Impossible Ledes, Journalistic Distance, and Truth
Wrestling with how to report a story you don't want to report.
A guy in a Dodge Challenger muscle car blew through a red light and caused a six-car pileup killing nine people.
A guy in a Dodge Challenger going “in excess of 100 miles per hour” blew through a red light and caused a six-car pileup, killing nine people.
A guy going “in excess of 100 miles per hour” in his muscle car charged through a traffic light in the middle of a slow Saturday afternoon, killing nine people.
A guy using his car as a muscle substitute charged through a red light in the middle of a slow Saturday afternoon, killing nine people. He was going “in excess of 100 miles per hour,” according to police.
A 59-year-old man owned a Dodge Challenger. Not a minivan. This was not a 59-year-old family man with kids or grandkids to tote around. Not an SUV. This was not a 59-year-old who wanted to drive a comfortable truck. This was a 59-year-old man who bought a car meant for speeding. On city streets.
A 59-year-old man, who felt he had no responsibility for the safety of others, revved his muscle car up beyond 100 miles per hour, and slammed into a minivan carrying seven family members. All seven family members, including four children, were instantly killed. So was the driver and his passenger.
Thirteen-year-old Lluvia Daylenn Zacarias had just gotten off the phone with her mother when the minivan driven by her uncle entered the intersection of Commerce Street and Cheyenne Avenue around 3pm on Saturday afternoon in North Las Vegas. The minivan never made it to the other side of the street. Neither did Lluvia, her brothers, Bryan Axel Zacarias (15), Adrian Zacarias (10), and Fernando Yeshua Mejia (5); her uncle Jose Zacarias-Caldera (35), and her step-brothers Gabriel Mejia-Barrera (23) and David Mejia-Barrera (25). Their Toyota Sienna minivan was t-boned by a 59-year-old man in a Dodge Challenger muscle car running a red light and speeding in excess of 100 miles per hour. The man had numerous excessive speeding violations.
We throw around the word “objective” in journalism like it was something with mass. Touchable. Immovable. But there are myriad decisions journalists make when we write ledes, when we decide which story to tell, and from which lens to tell it.
This was a tragedy. This was a tragedy in which half the people who died are children. Most of the coverage has been about that. An entire family, wiped out. Only the mom and dad, who were waiting in a restaurant for their kids to join them, are left.
We feel that. Boy do we feel that.
Listen to this story here.
But how different would this story be if just the uncle was driving and no one else was in the car? Or just the uncle and the two nephews in their 20s? Or just the uncle and adult people in the other cars, six of whom went to the hospital with severe or critical injuries?
We want to blame someone. The driver of the Dodge Challenger is dead. The local news has focused on the driver’s record. There seems to be no goal to the reporting. Just a lashing out, trying to pin the blame somewhere. Someone has to be responsible.
But what if it’s not one person? What if it’s an entire culture? What if it’s the boffo box office of all the Fast and Furious films - the death of whose star in a high-speed car accident was glossed over by media as “ironic”? What if it’s the whole idea that speed=manhood, and the kind of car you drive shows how tough you are? What if it’s a culture chasing the ever-elusive thrill, too scared of the depth in the mundanity of the slowness?
Just two months before this crash, the driver was pulled over by a police officer for going 19 miles over the speed limit. The officer spoke admiringly to him about his car, and gave him a ticket for doing 10 miles over.
Somehow I can’t imagine an officer speaking admiringly to the driver of a minivan.
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