Serious car crashes on Auckland's motorway system are, sadly, a daily occurrence. Most of them are due to the usual shit, like drivers paying too little attention and using too much speed, and sometimes they're because some dopey arsehole is trying to escape the police by going the wrong fucking way.Sadly, this is also a frequent problem - happening at least every couple of weeks - and unless they result in some terrible tragedy, they usually don't top the TV news bulletins, or lead a website for most of the day.
Unless there is some great footage of the crash, and then all bets are off, pal.
This happened last week, with a fairly serious crash closing down a good chunk of the southern motorway for a couple of hours during a week. There weren't any serious injuries, thank goodness, but there was some spectacular video of the head-on crash. It wasn't great quality - and was obviously filmed off another screen - but it showed the full impact in unflinching detail.
The origin of the video was pretty obvious. You could clearly see it had been taken off a screen at one of the police's control rooms, a breach of the wall of silence that usually surrounds police operations. The question of how it actually got leaked to the media is a bit rougher, but once one news organisation had it, most of them gleefully slapped it up on their websites, hiding the source of it all behind the generic 'supplied' tag.
Few of the newsrooms that used the footage seemed to consider that right from the start there was something dodgy about using it. It was obviously taken by a phone camera in a secure environment and after the crash had been shared with the world multiple times, the cops unsurprisingly put out a statement saying they were looking for who was responsible for the leak (with this twist in the tale usually appearing on the same story that was still using the footage in question with blithe indifference).
In other words, it really was great video, but somebody is going to lose their fucking job over this.
On one hand, the footage did serve a public interest - it literally showed the sickening impact and effects of a crash on a motorway in a way a thousand words could never capture, and is sure to stick in drivers' minds as they fang it on the motorway, and maybe making them a bit more cautious with their motoring.
And the video wasn't gross, or gory, or anything like that. You couldn't even really make out any details of the cars involved, just their fearsome impact. Our police force likes to hold onto information as much as possible, but it's totally arguable that splashing this across the news websites did actually serve a public good.
On the other hand, the poor soul who took that video, and almost certainly didn't expect it to be snapped up so forcefully by almost every organisation in the country, is definitely losing their fucking job over this. The news media makes a great show of protecting its sources, but it won't be hard for the cops to figure out who was in that secure control room at that time, and they're up shit creek without a paddle.
And they can expect little help from the media companies that used the footage, and made money from it by slapping ads in it. They're hardly likely to share any of that revenue with the person who will be getting by without a paycheque for a while.
There were a couple of newsrooms that didn't touch it, but that was probably because they couldn't source it themselves, and still had enough self-respect not to just rip it off from a rival newsroom and claim they got it supplied like everyone else. But that restraint was more than overwhelmed by the big news websites that went hard on it, and led their site on stories related to the crash for several days (it's not like anything else was happening in Auckland last week, like, say, a huge generation-defining protest that causes severe disruption right round the corner from the country's biggest airport or something).
Which is all just a bit gross, because it wasn't a huge fucking story, it was the kind of thing that happens all the bloody time, and no amount of jaw-dropping video is going to change that fact.
It's hard enough getting vital information out of the police as it is, and this isn't going to help matters, especially when the cops are guaranteed to clamp down on the leaker, to deter a repeat performance.
All over a fucking minor car crash that looked impressive, but wasn't that important. Good job, everybody.
- Margaret Tempest
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