They always said that if you are getting yelled at by both sides then you are getting it right. I remember my university lecturer was talking about elections at the time, but as a News Editor it’s true of most things.
Today’s topic for people to have a go at me about was the politics of people dying on the roads.
Here is a typical (fictional) press release that we might get from the police:
Police were called to the junction of the High Street and the B9999 at 12.46pm today (Tuesday) after reports of a collision involving a blue Nissan Micra and a pedestrian.
The pedestrian, a 7 year old boy, was taken to Anytown Hospital where his injuries are thought to be serious.
PC John McPoliceman of the Countyshire Roads Policing Unit said: “This was a tragic incident and we would appeal for anyone who saw the incident and either the pedestrian or a blue Nissan Micra in the run up to the crash to contact us on 101.”
Since I live in Anytown, I know that junction well, and I know my listeners will know it as that horrible busy one where all the crashes happen.
So here is the textbook, journalistic write up. You will have seen this in local newspapers and heard it on local radio stations, and will continue to hear it.
A 7 year old boy has been left with serious injuries after being hit by a car this lunchtime in Anytown.
It happened on the busy junction between the High Street and Nexttown Road.
Police are asking for anyone who saw the incident to call them on 101.
Who is at fault here? Who hit who?
Well first of all we need to talk about the Contempt of Court Act. You are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Any person who influences a jury otherwise is committing a criminal offence and will be taken to court and prosecuted. That includes journalists. That includes ME, personally. If I am found to have implicated the driver in my reporting then I get charged with a criminal offence.
And so we write these awkwardly phrased stories.
A grandmother of 5 has been praised by police after fighting off muggers with her handbag and sitting on one of them till police arrived…
A 28 year old man has been arrested in connection with the incident.
But this is where it gets political.
In the example above, the most correct phrasing would be exactly as the police had it:
A 7 year old boy has been left with serious injuries after he collided with a car…
Now I’m sorry but that sounds stupid. More so, you just do not talk like that in real life. “Did you have a good day darling?” “Not really – At lunchtime I saw a child colliding with a car, I had to give the police a statement.” No. Stop it. It’s laughable and this is not a funny subject.
“X was hit by a Y” is the standard phrase for people getting hit by vehicles. It’s the one I use because it gets the message across. It tells my listeners what happened without them pausing to say “that’s a funny way of saying it” and then missing my next story. I get 2’30” to tell you as much as I can, I’ve put 57 minutes of work into getting it ready, and I’ll be damned if I lose your attention because of sloppy phrasing.
Although it does lean slightly towards saying the driver is at fault, it’s open enough that you can imagine several scenarios where the child would be at fault. Of course it’s never the child’s fault… but the actions of the child would mean the driver was not at fault. Legally, I am safe from prosecution.
My other options are:
“X was hit WITH a Y” Whether it’s a car or a bat, it implies that it happened deliberately. I would be completely making that up.
“X was hit by the driver of a Y” Well this just says that the driver got out and punched the kid before driving off. Wrong again.
What about if it’s two cars?
Well that’s different.
“A Nissan Micra was hit by a Ford Focus…” When it comes to cars, vans, and lorries, a lot can be inferred from who went into who. So we need to be more careful. But here my job is easy. “This great big lorry full of cheese collided with another one carrying crackers…” is something you can imagine yourself saying (in very bizarre circumstances) and so the news story changes.
A woman has been left with serious injuries after her Nissan collided with a Ford this lunchtime in Anytown.
It happened on the busy junction of the High Street and Nexttown Road.
Police are asking for anyone who saw the incident to call them on 101.
This tells you the story in a simple straight forward way. There is no thinking for you to do about what I just said. It’s also true. He injures would have come (for example) from her brain colliding with the inside of her skull, as her head collided with something on the inside of her car. Or from her neck being jerked so violently that the spinal column was damaged. She was INSIDE her car. The Ford didn’t touch her.
Where it gets difficult is when cyclists become involved.
EDIT: An important note about road traffic law and the court system.
If the driver is at fault, the pedestrian / cyclist goes to hospital, the driver goes to court.
If the pedestrian / cyclist is at fault, the pedestrian / cyclist goes to hospital. That’s it.
So when avoiding contempt of court, the expectation is ALWAYS that the driver is to blame. I’m not going to bias a jury deciding whether a 7 year old with head injuries is guilty of road traffic law. The injured party is ALWAYS the victim in the mind of the person writing it because they are the poor sod getting their bones reset.
I wonder if this adds unconscious bias in the minds of some journalists? That it’s legally SAFER to imply the victim is to blame, because they obviously CAN’T be to blame, because they are the victim?
So here are my options.
