CBS Buckles Down Over Seat Belts   

During the last few months, CBS News, U.S. automakers and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have been waging a public battle over a simple act: smacking the back of a seat belt buckle to make it open.

Washington correspondent Roberta Baskin reported on the September 10 "Street Stories" that push-button safety belts common in American-made cars might not be effective in multi-impact collisions or rollovers because of "inertial unlatching." The program included at least a dozen demonstrations, usually with videocassettes being used to strike the underside of the latches.

"We never suggested that it was common," Baskin says. "But I'm convinced it can happen, and I have no doubt it does. We're talking about potential design problems across millions of cars."

Baskin's 11-minute
report struck a nerve in
Detroit, just as talk of "inertial unlatching" had done when Ralph Nader testified about it before Congress in 1966. This time around, the industry-funded American Coalition for Traffic Safety bought ads in the New York Times and Washington Post charging CBS had misled the public and arguing that no scientific evidence exists for "real world" inertial unlatching. NHTSA later wrote CBS President Laurence Tisch stating that "any objective review" shows that CBS "did not provide fair, unbiased and objective coverage of the facts."

At a November 18 press conference, the day before "Street Stories" aired a follow-up report by Baskin, NHTSA said it had found no evidence of inertial unlatching. The agency admitted, however, that it had received reports that buckles sometimes, albeit rarely, opened in crash tests for no apparent reason. Administrator Marion Blakey conceded, "In a crash environment it is conceivable that [inertial unlatching] could occur. But judging by all the data that we have before us, the odds of it occurring are minuscule."

Some reporters attending say CBS responded with hype. Hours later, Dan Rather would introduce Baskin's "Evening News"
report on the conference by saying, "Federal highway safety officials now admit that there is a potential problem with a type of automobile safety belt in millions of cars. So what are they going to do about it? Nothing."

If that's a fair summary of what Blakey said, CBS seems to be the only news organization that believes it. Several reporters say that they thought Blakey had simply acknowledged that she couldn't declare that belts would never unlatch. AutoWeek's Jayne O'Donnell says the network's report raised questions "that CBS might be trying to back up its own story rather than finding the truth," a sentiment echoed by the Detroit News' Bryan Gruley, who had written a long piece in October about the battle between CBS, consumer advocates and automakers.

Baskin responds that "the lead-in was dramatic but accurate. You have to understand that the press conference was called in reaction to our stories, and there's no question in my mind they were trying to undermine us. The spin they put on it was very different from their reference materials."

Baskin says that although NHTSA insisted there was no proof, the agency had received 47 calls after her first report from people who said their belts had come unbuckled in accidents. But NHTSA refused to provide names. "It was frustrating," she says. "I got [details on] only one case, and that was because the people called me separately."

In her follow-up, Baskin focused on that case – a fatal crash in which no one had actually seen the victim wearing a belt. But Baskin says she's convinced the woman had it on – largely because the victim's father, a former driving instructor, had instilled an "almost obsessive sense of safety" in his children and insists that his daughter wore her belt habitually. The father also told Baskin that NHTSA engineers who examined the car had concluded the woman was probably wearing it.

During Baskin's second report, former NHTSA administrator Jerry Curry said the agency gets enough complaints about inertial unlatching to warrant some investigation. But Curry, now an industry consultant, says he told "Street Stories" something else it chose not to air. "I told them, 'You're taking a fringe item that at most has a fringe impact on safety and making a big deal out of it.' "

Says Baskin, "Jerry Curry told me he never knew about the problem [while at NHTSA], and he indicated that he was not really familiar with the engineering aspects. So I don't think he's qualified to say."