The number one album today in 1969 was the soundtrack to NBC-TV’s “TCB,” a special with Diana Ross and the Supremes and the Temptations:
The number one album today in 1975 was Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks”:
Regardless of your definition of “fake news,” everyone should be able to agree that the media is not doing its job when it prints stories that are blatantly false.
And here’s what the media did since Donald Trump’s election, according to Daniel Payne:
Early November: Spike in Transgender Suicide Rates
After Trump’s electoral victory on November 8, rumors began circulating that multiple transgender teenagers had killed themselves in response to the election results. There was no basis to these rumors. Nobody was able to confirm them at the time, and nobody has been able to confirm in the three months since Trump was elected.
Nevertheless, the claim spread far and wide: Guardian writer and editor-at-large of Out Zach Stafford tweeted the rumor, which was retweeted more than 13,000 times before he deleted it. He later posted a tweet explaining why he deleted his original viral tweet; his explanatory tweet was shared a total of seven times. Meanwhile, PinkNews writer Dominic Preston wrote a report on the rumors, which garnered more than 12,000 shares on Facebook.
At Mic, Matthew Rodriguez wrote about the unsubstantiated allegations. His article was shared more than 55,000 times on Facebook. Urban legend debunker website Snopes wrote a report on the rumors and listed them as “unconfirmed” (rather than “false”). Snopes’s sources were two Facebook posts, since deleted, that offered no helpful information regarding the location, identity, or circumstances of any of the suicides. The Snopes report was shared 19,000 times.
At Reason, writer Elizabeth Nolan Brown searched multiple online databases to try to determine the identities or even the existence of the allegedly suicidal youth. She found nothing. As she put it: “[T]eenagers in 2016 don’t just die without anyone who knew them so much as mentioning their death online for days afterward.”
She is right. Just the same, the stories hyping this idea garnered at least nearly 100,000 shares on Facebook alone, contributing to the fear and hysteria surrounding Trump’s win.
November 22: The Tri-State Election Hacking Conspiracy Theory
On November 22, Gabriel Sherman posted a bombshell report at New YorkMagazine claiming that “a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers” were demanding a recount in three separate states because of “persuasive evidence that [the election] results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked.” The evidence? Apparently, “in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots.”
The story went stratospherically viral. It was shared more than 145,000 times on Facebook alone. Sherman shared it on his Twitter feed several times, and people retweeted his links to the story nearly 9,000 times. Politico’s Eric Geller shared the story on Twitter as well. His tweet was retweeted just under 8,000 times. Dustin Volz from Reuters shared the link; he was retweeted nearly 2,000 times. MSNBC’s Joy Reid shared the story and was retweeted more than 4,000 times. New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman also shared the story and was retweeted about 1,600 times.
It wasn’t until the next day, November 23, that someone threw a little water on the fire. At FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver explained that it was “demographics, not hacking” that explained the curious voting numbers. “Anyone making allegations of a possible massive electoral hack should provide proof,” he wrote, “and we can’t find any.” Additionally, Silver pointed out that the New York Magazine article had misrepresented the argument of one of the computer scientists in question.
At that point, however, the damage had already been done: Sherman, along with his credulous tweeters and retweeters, had done a great deal to delegitimize the election results. Nobody was even listening to Silver, anyway: his post was shared a mere 380 times on Facebook, or about one-quarter of 1 percent as much as Sherman’s. This is how fake news works: the fake story always goes viral, while nobody reads or even hears about the correction.
December 1: The 27-Cent Foreclosure
At Politico on December 1, Lorraine Wellert published a shocking essay claiming that Trump’s pick for secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, had overseen a company that “foreclosed on a 90-year-old woman after a 27-cent payment error.” According to Wellert: “After confusion over insurance coverage, a OneWest subsidiary sent [Ossie] Lofton a bill for $423.30. She sent a check for $423. The bank sent another bill, for 30 cents. Lofton, 90, sent a check for three cents. In November 2014, the bank foreclosed.”
The story received widespread coverage, being shared nearly 17,000 times on Facebook. The New York Times’s Steven Rattner shared it on Twitter (1,300 retweets), as did NBC News’s Brad Jaffy (1,200 retweets), the AP’s David Beard (1,900 retweets) and many others.
The problem? The central scandalous claims of Wellert’s article were simply untrue. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Ted Frank pointed out, the woman in question was never foreclosed on, and never lost her home. Moreover, “It wasn’t Mnuchin’s bank that brought the suit.”
Politico eventually corrected these serious and glaring errors. But the damage was done: the story had been repeated by numerous media outlets including Huffington Post (shared 25,000 times on Facebook), the New York Post, Vanity Fair, and many others.
January 20: Nancy Sinatra’s Complaints about the Inaugural Ball
On the day of Trump’s inauguration, CNN claimed Nancy Sinatra was “not happy” with the fact that the president and first lady’s inaugural dance would be to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” The problem? Nancy Sinatra had never said any such thing. CNN later updated the article without explaining the mistake they had made.
January 20: The Nonexistent Climate Change Website ‘Purge’
Also on the day of the inauguration, New York Times writer Coral Davenport published an article on the Times’s website whose headline claimed that the Trump administration had “purged” any “climate change references” from the White House website. Within the article, Davenport acknowledged that the “purge” (or what she also called “online deletions”) was “not unexpected” but rather part of a routine turnover of digital authority between administrations.
To call this action a “purge” was thus at the height of intellectual dishonesty: Davenport was styling the whole thing as a kind of digital book-burn rather than a routine part of American government. But of course that was almost surely the point. The inflammatory headline was probably the only thing that most people read of the article, doubtlessly leading many readers (the article was shared nearly 50,000 times on Facebook) to believe something that simply wasn’t true.
January 20: The Great MLK Jr. Bust Controversy
On January 20, Time reporter Zeke Miller wrote that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the White House. This caused a flurry of controversy on social media until Miller issued a correction. As Time put it, Miller had apparently not even asked anyone in the White House if the bust had been removed. He simply assumed it had been because “he had looked for it and had not seen it.”
January 20: Betsy DeVos, Grizzly Fighter
During her confirmation hearing, education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos was asked whether schools should be able to have guns on their campuses. As NBC News reported, DeVos felt it was “best left to locales and states to decide.” She pointed out that one school in Wyoming had a fence around it to protect the students from wildlife. “I would imagine,” she said, “that there’s probably a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies.”
This was an utterly noncontroversial stance to take. DeVos was simply pointing out that different states and localities have different needs, and attempting to mandate a nationwide one-size-fits-all policy for every American school is imprudent.
How did the media run with it? By lying through their teeth. “Betsy DeVos Says Guns Should Be Allowed in Schools. They Might Be Needed to Shoot Grizzlies” (Slate). “Betsy DeVos: Schools May Need Guns to Fight Off Bears” (The Daily Beast). “Citing grizzlies, education nominee says states should determine school gun policies” (CNN). “Betsy DeVos says guns in schools may be necessary to protect students from grizzly bears” (ThinkProgress.) “Betsy DeVos says guns shouldn’t be banned in schools … because grizzly bears” (Vox). “Betsy DeVos tells Senate hearing she supports guns in schools because of grizzly bears” (The Week). “Trump’s Education Pick Cites ‘Potential Grizzlies’ As A Reason To Have Guns In Schools” (BuzzFeed).
The intellectual dishonesty at play here is hard to overstate. DeVos never said or even intimated that every American school or even very many of them might need to shoot bears. She merely used one school as an example of the necessity of federalism and as-local-as-possible control of the education system.
Rather than report accurately on her stance, these media outlets created a fake news event to smear a reasonable woman’s perfectly reasonable opinion.
January 26: The ‘Resignations’ At the State Department
On January 26, the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin published what seemed to be a bombshell report declaring that “the State Department’s entire senior management team just resigned.” This resignation, according to Rogin, was “part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior Foreign Service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.” These resignations happened “suddenly” and “unexpectedly.” He styled it as a shocking shake-up of administrative protocol in the State Department, a kind of ad-hoc protest of the Trump administration.
The story immediately went sky-high viral. It was shared nearly 60,000 times on Facebook. Rogin himself tweeted the story out and was retweeted a staggering 11,000 times. Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum had it retweeted nearly 2,000 times; journalists and writers from Wired, The Guardian, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, ABC, Foreign Policy, and other publications tweeted the story out in shock.
There was just one problem: the story was more a load of bunk. As Vox pointed out, the headline of the piece was highly misleading: “the word ‘management’ strongly implied that all of America’s top diplomats were resigning, which was not the case.” (The Post later changed the word “management” to “administrative” without noting the change, although it left the “management” language intact in the article itself).
More importantly, Mark Toner, the acting spokesman for the State Department, put out a press release noting that “As is standard with every transition, the outgoing administration, in coordination with the incoming one, requested all politically appointed officers submit letters of resignation.” According to CNN, the officials were actually asked to leave by the Trump administration rather than stay on for the customary transitional few months. The entire premise of Rogin’s article was essentially nonexistent.
As always, the correction received far less attention than the fake news itself: Vox’s article, for instance, was shared around 9,500 times on Facebook, less than one-sixth the rate of Rogin’s piece. To this day, Rogin’s piece remains uncorrected regarding its faulty presumptions.
January 27: The Photoshopped Hands Affair
On January 27, Observer writer Dana Schwartz tweeted out a screenshot of Trump that, in her eyes, proved President Trump had “photoshopped his hands bigger” for a White House photograph. Her tweet immediately went viral, being shared upwards of 25,000 times. A similar tweet by Disney animator Joaquin Baldwin was shared nearly 9,000 times as well.
The conspiracy theory was eventually debunked, but not before it had been shared thousands upon thousands of times. Meanwhile, Schwartz tweeted that she did “not know for sure whether or not the hands were shopped.” Her correction tweet was shared a grand total of…11 times.
January 29: The Reuters Account Hoax
Following the Quebec City mosque massacre, the Daily Beast published a story that purported to identify the two shooters who had perpetrated the crime. The problem? The story’s source was a Reuters parody account on Twitter. Incredibly, nobody at the Daily Beast thought to check the source to any appreciable degree.
January 31: The White House-SCOTUS Twitter Mistake
Leading up to Trump announcing his first Supreme Court nomination, CNN Senior White House Correspondent Jeff Zeleny announced that the White House was “setting up [the] Supreme Court announcement as a prime-time contest.” He pointed to a pair of recently created “identical Twitter pages” for theoretical justice Neil Gorsuch and Thomas Hardiman, the two likeliest nominees for the court vacancy.
Zeleny’s sneering tweet—clearly meant to cast the Trump administration in an unflattering, circus-like light—was shared more than 1,100 times on Twitter. About 30 minutes later, however, he tweeted: “The Twitter accounts…were not set up by the White House, I’ve been told.” As always, the admission of mistake was shared far less than the original fake news: Zeleny’s correction was retweeted a paltry 159 times.
January 31: The Big Travel Ban Lie
On January 31, a Fox affiliate station out of Detroit reported that “A local business owner who flew to Iraq to bring his mother back home to the US for medical treatment said she was blocked from returning home under President Trump’s ban on immigration and travel from seven predominately Muslim nations. He said that while she was waiting for approval to fly home, she died from an illness.”
Like most other sensational news incidents, this one took off, big-time: it was shared countless times on Facebook, not just from the original article itself (123,000 shares) but via secondary reporting outlets such as the Huffington Post (nearly 9,000 shares). Credulous reporters and media personalities shared the story on Twitter to the tune of thousands and thousands of retweets, including: Christopher Hooks, Gideon Resnick, Daniel Dale, Sarah Silverman, Blake Hounshell, Brian Beutler, Garance Franke-Ruta, Keith Olbermann (he got 3,600 retweets on that one!), Matthew Yglesias, and Farhad Manjoo.
The story spread so far because it gratified all the biases of the liberal media elite: it proved that Trump’s “Muslim ban” was an evil, racist Hitler-esque mother-killer of an executive order.
There was just one problem: it was a lie. The man had lied about when his mother died. The Fox affiliate hadn’t bothered to do the necessary research to confirm or disprove the man’s account. The news station quietly corrected the story after giving rise to such wild, industrial-scale hysteria.
February 1: POTUS Threatens to Invade Mexico
On February 1, Yahoo News published an Associated Press report about a phone call President Trump shared with Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto. The report strongly implied that President Trump was considering “send[ing] U.S. troops” to curb Mexico’s “bad hombre” problem, although it acknowledged that the Mexican government disagreed with that interpretation. The White House later re-affirmed that Trump did not have any plan to “invade Mexico.”
Nevertheless, Jon Passantino, the deputy news director of BuzzFeed, shared this story on Twitter with the exclamation “WOW.” He was retweeted 2,700 times. Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, also shared the story, declaring: “I’m sorry, did our president just threaten to invade Mexico today??” Favreau was retweeted more than 8,000 times.
Meanwhile, the Yahoo News AP post was shared more than 17,000 times on Facebook; Time’s post of the misleading report was shared more than 66,000 times; ABC News posted the story and it was shared more than 20,000 times. On Twitter, the report—with the false implication that Trump’s comment was serious—was shared by media types such as ThinkProgress’s Judd Legum, the BBC’s Anthony Lurcher, Vox’s Matt Yglesias, Politico’s Shane Goldmacher, comedian Michael Ian Black, and many others.
February 2: Easing the Russian Sanctions
Last week, NBC News national correspondent Peter Alexander tweeted out the following: “BREAKING: US Treasury Dept easing Obama admin sanctions to allow companies to do transactions with Russia’s FSB, successor org to KGB.” His tweet immediately went viral, as it implied that the Trump administration was cozying up to Russia.
A short while later, Alexander posted another tweet: “Source familiar [with] sanctions says it’s a technical fix, planned under Obama, to avoid unintended consequences of cybersanctions.” As of this writing, Alexander’s fake news tweet has approximately 6,500 retweets; his clarifying tweet has fewer than 250.
At CNBC, Jacob Pramuk styled the change this way: “Trump administration modifies sanctions against Russian intelligence service.” The article makes it clear that, per Alexander’s source, “the change was a technical fix that was planned under Obama.” Nonetheless, the impetus was placed on the Trump adminsitration. CBS News wrote the story up in the same way. So did the New York Daily News.
In the end, unable to pin this (rather unremarkable) policy tweak on the Trump administration, the media have mostly moved on. As the Chicago Tribune put it, the whole affair was yet again an example of how “in the hyperactive Age of Trump, something that initially appeared to be a major change in policy turned into a nothing-burger.”
February 2: Renaming Black History Month
At the start of February, which is Black History Month in the United States, Trump proclaimed the month “National African American History Month.” Many outlets tried to spin the story in a bizarre way: TMZ claimed that a “senior administration official” said that Trump believed the term “black” to be outdated. “Every U.S. president since 1976 has designated February as Black History Month,” wrote TMZ. BET wrote the same thing.
The problem? It’s just not true. President Obama, for example, declared February “National African American History Month” as well. TMZ quickly updated their piece to fix their embarrassing error.
February 2: The House of Representatives’ Gun Control Measures
On February 2, the Associated Press touched off a political and media firestorm by tweeting: “BREAKING: House votes to roll back Obama rule on background checks for gun ownership.” The AP was retweeted a staggering 12,000 times.
The headlines that followed were legion: “House votes to rescind Obama gun background check rule” (Kyle Cheney, Politico); “House GOP aims to scrap Obama rule on gun background checks” (CNBC); “House scraps background check regulation” (Yahoo News); “House rolls back Obama gun background check rule” (CNN); “House votes to roll back Obama rule on background checks for gun ownership” (Washington Post).
Some headlines were more specific about the actual House vote but no less misleading; “House votes to end rule that prevents people with mental illness from buying guns” (the Independent); “Congress ends background checks for some gun buyers with mental illness” (the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette); “House Votes to Overturn Obama Rule Restricting Gun Sales to the Severely Mentally Ill” (NPR).
The hysteria was far-reaching and frenetic. As you might have guessed, all of it was baseless. The House was actually voting to repeal a narrowly tailored rule from the Obama era. This rule mandated that the names of certain individuals who receive Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income and who use a representative to help manage these benefits due to a mental impairment be forwarded to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.
If that sounds confusing, it essentially means that if someone who receives SSDI or SSI needs a third party to manage these benefits due to some sort of mental handicap, then—under the Obama rule—they may have been barred from purchasing a firearm. (It is thus incredibly misleading to suggest that the rule applied in some specific way to the “severely mentally ill.”)
As National Review’s Charlie Cooke pointed out, the Obama rule was opposed by the American Association of People With Disabilities; the ACLU; the Arc of the United States; the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network; the Consortium of Citizens With Disabilities; the National Coalition of Mental Health Recovery; and many, many other disability advocacy organizations and networks.
The media hysteria surrounding the repeal of this rule—the wildly misleading and deceitful headlines, the confused outrage over a vote that nobody understood—was a public disservice.
As Cooke wrote: “It is a rare day indeed on which the NRA, the GOP, the ACLU, and America’s mental health groups find themselves in agreement on a question of public policy, but when it happens it should at the very least prompt Americans to ask, ‘Why?’ That so many mainstream outlets tried to cheat them of the opportunity does not bode well for the future.”
Today in 1969, Jim Morrison of the Doors was arrested for drunk driving and driving without a license in Los Angeles:
The number one British album today in 1970 was “Led Zeppelin II”:
The number one single today in 1970:
On Thursday, Peter Alexander, national correspondent at NBC News, reported (on Twitter, where most reporting happens now) that the U.S. Treasury Department had quietly eased sanctions to allow U.S. companies to do business with the Russian FSB; 40 minutes later, he noted that it was a “technical fix” planned under the Obama administration. The first tweet was retweeted more than 6,200 times, the second a piddling 247.
This has been the pattern of late. Last Saturday, following Trump’s controversial executive order on refugees, CNBC’s John Harwood reported that the Department of Justice had no role in evaluating the order (3,000+ retweets); one hour later, he issued a correction (199). Similarly, Raw Story cited American Foreign Policy Council scholar Ilan Berman to suggest that there was “no readout of Trump-Putin call because White House turned off recording.” The tweet linking to that story has 9,700 retweets, and travel blogger Geraldine DeRuiter’s outraged tweet — “They. Turned. Off. The. Recording. When. He. Called. Putin. IF OBAMA HAD DONE THIS THE GOP WOULD HAVE HAD HIM TRIED FOR TREASON.” — has been retweeted nearly 30,000 times. Berman took to Twitter to explain that he didn’t know “for a fact” that the recording had been turned off; it was simply “conjecture.” Twenty-seven retweets.
Care for more? There was a great deal of Supreme Court–related misinformation. Jeff Zeleny, CNN senior White House correspondent, reported that the White House had set up Donald Trump’s Supreme Court announcement as a “prime-time contest,” noting identical Twitter pages for potential appointees Neil Gorsuch and Tim Hardiman (1,100+ retweets); a half hour later, he noted that the pages were in fact not set up by the White House (159 retweets).
Off of Twitter, NBC News reported that Gorsuch, Trump’s nominee, “opposed campus military recruiters” in an op-ed written for Columbia University’s student newspaper in February 1987. It wasn’t true. The U.K.’s Daily Mail reported that Neil Gorsuch founded a “Fascism Forever” club at his Jesuit high school. That wasn’t true, either.
