In the wake of the ongoing controversy surrounding Volkswagen’s diesel car emissions controversy, MSNBC reporter Tony Dokoupil wildly proclaimed that Republican politicians were cheering on the German car maker for deceiving the Environmental Protection Agency.
Dokoupil appeared on All In with Chris Hayes Tuesday night and insisted that “[i]f you’re a Republican, if you think the EPA goes too far on stuff like this, this is almost like a heroic act by Volkswagen.”
The liberal MSNBC reporter hyped how unlike past corporate cover ups in the past, VW actually engaged in an “abundance of courage” by allegedly trying to make a car that deliberately deceived EPA emissions standards:
Typically companies find a defect and then they lack the courage to acknowledge it and fix the problem. This is actually an abundance of courage. In 2009, Volkswagen was trying to get into the U.S. market. It was trying to beat Toyota. Emission standards come down. And at some point, the company made a decision. They said we can make a fun car or we can make a legal car. And we’re going to choose through this device to make the fun car and screw the emission standards.
Dokoupil then eagerly decided to inject politics into his assessment of the Volkswagen scandal and without proof asserted that Republicans would eagerly approve of its deceptive practice of making their diesel vehicles appear cleaner than they actually were:
If you’re a Republican, if you think the EPA goes too far on stuff like this, this is almost like a heroic act by Volkswagen. They got in a room, and they came up with a cheating machine, they didn’t move numbers around, a machine that beats federal regulators in Washington.
Host Chris Hayes never bothered to challenge his MSNBC colleague to actually provide evidence that Republicans would view VW’s actions as a “heroic act” and instead spent the rest of the segment hyping how the company “had software implanted to fool the emissions testers, right? They had to actively decide to do this.”
Dokoupil concluded his comments by praising the EPA’s emissions standards as “going farther than any other regulatory body in the world to try to knock down these terrible chemicals which do terrible things to people.” The MSNBC reporter is known for his defense of the EPA at all costs and made sure to vindicate the agency of any wrongdoing following the toxic waste spill in Colorado and instead blamed “locals” for the environmental disaster.
See relevant transcript below.
MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes
September 22, 2015
CHRIS HAYES: Joining me now, Tony Dokoupil, MSNBC national reporter, host of Greenhouse on Shift. You’ve been doing great work on this. Okay, here’s the thing, corporations cover stuff up all the time. There was Vioxx, there was the GM ignition thing, even tobacco companies with, you know, link to cancer. They discover a bug, they cover it up. This is not that, right?
TONY DOKOUPIL: This is different. Typically companies find a defect and then they lack the courage to acknowledge it and fix the problem. This is actually an abundance of courage. In 2009, Volkswagen was trying to get into the U.S. market. It was trying to beat Toyota. Emission standards come down. And at some point, the company made a decision.
They said we can make a fun car or we can make a legal car. And we’re going to choose through this device to make the fun car and screw the emission standards. If you’re a Republican, if you think the EPA goes too far on stuff like this, this is almost like a heroic act by Volkswagen. They got in a room, and they came up with a cheating machine, they didn’t move numbers around, a machine that beats federal regulators in Washington.
HAYES: Because they basically say look, we’ve got this diesel car. And it’s got great pickup. And we want people to have the vroom of the diesel, right, but everyone knows diesel is dirtier, right, so they come up with this thing, they go, clean diesel.
I remember looking at this car. I was going to buy this car, Okay. I was looking at buying this car. And you read all the stuff on the website. They’re like, no, no, no everything you know about diesel is wrong. And it turns out they had software implanted to fool the emissions testers, right? They had to actively decide to do this.
DOKOUPIL: Oh yeah, this is not an accident. This is -- guys got in a room, the smartest engineers they had, and they had to design a cheating machine. We’re used to accounting fraud, financial fraud, move some numbers around, make something up on a computer. This is a device constructed in the headquarters of Volkswagen to deceive on a mass scale, and particularly to deceive the EPA, which is going farther than any other regulatory body in the world to try to knock down these terrible chemicals which do terrible things to people.
