"Journalists in Brazil are just starting to open their eyes to issues of safe and sustainable mobility Workshops like this help push that forward," said Flavia Peixoto, a journalist with Brazil's public news agency, to 21 Latin-American reporters at a WHO-hosted workshop held on July 22-23 in Natal, Brazil.
News reports influence public opinion and policy choices and the journalists from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico are learning to dig deeper into the hidden causes of fatal road crashes and analyse responses to a crisis that claims nearly 1.2 million lives every year.
The workshop includes sessions on the science behind road safety, road safety progress in the Americas, motorcycle safety, emergency care and a field trip hosted by the Natal city authorities. Participants from previous workshops also share their experiences along with practical exercises.
"The media is key to holding leaders to account, sharing facts and driving demand for change. This is about giving journalists the evidence, tools and know-how to cover road safety comprehensively. Safe, equitable and sustainable mobility saves lives but it also powers health and prosperity and helps fight climate change," says Dr Nhan Tran, Head of Safety and Mobility at WHO.
Supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the workshop is part of the Road Safety Reporting Initiative , which helps journalists tell better stories to help reduce road deaths. In recent years, reporters trained through the initiative have won journalism awards in Ghana , India , Nigeria and Viet Nam .
The scale of road traffic injuries
Road crashes claim more than two lives per minute and kill far more people each year than armed conflict and terrorism combined. Yet public clamour for change barely registers when compared to issues that lead global news bulletins each day.
In the WHO Region of the Americas, crashes kill around 145 000 people each year. Yet this is "Just the tip of the iceberg, with many more seriously injured and a lasting, damaging impact on families, communities, the health sector and the economy," says Dr Ricardo Perez Nunez, WHO Regional Advisor on road safety and injury prevention for the Americas.
"If these deaths were caused by a virus, it would be called a pandemic, and the world would scramble to develop vaccines. Reducing road deaths has long been misunderstood. …We know how to prevent these tragedies," wrote WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a recent editorial .
Small changes, big impact
During the workshop, journalist Flavia Peixoto shares lessons from producing a documentary on mobility that was a runner-up in a national journalism competition, after a previous WHO training.
"I interviewed a mother who lost her son in a crash. She said she doesn't ever want to hear the word 'accident' again," Peixoto says.
Most news reports frame crashes as isolated and unavoidable "accidents " rather than part of a preventable, society-wide public health crisis with complex causes, effects and solutions.
News reports often blame victims or other road users for fatal crashes. This is despite evidence that less obvious and systemic factors can often mean the difference between life or death in a crash.
"Journalists must highlight the complex nature of the issue, including street planning, infrastructure, laws, education and regulation. We should aim for human-centered stories that place crashes in a broader road safety context," says Brazilian journalist Vinicius Lisboa.
Solving this can be as simple as adding a few lines of context, substituting the word "accident" and avoiding implying that victims are to blame in short, urgent 'hard news' reports on road crashes.
Sharing solutions
The solutions journalism approach to reporting shifts the focus of news stories from issues to responses.
"This is not hype, advocacy or propaganda. Solutions journalism is about rigorous, evidence-based and impartial analysis of responses to complex," says Matthew Taylor, a consultant who manages the road safety reporting initiative for WHO.
"It's about what we can learn, and for road safety that is crucial because many countries have valuable lessons to share," he says in a session supported by the Solutions Journalism Network .
People will always make mistakes on the roads, but we have proven solutions that ensure our transport systems can absorb these errors in a way that significantly reduces the risk of death.
As part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the Decade of Action for Road Safety 2021-2030 , the world has set an ambitious goal of halving road deaths by 2030.
Key to meeting this goal is the decision to design and develop transport systems for people - not for motor vehicles - and to make safety paramount in all decisions.
The Global Plan for the Decade of Action for Road Safety offers a blueprint for governments to boost road safety by applying the safe systems approach where all actors work together in a coordinated way.
"Solutions journalism shares what works, what doesn't and why," says Taylor. "This has led to a range of comparative stories that share knowledge between communities and countries. It maintains journalistic integrity, but it also shares solutions that others can learn from and apply."
"I took away valuable tools and guidelines for communicating responsibly on the road safety crisis in Latin America," says Juan Diego, a workshop participant and journalist with Colombia's El Espectador.
"I now better understand how to translate data into stories that mobilize opinion and contribute to an urgent conversation that must involve all sectors of society."
