4 ms·
I was looking at the front page of an Edmonton newspaper from the 1940s that my father had kept as a souvenir and right on the front page on the bottom was a ta
by Tiktaalik 5y ago
I was looking at the front page of an Edmonton newspaper from the 1940s that my father had kept as a souvenir and right on the front page on the bottom was a tally of traffic deaths!
That the newspaper would be tracking this fact so prominently suggests that at the time it was news that a car crashed and injured/killed someone.
From this newspaper it seems to me that at some point we were concerned the casualties coming from automobile use. At some point I guess the news became dull to it, stopped reporting, and thus people in general stopped caring. Unsure when that happened and why.
- sosborn 5y agoA modern day equivalent will be COVID cases/deaths. The time will come when it is t reported daily, despite the fact that it is now endemic.
- uuddlrlr 5y agoIn my Canadian city all traffic related deaths are heavily covered, fwiw
- rbanffy 5y agoIn Dublin, Ireland, I see about one/two events per week that make into newspapers.
- mywittyname 5y agoCar crashes are still news worthy. My local news org reports on them daily. Sometimes they are the website equivalent of front-page news. Americans definitely care a lot about car accidents. There's an entire government organization (NHSTA) dedicated to collecting statistics on car accidents and working with manufactures to reduce car fatalities by designing crash tests that simulate the most deadly types of accidents. There's also a separate organization funded by insurance companies (IIHS) that does roughly the same thing.