Article - VW Engineer Pleads Guilty in U.S. Criminal Case Over Diesel Emissions
This article showcases the recent events concerning the Volkswagen emission scandals that were uncovered in 2015. The popular car company was caught cheating on emissions tests by including software that would decrease nitro-oxide emissions when it detected the car was being tested at the expense of efficiency. Specifically, it mentions the recent confessions made by Volkswagen engineer James Robert Liang, who recently pleaded guilty. The author, Hiroko Tabuchi, has been writing about Business for The New York Times for eight years. In 2013, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.
It seems this article was written for people concerned about the future of Volkswagen. The author’s style of writing, however, appeals more to an audience wanting to see the giant topple. This article was written almost a year after the scandal was first discovered by the public, which has given writers enough time to gather what they need to disgrace the German carmaker. The author uses these gatherings to contribute to her scornful tone. She includes quotes from VW executive’s emails that read “regulators are still waiting for Answers. We still have no good explanations!!!!!” This particular quote is included to make the executives of Volkswagen seem desperate and childish.
The author then quotes the chief of the Justice Department’s Environmental Crimes Section who says that this was “the first shoe to drop”. This idiom means that there is an inevitable next step in the process and that Volkswagen will have to endure, and that Volkswagen is destined to lose the battle. The author villainizes Volkswagen at the end of the article by saying that the prosecutor’s office of Lower Saxony, a town in which Volkswagen powers most of the economy, was reluctant to comment. It would be impossible to deny that Volkswagen is in the wrong and so it is relatively easy for the author to villainize them in this article, and Tabuchi is certainly successful in portraying them that way.
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