Good lord. The Washington Post, in the midst of rolling out its big, bold, incredibly odd Chandra Levy inquiry, fronts today’s paper with another searing investigation: into the danger of DC’s double decker tour buses.
Seriously. Here’s the lede:
Passengers riding in a double-decker sightseeing bus ducked and brushed aside low-hanging branches yesterday as they toured the District while hearing frequent recorded warnings to beware of “obstacles” such as tree limbs, electrical wires and bridges.
The story comes with video footage of DC’s DDD (Double-Decker Danger) in action (multimedia! visual dynamism!). And said video is pretty crazy: riders duck as the bus’s top deck just barely skirts trees, and one guy’s cheek gets a butterfly kiss from a tree branch.
DC’s DDD is newsworthy—”the potential danger of riding on the top tier of a double-decker bus became clear a week ago when two passengers were killed after their heads struck an overpass along the Southeast Freeway,” the article notes. But is it front-page news, in a paper that’s much more than local? Don’t think so.
Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.