The ambulance chasing gets personal, but the story winds up hollow, abetted by bad editing

OK, last month, Pocket gave me this story from The Atlantic: "We Should All be More Afraid of Driving."

Summary? Joshua Sharpe works for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Reports on "police scanner news," to put it bluntly.

That includes car wrecks.

Of which he's had two himself.

The first? Hit a woman standing in the middle of I-75. Here's the intro: 

I thought I saw something in the road.

Meth addict, as it turns out.

Much later, he makes contact with her. The accident allegedly scared her straight, but it's unclear whether that lasted or not.

OK, for a while afterward, Sharpe peeled back on ambulance chasing. We're being blunt, remember. But eventually, he picked it back up again.

Two years later? Second accident:

I thought I saw a car veering toward me. 

It was a bright morning in February 2018. I was driving to work on Clairmont Road when a car suddenly appeared to be merging into my lane from the right, bound to hit me. This time, I did swerve. I wrenched the wheel and turned into oncoming traffic.

Note the parallel in the opening?

That said, as he eventually did after the first accident, he contacts the others involved. (Well, some of them.) The driver of the truck basically half hates him. The passenger fully hates him.

What's missing from the story?

No attempt to contact the swerving driver. No attempt to find out who it was, in fact. (Hold on to that idea.)

So, I DM'ed Sharpe on Twitter after tagging him, then seeing his account was open to messages.

Here's what I asked:

One thing about your Atlantic piece on accidents I just DON'T GET! You said the 2nd accident was caused by a swerving driver, but ... you never talk(ed) to him. Did you never even try? Or was the "thought I saw" not actual, and itself an artifact from PTSD from the first accident? (I've been in one wreck bad enough to have a plate in my left forearm, so I get the background.)

No response yet, for three-plus weeks.

To me, beyond the basic warning of the story, not having this information just leaves it limp to me.

Maybe Sharpe did "hallucinate" a swerving driver? Maybe he's afraid to say that, even though that could be part of his message? Or even, arguably, "should" be, not "could" be. Or per highway traffic engineers, there's the lack of mention just how big today's pickups are. Whether the accident was his fault due to a PTSD episode, or an actual swerving driver's fault, it might have been less severe had he not swerved into a monster F-250.

And, that's why I've posted it here.

The tale is designed to be cautionary, but for whatever reasons, Sharpe pulls multiple punches on that. And, it can't be him having a journalistic concern about "personal involvement," as Sharpe mentioned his having PTSD early on. 

It's also bad editing. This IS Atlantic Monthly, after all. And, it's a journalistic magazine, not a repository of modernist or post-modernist short stories. Either Sharpe really saw a driver swerve (and was unable to identify him or whatever), or he thought he saw a driver swerve due to PTSD. Sharpe's editor should have insisted on Paul Harvey's "the rest of the story" or else rejected it.

Dear TPA: Was there nobody local?

 I recently saw this year's Texas Press Association directory.

I noticed two things when I turned to page 1.

First is that they got a Texas Parks and Wildlife staff photog to do the cover picture. I looked back and see that it's been at least three years now since TPA's been doing that, and abandoning the old cover photo contest among member newspaper staff.

I stopped entering it after whoever the judges were chose a picture of an OK but not great sunset with a silhouetted Prick of Huntsville (you know what I mean, Texans) in the foreground. (I had entered a picture from a recent Big Bend vacation that year.)

Second, I noticed this year's directory was printed by a company headquartered in ...

(drumroll)

(dramatic drumroll)

Ontario, Calfornia!

OMG, the TPA directory has been Californicated!

Wrecking two newspapers

 This is a follow-up to my previous post about Dennis and Theresa Phillips and a sidebar of Jim Moser.

Just saw the latest TPA directory.

I knew Marlin and Rosebud had been bleeding subscribers, but didn't realize it was THAT bad.

One-third of the level of when I was there six years ago.

Yes, all newspapers have lost subscribers, but most small-town papers haven't lost them like THAT.

 Sadly and interestingly, I got a call on my cell a month ago. A lady thought it was still the phone number for the Marlin Democrat. Dunno if she had that from my original time there, or my brief return. I vaguely remember the caller by name, having web-searched the number.

CJR falls into its own post-truth rabbit hole

Michael Schudson, a Columbia journalism prof, no less, and his PhD student, I presume, Jueni Duyen Tran, have an overall good article at Columbia Journalism Review about whether and how much the media should have explicitly called Donald Trump a liar. (Their argument is that because Trump is indeed often detached from reality, "lie/liar" actually shouldn't be used that often.)

But, re Trump and his reaction to the coronavirus, and his many lies and reality field distortions on this, about halfway down the piece we have:

Similarly, in September 2020, as Bob Woodward published his book Rage and along with it recordings of his interviews with Trump, revealing that the president had knowingly downplayed the pandemic throughout the early months of 2020, the L-word was noticeably absent from the Times’ reporting. In several articles, the paper observed that the president “privately understood how deadly the coronavirus really was even as he was telling the public the opposite.” This qualifies as “lying”—even if, as might be argued in this case, there could have been good reason to lie to avoid contributing to a public panic.

WRONG. WRONG. WRONG. 

This is journalistic malpractice, to put it bluntly. Journalism should NEVER co-sign the old Platonic noble lie. And, we have non-Trumpian evidence of that in the past year.

As noted elsewhere, specifically with Fauci, Platonic noble lies almost always get outed. In Fauci's case, it's led wingnuts to quote Fauci against Fauci. 

That said, as per my Merrill Perlman post that's often been the featured post here, this is not the first foul ball from CJR.