Examples from the News and Tribune illustrate how "Media Coverage of Car Crashes Downplays the Role of Drivers."

Read the headline again.

How Media Coverage of Car Crashes Downplays the Role of Drivers

It has been my contention for quite some time that the News and Tribune is a prime and persistent practitioner of this bias. These lapses may or may not be intentional. They just are.

First, the article explaining why.

I urge you to suspend your own biases for just a moment and read what Richard Florida has to say. After the article's conclusion, I'll paste recent examples from Facebook of the News and Tribune's (at best) inconsistent scattershot approach -- at times proper, at others ridiculous.

Note that the research referred to by Florida describes "pedestrians and cyclists collectively as 'vulnerable road users,' or VRUs."

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How Media Coverage of Car Crashes Downplays the Role of Drivers, by Richard Florida (CityLab)

Safety advocates have long complained that media outlets tend to blame pedestrians and cyclists who are hit by cars. Research suggests they’re right.

Since 2013, deaths among pedestrians and cyclists on U.S. roads have risen by nearly 30 percent and 14 percent respectively. Yet the public reaction to this spike in deaths has been fairly muted. Why?

One possible reason: road safety advocates have long complained that media outlets tend to blame pedestrians and cyclists who are hit by cars. A paper published earlier this year in a journal of the National Academy of Sciences’ Transportation Research Board offers proof that they’re right.

snip

News stories overwhelmingly (but often subtly) shift blame onto pedestrians and cyclists, the researchers found. “Coverage almost always obscures the public health nature of the problem by treating crashes as isolated incidents, by referring to crashes as accidents, and by failing to include input from planners, engineers, and other road safety experts,” they write.

Despite its suggestion of inevitability and faultlessness, ‘‘accident’’ was the most commonly used term for crashes, occurring in 47 percent of sentences in articles’ body text and 11 percent of titles across the sample. News reports were also much more likely to use phrases like “a pedestrian or cyclist was hit by a car” instead of “a driver hit a pedestrian.”

(Journalists, it should be noted, have legal obligations to avoid placing blame on either party without an official determination by police or other authorities.)

Sentence structure and word choice matter. “A pedestrian was hit by a car” centers the victim getting hit—and as the authors note, “[p]eople tend to place greater blame on the focus of the sentence,” i.e., the victim. This kind of language de-emphasizes the agency of the driver. Additionally, many news reports used what the authors call “object-based language.” They explain:

Reports may describe a vehicle doing something rather than a driver (‘‘a car jumped the curb’’ versus ‘‘a driver drove over the curb’’). Object-based language obscures the driver’s role in the incident, thereby reducing blame. Observers tend to refer to people in cars using ‘‘object-based’’ language (e.g., car, traffic) but typically describe people walking or using bicycles with ‘‘human-based’’ language (e.g., bicyclist, pedestrian, person). This practice assigns unequal agency among the two groups.

Across the 200 articles that the researchers analyzed, 65 percent of sentences did include an agent—but that agent was the VRU in a full 74 percent of cases. And when a driver or vehicle was mentioned, sentences used object-based language (“A car hit a cyclist”) 81 percent of the time. “In other words, sentences overwhelmingly referred to an inanimate object as the actor [in a crash] rather than a driver,” the authors write, adding: “The use of object-based language was particularly jarring in the case of hit-and-run collisions where ‘the vehicle drove away.’’’

More than a quarter of the articles did not mention the driver at all, and some seemed to blame the victim for “darting” in front of a car.

News reports rarely mention the broader context behind car crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists. Safety advocates are right to be alarmed. Last year, more than 6,000 pedestrians were killed on roadways, up 3.4 percent from the previous year and the highest number since 1990. The fatality rate for cyclists jumped even higher (by 6.3 percent). This was during a period when overall traffic deaths (that is, including drivers) actually fell by 2.4 percent.

Very few of the articles in the sample brought up the role of road design or framed crashes as a public health issue, and none quoted experts knowledgeable in urban planning or traffic engineering. “This pattern of coverage likely contributes to the limited public outcry about pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities,” the authors observe.

Journalists are falling into common linguistic traps rather than consciously victim-blaming. But the problem is exacerbated by the shrinking of local newsrooms, so there are fewer seasoned reporters out there covering our deadly roads.

