Taking their toll: News frames involving work vehicles and non-worker victims on Canadian roadways


Tim Gawley, Wilfrid Laurier University; Shane Dixon, Wilfrid Laurier University

The vast majority of work-related injuries and fatalities in Canada are identified and recorded within well-defined physical- and socially-bounded workspaces. These boundaries enable us to categorize who and what counts in our understandings about occupational health and safety. News reporters also adopt these boundaries within which they will pursue and write stories that reflect them. The result is a framing of workplace-related injury and fatality news that reinforces public perspectives about what is recognized as a work-related injury or fatality in Canada and their impacts on Canadians. Frames provide ‘‘interpretive packages’’ enabling us to make ‘‘sense of relevant events, suggesting what is at issue’’ (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989, p. 3). In this way frames highlight some issues and render others as unimportant or irrelevant, ultimately providing a narrative for making sense of an event or occurrence. In their reporting, journalists adopt frames to tell news stories. Frames in these stories can significantly influence the public’s interpretation of work-related injuries or death to workers and non-workers. However, there are work-related events that put the lives and health of non-workers in physical jeopardy as well (e.g., exposure to carcinogens, assault, suicide, public transportation collisions, pedestrians struck by work vehicles) which can skew public awareness about just how much workplace events negatively impact the health, safety, and wellbeing of Canadians (Bittle, Chen, and Hebert, 2018). The debate about who counts as a victim of work-related injury or fatality in Canada prompts us to examine how news media frames injurious or fatal events that occur at the intersection of work and nonwork contexts. This study is driven by four main questions. 1) How do our sampled news stories frame coverage of traffic incidents involving workers and nonworkers? How common are ‘episodic’ and ‘thematic’ frames? 2) What are the dominant characteristics of these frames? 3) Does coverage emphasize individual or complex social explanations for these events, and 4) In which frames do these features tend to reside? Quantitative and qualitative content analysis was used to analyze 115 articles sampled from June 2018 to June 2023. The articles were selected from a news story database that contains articles from Canadian news outlets. We selected articles that focused on stories covering the intersection of work-related and non-work-related injuries and fatalities (e.g., workers and workspaces being struck by nonwork vehicles; nonworker motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians being struck by work-related rail and road vehicles). Our findings highlight the strong presence of ‘episodic’ frames relative to ‘thematic’ frames (Iyengar, 1991). The latter frames present topics, such as work-related injuries and death, in a broader social context, often linking the event to prior events or larger trends. Prevalent generic frames among the stories are ‘human interest’ frames and ‘responsibility’ frames (Semetko and Valkenburg, 2000). In the vast majority of cases, thematically developed stories are framed as traffic events and not work-related. These events challenge notions that work injuries and fatalities only happen on worksites because in effect these ‘workplaces’ or ‘workspaces’ can be everywhere and often intersect with or co-exist alongside nonwork activities. Two implications of the findings are that news stories, because they prioritize a traffic lens rather than the work-relatedness of the incident, serve to reproduce notions about where work injuries and fatalities occur – workplaces – and replicate ideas about who counts as a work-related victim. The findings suggest a broader conception of ‘workplace’ be considered that emphasizes how the work-relatedness of an event is not restricted to a single geographic location. We propose that news media reconstitute their workplace framings to consider the consequences that work-related events can have for workers and nonworkers alike.

This paper will be presented at the following session: