Journalism majors/students/etc....what's wrong with this story?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I wasn’t sure which forum to put this in, as I expect this to be a discussion, rather than a debate - mods, feel free to move, as appropriate.

Here’s the link:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,112869,00.html

Now, here’s the first paragraph:
"SPRINGFIELD, Va. — A sport utility vehicle hit a man on an interstate highway Sunday and dragged his body – apparently lodged in the suspension (search) – 8 1/2 miles to the driver’s home, police said."

Can any of the journalism majors tell me what’s wrong with this paragraph? I believe there is something wrong here, and it pertains to a general trend I see lately in news stories, not just stories about SUV’s.

Think about it a moment, then scroll down and I’ll share my thoughts.
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My issue is with the personification of the SUV. In fact, with inanimate objects in news stories being personified, in general.
The SUV DID NOT HIT AND DRAG THE VICTIM. The DRIVER hit the victim, he just happened to do it with an SUV.
A couple of other (fictitious) examples:
“A 38-year-old man was killed by a gun…”
No, a 38-year-old man was killed by someone USING a gun…or substitute a frying pan, or a baseball bat, or a knotted rope…or a candlestick in the library…

My gripe is not with the gun or the SUV, but rather what I see as lazy reporting habits.
So, journalism majors, professors, practitioners - what has happened to the, “Who, What, Where, When, and Why” of news reporting? Has it taken a back seat to sensationalism? What is the methodology of reporting being taught in colleges and universities today?

IMHO, it seems to me that objective journalism shouldn’t care on first blush whether it was an SUV, a gun, or a ramen noodle that killed the person, but rather WHO the perpetrator was FIRST, and then the method of demise…

Any thoughts?

2

I can see your point regarding the personification, but I don’t agree with your assertion that the lead is not objective and gives in to sensationalism. A lead does not need to have the who, what, where, when, why and how in it to be a good lead; in fact, attempting to include all that might make the lead feel a little too busy and overstuffed. A lead just needs to be a good hook. We get the perpetrator’s name at the beginning of the second paragraph anyway, so it’s not like we had to wait a long time.

3

The only experence I have with journalism is the class I’m taking on it right now in high school, but here’s my take on it.

I don’t think the reporter’s intention was to personify the SUV, place the blame on anything other than the driver, or otherwise sensationalize the story, though I can understand how his less-than-to-the-letter phrasing could give off that impresison.

I’d say the lead is worded as such for several reasons. Straight news writers are trained to start off with most interesting or important Who, What, Where, When, Why, or How. (On preview, exactly what Snoooopy said. In this story, the most distinguishing factor is how the man died, so “was dragged by an SUV” is used instead of the driver’s name, which is, to everyone but those who know him personally, fairly meaningless. Many reporters would shy away from starting their story off with something so dismissable and would work it in later; (in this story, he works it in in the second or third sentence).

The second is lenghth; saying, “A man driving a sport utility vehicle killed a man when,” etc., means, more or less, the same thing as “A sport utility vehicle struck and killed a man this afternoon,” etc. While it may be technically wrong to word it as such, it is to be assumed a man was driving it the SUV, thus starting with “A man driving” is almost redundant. In addition, it also shortens the lead sentence (almost always a good thing–leads are by definition supposed to be short, interesting, and to the point) by three words. Anything more information at that point would be overwhelming and discouraging to readers.

4

So when relating an accident, do you day you were hit by a person or hit by a car? Do you say that bruise was from a baseball bat or from Fred?

I think you’re making a mountain out of a molehill, and frankly I don’t even think there’s a molehill.

The SUV DID NOT HIT AND DRAG THE VICTIM. The DRIVER hit the victim, he just happened to do it with an SUV. No, the SUV hit the victim, it just happened to be driven at the time. :smiley: Actually, your way is more likely to be misleading. “Joe hit John…” is almost meaningless until you add “…with his car,” “…with a frying pan,” “…with his fist,” or some such.

You’ve heard the phrase “pick your battles”? Trust me, you can make a much better pick.

5

I think changing it to “A man driving a sport utility vehicle hit a man” would only confuse readers further. The lead is supposed to be short and sweet, and the SUV obviously didn’t hit the man and drive home by itself. That someone was behind the wheel is a given - otherwise it’d be a much bigger story!

6

My thought? “Oh no, the story from Fark where the SUV is personified, wah wah wah, and ‘you won’t hear someone saying a car hit someone’ etc. etc. Poor SUVs whine whine.”

7

My problem with it was that the “…to the driver’s home” made it sound (in my mind, anyway) like the SUV was unoccupied and took the body to the home of its usual driver. But maybe I’m just weird.

8

Myrr21,

I believe you are correct. The story just didn’t read right to me, and I couldn’t quite place it - so I picked up on the personification thing, thinking that was it.

9

Is this lead any different from, say, “an eighteen wheeler” or “a delivery truck” accidents? The advantage I can see to saying “An SUV” is that it takes up a surprisingly small amount of space and provides a pretty accurate picture of the accident.

That people interpret this as an attack on SUVs is just hypersensitivity, methinks.

10

I wanted to clarify, I did not take this as an attack on SUV’s per se, but rather, that I took umbrage to the whole personification thing, period, and felt that it was “lazy journalism.”

Naturally, my perception could be wrong, and there are a number of very good posts at the beginning of this thread that did a good job of informing me of the necessity of a quick, dirty “lead.”

11

I’m not trying to pile on, but I agree with the previous posters. The lead is supposed to be attention-grabbing, and in this case, it summarizes the most important fact of the story. (That’s not always the function of the lead.)

