With one notable exception, the headlines and ledes in today's paper all perpetuate in varying ways and degrees the error of erasing the driver in car crashes - the person who is
responsible for the safe operation of a car.
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| "Van jumps curb" |
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| "Vehicles crash into buildings" |
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| "Abandoned car involved in shooting" |
The one exception? The front-page story about an errant cop. Its grammatical and responsible subject is always the driver, a person charged with the safe operation of a motor vehicle.
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| "Officer resigns after crashing into car" |
This is exactly right!
The topic is beginning to move from advocacy circles to journalism circles.
From the Columbia Journalism Review:
Reporters also tend to write about the car, and not the person behind it.... “In a way, journalists gave a kind of quasi-autonomy to cars long before autonomous vehicles existed,” Dudley says. The vehicle is responsible, not the motorist, in most news reports. “[It’s] framing traffic deaths as things that kind of happen, and not being skeptical about why it happened and who is responsible,” Dudley says.
1 comment:
The Statesman-Urinal is filled with these kinds of stories. Typically, a motor vehicle lost control, not the driver failed to maintain control. However, perhaps the classic was in a recent pedestrian death where a driver narrowly missed the pedestrian, but the pickup in the adjacent lane was "not so fortunate." I occasionally call them on these stupid characterizations of the causes of crashes but have rarely received a response and have seen no change in the writing.
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