Good article from the Irish Examiner:
Road policing experts, road safety professionals, and the National Union of Journalists’ (NUJ) ethics council ... call for language that recognises human agency, avoids speculation, and refrains from calling collisions “accidents” unless they are demonstrably unavoidable. They remind journalists not to present vehicles as if they act independently, but to identify drivers where appropriate.
...
At present, our reporting habits risk obscuring the truth. When a headline declares that a cyclist “was in collision with a truck”, it subtly suggests the cyclist was the instigator — while the person driving the truck disappears from view. Readers are left with a story in which tragedy simply happens, as if by chance — rather than one in which human decisions and behaviours can be examined. Was the driver speeding? Were they distracted? Did they fail to yield? Such questions are much harder to ask when the driver is written out of the account.This matters because language influences how we think about prevention. If crashes are reported as random, inevitable events, then all that remains is condolences.
But if they are reported as the outcome of choices — by drivers, by engineers who design unsafe junctions, and by policymakers who fail to reduce speed limits — then accountability becomes possible. Prevention becomes possible too.
https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/commentanalysis/arid-41712236.html
posts
