Short abstract
Is media indignation over speed cameras undermining a valuable public health message?
It is not so unusual for a public health message to fail to make the impact that the medical profession feels that it deserves. To have a public health or safety message actively undermined by the media might, though, be felt to add insult to injury.
However, that has been the recent double whammy of a fate for the Speed Kills campaign. Newspaper coverage of the use of speed cameras in particular is so far off message as far as health and safety professionals are concerned that barely do the cameras' potential to save lives even get a mention.
Certain sections of the press have skewed the speed debate so much that it now seems to centre solely around the perceived infringement of individual rights, the “criminalisation” of the majority of drivers, and, in the most inflammatory aspect of the debate, the alleged siting of speed cameras purely for revenue-raising purposes.
The Sunday Mirror recently predicted that “Britain's roads will be spied on by an astonishing 20 000 speed cameras by the year 2013.” The paper added that this apparent nightmare scenario heralded “a new age of misery for millions of motorists.” Earlier this month a Daily Mail leader declared: “Seldom has a section of the British people been subjected to such a concerted and malevolent Government campaign.”
Figure 1.
Caught on camera: but are newspaper campaigns (above right) trivialising the dangers of speeding?
Credit: SIPA/REX
Meanwhile, the News of the World, the country's best-selling paper, continues its Cameras... Action campaign—a “crusade to stop cops misusing speed cameras”—and the Sun offers readers free Stop the Highway Robbery car stickers.
The World Health Organization projects that by 2020 traffic fatalities could rank third among causes of death and disability—ahead of malaria, tuberculosis, and AIDS—and it is devoting this year's World Health Day to road safety under the slogan “Road Safety is no Accident.” The United Kingdom Health Development Agency has also taken up the cause recently, calling for speed limits on residential roads to be cut to 20 mph to reduce children's deaths and injuries by 67%.
Inappropriate speed for road conditions is a factor in a third of crashes, and about 72 000 speed related incidents a year in Britain account for 1100 deaths and 12 600 serious injuries. The cost to the health service is vast. So why do some newspapers seem not to see speed as a health issue to be taken seriously?
The News of the World's Jules Stenson insists that his paper does understand speeding as a health issue and does support the use of speed cameras in certain areas. “What we object to,” he explains, “is the Big Brother excess of speed cameras, their overuse, and the thousands and thousands of otherwise law-abiding people being criminalised because of poorly and cynically placed cameras.
“We accept that speed kills but we don't think cameras are the way to slow people down. We'd like to see more measures such as police highway patrols and driver education.”
Why then does the News of the World not campaign positively for more and better anti-speeding measures rather than focus on the alleged negative aspects of the cameras?
“But that's newspapers,” says Stenson. “The most interesting facts go at the top.”
He points out that his paper's campaign has had a massive resonance, with outraged readers inundating the paper with examples of badly placed cameras on which the paper duly reports.
Figure 2.
Where, though, wonders Kevin Clinton, head of road safety at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, do the News of the World and other national newspapers—the majority of which have taken up the anti-camera campaign to some extent—carry the views of people who have been injured or lost family members in speed-related incidents? “Let's hear from them,” he says. “The media do talk to us and they do publish our comments, so their stories have a little bit of counter-argument. But they don't like speed cameras and that comes across far more clearly.”
He claims that many of the arguments that many journalists make cannot be substantiated. For example, he explains, it is little reported that speed cameras reduce death and serious injuries by 35% at the places where they are sited, and there is no evidence to support the wide claim that cameras are sited purely for revenue-raising purposes. Legislation, in fact, specifically prohibits it.
Zoe Stow, chairwoman of RoadPeace, the national charity for road crash victims, says that had speeding been a disease killing and injuring so many, there would long ago have been a public inquiry. Questions would have been asked in the House of Commons, and the full wrath of the media would have been unleashed.
“The public health message about speeding is failing to get through,” she says. “It's illogical. Until we twist things around to show that if you speed then you're lucky if you don't hurt yourself or someone else, rather than unlucky if you do, nothing will change.”
However, she acknowledges that it took around 20 years for the drink-driving message to be taken seriously. Just a decade into the Speed Kills campaign, maybe there is another decade to go before people see themselves as potential victims rather than unfairly persecuted. The media certainly seems less than keen to help push the message along.