The News and the Noise

This was a week of announcements. It was not, for the most part, a week of news. The distinction is the whole of our profession, and it is worth defending in plain daylight, because the industry has spent the past several days doing everything in its power to blur it.

Consider the inbox. BMW named a new head of sales and marketing at its North American financial arm, and moved another man into the chair the first one left. Rolls-Royce installed a new president for North America, effective the first of July. Genesis appointed a vice president of sales operations, who arrives from running Hyundai's business in Mexico, while the vice president he replaces slides over to Hyundai's national sales job, which had itself just come open. Four brands, a fistful of titles, a relay race of executives handing one another the same baton. Each release ran to several hundred earnest words. Each described the man as a respected leader with a proven track record of delivering results. None of them mentioned a car.

We do not begrudge these men their promotions. We wish them long careers and short commutes. But a reader does not come to this masthead to learn who got the corner office. He comes to learn whether the car is any good. An organizational chart is not a road. A reporting line is not a steering rack. When a company tells us, with the gravity of a coronation, that a regional vice president now oversees seventy-eight dealers across twelve states, it has told us nothing a driver can feel through the wheel at seventy.

A reader does not come to this masthead to learn who got the corner office. He comes to learn whether the car is any good.

The awards were worse, because the awards wear the costume of judgment. This week a single quality study was announced, and within hours it had been pressed into service as a laurel by everyone who placed anywhere near the top of anything. Three models highest in segment. Two more ranked second. The releases arrived trimmed to the precise shape of the trophy each brand had won, and not one millimeter wider. We will tell you the part the press releases buried: in that same study, initial quality improved across nine of ten categories, and the tenth, infotainment, got worse, dragged down by the phones we keep insisting our dashboards marry. That is the sentence worth printing. The rest is a brand holding up its own ribbon and asking you to applaud the act of being handed it.

This is the oldest trick in the trade, and it is not aimed at the foolish. It is aimed at the busy. A reshuffle and an award have the same useful property: they generate paper without generating obligation. They let a company appear to be in motion while standing perfectly still. They fill a slow week. And a publication that cannot tell the difference, that runs the press release because the press release arrived, is not a newspaper. It is a bulletin board with delusions.

So we draw the line, and we draw it where we always draw it. A leadership change earns a line of type when, and only when, it changes what reaches the driveway. An award earns ink when we can say what it measures and what it leaves out. Until then, the personnel desk can keep its confetti, and we will keep our column inches for the only question that has ever justified this enterprise: how does the thing drive.

There is a temptation, in a thin week, to mistake volume for substance, to let the machinery that now manufactures noise at industrial scale set the agenda for men who are paid to have judgment. We have watched that machinery grow. We have watched it learn to write the flattering paragraph, to generate the plausible release, to fill the silence with something that reads like meaning and is not. We will not be its stenographer. The defense against a flood is not a bigger bucket. It is the nerve to let most of it run past.

This magazine has, over the years, given itself a fair number of awards. We mention this not to retract them, but to be honest about the company we keep. The difference between our judgments and the ones clogging the wire this week is not modesty, of which we have little. It is that we have driven the cars. We will go on driving them. And when the next reshuffle crosses the desk, dressed up as history, we will read it, weigh it, and in nearly every case set it gently in the basket where the noise goes to die.

That basket is the most important piece of furniture in this building. We intend to keep it full.