A Light Rail Rashomon on Twitter

by on September 9, 2010

The “he said/she said” in my Twitter feed

The Seattle Times has a habit of reporting on accidents involving the light rail thusly: “Car hit by light-rail train in Seattle.” (For more instances, go here.)

In reading the story, you learn that the car “attempted to make a turn onto Othello Street against the light” and collided with the train. Seattle Transit Blog writes it up that way: “Car Collides with Link.”

For contrast, try to imagine if the Times reported on car accidents in ways that gave no indication who caused the accident: “Car hit by other car in Seattle this morning.” Doesn’t seem newsworthy does it?

But in the Times headlines, light rail is always implicitly the agent of destruction: light rail “injures two” (who tried to make an illegal left turn in front of a sign marked No Left Turn), a woman “sustain[ed] injury” when she ran into the light rail, and a girl talking on her cellphone who stepped into the trackway was “struck by light-rail train.” In none of these cases did the illegality, incompetence, or obliviousness of the person who caused the accident make it into the headline.

“Light-rail train hits pickup“–making an illegal turn, as it happens. From the Times headline (not even in the passive voice this time), you’d have to assume the light rail was at fault. Otherwise you might have read an investigative story about how Seattle drivers’ illegal left turns are costing a cash-strapped Sound Transit a bundle further damaging light rail’s reputation for reliability.

Filed under News

8 thoughts on “A Light Rail Rashomon on Twitter”

  1. You’re getting overworked about this. I didn’t cover this story, but we write that the car driver made an illegal left turn, etc. I’ll leave it to smarter people to argue in hindsight about whether politicians should have put the tracks at surface, a question we covered in the 2000s.

    The financial cost to Sound Transit of these collisions is (comparatively) tiny — the bigger harm to Link is schedule reliability for the transit riders.

    Anyway, The Sunbreak is cool, good luck with building readerhip -

    Mike Lindblom, Seattle Times transportation reporter.

  2. Hi Mike, thanks! I won’t say it’s the most important story of the day, but as a headline skimmer myself, I think it’s important to break bad habits, which is what this seems to be. The cumulative impression–again, purely from the headlines–is that the train is causing the colliding, and it’s just not. You’re no doubt right about the reliability toll being the bigger issue than cost. I still think it might be a story worth pursuing, because it doesn’t seem like drivers are learning not to make illegal lefts in front of the train.

  3. Remember the headline is there to get attention not to tell the story. Sensationalism sells. Also the “News Media” is all about sales not news. With the Times it is all about Ryan, not the truth.

  5. That is true. Our reporters don’t write the headlines. Sometimes, if I see a major problem in a headline (or photo caption), I will go to the editors’ desk and ask for a change online. On the big A1 stories, editors will often show us the print page the night before, as an additional quality-control step.

  6. Doesn’t “Car Collides with Link” imply that the car struck the train? Regardless of fault, physically, the train hit the car, didn’t it?

    I’m not a grammarian, and i acknowledge the implication of fault with the phrasing, but the Times version sounds more correct based on the facts.

  7. I read collides in that case as “car and train hit each other.” (“Come together violently” is one definition of collide.) But I’d also accept “car and train collide.” Really, my point is just that the news is that cars are creating light rail accidents, so however you phrase it, the first impression shouldn’t be, “Oh, a train smashed into a car again.”

  8. But a train DID smash into a car, again.
    Whether is the was the drivers fault or not, that is what happened.

    Call this a variation on “History is written by the winners” (the train will always be the winner…)

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