Viral Video of W. Va. Reporter Struck by Pick-Up Driver on Live TV Should be a Watershed Moment

A horrifying car crash that aired during a live TV news broadcast in West Virginia is sparking a conversation about roadway and workplace safety — and the many ways that U.S. media normalizes traffic violence, even when they watch it happening in gruesome real time.

Tori Yorgey, a reporter for the NBC affiliate WSAZ, went viral on Thursday after her camera captured her being struck from behind by the driver of a pick-up truck as she reported from the side of a road in rural Dunbar. In the footage, Yorgey — who had been sent to the site alone, without the support of even a camera operator, to report on the dangerous road conditions — is seen being knocked down violently before righting herself and telling her in-studio co-anchor that she had “just got hit by a car, but I’m okay.”

Moments later, Yorgey adds, “I actually got hit by a car in college, too, just like that.”

Later in the broadcast, she says that the driver who struck her “was so nice, though. She didn’t mean to. It was an accident. I know it was.”

Yorgey was reportedly later transported to an area hospital as a precaution. She could not be reached for comment, and WSAZ has not responded to a request for information regarding her condition.

Warning: the video below is disturbing.

When journalists seated safely at a desk refer to a car crash as an “accident,” though, they don’t have those same excuses — and that’s exactly what many of the journalists who covered Yorgey’s crash did, despite long-standing guidance from the Associated Press to avoid using the term.

When a news station sends a reporter out onto a dangerous roadside at night without so much as a reflective vest or a single coworker to advocate for her safety, it does so both with full knowledge of the dangers of that choice, and with full knowledge that the public is unlikely to decry their negligence. That’s because, in the American consciousness, accidents happen — particularly when a car is involved. (And anyway, as every exhausted pedestrian advocate knows, even the best reflective vest in the world won’t stop the force of a pick-up.)

Tori Yorgey is not a war zone reporter who signed up to put her life on the line every time she covered her beat. (Though, to be clear, those journalists deserve robust protections, too.) She just happened to be covering one of the most dangerous spaces in the public realm: an American highway. And until every road in the country is redesigned to be safer, her crash won’t be the last.