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How the public thinks about the problem of traffic injury and fatalities and what can be done about it is significantly influenced by how the media reports on it. Listed below are several resources of research and strategies on the role media plays in road safety.
- SafeTREC
SafeTREC will build on current large scale data efforts...
- Crash Data
Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC)...
- SafeTREC
Nov 26, 2021 · Seeking to find a single cause for a crash is a fundamentally flawed approach to road safety, but it underpins much of American traffic enforcement and crash prevention.
- Abstract
- Theory
- Mediatization
- Effects of Distorted News Attention
- Methods
- Results
- Discussion
- About The Authors
This paper is concerned with people’s irrational fear perceptions in our contemporary world. Despite that objective long-term global trends on many facets show that we live in the safest period in human history, we simultaneously seem to live in an age driven by fear (Rosling 2018). News media, as the main antecedent of our perceptions of what happ...
Cultivation theory (Gerbner 1969), as a widely used theory in mass communication research, provides insights into how people’s social reality can be shaped by news exposure. Increased media consumption can cause audiences’ worldview to mirror patterns depicted in the media rather than what happens in the real world. In general, cultivation theory i...
To further understand how media have become interwoven with our daily lives, it is essential to consult literature on news selection and how such processes have changed over the years. The theory of mediatization provides a valuable starting point to understand how news media portray the world nowadays. Mediatization highlights a long-term process ...
In addition to explaining variation in media coverage of aviation and road accidents over time, our research is primarily designed to determine whether biased news attention for rare incidents can actually distort audiences’ behavioral responses. Cultivation theory distinguishes two levels of outcomes (Shrum 2004): First-order outcomes refer to whe...
This study relies on a longitudinal design to compare US news attention with real-world statistics. A computer-assisted content analysis was applied to retrieve the articles that covered aviation accidents (N = 24,954) and road accidents (N= 55,731) in five quality and popular newspapers. The time period of 1996–2017 was selected as by this time co...
Media Distortion Hypotheses
We start with testing whether the actual occurrence of both aviation and road accidents show a different over-time trend as compared with news coverage of both accidents. First, we test the effect of a linear monthly trend variable on the real-world statistics on number of aviation and road accidents. OLS regressions show how this monthly trend variable has a negative effect on total number of fatal road accidents (b = −0.31, SE = 0.03, p < .001) and fatalities due to road accidents (b = −0.4...
The over-time Effects of Media Attention
To determine the effects of media coverage of aviation accidents, we, in a first step, assess its effect on travel behavior (H4). By relying on monthly aggregated ARIMA modeling, we aim to see if road traffic, relative to air traffic, increases as a consequence of more news coverage on aviation accidents in previous months. A new variable was constructed to measure relative travel behavior by dividing total US road traffic with US aviation traffic and multiplying it by 10,000. This relative m...
Since risk and fear dominate most headlines, this study aimed to clarify people’s irrational fear perceptions as a result of overly negative news. To do so, we rely on the case of travel accidents. The purpose was to explore if news media disproportionally portray such negative incidents and if news attention for rare and vivid aviation accidents c...
Toni G.L.A. van der Meeris an assistant professor of communication at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His research focuses on crisis communication, (negativity) bias in the supply and demand side of news, processes of mediatization, media and public framing of issues related to corpo...
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Jul 6, 2022 · July 6, 2022 8 min read. Public health, medical experts examine causes behind spike in pandemic traffic fatalities. It’s like we forgot how to drive, one Harvard expert observed recently about the two-year spike in traffic-related deaths, which marked an abrupt end to years of American roads becoming progressively safer.
Oct 25, 2023 · 1 NHTSA: Overview of Motor Vehicle Crash Traffic Crashes in 2021. Last updated: Wednesday, October 25, 2023. Almost 95% of people who die using our Nation’s transportation networks are killed on our streets, roads, and highways, and this threat to our safety is getting worse.
Sep 19, 2021 · According to several traffic experts I spoke with, the explanation for the 2020 fatality spike is relatively straightforward: With fewer cars on the road during quarantine, traffic congestion...
Dec 11, 2023 · People living on the streets are especially vulnerable to being hit by a car. Some of these problems are difficult to solve. For others, however, there are promising solutions that state and...
