In the course of litigating cases over the last few years, my staff and I have incidentally come across more and more crashes that the news media isn't reporting on. These aren't just minor fender benders, but major crashes where people died or suffered serious injuries due to commercial vehicles or drunk drivers. That's not all—by our reckoning, the media has all but given up on reporting work fatalities.
These discoveries leave me with a dilemma. The stories we're uncovering are certainly newsworthy; if there's a trucking company breaking the rules, a bar dumping drunks on the highway, or a business that isn't protecting its workers, the public has a right to know about that. Moreover, it's often when the public applies pressure that these bad actors finally stop endangering their communities.
At the same time, I appreciate that many of these stories represent the worst day in someone's life. And while some people welcome when the media notices their plight, others just want to be left alone. These competing interests were foremost in my mind when I weighed what to do with the stories we keep coming across.
That's why I decided to explain the reasons I've chosen to do my part in publicizing these forgotten crashes. I don't expect to persuade everyone that this is the right decision, but even if you disagree with this course of action, my hope is that this will at least help clarify why I decided to publish these stories.
What Do News Reports Mean to Victims' Families?
When I first started practicing as a personal injury and wrongful death attorney more than 30 years ago, one of the standard parts of any case was to track down local media reports about the incident that gave rise to the case. As part of their job, my team would round up police reports, open records packages, OSHA reports, TABC records, and also whatever appeared in the local paper.
Invariably, when I would meet with a client in their home, the first thing they'd want me to see is their loved one's story in the local newspaper. Admittedly, I didn't fully understand the significance of this at the time. My staff and I gathered far more information in our investigation, could provide a better explanation about the events that led to their loved one's death, had answered any questions the news report raised, but the victim's family members still insisted that I sit down with them and read the article together.
Looking back, I have a better appreciation of what those articles meant to my clients. The newspaper articles showed those families that someone took the time to write about their loved one. The family wasn't suffering alone, and they held in their hands something tangible that showed people in the community knew what happened, and they cared. Particularly when they had lost a loved one, the newspaper served as one last heirloom from the departed. The news account of the event, as much as the obituary, was the punctuation at the end of a life. Whether it brought the family further sorrow or reminded them of happier times, it still meant something to them.
And for the most part, that experience is gone.
What Do News Reports Mean to the Media? (Hint...It's Clicks)
There have been countless reports about the slow demise of local newspapers and these thousands of local journalists who now longer have jobs. With that being said, it wasn't a news article that brought the changes in the industry to my attention, but the fact that with increasing regularity, my staff told me that there were no news accounts of the cases we were working on.
We first noticed it with on-the-job fatalities. Fifteen years ago, if a worker died on the job, there was always a news story about the accident. Then slowly, the news seemed to lose interest in those stories. For the longest time, if a person died in a car accident, let alone a drunk driving accident, a reporter had the story. Now, people even die in commercial vehicle accidents, the kinds of crashes that were the bread and butter of generations of small-town reporters, and there's no record in the media that anything happened.
Most of us know the story by now. A decline in ad revenue led to a cascade of mergers and layoffs. On top of that, the business model no longer relies on people purchasing a physical copy of a newspaper everyday, but instead focuses on people clicking on stories to drive internet traffic. The first consequence of this change is there are simply fewer reporters to write about what's going on in a community, particularly small communities. A second repercussion is that newsrooms, to make up for their lack of reporters, fill content with more national stories from wire services.
More recently, some outlets bypassed the wire services and turned to bots and artificial intelligence (AI) to create content on the cheap. Together, these efforts try to drive as much web traffic to the paper (clicks) at the lowest possible costs means that stories that would garner attention in the past no longer receive any coverage.
Why Are Accident News Reports Important for the Public?
Earlier, I touched on the importance that families placed on the news coverage of their loved one's death. Also, I briefly alluded to the consequences for the community at-large. I'd like to spend a bit more time fleshing out the consequences to the community when important stories go uncovered.
