The Michigan Department of Transportation has a message regarding vehicle accidents.
“Accidents are not accidents, they are preventable. When reporting, use ‘crash’ instead of ‘accident’.”
In recent weeks, MDOT press releases have provided this advice to reporters.
MDOT spokesman Jeff Cranson, who has focused on this language for years, said the idea to include it in MDOT press releases came about fairly recently, based on email correspondence with colleagues in Colorado.
Cranson saw the advice being used there and thought it would be a good way to get the message across to Michigan as well.
It could represent a change in approach, but the message itself is not new for MDOT.
“It’s something we’ve been pushing for for a long time,” Cranson said. “It seems like a subtle distinction, but it isn’t.”
Cranson wants to make the point that words matter, and in this case, that they can influence how we perceive and respond to a tragically common event. As the number of deaths on America’s roads exceeds 40,000 by 2023, frank talk seems warranted, according to federal data.
Wrecks are ‘the result of systemic policy failure’
An MDOT web page dedicated to this topic notes that “when we call something an ‘accident’ it implies that no one is at fault and that no one, including the driver, is responsible for the outcome. The term ‘crash’, on the other hand, is more specific in terms of the outcome of the action, without the unpreventable implication.”
In a 2019 podcast, Cranson spoke with Lloyd Brown, who was then communications director for the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. Brown explained that when we call a preventable accident an accident, we let someone go free.
It can be said that some accidents are impossible to avoid, for example when there is a medical emergency. But most involve human error, Cranson said. A deer running across the road may be hard to avoid, but was the driver speeding?
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Writer Kea Wilson notes that “the term ‘car crash’ implies that fatal collisions are purely the result of unintentional mistakes by individual drivers, and not the result of systemic policy failures that we can and should address.” Wilson’s thoughts on the subject appeared in April in a post on Streetsblog USA, which reports on the needs of the non-driving public.
In 2016, The Associated Press added an article on the subject to the AP Stylebook, long the go-to guide for journalists looking for the official word on everything from word choice to punctuation rules. It wasn’t a complete vindication for those who wanted to banish “accidents” from reporters’ vocabulary, but it recognized the need for nuance.
We don’t call plane crashes ‘accidents’
“Accidents, collisions,” the Stylebook advises, “are generally acceptable for car and other collisions and wrecks. However, when negligence is alleged or proven, avoid accidents, which may be interpreted by some as a term exonerating the person responsible. In such cases, use crash, collision or other terms.”
There has long been concern among some about the use of the term “accident.” George Reagle, then the federal government’s deputy administrator for motor carriers, made the point that an “accident is not an accident” in a message dated September 18, 1997:
“The concept of ‘accident’ works against the use of all appropriate resources to address the enormous problem of highway accidents. The use of ‘accidents’ promotes the idea that the resulting damage and injuries are inevitable.”
A 2019 study on the impact of reporting on shaping perceptions of blame and preferred solutions found that “editorial patterns in traffic accident reporting influence people’s interpretation of what happened and what they can do about it.”
A 2015 Vox article points out that not only do we strangely even distinguish between modes of transportation—we wouldn’t use “plane crash,” for example—but that the use of “accident” to describe car crashes was hardly coincidental.
The auto industry has helped change the way we view accidents by influencing reporting, according to the article, which noted that “early accident reporting in the 1910s and 1920s portrayed the vehicles as dangerous killing machines – and that their violent collisions were rarely called accidents. .”
What started as an industry attempt to shift blame for vehicle crashes onto pedestrians led to a change in common usage, and accident “became the most common way to describe collisions,” the piece said.
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That effort had lasting power. Today, it is not uncommon for “accident” to still be used in conversations to describe crashes, even if it is not as common in news stories about crashes.
Cranson said he believes there has been some improvement on this front, but admitted, “I still cringe when I see it in some stories.”
Contact Eric D. Lawrence: elawrence@freepress.com. Become a subscriber. Send a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: MDOT tells reporters: Don’t call crashes accidents