There are several steps journalists can take to cover road crashes more accurately. First and foremost, they should avoid referring to them as “accidents” and use “crash” or “collision” instead. “Because of the undue neutrality that ‘accident’ conveys, the editors of the British Medical Journal banned the use of the word” in 2001, as the paper notes.

Journalists should also be mindful of the tendency to blame the victim and to attribute agency to inanimate objects (cars). They should not let drivers off the hook, especially in cases of hit-and-run deaths. And they should look for patterns in pedestrian and cyclist deaths and contextualize their stories accordingly. Articles should probe issues such as road design, local failure to act on traffic safety initiatives (for example, Vision Zero policies), and broader public health. Experts can be helpful by acting as a resource for local news outlets covering this topic.

Ultimately, the study finds evidence for what many urbanists and safety advocates have been saying: The media is complicit in the growing American crisis of death by vehicle drivers. Better reporting practices are an indirect but important way to get to Vision Zero.

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Before listing examples of muddled News and Tribune usage, allow me to offer all requisite condolences to the families of the child and woman from Pekin, both killed by drivers the past month. Anyway you cut it, they're awful losses.

Permit me also to add that one way to help avoid future occurrences is to be precise in the way we refer to the situation, something the newspaper currently is struggling to achieve. Without knowing what exactly we're talking about, how can we move forward to make it better?

As an aside, what does the woman being a transient have to do with anything?

So: Crashes or accidents?

The newspaper gets it right ... often, though not always.

Hit by a car, or hit by a driver? Interesting that in the case of two walkers being struck, both were hit by a car, not a driver. But twice when two vehicles were involved in a mishap, drivers/humans are mentioned as having been involved.

When I brought this up on Facebook, something on the order of 15 comments were hurled at me to the effect that walkers are always to blame because they shouldn't be located where drivers are operating.

However the way I can recall being taught in driver's ed, the driver bears a responsibility to be proactive above and beyond all minimum standards. Now it's almost never the driver's fault; that's not the newspaper's doing, of course, but there's a great deal of complicity on the part of the nation's prosecutors, perhaps owing to an inadequate statutory structure.

Back to Florida's case. When's the last time you heard anyone locally -- newspaper, prosecutor, police, elected officials -- do any of this?

"They should look for patterns in pedestrian and cyclist deaths and contextualize their stories accordingly. Articles should probe issues such as road design, local failure to act on traffic safety initiatives (for example, Vision Zero policies), and broader public health. Experts can be helpful by acting as a resource for local news outlets covering this topic."

Our milieu at present is a sort of societal imperialism afforded by automobile centrism. As I've noted previously, driving is the last acceptable vestige of such imperialism in American life. Society properly frowns on the "N" word, sexual harassment and ableism, to name a few.

But we still willfully and almost proudly choose our words to absolve drivers who kill walkers, bikers and other non-automotive users of our planet.

Where does it say that drivers have MORE rights than non-drivers? Was that in the Declaration of Independence somewhere, and I missed it?

This narcissistic imperialism is the way most of us treat the undisputed hegemony of cars, isn't it?

My point, then: If media generally (and I believe lazily) phrases driver and walker/cyclist interaction as the former's interests invariably outweighing the latter's, then at the very least media is doing nothing to help resolve the problem.

The preceding placards clearly indicate that the News and Tribune could do better in every way cited by Florida's report.

Whether it cares to do so is something I wouldn't be willing to bet actually happens.

Simply stated, "Cars Are Death Machines."

To repeat: Car-centrism, or if you will "automobile supremacy," not only is a form of imperialism. It is perhaps the last remaining form of imperialism almost entirely absent social stigma.

When we get behind a steering wheel -- all of us, including me -- our assumptions of acceptable behavior change every bit as radically as when we savage people on social media.

Imperialism? Very much so.

Space must be seized to accommodate cars to the expense of non-car users. We expect to warehouse cars on public ground at no cost to ourselves. We demand cheap fuel and will support limitless violence (foreign wars, domestic economic coercion) in order to get it. We'll go to any length to characterize this addiction as freedom. The list of destructive behavior is seemingly endless, and yet we've made automobile supremacy the basis of civilization at the present time.

