Thursday, June 7, 2018

Toxic Water or Toxic Streets and Cars?

The water advisory's back on. And stories in today's paper again pose the question: Which is more dangerous, our public water system or our autoist public road system?

Maybe it's those other things in the photo that will kill

It's not mysterious! A driver hit the girl with her truck

This is more neutral and accurate
Maybe Salem officials should offer a "do not drive" advisory for vulnerable populations? We tolerate way more death and injury on our roads right now than we seem prepared to tolerate with our water system! Why this disproportion?

Two of the three pieces also have the driverless car. The most interesting is the caption on the "toxins in water" piece: "cars wait to receive bottled water." People in cars are waiting, not the cars themselves. But even here we displace agency onto the inanimate car. That is a measure of how thoroughly infected we are by this rhetoric of the driverless car.

Columbia Journalism Review

1 comment:

Walker said...

But, speaking of the classism and racism inherent in our zoning codes (especially the prohibition on any home business activities), let an undocumented driver be involved in a crash and BOOM, suddenly the reporters and headline editors all know how to write about the driver.