Kudos to Matt Lauer on the Toyota story

Here's the deal. As this story of the Toyota defect has grown and grown in the past months, finally getting huge in the last week with the stop-sale announcement, ABC has been one of the leaders on the story (LAT, Detroit Free Press and some others have been great too, but ABC has been the one breaking parts of the story on TV).

So when the company finally did an interview in the U.S., they wanted a friendly setting (the head of the company internationally is (or was) at the WEF in Davos, dodging reporters).

The Today Show sure sounds like a good choice to me. Today even has a partnership with the "Toyota Concert Series." Hmm.

But Matt Lauer's interview this morning with Jim Lentz turned out to be really good. He was well prepared and didn't let Lentz spin or slither away. Three cheers.

On ABC, meanwhile, team Brian Ross did a well-executed ambush interview, which isn't that common these days (outside of O'Reilly and the celebrity press). This situation certainly seems a fair time for it.