Much longer than that. 60 Minutes was this bad in the late 1970s. In somewhat famous examples, their bogus hatchet job on the Jeep CJ was in 1980. For the most notorious, Audi "unintended" acceleration in 1986 and Alar in apples in 1989; all three of these involved serious falsifications.

The Jeeps were driven by robots that moved the steering wheel twice as fast as a human could, and even then the 4 Jeeps they tested a zillion times were a lot more stable than you would think (I drove a ~1966 Kaiser CJ-5 1977-79). They over pressurized an Audi's automatic transmission, even plugged a pressure relief valve, to demonstrate the failure they were claiming. Alar has never been shown to be a carcinogen, although if you feed near LD50 doses of a breakdown product to lab rodents you can show a carcinogenic effect. If you drink over 5,000 gallons of apple juice a day Alar might be a threat, but that's well over the LD50 (lethal dose for 50% of a tested population) of just plain water, which is around a gallon and a half at once.