60 Minutes

===Audi unintended acceleration===
On November 23, 1986, ''60 Minutes'' aired a segment [[greenlight|greenlit]] by Hewitt, concerning the [[Audi 5000]] automobile, a popular [[Germany|German]] luxury car. The story covered a supposed problem of "unintended acceleration" when the brake pedal was pushed, with emotional interviews with six people who sued [[Audi]] (unsuccessfully) after they crashed their cars, including one woman whose six-year-old son had been killed. In the ''60 Minutes'' segment footage was shown of an [[Audi 5000]] with the accelerator "moving down on its own", accelerating the car. It later emerged that an expert witness employed by one of the plaintiffs modified the accelerator with a concealed device, causing the "unintended acceleration".<ref>{{cite news|title=Audi Investigated for Unintended Acceleration|url=http://www.automobile.com/audi-investigated-for-unintended-acceleration.html|work=Automobile.com|url-status=dead|archive-url=http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20121217135715/http://www.automobile.com/audi-investigated-for-unintended-acceleration.html|archive-date=December 17, 2012}}</ref> Independent investigators concluded that this "unintended acceleration" was most likely due to driver error, where the driver let their foot slip off the brake and onto the accelerator. Tests by [[Audi]] and independent journalists showed that even with the [[Wide open throttle|throttle wide open]], the car would simply stall if the brakes were actually being used.<ref>{{cite news|title=Audi's Runaway Trouble With the 5000|last=Yates|first=Brock|work=[[Washington Post Magazine]]|date=December 21, 1986}}</ref>

The incident devastated Audi sales in the United States, which did not rebound for 15 years. The initial incidents which prompted the report were found by the [[National Highway Traffic Safety Administration]] and [[Transport Canada]] to have been attributable to operator error, where car owners had depressed the accelerator pedal instead of the brake pedal. CBS issued a partial retraction, without acknowledging the test results of involved government agencies.<ref>{{cite web|title=Manufacturing the Audi Scare|url=http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cjm_18.htm|last=Huber|first=Peter|work=[[The Wall Street Journal]]|publisher=[[Manhattan Institute for Policy Research]]|date=December 18, 1989}}</ref> Years later, ''[[Dateline NBC]]'', a rival to ''60 Minutes'', was found guilty of similar tactics regarding the fuel tank integrity of [[Dateline NBC#General Motors vs. NBC|General Motors pickup trucks]].<ref>{{cite magazine|title='Dateline' Disaster: NBC and General Motors feud over a staged car accident|url=https://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,305709,00.html|last=Fretts|first=Bruce|magazine=[[Entertainment Weekly]]|access-date=July 29, 2013|archive-date=June 4, 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130604205808/http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,305709,00.html|url-status=dead}}</ref>