And there was still more. Reuters reported that Trump was responsible for the SEAL-team raid in Yemen that left an American soldier dead, and even approved the operation “without sufficient intelligence, ground support, or adequate backup preparations.” It almost certainly wasn’t true.
The Associated Press reported that Donald Trump “warned in a phone call with his Mexican counterpart that he was ready to send U.S. troops” into the country. A spokesman for Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto immediately decried the report as “absolutely false,” and U.S. officials explained that the comments were intended as a joke.
Half a dozen sites reported that Donald Trump changed the name of Black History Month to “African-American History Month.” False.
Again: This was all within the last week.Journalists, citing Donald Trump’s own serial fabulism, have lamented that journalism is uniquely difficult in the era of Trump. It’s not. Journalism, as a trade, is the same now as it was under Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush. The basic rules still apply. When you make a claim, have as many sources as possible at hand to support it. Name your sources, as often as possible. If you do not have reliable evidence for a claim, don’t make it. If you don’t have a firm grasp of your subject, consult an expert. Be fair-minded. Be honest.
The above does not require “skepticism.” It does require prioritizing what is true over what is exciting. Anyone with a high-school diploma has been instructed in how to read with a basic amount of discrimination — to note the difference between “primary” and “secondary” sources, to evaluate the credibility of an assertion. We should be able to expect journalists to exercise at least this much discernment.
There is a theory, which has mustered considerable assent, that Donald Trump — or at least Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and Sean Spicer — are working to undermine not simply the left-leaning press but the very notions of “fact” and “truth,” so that they can wield power more effectively, shielded by a nationwide epistemological fog. Perhaps this is so. But even if it is, the situation is not righted by the journalistic corps’ doing the same.
This country has plenty of activists, in government and out of it. Massive numbers of people on both sides are prepared to march and shout and donate and propagandize on behalf of their preferred causes. We don’t need more activists. We need journalists.
The number one British album today in 1965 was “The Rolling Stones No. 2”:
The number one single on both sides of the Atlantic today in 1965:
The number one single today in 1982 …
… from the number one album, the J. Geils Band’s “Freeze Frame”:
The number one single today in 1966:
The number one single today in 1983:
Today in 2006, the Rolling Stones played during the halftime of the Super Bowl:
The number one single on both sides of the Atlantic today in 1965:
The number one British album today in 1967 was “The Monkees”:
The number one single on both sides of the Atlantic today in 1978:
Automotive News reports:
There’s another round of midengine Chevrolet Corvette spy photos, and they’re perhaps the best look at the long-rumored sports car yet.
Spy photographers spotted what appears to be a midengine Corvette at one of General Motors’ winter-testing facilities.
The photos indicate that the vehicle will have a lower hood line, a longer rear deck and a much shorter dash-to-axle ratio.
The midengine mule was spotted, at times, next to a pair of other Corvette prototypes that are likely next-gen ZR1 mules.
Despite being heavily camouflaged, some key design features such as taillights and the vehicle’s exhaust layout were visible.
The latest photos illustrate just how much of a departure, in terms of design and engineering, a midengine Corvette would be for GM.
It remains unclear where a midengine Corvette would stand in the Chevrolet performance lineup and whether it will replace the C7 Corvette outright or coexist with the current generation.
In August, The Detroit News, citing multiple sources, reported that GM plans to begin selling a midengine Corvette in early 2019.
The Corvette, one of GM’s oldest nameplates, continues to attract mostly older buyers, and the automaker is eager to switch to a midengine layout to attract younger consumers, the paper said.
There have been several reports in Car and Driver and other media outlets over the past three years speculating about revived plans for a midengine Corvette.
While the Corvette has been GM’s premier performance vehicle for decades, a switch to a midengine layout would entail a major overhaul of the current car, the C7.
Almost no parts could be carried over because nearly all of the major components on a midengine car would be in different locations.
Switching from a front to midengine layout would entail engineering a new chassis, creating a new transaxle — the transmission and axle — to drive the rear wheels, developing new cooling, air-conditioning and suspension systems, and designing an all-new body.
A midengine Corvette would give GM a true competitor to Ford’s GT supercar, which is midengined, as well as supercars from Ferrari, Lamborghini and Porsche.
In June 2016, GM disclosed plans to spend $290 million to retool the Bowling Green, Ky., assembly plant where the Corvette is assembled.
The factory’s assembly operations are set to be upgraded and modified for “technology upgrades and manufacturing process improvements.”
In 2015, GM said it would spend $439 million on a new paint shop at the Corvette-only plant. Work on the paint shop began in 2015 that year and will run until mid-2017.
Motor1 suggests that the mid-engine car will be in addition to, not in place of, the current Corvette:
Two of the most anticipated American sports cars are under development side by side.
