High Times: The Media Gets it Wrong

Here we go again. I wasn’t going to touch this one. Really, I wasn’t.

I promised to obey the mental note I made to myself to stop whining about the media’s portrayal of the trucking industry. But that’s until I heard the tape of a Global TV broadcast British Columbia Trucking Association president Paul Landry played for me.

The story was about a tragic fatal accident involving a transport truck in Williams Lake, B.C. Police were investigating, and did not know how the accident occurred at the time. But that doesn’t mean there was a shortage of opinion in the report: “Personally, I thought it was drugs–truck drivers have a big problem with crystal meth and cocaine.”

Know who said that? Well, neither do I. That’s apparently an anonymous trucker who called up the station to offer his unsolicited account of the situation (If only getting sources was that easy for all of us).

After briefly mentioning that other factors may have been at work in the crash, reporter Darlene Heideman just can’t help revisiting the shiny drug angle once more. She voices over: “The trucker who contacted us says drivers are using, and it could be as high as one-third to half of them taking hard drugs.” Finally, the driver tops this piece of work off: “It’s cheap. You can, you know, for 35 bucks make a run to Calgary and back.”

That’s it. No qualification, no opposing source, no counterpoint. Nothing.

So, not only have you or your employees been called pollution-spewing, safety negligent, and overtired liabilities in the past by the media, but now half of you are on crystal meth too. You may think that’s a facetious interpretation, but how else can one take it when you consider the overt sensationalism and lack of context in the story?

There’s something called ethics in this business. Ethics is almost always subjective. It can range from something trivial as, say, not sticking your byline to an unedited press release, to–and I’ll just go with the prevailing example here–not insinuating that half of an entire professional workforce is on the pipe and then neglecting to follow up that assertion with a very easily accessible counterpoint. But that’s just me.

In Landry’s words, if Ms. Heideman just took an extra 10 minutes in researching her story, she would have discovered that dozens of thousands of truck drivers are tested for drugs both randomly and for pre-employment each year (although only cross-border drivers are required to do it). The crystal meth and cocaine failure rate is between 0.1 to 0.2 per cent. Now, I became a writer because I’m just not very good with numbers, but I would think that 0.2 per cent — or even just for the sake of argument 10 per cent — is not “one-third to half” of all drivers.

Truckers and drugs seem to be a hot issue in B.C. these days. Just days before the Global TV report, the Vancouver Sun published a story indicating that there’s a widespread problem with organized crime using B.C. carriers to smuggle marijuana across the border. In this case, the reporter did seek out a quote from the BCTA, but instead relied on the assertions of a single company owner and “several truckers” that organized crime is infiltrating the coastal industry.

What didn’t make the report, however, was the fact that U.S. border officials process about 34,000 southbound trucks a month at the Pacific Highway crossing. There have been 70 significant truck seizures of marijuana over the past 3 years. This amounts to approximately one seizure for every 17,486 trucks–or only .00057 per cent of all trucks.

Trucking is an easy target because, like all repeated targets, it doesn’t defend itself very well. You need to fight back. Rebut any sensational news item you see through letters to the editor; pester media to attend any positive community events you’re involved in. All of you have giant rolling billboards. Why not use them to deliver your own message to the public?

Respect is something that doesn’t come easily for truckers. But you’ll never get it from the public as long as uninformed attitudes epitomized in stories like this continue to go unchallenged from a large portion of the industry.