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> it's been long acknowledged that "accident" is a problematic word to describe vehicle crashes because it minimizes the agency of a driver and intentional deci

by zamfi 5y ago

> it's been long acknowledged that "accident" is a problematic word to describe vehicle crashes because it minimizes the agency of a driver and intentional decision making processes that lead up to a crash I seem to recall that this was intentional, to improve acceptance of motor vehicles in the early days. Certainly the way laws are written, there is quite a high bar before an "accident" brings the kinds of criminal charges that any other reason for a similar action would trigger. For example, if you kill someone through inattention, that is often charged as involuntary manslaughter, unless you did it with a car and were following traffic laws, in which case it is rarely charged. As a society we have traditionally come to accept that driving kills lots of people, often but not always at random, and we don't want to be handing out random prison sentences for those with merely bad luck. (Or, at least, without provable blame.) I suspect there will be backlash, your post is one example.

riffic 5y ago
> I seem to recall that this was intentional, to improve acceptance of motor vehicles in the early days. The link I shared previously (Fonseca, 2020) mentions this: --- Why do we talk about crashes like this? It didn't happen by accident. You may know the history of how early carmakers turned "jaywalking" — a term initially meant to shame pedestrians out of the street — into an actual crime. But the emerging auto industry also had a hand in influencing how the public perceived fatal collisions. In the early days of the automobile, reckless drivers were killing pedestrians, mostly women and children, at alarming rates. Newspaper coverage in the 1910s and '20s painted drivers as "remorseless murderers" and angry mobs reportedly dragged drivers involved in fatal collisions from their cars. So the industry went into damage control, with one national auto industry group even creating a free wire service for newspapers, which incentivized reporters to send in basic details of a traffic collision in return for a full, ready-to-publish article. What a thoughtful convenience! Except, unsurprisingly, the narrative in those articles largely shifted the blame to pedestrians and used the term "accident" to describe crashes, which helped embed the term in the minds of news readers across the nation. In the face of the rising death toll, a 1926 editorial in The New Republic titled "The Murderous Motor" proclaimed: "...much of the present waste of life is inevitable and will continue no matter what preventive measures are taken." Imagine if outlets today were publishing stories about data privacy from a free wire service run by Facebook, Google or Uber. That's essentially the ethical breach many newspapers allowed back in the '20s and '30s — and the echoes and effects can still be seen in news stories today. The auto industry exploited the power of the press because its leaders understood that language and perspective (and growing ad revenue) can shift culture — and recent scientific research backs that up.

by zamfi 5y ago

riffic 5y ago

> I seem to recall that this was intentional, to improve acceptance of motor vehicles in the early days. The link I shared previously (Fonseca, 2020) mentions this: --- Why do we talk about crashes like this? It didn't happen by accident. You may know the history of how early carmakers turned "jaywalking" — a term initially meant to shame pedestrians out of the street — into an actual crime. But the emerging auto industry also had a hand in influencing how the public perceived fatal collisions. In the early days of the automobile, reckless drivers were killing pedestrians, mostly women and children, at alarming rates. Newspaper coverage in the 1910s and '20s painted drivers as "remorseless murderers" and angry mobs reportedly dragged drivers involved in fatal collisions from their cars. So the industry went into damage control, with one national auto industry group even creating a free wire service for newspapers, which incentivized reporters to send in basic details of a traffic collision in return for a full, ready-to-publish article. What a thoughtful convenience! Except, unsurprisingly, the narrative in those articles largely shifted the blame to pedestrians and used the term "accident" to describe crashes, which helped embed the term in the minds of news readers across the nation. In the face of the rising death toll, a 1926 editorial in The New Republic titled "The Murderous Motor" proclaimed: "...much of the present waste of life is inevitable and will continue no matter what preventive measures are taken." Imagine if outlets today were publishing stories about data privacy from a free wire service run by Facebook, Google or Uber. That's essentially the ethical breach many newspapers allowed back in the '20s and '30s — and the echoes and effects can still be seen in news stories today. The auto industry exploited the power of the press because its leaders understood that language and perspective (and growing ad revenue) can shift culture — and recent scientific research backs that up.