MDOT has message for reporters: Avoid calling crashes ‘accidents’

The Michigan Department of Transportation has a message to deliver about vehicle crashes.

“Crashes are no accident, they are preventable. Please use ‘crash’ instead of ‘accident’ when reporting.”

In recent weeks, MDOT press releases have been carrying that advisory for reporters.

MDOT spokesman Jeff Cranson, who has been focused on this use of language for years, said the idea to start including it on MDOT press releases came fairly recently, based on email correspondence with counterparts in Colorado.

Cranson saw the advisory being used there and thought it would be a good way to drive the message home in Michigan, too.

It might mark a change in approach, but the message itself isn’t a new one for MDOT.

“It’s been something we’ve been pushing 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 sway how we perceive and react to a tragically common occurrence. With the number of people killed on U.S. roads topping 40,000 in 2023, according to federal data, straight talk would appear to be warranted.

Wrecks are ‘the consequence of systemic failures of policy’

An MDOT webpage dedicated to the topic notes that “when we call something an ‘accident’ it implies that no one is at fault and that no one, including the driver, bears responsibility for the outcome. The term ‘crash,’ on the other hand, is more specific in terms of the action’s outcome 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 crash an accident, we’re letting someone off the hook.

It can be argued that some crashes might be impossible to avoid, such as when there’s a medical emergency. But most involve human error, Cranson said. A deer running across the road might be tough to avoid, but was the driver speeding?

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Writer Kea Wilson notes that “the term car ‘accident’ implies that deadly collisions are purely the result of individual drivers’ unintentional mistakes, rather than the consequence of systemic failures of policy that we can and must address.” Wilson’s thoughts on the subject appeared in April in a posting on Streetsblog USA, which reports on the needs of the non-motoring public.

In 2016, The Associated Press added an entry on the topic to the AP Stylebook, long the go-to manual for journalists seeking the official word on everything from word choice to punctuation rules. It wasn’t a complete vindication for those seeking to exile “accident” from reporter vocabularies, but it acknowledged the need for nuance.

We don’t call plane crashes ‘accidents’

“Accident, crash,” the Stylebook advises, are “generally acceptable for automobile and other collisions and wrecks. However, when negligence is claimed or proven, avoid accident, which can be read by some as a term exonerating the person responsible. In such cases, use crash, collision or other terms.”

Concerns about the use of the term “accident” have been longstanding for some. George Reagle, the federal government’s then-associate administrator for motor carriers, made the point that a “crash is not an accident” in a posting dated Sept. 18, 1997:

“The concept of ‘accident’ works against bringing all appropriate resources to bear on the enormous problem of highway collisions. Use of ‘accident’ fosters the idea that the resulting damage and injuries are unavoidable.”

A 2019 study on the impact of news coverage in shaping the perception of blame and preferred solutions found that “editorial patterns in traffic crash reporting influence people’s interpretation of what happened and what to do about it.”

A 2015 Vox article points out not only that we strangely make a distinction even among modes of transportation — we wouldn’t use “plane accident,” for instance — but that the use of “accident” to describe car crashes was hardly accidental.

The auto industry helped to shift the way we view crashes by influencing news coverage, according to the article, which noted that “early coverage of crashes in the 1910s and 1920s depicted the vehicles as dangerous killing machines — and their violent collisions were seldom called accidents.”

What started as an industry effort to shift blame for vehicle crashes onto pedestrians led to a change in general usage, and accident “became the most common way to describe collisions,” the piece noted.

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That effort had staying power. Today it’s not uncommon to hear “accident” still used in conversations to describe crashes even if it’s not as common in news stories about crashes.

Cranson said he believes there has been some improvement on this front, but he admitted, “I still cringe when I see it on some stories.”

Contact Eric D. Lawrence: elawrence@freepress.com. Become a subscriber. Submit 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

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