The crimes of Mitsubishi Motors Corp. have made the media a little more attentive to vehicles that blow up. In the past several weeks, it seems an awful lot of MMC products have spontaneously combusted. Whenever they do, it's reported in the newspapers, and the frequency of such reports (at least four during the weekend of June 26) can't help but make you wonder how often these explosions happened when the media wasn't on the lookout for them. To paraphrase the old proverb, if a car catches on fire and no reporter is around to observe it, does it burn?

Usually, when a vehicle-related mishap is reported, the make and model are never mentioned. It's a tacit courtesy extended to the car industry by newspeople to avoid giving the appearance that the manufacturer might be to blame for the mishap. Under the shadow of the current scandal, however, such a courtesy can also seem like collusion.

The media say MMC's crimes are unique, a product of its corporate culture, as if what it did were an anomaly; but a look at the broader picture shows that MMC's conspiracy of negligence fits into a pattern of larger institutional negligence. Two recent TV news programs made it clear that whatever sins MMC committed, they were easy to commit, given the Japanese government's official business priorities.