The engineers in charge of the Chevrolet Corvette are keeping very busy this winter by developing several versions of the sports car at once, and these spy photos offer a fantastic look of the mid-engine model and future ZR1 testing together. This is our first opportunity to compare them next to each other.
With its short, sloping nose and long rear section, Chevy is taking a familiar supercar design approach for its mid-engine Corvette. The undulating camouflage on the bulging hood suggests there might be an intake there or the designers are going for a highly sculpted shape. Two bubbles in the roof give the driver and passenger more headroom while keeping the center section low.
Openings in the concealment along the rear fenders hint that there might be intakes there for feeding air to the engine. The camouflage at the tail hides the lights but keeps the taillights relatively unhidden. The quad exhausts and exposed muffler look good, but it’s surprising not to see a big diffuser or wing back there. These aerodynamic devices are largely the norm at the rear of many super cars today.
When not on the test track, these spy shots show that Chevy is keeping the mid-engine Corvette highly camouflaged. Not only does a massive covering completely hide the shape of the body, but the company also has a pair of pickups flanking the much-anticipated vehicle.
In comparison, the ZR1 appears to sit slightly higher than the mid-engine ‘Vette but still looks mean. These shots show it with two separate wings – an incredibly tall one with large end plates and a smaller example. The ZR1s here feature bulging hoods and aggressive front fascia designs.
We expect the ZR1 to arrive late in 2017 as a 2018 model year vehicle, and it might use Chevy’s new LT5 6.2-liter dual-overhead cam V8. The different wings hint that there might be an even hotter performance package.
The first question that comes to mind is: Is this actually a Corvette, or is this perhaps the next Cadillac XLR, which was based on the Corvette but with the NorthStar V-8 engine and more luxury accouterments.
There remains a certain illogic in replacing the rear-wheel-drive Corvette, of which Chevrolet sells every one it makes, with a mid-engine replacement using unproven technology (of which GM has a bad habit of sending into the marketplace before it’s really ready) and a list price likely to be far beyond $100,000.
CarGurus presents GM’s supposed rationale:
The average ‘Vette buyer is a 59-year-old male, but Chevrolet would love to start sending Corvettes home with guys and gals a decade or two younger. Certainly the C7 appeals to a younger crowd, but the Corvette brand has become associated with being a mid-life crisis purchase. When was the last time you saw someone driving a Corvette who didn’t have white hair?
Younger folks tend to buy the Camaro or Mustang.
Part of the reason is because older buyers are usually better-equipped to buy such an expensive car than their younger counterparts. In fact, more than 40 percent of Corvettes are purchased with cash.
There’s a new Corvette on the horizon, though, that might be enough to persuade younger folks with extra cash to jump on the Corvette train. …
It would also, GM hopes, make the car appeal to a younger crowd. Ferrari’s average buyer is 47, and Lamborghini’s is 48, while the average Porsche 911 buyer is 52.
The biggest problem, in my humble opinion, is that the Corvette was coolest when older people were young. The other brands require a deeper appreciation for quality cars, while the Corvette is a feel-good purchase that makes people reminiscent of when they were younger.
That rationale lacks logic. Comments on the Car Gurus post point out that you can spend $90,000 on the current Corvette. A mid-engined Corvette would be far more expensive than that. If younger buyers don’t buy Corvettes due to their price now, a more expensive Corvette won’t change that. And if you’re, say, 35 to 45 and rich, you seem more likely to buy a Ferrari or Porsche.
The current Corvette is a performance bargain for the price. I’m not certain why Chevy wants to screw that up, but it is GM we’re talking about.
The UW Athletic Department reported sad news yesterday:
The Wisconsin Department of Athletics is saddened to learn that Jeff Sauer, UW’s men’s hockey coach from 1982 to 2002, has passed away at the age of 73.
Sauer led the Badgers to 489 victories, the most victories for a UW coach in any sport. He guided Wisconsin to the 1983 and 1990 NCAA titles. In addition, the Badgers won WCHA regular-season titles in 1990 and 2000 and WCHA playoff crowns in 1983, 1988, 1990, 1995 and 1998.
Sauer was inducted into the Wisconsin Athletics Hall of Fame on Sept. 16, 2016.
“Our entire athletic department family is saddened to hear of the passing of Coach Sauer,” Director of Athletics Barry Alvarez said. “Jeff was a hockey man through and through. He had a passion for the sport and for coaching, and his imprint on the game will be felt forever through the lives he touched. Our hockey programs at Wisconsin benefitted greatly from Jeff’s influence. I want to extend the condolences of Wisconsin Athletics to Jeff’s family, friends, colleagues and former players.”
“Coach Sauer’s record speaks for itself, but he’s just done so much besides coaching hockey,” UW men’s hockey coach Tony Granato said. “That is the part I will miss most about him. He was about caring for people and sharing. I watched him volunteer endlessly for both the U.S. Sled Hockey and Hearing Impaired teams and watched him do anything that was asked of him for any special situation that was needed.