Cyclists are people, balanced on small bits of fast moving metal. Yeah.
First, lets assume we know it’s a male person on a bike.
“A man has been left with serious injuries after his bike collided with a Ford Focus this lunchtime in Anytown.” That sounds a bit unbalanced, like he rode his bike into the car. Implies he’s to blame.
“A man has been left with serious injuries after a Ford Focus collided with his bike this lunchtime in Anytown.” … Luckily he was in the sandwich shop at the time. Unfortunately he was hit by a meteor as he ran out to investigate. It’s better but it doesn’t sound right, because his injuries come from HIM colliding with the car, not his bike.
We can take this confusion out by using another word: A Cyclist (defined in this and many other cases as a person riding a bike) has been in collision with a Ford Focus. This is especially useful as VERY OFTEN the police get on scene and ignore the person on the floor who’s being held down and rolled about by paramedics. The cyclist isn’t going anywhere, but all the witnesses are.The police leave the cyclist in the care of the ambulance crews who strap them firmly to a spinal board and bugger off in an ambulance asap. We hear about the accident and the press office tell us that it’s bike vs car. Is it a man or a woman? No idea.
It’s a person. People get hit by things
“A cyclist has been left with serious injuries after they hit a Ford Focus this lunchtime in Anytown.” Silly Cyclist rode into a car. Wrong.
“A cyclist has been left with serious injuries after they were hit by a Ford Focus this lunchtime in Anytown.” This sounds fine to me. Yet still, people tell me they are not happy with this. It is exactly the same wording as if a child pedestrian had been hit, but I get complaints saying I am placing blame on the cyclist, not the driver. That by referring to the cyclist as a person, and the car as a thing, I am implicating blame on the person. Personally I consider it the same as the above example. I’m leaving it to people’s imaginations meaning I am safe from prosecution. But I accept I am not all knowing, and am open to opinions.
“Cyclist hit WITH a Ford” … by Superman, he picked it up and smacked the cyclist in the head with it. Definite racist overtones against Kryptonians there.
“Cyclist hit by a driver in a Ford”… who wound down his window and punched him as he drove past at a nice safe distance. Nope.
But although I will continue to use “X hit by a Y” and I stand by my choice to do that, is there ANY other way of doing it?
To my mind: Only if Cyclists stop being people. We may need to write about them as if they were soft squishy vehicles. This would take us back to using collision, and the ONLY option left available:
A cyclist has been left with serious injuries after a collision involving a Ford Focus this lunchtime in Anytown.
It happened on the busy junction at the High Street and Nexttown Road.
Police are asking for anyone who saw the incident to call them on 101.
Does this work? To me it sounds clunky, vague. But the thing is… language evolves. That’s one of the many reasons I love it. Maybe, just as we got used to saying “The Information Super Highway, or Internet…” we need to stop thinking of people on bikes as people, and see them as vehicles on the road like any other.
Maybe if drivers stopped seeing cyclists as people and started treating them like drivers of person shaped vehicles then we wouldn’t get so many collisions in the first place? Who knows.
Local News Ed 
Maybe if drivers *started* seeing cyclists as people (fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, brothers, sisters, just trying to get from A to B same as anyone else) on bikes then there wouldn’t be so many collisions in the first place.
The word “cyclist” is apt to make some people think I am “other”, just because of my mode of transport.
But apart from that, yes. You walk a fine line between clunky language and legal sanction: not an easy job. Thanks for giving it a lot of thought.
I really enjoyed reading this and think it’s an excellent start in trying to pick a way through this semantic minefield. I see you have used the word ‘accident’ only once which is quite an achievement as its use is so indiscriminate in this country. It is my particular hobby to infuriate myself at the use of it by … well anyone really. The problem, for me, is that in its common-usage, it not only excuses everyone from blame by suggesting that something was unavoidable but at the same time actually has legal-weight as it appears in legal-judgements be it trials, investigations, inquests – and also research-papers and documents to local and central government. It is a word that I have come to believe is completely without meaning or practical use in any situation. What I think people mean is ‘unintentional’ or ‘without intent’.
The law has ‘murder’, and ‘manslaughter’ but not ‘unintended death’ although a web-search will show its usage in other parts of Earth for statistical reporting purposes.
Obviously we cannot go around saying that someone had ‘an unintentional’ but ‘collision’, ‘incident’ and ‘crash’ not too difficult to use. I am often stumped as to what to say on each and every occasion but your piece has gone some way to helping me organise some thoughts. Thank you.