And then there's that other factor, because cars are death machines, and we seem to like it that way. How "freedom" fits into this dichotomy remains a complete mystery to me.

Cars Are Death Machines. Self-Driving Tech Won’t Change That.

By Allison Arieff (New York Times)

Cars are death machines. Pedestrian fatalities in the United States have increased 41 percent since 2008; more than 6,000 pedestrians were killed in 2018 alone. More than 4,000 American kids are killed in car crashes every year – I am thankful every day my niece wasn’t one of them.

Straight to the conclusion.

I’m not so naïve to think we can get rid of cars altogether, but we have so many tools to eliminate traffic-related injuries and fatalities right now. Banning all passenger auto-driving vehicles above a certain weight and front grill height would be a great start. Other solutions run the gamut from the quick and easy fixes — like reducing speed limits, eliminating right turns on red, building protected bike lanes and instituting congestion pricing — to major and necessary commitments like funding new transit projects (upgrading, maintaining and expanding existing transit systems) and rethinking land use to encourage walkable development rather than sprawl.

We can all commit to driving less, which reduces both CO2 emissions and the potential for crashes. We need to be as defensive about crosswalks and bike lanes as drivers are about their cars (and where we believe we are entitled to park them).

Until then, the streets will belong to the death machines.

Posterity will affirm it: "Was the Automotive Era a Terrible Mistake?"

“When it came my turn to present, the solution I proposed for trips of less than a mile -- and more than half of urban trips are this short -- was shoes, available since 1600 BC.”
-- Samuel I. Schwartz

I've heard it said that drugs rewire the brain. This may or may not be true, but to me, driving definitely does. We become something different when we're behind the wheel, and for the most part the difference is unpleasant.

Was the Automotive Era a Terrible Mistake? by Nathan Heller (The New Yorker)

For a century, we’ve loved our cars. They haven’t loved us back.

In America today, there are more cars than drivers. Yet our investment in these vehicles has yielded dubious returns. Since 1899, more than 3.6 million people have died in traffic accidents in the United States, and more than eighty million have been injured; pedestrian fatalities have risen in the past few years. The road has emerged as the setting for our most violent illustrations of systemic racism, combustion engines have helped create a climate crisis, and the quest for oil has led our soldiers into war.

Every technology has costs, but lately we’ve had reason to question even cars’ putative benefits. Free men and women on the open road have turned out to be such disastrous drivers that carmakers are developing computers to replace them. When the people of the future look back at our century of auto life, will they regard it as a useful stage of forward motion or as a wrong turn? Is it possible that, a hundred years from now, the age of gassing up and driving will be seen as just a cul-de-sac in transportation history, a trip we never should have taken?

And this.

It is odd, then, that we still look to the mid-century for evidence that cars proved their necessity and worth. Tell someone that you cannot drive, and they respond as if you had confessed an intimate eccentricity, like needing to be walked on with high heels before bed. “Re-e-eally! ” the reply goes. “How do you . . . ?”

The answer is planes, trains, buses, ferries, cabs, bikes, feet, and the occasional shared ride: almost anywhere in the world can be reached this way for less than the amortized cost of a car and its expenses.

And this.

The original sin of cars, the problem from which other problems emerged, was commercial pressure for private ownership—for the car to be a personal vehicle in your garage rather than a shared technology woven into the transportation network, as early electric cars would have been. The costs of this decision can be seen on every curb: the typical American vehicle spends ninety-five per cent of its life parked.

It appears this 95% of a car's time parked is spent by its owners bitching and moaning about the period of 5% movement.

"The automobile took over because the legal system helped squeeze out the alternatives."

I've said it before and I'll say it again: car-centrism, or "automobile supremacy," as the author refers to it, not only is a form of imperialism. It's perhaps the last remaining form of imperialism almost entirely absent social stigma.

When we get behind a wheel -- all of us, including me -- our assumption of acceptable behavior changes every bit as much as when we savage people on social media.

Single-family-only zoning, parking requirements, the mortgage-interest tax deduction ("the deduction primarily subsidizes large houses in car-centric areas"), prioritization of motorists' convenience over public safety, insurance inadequacies, tort law, criminal law ... the list of ways that the legal system institutionalizes this mode of imperialism is lengthy and daunting.