Serious injuries and deaths from accidents aren't "one of those things that just happens." When an investigation looks behind the curtain, most of the time it uncovers underlying dangerous behavior that led to the accident. For example, behind the majority of drunk driving crashes is an alcohol provider who broke the law by serving an already intoxicated person. Commercial vehicle crashes often stem from companies whose safety practices aren't up to snuff. Such companies often don't properly screen or train drivers, or sometimes create perverse incentives that incentivize drivers to break the rules. In a similar vein, it's exceptionally rare to read about a work accident that doesn't stem from some underlying safety issue at the worksite.
Left unchecked, these bad behaviors don't correct themselves and result in more deaths and injuries over time. This is why, incidents that appear to only affect the victim and their family are important to the entire community. Looking at just a single consequence, it's the public, through their elected representatives, that determines how many resources the government devotes to workplace safety enforcement, commercial vehicle inspections, and alcohol provider investigations.
In order to make this decision, the public needs accurate information. For most people, the information that informs their thinking doesn't come from an annual report put out by that state that almost no one reads, but from what they see in their own community. When the public doesn't hear about serious incidents in their community because the news didn't bother to report on them, voters don't get the full picture.
It's difficult to understate the role that information plays in our ability to be a self-governing people. Traditionally, this has been the media's domain, but it seems that in its current state, the media isn't always up to the task. Should we just accept that and move on, or should those in a position do something act?
Doing Our Part to Help the Press Do Their Job
Now that you know factors that went into my thinking, let me explain what steps I'm taking. As I mentioned before, my firm comes across numerous serious accidents that don't make it into the news during the course of litigating our caseload. Rather than sit on these incidents, I've decided to help the put these incidents on the media's radar through press releases. I'll admit, it's an unconventional strategy, but these stories deserve media attention that they don't currently receive.
The advantage of a press release is that every newsroom, not matter how small has access to them. If newspapers can't afford the staff to send a reporter to the scene of these incidents, then my hope is they'll read the stories my firm puts out and relay that information to their audience, raising awareness of these incidents in the process.
Certainly, there will be some victims and their families that find this intrusive, while others will welcome the notice taken of their crash. I certainly appreciate the objections that the first group raises. The last thing I want to do is to upset those who've already gone so much. In addition, I know some people will have privacy concerns. I certainly understand that in this day and age. That's why I'm not publishing any information that cannot already be accessed through public databases. While these databases may not have a press release's visibility, anyone with a smartphone can access this information. In short, nothing in my firm's reporting isn't already out there for anyone to discover.
With these safeguards in place, I feel comfortable assisting the media find and cover these important stories.
What Is the Point of Publicizing Incidents that Result in Serious Harm?
I've already hinted at some of the benefits of publicizing accidents, but now let me address that concern head on. Solutions to these problems will only come with input from everyone, including the public. As news coverage of these crashes declines, so does public awareness. This matters because it's usually someone in the public, not a committee in Austin or Washington that comes up with ideas that improve people's lives. I'm not making a political statement by saying that, but dealing with how innovation occurs in our country. It wasn't a committee that forced the government to take drunk driving seriously in the first place, but organizations like Mothers Against Drunk Driving that were aware of a problem, organized, and put forward ideas on how to reduce drunk driving crashes.
If members of the public aren't even aware of the problem, then they'll never think of life-saving solutions that make sure other families don't endure what the families in these accidents have to go through.
Lastly, I should probably talk about the elephant in the room. After all, I practice personal injury and wrongful death law, so I'm sure some people are wondering, "Wouldn't eliminating commercial vehicle crashes, drunk driving accidents, and workplace injuries put me out of business?" To be perfectly frank, just as oncologists encourage their patients not to smoke, even though they'd have more patients if everyone smoked, my colleagues and I use the insights our profession gives us to urge whatever measures are necessary to reduce accidents. We handle these cases because they happen and we have the training to help.
In an ideal world, these cases wouldn't exist and we'd make fine tax or family lawyers. But we're not going to get to that world without the public understanding the scale of the problem.