“He was just a great person and anyone that has had the pleasure of knowing him, playing for him or that was touched by what he gave us was just so lucky to have him as a coach and friend.”
“It’s a tough day, certainly for the people that were close to Jeff and knew him,” UW women’s hockey coach Mark Johnson said. “He was a great man and a tremendous ambassador for the game of hockey.
“I’ve known him since I was seven or eight and he has had an impact on my career, whether as a young player, a college player or coach. He was the one in 1980 that convinced my dad, after their Friday night game between Wisconsin and Colorado College, that my dad should fly out to Lake Placid that Saturday to watch our gold medal game. Obviously Jeff and my dad were extremely close, my dad coached him when he was at Colorado College and he was an assistant coach for my dad. They both loved baseball and both got involved in hockey and had a passion for the game.
“He’s going to be missed for a lot of reasons. He was great for the sport, he ran a great program at Colorado College for 11 years and he took over for my dad here in the early 1980s and did an outstanding job for 20 years, winning a couple of national championships. I coached with him here for six years and I played under him with different national teams.
“Jeff was also instrumental in the foundation of our women’s hockey program as he was a great friend to the program, especially in the early years. He has impacted my life in a lot of different ways and I want make sure people are praying and their thoughts are with Jamie and the rest of his family. I’m sure they are stunned by his passing and it is a sad day for the hockey community, especially for the people that were close to him.”
Andrew Baggot chronicles Sauer’s accomplishments:
One: Sauer succeeded an icon and found a way to create his own championship legacy.
Bob Johnson was that legend. He built the Badgers into a perennial powerhouse, winning three NCAA titles from 1973 to ’81 before Sauer took over in 1982 and produced two national championship-winners of his own.
Two: Sauer left the college game as a coach in 2003, but instead of easing into retirement, he took his generosity and love of hockey to the disabled and excelled on an international stage.
In addition to coaching Team USA in the Deaflympics, he led the American sled hockey team to two Paralympic gold medals.
Three: Sauer nurtured a coaching tree that has some prominent local branches.
One of Sauer’s former assistant coaches, Mark Johnson, oversees the four-time NCAA champion women’s hockey team at Wisconsin. On the other UW bench is first-year head coach Tony Granato and associate head coaches Don Granato and Mark Osiecki, all of whom played for Sauer and the Badgers.
When the new staff was unveiled last March, Sauer was included in the welcoming video and beamed throughout.
“You could see how proud he was,” Tony Granato said.
The roles were reversed last September when Sauer was inducted in the Wisconsin Athletics Hall of Fame as a host of former players looked on.
“The day resonates with me just because I was able to get there,” said Rob Andringa, whose grew up in Madison and played four years for Sauer.
“It was such a great feeling to see him,” Osiecki said.
Osiecki and Tony Granato had lunch with Sauer in late autumn and the three men spoke enthusiastically about the future. Granato made sure Sauer knew he was welcome to visit the Kohl Center offices or practice any time.
Many colleagues and confidants were stunned by the news of Sauer’s death and its cause, pancreatic cancer. He attended a UW game against Michigan State in early January, but was hospitalized not long after that. …
Sauer was born in Fort Atkinson, graduated from Colorado College in 1965 and spent 31 seasons coaching college hockey at his alma mater and Wisconsin.
He amassed 655 career wins, which ranks among the top 10 all-time, and a program-best 489 victories with the Badgers from 1982 to 2003.
Osiecki said his enduring lesson from Sauer was about psychology.
“Allowing personalities to come out,” he said. “That’s one of the things he did well.
“We always talked about him being a conductor of the orchestra. Knowing what you had in the locker room and never really constricting it so much and let the personalities come out. His teams played to that.”
Osiecki spoke from Minneapolis, where he got the news while having breakfast with his father, Tom. It turns out that Sauer and Tom Osiecki played on the same Twin Cities-based bantam team growing up.
With Sauer behind the bench, Wisconsin won an NCAA title in 1983, but many refused to give him due credit because the roster was comprised of Johnson’s players.
The critics were silent in 1990 when the Badgers swept the Western Collegiate Hockey Association regular-season and playoff crowns on the way to claiming the national championship.
Andringa, Osiecki and Don Granato played on that team. Andringa and Osiecki were defensive partners when UW hammered Colgate 7-3 in the NCAA title game at Joe Louis Arena in Detroit. Andringa and Granato were co-captains the following season.
Andringa recounted how emotional Sauer became in the winning dressing room.
“We did this together,” Sauer told them. “You guys deserve this. You are like sons to me.”
Andringa said Sauer was one of those coaches who appeared on the fringe of team pictures, not out front.
“He love being a part of what is special about being on a team and in the locker room,” Andringa said. “That closeness.”
Andringa said one of Sauer’s greatest strengths was “the way he allowed us to be the 20-year-old kid who could make a mistake. He could laugh and joke about a prank.
“He was so good at being in the moment.”
Following an icon like “Badger” Bob Johnson isn’t easy.
