Head-to-Head
Head-to-Head
The Examiner vs. Chronicle on Pedestrian Safety
"Run for Your Life" exclaims the June 4 Sunday Examiner with RUN in blood-red type. A photo shows a pedestrian, face creased with alarm, racing for the curb as a cab with wheels a blur bears down on him.
It brilliantly illustrates the problem and theme of the 63-inch story: Let the pedestrian beware!
The Chronicle story the next day also makes page one. Again the photo strikes the theme: A street vendor safely crosses an intersection with extended sidewalks to give him a better view of the traffic--and drivers a better view of him and his slow-moving flower cart. This story stresses solutions.
The two newspapers took very different approaches to the same important issue: Eighteen pedestrians have been killed in San Francisco since January and many more injured.
Both stories feature strong writing and photography, and many interviews. But readers can learn much more from the Chronicle’s account. Rather than describing the story solely from the pedestrian’s viewpoint, the Chronicle sees the problem whole. Pedestrians, drivers, police and the physical environment and technology of crossings all contribute to the crisis and each forms part of the solution. The Chronicle aims for the head; the Examiner for the gut..
Injury control experts will tell you that it takes three things to make San Francisco safe for foot traffic: education, engineering, and enforcement.
Enforcement is simple: Arrest or ticket those who break the laws already in place.
Engineering is more complicated, but effective. It involves changing the structures in the environment to slow traffic, increase time for walking and maximize visibility.
Education is more than simply imploring people to be careful. It is about transmitting
the values that influence expectations and social norms about what constitutes
acceptable behavior.
A comprehensive pedestrian safety program would involve all of these aspects.
The Pedestrian Safety Task Force at the Department of Public Health is spearheading
such an approach.
The Examiner: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid
The Examiner devotes more than half the front page and a full page
inside to tell the story of pedestrian safety. It recounts who has been hit
recently, ranging from toddlers to the elderly, and the extent and circumstances
of their injuries. Quotations from a city official emphasize the dangers to
pedestrians in the city overall. The contextual information here, and the story’s
size, confirm the seriousness of the problem.
But now that we know it's a serious, what should we do? The Examiner
quotes advice from pedestrians: wait for the green or well beyond it, look both
ways, point your finger under your shirt like you have a gun, make sure no one
is running a red light, hold out an extended arm, check and recheck for cars,
make eye contact with drivers, wait for the right of way, don't jaywalk, walk
in a crowd, wait until the end of the green cycle before starting to cross the
street, pay attention, and finally, pray.
What the Examiner doesn't do is look beyond this advice. Does it work?
Is some of it bad advice? And, is that the best we can do?
The experts would say no. In fact, pedestrian behavior is only one part of the
story. At minimum, drivers also have obligations here. What should they be doing,
and what strategies do they employ, to avoid pedestrians?
Worse, the Examiner reports on no prevention tactics outside of what
pedestrians themselves can do. Surely there are others with responsibility here.
What about enforcement? What engineering solutions might work in San Francisco?
What has worked elsewhere?
The Chronicle: focusing on solutions
In less than half the space, the Chronicle presents more than twice
as much information. Before we leave the front page, we know of three remedies
- speed bumps, wider sidewalks, and countdown lights - each of which could help
slow down traffic and reduce injuries.
The article elaborates these structural interventions as well as enforcement,
multidisciplinary task forces, lighted sidewalks, traffic circles, and eliminating
one-way streets. The policies aren't just listed. The reporter tells us where
the experts agree, which are most promising, and which have already been abandoned.
The Chronicle is long on substance and short on sensation, yet still
presents engaging information, with plenty of first-person accounts from pedestrians.
For a frequent pedestrian in San Francisco, the Chronicle provides an
idea of what to expect--or demand--from the city in the way of reasonable protection.
The article prepares you to act as a citizen, rather than react as a victim.
"Walk defensively" is the take home message from the Examiner.
Pretty scary and not much help. The front page placement reinforces the notion
that this is important, but the article sheds no light on what can be done,
besides staying alert.
Neither article mentions that the Pedestrian Safety Task Force, a group working
on solutions, meets the 3rd Tuesday of each month at 10 a.m. at the Department
of Public Health, 101 Grove Street, room 220.
The Grades:
Chronicle A-
Examiner C-
--Lori Dorfman
Lori Dorfman directs the Berkeley Media Studies Group.
Dick Rogers, Metro Editor of the Examiner, reponds:
It's an odd notion that Grade the News would draw conclusions about two newspapers' coverage of a broad, long-running issue by comparing just two stories. That's a little like saying that one baseball team is better than another based on one game last Sunday. Wouldn't you want to know how the teams did over the season?
More to the point, it's like saying one paper is more serious because it wrote last Sunday about racism in baseball management while the other paper reported on the game. So maybe you can understand why your "head-to-head" comparison of last week's pedestrian stories in the Examiner and the Chronicle makes my teeth hurt.
Let me get this straight: You nick us because we gave voice to the people who run the risk of stepping off the curb, and the Chron took a different tack? If you'd expended any effort, you'd have known that we've taken pedestrian safety seriously for a long time.
Would it help your readers to learn that we've produced a computer-assisted project showing how San Francisco's per-capita pedestrian death rate compared with a large number of other big cities over a period of years? Or that we did a computer-assisted project showing the characteristics of drivers who run red lights? Or that we've carried many powerful and thought-provoking columns by Rob Morse on the topic? Or that we've raised questions about whether costly high-tech measures really help?
Perhaps you should look at this week's coverage. While the Examiner revealed that police statistics reflect only a small portion of pedestrian injuries in San Francisco, the Chronicle wrote about a handful of traffic signs being torn down in Sea Cliff. Does that make one paper more serious than the other? Of course not. It proves only one thing: If you're going to hand out grades, you have to do your homework.
P.S: Seems like you liked our Page 1 photograph sufficiently to take it without credit or permission for your web site. Maybe you should give yourself a dunce for that one.
--Dick Rogers, Metro Editor, San Francisco Examiner
Editor's Note: We appreciate Mr. Rogers' drawing attention to past reporting successes of the Examiner on this issue. In fairness, however, this case study did not purport to compare the overall quality of the Chronicle's and Examiner's reporting of this long-running issue. We focused only on two stories. We did so because both plumbed the same issue in depth on the front page on succeeding days and demonstrated contrasting approaches. (The Sunday Examiner has fared well in our long-term content analyses; see the "report cards" on the main page.) On Mr. Rogers' final point, use of a news photograph for purposes of critique is permissable under the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. The photo was identified as the Examiner's in the first paragraph.