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Actually all of this discussion is a reflection of our culture and the fact that we think of collisions as accidents, something unavoidable, a fact of life. Putting it passively… ‘there has been a collision involving a cyclist and a Ford Focus…’ may be neutral, but it also makes it seem as though it might be caused by some force of nature. Or, as if it were inevitable. Accidents happen, don’t they?
No. No they don’t. Someone is at fault, and it probably isn’t the car. Did the car hit the cyclist? The car is not a person and therefore is incapable by itself of doing anything.
.
This is not a problem that is unique to road traffic collisions. The same technique is used for other incidents, as well…. ‘Train derails, injuring 53 people’
A netural point of view does not mean that the media have to make it sound as if no one was at fault, only that they should not assign fault.
Maybe I can offer another alternative…
A cyclist has been seriously injured in a road traffic collision today at lunchtime in Anytown. The other person involved was driving a green Ford Focus. He has been questioned, but not charged. Anyone who witnessed the incident at High Street and Nexttown Road, or saw a Green Ford Focus in the area near lunchtime should call police on 101.
Or perhaps…
A cyclist has been seriously injured in a road traffic collision today at lunchtime in Anytown. The other person who was involved drove a green Ford Focus….
I think that we need to show that people are involved in collisions. They don’t just happen, and they aren’t inevitable. I accept that media need to remain neutral and unbiased. But not to extent of dissociating the actions of people form a collision. Cars donæt cause collisions. People do.
Thanks for giving this topic the time and attention it deserves.
p.s. ‘Who hit who’ really should be ‘Who hit whom’
I see what you have done, but you’ve just made that up. We do not know if the driver has been questioned. He or she may have been so upset that police sent them home for a cup of tea. The press office will be unlikely to get that level of detail from an officer, and so would take a while to find out. Radio does not wait unfortunately.
Well, I was just following on from what you made up. Okay. Leave out the bit about the driver has been questioned. IT DOESN’T MATTER ANYWAY. What matters is that people are involved, not bikes and cars. So…
A man has been seriously injured in a road traffic collision today at lunchtime in Anytown. The other person involved was driving a green Ford Focus. Anyone who witnessed the incident at High Street and Nexttown Road, or saw a Green Ford Focus in the area near lunchtime should call police on 101.
Hi – I think maybe I started this? I don’t like the phrasing “hit BY a car” because it suggests the car did something of its own accord, suggesting that its driver must be innocent and, by elimination, that either there was a vehicle defect or the other party (the person “hit by a car” – and killed, in this instance) was in the wrong, when you don’t know that either. I do actually say things like “a car and a walker collided” these days, unless I know more – but I didn’t suggest that earlier because there were only 140 characters… oops.
Few phrasings avoid portraying someone as guilty – either the motor vehicle driver, the other party or the vehicle manufacturer. If we reject the few neutral phrasing as “stupid” what’s left is a choice: who are you going to blame?
But let’s talk about the Contempt of Court Act http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1981/49/contents – which bit are you worried about? My understanding (as a student journalist way back when) was that the Act mainly tidied up earlier common law and gave defences that any prejudice was incidental to the discussion of a matter of general public interest (like a death on the roads) and that refusing to reveal a source is not contempt… but maybe you know an aspect of that Act that I don’t, because I never got that far into it and I’ve been a long time away.
I think I learned about contempt from an National Union of Journalists briefing. I don’t know/remember if you’re NUJ, but I remembered that its Code of Conduct says “a journalist… strives to ensure that information disseminated is honestly conveyed, accurate and fair” – ultimately, is it accurate or fair to blame the car? The car is the least likely cause – it doesn’t even appear as significant in stats like http://www.ctc.org.uk/blog/chris-peck/whos-to-blame-in-crashes-between-cyclists-and-motorists which shows the motor vehicle driver is blamed for 80% of all injuries to 25+ cyclists – I expect the figure is similar for pedestrians, but I don’t have it to hand.
Why does it get any more difficult when cyclists are involved? They’re just people on bikes: not squishy vehicles and often not particularly fast moving, at least around Lynn 😉
I agree with Tim above that the word “cyclist” tends to be used by news items lately to portray the person as some sort of extreme sport freak, to make them part of an “out group” or other “tribe”, to dehumanise them. Please just call us people. If I remember the last official figures, something like a sixth of Lynn residents commute by bike and almost a quarter ride bikes frequently – and I feel that’s largely despite weak/botched council support for cycling recently. If anything, the special case should be the licensed person driving tons of motorised metal (and I drive cars too, like 80% of cyclists).
I can’t agree with the claim that drivers who are at fault go to court while injured walkers and riders get off! Just last week, the Evening Standard revealed that only 4 drivers were jailed for the 40 riders killed in London between 2010 and 2012… Now, compare that 10% to the 85% you’d expect to be at fault according to the figure three paragraphs ago – and that’s a big gap.