“You look at history and I don’t care what sport you pick, there’s not too many people who can succeed after a legend,” Andringa said of Sauer. “He was able to do that.”
Mark Johnson, Bob’s son, was an assistant under Sauer from 1996 to 2002.
“He was a great man and a tremendous ambassador for the game of hockey,” Johnson said. “He’s going to be missed for a lot of reasons.”
Paul Braun was the long-time radio and TV voice of the program. Not long after getting the dreadful news about Sauer he was sifting through hundreds of cassette tapes from UW games long ago, many featuring his good friend and fellow golf aficionado.
“He was one of the classiest people I’ve ever met in my life,” Braun said of Sauer. “A guy who had impeccable integrity.
“What I liked about him was that he was just Jeff. He was the same all the time.”
At one time, Joel Maturi, a former high school basketball coach, was the UW Athletic Department administrator in charge of overseeing men’s hockey. He remembers Sauer ribbing him good-naturedly about his suspect background, but being a patient teacher.
Maturi went on to serve as athletic director at Miami (Ohio), Denver and Minnesota, all hockey-centric schools.
“I owe my career to Jeff Sauer,” Maturi said. “Every place I went from there was because of hockey and because of what I learned from Jeff.”
After his college coaching career ended, Sauer lent his wisdom to WCHA commissioner Bruce McLeod, USA Hockey – with former UW player Jim Johannson in a supervisory role – and wound up serving as a mentor to a host of coaches, players and officials at all levels.
Tony Granato said that selfless love of the game is Sauer’s enduring legacy.
“That’s an incredible man,” he said. “After all he had done for so many kids in our program, players and people that he touched, to say, ‘You know what? I have more to give.’
“That’s what makes Jeff Sauer remarkable. It’s the stuff he did for people, period.
“You’re so thankful you had him in your life, but you also wish he could be around here every day to watch and still be a part of it.”
There are certain people (and they know who they are) who never gave Sauer much credit because he didn’t match Johnson’s accomplishments at UW. Well, who could? That’s like saying that Johnson wasn’t as good a coach as Herb Brooks because Johnson only won three NCAA titles and didn’t win Olympic gold.
I had a couple of encounters with Sauer when I was a UW student. I interviewed him once about the crazy possibility of an on-campus arena, which a dozen years (and a $25 million contribution) later became the Kohl Center. Then I interviewed him as a sports intern for a Madison TV station. He was helpful and friendly in both cases.
Being in the UW Band gave me a view of his work during games. He wasn’t a screamer, at least during games. He seemed to be the same whether the Badgers were up or down, which is less entertaining to watch than the screamers, but probably more effective. He also would occasionally crack a smile at some of the Band’s wittier observations about the game.
Unfortunately I was a victim of bad timing in that Sauer won his first national championship the year before I became a UW student, and won his second two years after I graduated. (However, I made the trip to Detroit to see the Badgers brush off Colgate.)
The 1990 Badgers accomplished what only one other UW team did — sweep the WCHA regular-season and tournament championship and the NCAA title.
I also saw him last May, when he spoke to a group of 12-season high school athletes, who played sports in every season in their high school years. He spoke to the students about lessons you learn from sports and what you get from sports (which is less about the accomplishments and more about how you get there). I told him I was a student when Sauer had the only successful major sports program (i.e. program that brought in revenue) at UW.
He was a great ambassador for hockey and for UW.
Today in 1959, a few hours after their concert at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson got on a Beechcraft Bonanza in Mason City, Iowa, to fly to Fargo, N.D., for a concert in Moorhead, Minn.
The trio, along with Dion and the Belmonts, were part of the Winter Dance Party Tour, a 24-city tour over three weeks, with its ridiculously scheduled tour dates connected by bus.
Said bus, whose heater broke early in the tour, froze in below-zero temperatures two nights earlier between the scheduled concert in the Duluth, Minn., National Guard Armory, and the next scheduled location, the Riverside Ballroom in Green Bay.
Holly’s drummer had to be hospitalized with frostbite in his feet, and Valens also became ill. The tour got to Green Bay, but its scheduled concert in Appleton that evening was canceled.
After the concert in Clear Lake, Holly decided to rent an airplane. Holly’s bass player, Waylon Jennings, gave his seat to the Big Bopper because he was sick, and Valens won a coin flip with Holly’s guitarist, Tommy Allsup. Dion DiMucci chose not to take a seat because the $36 cost equaled his parents’ monthly rent.
As he was leaving, Holly told Jennings, “I hope your ol’ bus freezes up,” to which Jennings replied, “Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes!”
Shortly after the 12:55 a.m. takeoff, the plane crashed, instantly killing Holly, Valens, the Big Bopper and the pilot.
The scheduled concert that evening went on, with organizers recruiting a 15-year-old, Robert Velline, and his band the Shadows. Bobby Vee went on to have a good career. So did a teenager in the audience, Robert Zimmerman, who became known a few years later as Bob Dylan.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
