the decline of big time journalism.
I welcome your thoughts.
