A driver struck and killed a person in a Salem park today.
From Salem Police:
At approximately 9:15 a.m. today, August 20, park users called for police assistance at Woodmansee Park when a man in the parking lot area was struck by a woman driving a vehicle.
The man is deceased, and the driver has been questioned. Salem Police detectives have assumed the investigation....
No further information on this active investigation is available for release at this time.
Perhaps because there was on the surface evidence for criminal intent, and detectives are taking over the investigation, the police statement does not erase the driver. Even though it uses the passive voice, "was struck by," it identified the agent as a "woman" and does not use the "hit by car" formula.
Even more interesting, in churning the police release, the SJ introduces the "hit by car" formula and erases the driver! That formula survived in an update four hours after the original. (We'll see if it appears also in print and in later online versions. This is evidence, in the wrong direction of course, that newspapers can exercise editorial judgement with police reports and not simply reproduce their biases.)
A man was killed Saturday morning in the parking lot of Woodmansee Park off Sunnyside Road SE after being struck by a vehicle, Salem Police said in a statement.
Police were called about 9:15 a.m. Saturday when the man was struck by the vehicle, according to the statement.
Update, August 21st
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| "hit by car" trope in print |
Here it is in the Sunday paper, still with the "hit by car" formula.
Additional Update, August 21st
And here is an update from police:
Salem Police detectives arrested Branda Myshelle Myers, age 29 of Salem, on two charges of murder: first and second degree, respectively.
On Saturday, August 20, patrol officers responded to the report of a hit and run collision at Woodmansee Park in south Salem. Witnesses at the scene were able to direct officers to the location of the decedent, Vince Edward Fouts, age 38, of Salem, as well as Myers.
Detectives learned Myers and her former spouse, Fouts, were in a custody dispute and attempting to resolve matters that morning at the park. The argument between the two escalated, and Myers used her vehicle to run over Fouts several times. [updated with correct spelling of Fouts]
This post will be updated.
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| On erasing the driver - Columbia Journalism Review |
For more discussion of language see these other examples:
- "Headline Omits Verb, Erases the Driver; New TRB Paper Addresses Problem" (2019). This also has links to a follow-up study on framing and reader interpretation.
- See the way the story develops with different publications in "Driver Strikes and Kills Marshall Leslie on Foot near Downtown Safeway." (2019)
6 comments:
And it wasn't some intern or rookie reporter who penned the SJ story. It was the Editor!
Yeah, that was interesting.
Added the print version, also.
And the police have published an update: The driver was arrested for murder.
(Corrected Douts to Fouts from police correction)
In the follow-up pieces there was still a kind of erasure in the paper. The SJ's headline was "Woman charged in killing of former partner." Any car was incidental.
By contrast Salem Reporter said, "Salem woman runs over, kills ex-husband with car at Woodmansee Park, police say."
As an instance of domestic violence, and perhaps with previous, aggravating instances behind it, it is a complicated and exceedingly sad story.
There are multiple and overlapping contexts for the story, and in short pieces it may not be possible to give appropriate weight to each of them.
But the death is also an instance of traffic violence.
People use cars for dominance and much smaller, non-fatal kinds of aggression. The outcome, murder, compounded by intent, is qualitatively different than "ordinary" traffic crashes, in which harm is generally not intended. But cars are routinely used also in aggressive actions that do not result in death, and the use of a car here as a murder weapon is also only quantitatively different than other aggressive uses of cars.
A car was available as a murder weapon in part because we have already normalized dominance and lethality with cars and driving. This was not some novel use of a car that no one had ever thought of before.
The conclusion is sad and ambiguous all the way around. Salem Reporter says Myers agreed to "a reduced charge of second-degree manslaughter, a class B felony....[and was sentenced to] 75 months in prison and three years of post-prison supervision. The judge ordered her to pay $15,911 to the state’s crime victims compensation program and revoked her driver’s license for life."
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