What's it going to take to make improvements, or do we continue to shrug and say nothing can be done?

Americans Shouldn’t Have to Drive, but the Law Insists on It, by Gregory Shill (The Atlantic)

The automobile took over because the legal system helped squeeze out the alternatives.

 ... As I detail in a forthcoming journal article, over the course of several generations lawmakers rewrote the rules of American life to conform to the interests of Big Oil, the auto barons, and the car-loving 1 percenters of the Roaring Twenties. They gave legal force to a mind-set—let’s call it automobile supremacy—that kills 40,000 Americans a year and seriously injures more than 4 million more. Include all those harmed by emissions and climate change, and the damage is even greater. As a teenager growing up in the shadow of Detroit, I had no reason to feel this was unjust, much less encouraged by law. It is both.

It’s no secret that American public policy throughout the 20th century endorsed the car—for instance, by building a massive network of urban and interstate highways at public expense. Less well understood is how the legal framework governing American life enforces dependency on the automobile. To begin with, mundane road regulations embed automobile supremacy into federal, state, and local law. But inequities in traffic regulation are only the beginning. Land-use law, criminal law, torts, insurance, vehicle safety regulations, even the tax code—all these sources of law provide rewards to cooperate with what has become the dominant transport mode, and punishment for those who defy it.

Let’s begin at the state and local levels ...

Especially this.

In other words, the very fact that car crashes cause so much social damage makes it hard for those who are injured or killed by reckless drivers to receive justice.

In a similar spirit, criminal law has carved out a lesser category uniquely for vehicular manslaughter. Deep down, all of us who drive are afraid of accidentally killing someone and going to jail; this lesser charge was originally envisioned to persuade juries to convict reckless drivers. Yet this accommodation reflects a pattern. Even when a motorist kills someone and is found to have been violating the law while doing so (for example, by running a red light), criminal charges are rarely brought and judges go light. So often do police officers in New York fail to enforce road-safety rules—and illegally park their own vehicles on sidewalks and bike facilities—that specific Twitter accounts are dedicated to each type of misbehavior. Given New York’s lax enforcement record, the Freakonomics podcast described running over pedestrians there as “the perfect crime.”

And the conclusion.

Americans customarily describe motor-vehicle crashes as accidents. But the harms that come to so many of our loved ones are the predictable output of a broken system of laws. No struggle for justice in America has been successful without changing the law. The struggle against automobile supremacy is no different.

"Ideology as History": critiquing Burns and Novick’s The Vietnam War documentary.

I'm suddenly struck by the number of times we walked into a bar or restaurant in Belgium and Holland, only to find not even one functional television. Heavenly.

While we were gone, the documentary event of the season debuted.

Vietnam: 'The war in south-east Asia is now the subject of an epic 10-part, 18-hour series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick."

I'm struck by this observation in The Guardian's article: "Two thirds of Americans who served in Vietnam are no longer alive ... while the majority of Vietnamese people were born after the war."

It's why history matters.

Even before pre-truth became post-truth, the tricky part has always been getting the history right, and that's why people like Howard Zinn matter.

Learn about Howard Zinn and “What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me About the American Empire.”

Howard Zinn died in 2010. A few years ago, when I tried listing the most influential books in my life, Zinn's A People's History of the United States was not among them, and this was an unfortunate omission, to be rectified in a future update.

Now more than ever, you need to know these things.

It's about sifting though the evidence and following it to a conclusion, not cherry-picking the parts that support pre-existing beliefs -- and in the case of the new series about the Vietnam War ...

Ideology as History: a Critical Commentary on Burns and Novick’s “The Vietnam War”, by Chuck O'Conell (CounterPunch)

After watching Episodes One and Two of the Burns and Novick Vietnam War series, I am reminded of the old adage asserting a valuable point for students of history: the class that controls the means of material production controls also the means of mental production. Listening to the narrator scroll through the list of financial sponsors cautioned me to lower my expectations that the series would break away from the predictable liberal narrative that has been dominant in discussions about the Vietnam War.