Basically, it seems like even though the roads seem to be designed for cars first (despite what the Local Transport Plan policies say), people still keep crashing cars into things around here, disrupting traffic (how often does KLFM report congestion on the bikeways?), destroying things (like Setchey toll house a few years ago) and even killing people, but drivers always get an easy ride from the press, police and courts. I’m fed up with lives being screwed up by what looks like bad driving and that’s maybe why I was a bit touchy about the car getting the blame. Thanks for setting out your thoughts and giving a space for discussion. Sorry for rambling but my thoughts on this aren’t well-structured – maybe the message is in here somewhere?
That scandalously low 10% jailing rate is the sort of thing motivating a whole campaign from CTC, the national cycling charity, calling for “Road Justice”. Which reminds me: the charity’s local campaigner Rob Archer is back writing in the Lynn News on Fridays again – hooray!
Thanks for a good look at some issues you have to deal with whilst reporting that some people will not realise.
Whilst taking my time to get back to this (virus nearly gone now, Emily!) I notice many people have replied with pretty much all I wanted to say!
One issue that does need highlighting in my mind is that when we talk about “cars causing accidents” we dehumanise the event and evade thinking about human responsibility. I’m not saying that in one particular incident the driver holds the blame, more that we remove the option of responsibility. I do understand that it is very difficult to manage to convey that without implying blame!
My prefered phrase: Two people where involved in a collision today at lunchtime on the High Street. One, a man aged 57 who was riding a bike, suffered serious injuries. The other, who was driving a Black Ford Focus, was uninjured.
There are lots of other bits of information that may or may not be added. I feel that this highlights that we are talking about humans and that no blame is assigned. Some may think the wording is clunky and unnatural. I think we get used to phrases pretty quickly once in use.
Finally, wording matters greatly and especially in local area media. The word “cyclist” has some very strong negative reactions. I’m trying to find the study done by J Datta et al (including R Alred?) that was discussed on Radio4 last year. Hear the word “cyclist” and most people think “irresponsible”, “dangerous”, “angry”, and so on. Hear the word “cycling” and many people think “sunny”, “family”, “holiday”. So when using the word “cyclist” many people have already assigned blame, often unconsciously. Strangely enough this also applies to those who do ride a bike. And I think MJ above has all the follow on to that about outgroups and dehumanisation.
Anyway, my short two-pennyworth. BTW, do you come to Cambridge much? I met and chatted with your Cambridge colleague David Loombe on CamRideHome a few months ago. It’s a great social bike ride every last Friday of the month. Fancy it?
And then, just to undermine my argument, the British Heart Foundation put out survey results saying cyclists are cool and the two coolest would be Michael McIntyre and Holly Willoughby 😉 http://www.bhf.org.uk/default.aspx?page=16733
Is CamRideHome fun? I keep meaning to go take a look.
Equally, do you get up to Lynn much? KLWNBUG.co.uk ride out from Lynnsport (on National Route 1 northbound about 1 mile from the stations) for a relaxed day trip 10am roughly every other Sunday (next: 12th and 19th Jan, 2nd and 16th Feb).
I noticed the BHF study (is it theirs?) as well, but did spot that they only talk about cycling as a sport and not the humdrum existence of a lowly commuter!
CamRideHome is quite fun, although quite low turnouts at the moment thanks to the weather. I keep pushing a few over twitter but often forget until the day when others plans have already been made!
Sorry, I rarely get up to Lynn, despite my mothers parents being in the crematorium.
Like another commenter mentioned above, the main issue with the way RTCs are reported is the way they are almost worded in a way which makes the car a sentient being devoid of a driver.
I have linked to this post by Robyn Kalda before which explains why semantics matter. http://www.hclinkontario.ca/index.php/blog/entry/crash-on-how-we-need-to-change-how-we-talk-about-car-crashes.html
Back to the contempt thing. I’ve been told by someone who I think is a former policeman (my memory may be tricking me) that “a charge of contempt can’t be made unless proceedings are active (when someone has been arrested; a warrant has been issued; they have been orally charged or an information has been laid)” – that wasn’t the case in the news item which kicked this off, so contempt wasn’t possible, or have we missed something?
This is true, but it’s on the journalist to check whether an arrest has taken place between each bulletin. If you’re putting things into print or online then you’d have to edit, or remove things, and be checking all the time. Writing within the rules takes 45” and then it’s done for ever.
So given that you are gambling with your criminal record, your career, and your ability to pay your mortgage and feed your children, I’ll act as though the case is active from the word go, rather than have to faff about with wording at risk of losing everything, just because I can.