While it’s true there is some unwitting personification here and that editing could have added some clarity, I think it’s okay to overlook it because the truth is obvious. Nobody’s really going to read the paper and think the car was driving itself. They might say ‘it sounds like they mean…’ as drkgntly has, but everybody will get the meaning. “To the driver’s home” is probably there because the human being who was driving the SUV is not mentioned at the beginning of the sentence. So “his home” would have implied “the home of the man who was hit by the SUV,” since he is mentioned and the driver was not.

A more precisely written lead might have gone something like “The driver of a sport utility vehicle on an interstate highway hit a man with his car Sunday, dragging the body of the victim – apparently lodged in the suspension – 8 1/2 miles to the driver’s home, police said.” But there’s a certain amount of redundancy there, and it’s just not snappy, which a lead needs to be in this kind of story (the bloody kind). We know that people drive cars.

The news peg, or interesting element, or whatever you want to call it, isn’t just the accident here. It’s that this guy was hit by a car and his body dragged 8 1/2 miles, which is freakish and unusual. If it was just an accident story, it might have read differently. With a shooting story, the shooting itself is the news. The people involved are important, since that kind of thing typically involves family members and individual details matter. You wouldn’t say a gun shot somebody because that’s what guns do. SUVs don’t typically drag people 8 1/2 miles.

12

I used to write out on a separate paper the who, what, when, where, and how of the sample events I had to write stories for. I’m pretty sure I was taught to do so.

Anyway, in this story, the who should be "an SUV driver", the what “killed a man”, the when “Sunday”, the where “Interstate 95”, and the how “by dragging him blah blah…”. I’d save the why, “apparently lodged in suspension” for the next paragraph. So I probably would have written something like:

"An SUV driver struck and killed a man Sunday on Interstate 95, dragging the body 8 1/2 miles to his home.

John Doe, 25, of Lorton, was charged with manslaughter, driving while intoxicated, and felony hit-and-run after he called police to report the body, which apparently had become lodged in the front-end suspension of his vehicle.

Fairfax County Police spokeswoman Sophia Grinnan said Doe hit John Doe2, 27, of Woodbridge, who had gotten out of his car after getting a flat tire near the Fairfax County Parkway. Doe was traveling in a southbound lane when he hit Doe2."

13

But the lead has to reflect the most important element of the story. In this case, that’s not the who (guy driving car). It’s the what (corpse dragged a very long way by car). So the sentence is written to give that detail more prominence. Again, what you’ve got here is not journalistically the most precise, but there’s supposed to be some shock value here, and that’s just how the news is, I guess- the writer and editors decided not to mute the shocking aspects by using a more conventional style.

14

I don’t see how yours:

“The driver of a sport utility vehicle on an interstate highway hit a man with his car Sunday, dragging the body of the victim – apparently lodged in the suspension – 8 1/2 miles to the driver’s home, police said.”

is much different from mine:

“An SUV driver struck and killed a man Sunday on Interstate 95, dragging the body 8 1/2 miles to his home.”

Both mention the SUV driver first and the dragging of the corpse second.

I phrased mine the way I did in part because I couldn’t think of a way that told of the dragging first without using passive voice. But mostly, I disagreed that the dragging is the most important aspect of the story. It’s definitely the most sensationalistic. But because I was under the impression that the Associated Press does not favor a sensationalistic approach to news, I wrote it the way they typically do, which is in a neutral tone.

15

Maybe it’s just me, but the first half of that sentence conjures the image of a road rage incident where the driver got off the car and punched someone. I think saying “an SUV hit a man” is clear and unambiguous - we all know that SUVs are generally driven by a human being, unless explicitely stated otherwise.

(And in case someone thinks I’m biased, I’m a bicycle enthusiast and currently car-free.)

16

That’s just a lousy lead, for two reasons.
1)It’s got a subjunctive clause (ick ick ick)
2) It’s passive.

A sport utility vehicle hit a man on an interstate highway Sunday and dragged his body – apparently lodged in the suspension (search) – 8 1/2 miles to the driver’s home, police said."

My 30 second rewrite is: One man is dead after being struck by an SUV and dragged eight and a half miles. Police say the driver hit the victim on an interstate highway, but failed to notice the victim was wedged under the truck until getting home.

17

I don’t see anything wrong with the story. I’m not even sure there is personification with respect to the SUV. If you think about it, the SUV was dragging the body, not the driver.

Oh, and Barbarian, that wasn’t a subjunctive sentence, it was a passive sentence. They’re not to be avoided at all costs, but they should be used sparingly and appropriately.

Robin

18

I thought AudreyK’s lead was pretty tight.

Barbarian’s 30-second re-write is too long for a lead. Two sentences? Way too much. It reads like the television news or a radio broadcast would sound – not the way journalists are trained to write for print. (There are different styles for different media, if you didn’t know that.) Get it down to 20 words or less and we’ll take a look.

my $0.02

Carry on.

19

I think it just needs a re-write, sentence structure feels clunky.

Here’s my 30s re-write–A man was killed Sunday after being hit by a sport utility vehicle and then dragged 8 1/2 miles to the drivers home, police said.

The fact that he was apparently lodged in the suspension could be left until a bit later in the story, I mean, he’s obviously lodged <i>somewhere</i>. It’s not necessary in the first paragraph. Ditto with anything else I left out, you don’t need to have all the 5 Ws in your lead. 'Course, that’s just me.

Speaking of which, I still need to finish my own journalism assignment…

20

You know, this lead addresses the who, what, where, when and how, but omits the why, and I think that’s a shame. Let me suggest this change:

“An SUV driver struck and killed a man Sunday on Interstate 95, dragging the body 8 1/2 miles to his home because he is an asshole.”

Beautiful!