What is that liberal narrative? It is a bundle of intertwined claims: Vietnamese opposition to the French and then the Americans was motivated by a nationalist desire for independence, the Saigon government of the South was a legitimate government, the rebellion of the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam against the U.S. supported Saigon regime was directed by the communist Hanoi government of the north, the military conflict in Vietnam was thus a civil war, and U.S. military involvement in support of the South was the result of a series of mistakes by American political leaders. It’s a narrative that has a certain plausibility not least because it has been repeated over and over for fifty years.

A more comprehensive scholarly reading of history produces a more accurate narrative: First, without discounting the significance of nationalism in Vietnamese society, a more important factor in the war was the goal of land reform offered by the communists to the peasants who comprised the majority of the population. The military struggle was in large part a social revolution against the landlord class and its foreign backers. Second, the Saigon regime that emerged after the failed French war of re-conquest was a U.S. creation financed and managed by the Americans who built its military and prodded it into fighting against the Vietnamese revolutionary forces. When an army such as the South Vietnamese Army is funded and trained by a foreign power to maintain the foreigner’s domination of that same country, that army is not fighting a civil war – it is fighting a war of counterinsurgency and is essentially an army of collaborators. Third, the National Liberation Front was an autonomous Southern political entity that emerged from the failure of the Hanoi government to press a fight against the southern regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. Dominated by communists it was in liaison with Hanoi as the North gradually gave greater assistance to the rebels’ efforts. Fourth, the U.S. involvement was not the result of a series of mistakes but was the result of a series of deceptions and provocations made by every U.S. administration running from Harry Truman all the way to Richard Nixon on the basis of the perceived political-economic imperatives of advanced capitalism in Southeast Asia. Let me amplify these points ...

Now more than ever: "US Military Should Get Out of the Middle East."

Hama Rules, 1982.

It isn't minimizing the horror of chemical weapons to offer a reminder that there is a thing called Assad-Vu in Syria: they've all been here before.

1982 Hama massacre

I've been around for 12 presidents (yes, a few months of Eisenhower, too), split between seven Republicans and five Democrats, and while they may seem to have little in common, most have seemed quite willing to bomb things. This might constitute something of a trend.

Journalist Phillip M. Bailey‏ won last night's local Internet with this:

Now we get to watch #Dems and #GOP switch their positions on #Syria airstrikes.

Yep.

US Military Should Get Out of the Middle East, by Jeffrey D. Sachs (Common Dreams)

It’s time to end US military engagements in the Middle East. Drones, special operations, CIA arms supplies, military advisers, aerial bombings — the whole nine yards. Over and done with. That might seem impossible in the face of ISIS, terrorism, Iranian ballistic missiles, and other US security interests, but a military withdrawal from the Middle East is by far the safest path for the United States and the region. That approach has instructive historical precedents.

America has been no different from other imperial powers in finding itself ensnared repeatedly in costly, bloody, and eventually futile overseas wars. From the Roman empire till today, the issue is not whether an imperial army can defeat a local one. It usually can, just as the United States did quickly in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. The issue is whether it gains anything by doing so. Following such a “victory,” the imperial power faces unending heavy costs in terms of policing, political instability, guerrilla war, and terrorist blowback.

Terrorism is a frequent consequence of imperial wars and imperial rule. Local populations are unable to defeat the imperial powers, so they impose high costs through terror instead.

America's "empire of chaos," a cannon now turned inward and pointed at YOU, lord.

Ready for more uplifting Tuesday morning reading? Okay, here goes. We've uncorked the bad genie from so many worldwide bottles, and now we're enveloped in the consequences.

American History Explains Donald Trump, by Tom Engelhardt (The Nation)

After so many years of creating chaos abroad, it’s finally come back to haunt us.

The one thing you could say about empires is that, at or near their height, they have always represented a principle of order as well as domination. So here’s the confounding thing about the American version of empire in the years when this country was often referred to as “the sole superpower,” when it was putting more money into its military than the next 10 nations combined: It’s been an empire of chaos ...

Now, set the hook, because we'd best get used to it.

 ... The United States with all its wealth and power is, of course, hardly an Afghanistan or a Libya or a Yemen or a Somalia. It still remains a genuinely great power, and one with remarkable resources to wield and fall back on. Nonetheless, the recent election offered striking evidence that the empire of chaos had indeed made the trip homeward. It’s now with us big time, all the time. Get used to it.