N.B. – This was published in The Lobbyist (January 4) where I write a column (Subtext).

The phrases are all too familiar by now: karambola ng mga sasakyan, motorsiklong sumalpok na dyip, nasirang taksi dahil sa tindi ng bangga, trak na inararo ang kabahayan, bus na nahulog sa malalim na bangin.

These carefully chosen words in Filipino help provide graphic details of road accidents and entice media audiences to read, listen to or watch completely the news report. For television news programs, footage of the injured and the dead being carried away from the smashed vehicles, along with the weeping relatives and friends of victims, provide much-needed drama. The ambient sound of onlookers shouting and panicking adds to the tension being felt by the viewers. The bombastic voice of a news anchor completes the formula for primetime entertainment minutes ahead of our favorite telenovela.

Yes, we all know that journalistic outputs are supposed to mainly inform instead of entertain. So now we ask: Why are news reports about road accidents packaged as action or drama films?

Some essential ingredients of a news report are obviously missing. For now, let’s just focus on just one: Context.

It’s actually very important to report road accidents to advise motorists and commuters to be careful, especially in plying routes that are known to be accident-prone. The timely advice of a traffic enforcer to, say, not drive under the influence of alcohol serves as a wake-up call to those whose idea of a good time is to get drunk BEFORE driving home. When a police officer reminds motorists to make sure that their vehicles are in good running condition, car owners get that much-needed reminder to go to the nearest mechanic to have their vehicles’ brakes checked.

But useful data like these could get drowned by the drama that becomes the focus of news reports. There are questions that are left unanswered given the tendency of journalistic outputs to just focus on the particular, totally ignoring how a specific road accident relates to an overall situation.

The context of a road accident could be explained if a journalist were to find answers to some important questions:

1. How many road accidents happened, say, in the past five years in the area? What is the nature of these accidents?
2. What have local government officials and concerned government agencies done in the past to ensure that these accidents would be prevented? Had there been efforts, for example, to improve lighting conditions, as well as to widen and repair the roads?
3. Given that an accident happened, what will the concerned national and local officials do to make sure that it will not be repeated? What specific precautionary measures will they take from now on?
4. If the accident was due to a vehicle’s mechanical failure, why did the driver or owner fail to repair it? If an owner, for example, forced his or her worker to drive a bus with defective brakes, why did the worker agree? And, more importantly, what motivated the owner to make a dangerous, life-threatening business decision?
5. Much as a particular driver could be at fault, what are the economic reasons for his or her being “careless”? Truck drivers, for example, are known to work long hours. Bus drivers and conductors, on the other hand, are perennially pressured to get as much passengers as possible to augment their income, hence the fast driving and general disregard for traffic rules. In other words, the objective conditions should be analyzed more instead of just dwelling on the subjective reason of a culprit’s being inherently careless or, worse, uneducated.

I’m sure you can think of other questions that can provide more useful information to media audiences. For now, we can only hope that concerned journalists would provide more context to their reports about road accidents so that people could be informed more, and entertained less.