Death Bus

Some things in journalism are universal.

When a dog saves a baby from a fire, that's front page news.

When the nation goes to war, that's front page news.

When a bus driver boast to the kids he's driving around on a field trip up Table Mountain that he'll drive them back down "on two wheels," and then proceeds to make all the kids scream with his crazy driving, and then turns the bus over on a sharp turn, projects himself out the window and kills three of his young passengers... well, you can guess what the Daily Voice did on Friday.

They did what any self-respecting tabloid would do. They gave it the cover, and five pages inside. The Voice is a small newspaper, so this accounted for about 70% of the day's total news hole.

The Cape Town broadsheets gave it similar play.

I like to pick on the Voice, but everything about the coverage reminded me exactly of how any American newspaper would cover such an event. In fact, it reminded me a lot of Newsday, right down to the staff box accompanying the lead story that listed about three quarters of the reporters employed at the paper.

Newsday, even though it's usually a tabloid in name only, would do almost all of the things that the Voice did: get the parents, get the bus company, get the early suspicions of what caused the crash (was it the maniac driver, the faulty breaks, or both?). Newsday would even throw out their usual topless women on page three, if Newsday usually featured topless women on page three. They don't. Not yet.


But one thing struck me as being somewhat different. American newspapers are more conservative in their use of graphic pictures than papers elsewhere in the world, including South Africa. Photo editors think that Americans don't want to see blood and guts with their morning cereal, and they're probably right. But I've seen pictures of the aftermath of Iraqi suicide bombings in South African newspapers, for example, that every American should see at least once, so they appreciate those endless stories about 10, or 20, or 30 people dying in the latest attack where a crazed jihadist tried to drive a truck into the Green Zone.

I can't find those pictures now, or else I'd put one up here and ruin your morning cereal. But let's just say that the pictures of haunted-looking soldiers are much more effective if they aren't cropped off at the knees. That way, you can see the river of blood and brain matter they're standing in.

The pictures of the bus crash from the Voice and the other newspapers weren't especially graphic on Friday, though even the somewhat bloodless pictures of wounded kids sitting stunned against the quarterly might not have passed muster in the states. That's too bad, because they told the story incredibly well. In fact, there was one that ran all the way across the top of the Cape Times that is easily the best picture I've seen in a newspaper in years. It was one part war photograph, one part Caravaggio.

You can't get the full effect on the web, but take a look anyway. Think an American newspaper would print this? I'm not sure.