I noticed the same behavior in some of the small-room presentations at the Fire Department Instructor’s Conference. Instructors use images or video snippets from fire departments hundreds of miles away to show what not to do. The presenter has no information on the image’s background, or doesn’t care.

A few of these instructors criticize or belittle the department shown in the image. Poor form! I interrupted the EMS instructor to say the story was inaccurate and later emailed her to express my disappointment in the fabrication of a line-of-duty-death ambulance crash. I provided a news article about the crash and asked if there were fabrications in the clinical portion of the refresher.

Ambulance 826 – The real story as shared by the PGFD Public Information Officer

Just after midnight on Thursday [September 16, 2010], a Prince George’s County ambulance and a civilian vehicle were involved in a crash in the 5600 block of Marlboro Pike in District Heights. The crash resulted in 3 civilian fatalities and two Firefighter/Medics being transported to a Trauma Center.

Ambulance 826 had just departed the Fire/EMS Station and was traveling west on Marlboro Pike en route to a overdose call on Tanow Place. Initial reports indicate that a GMC Suburban SUV was travelling east-bound in the west-bound lanes at a high rate of speed. The ambulance, with emergency lights on and siren sounding, had to swerve to avoid a head-on collision. The SUV side-swiped the ambulance and then hit a brick wall and utlity pole before coming to rest on it’s roof about 120 feet from where it first struck the ambulance.

The three occupants of the SUV, adult males, were pronounced deceased on the scene. Two Firefighter/Medics were transported to a Trauma Center for evaluation but did not appear to have suffered any injuries.

The ambulance sustained major damage from the crash in which the entire right side of the patient compartment was torn off.

The Prince George’s County Police Department Accident Reconstruction Team are conducting the investigation.

Public Discourse In The Age of Show Business

Professor Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse In The Age of Show Business pointed out that visual communications, inspired by television, has made our world more like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World – a population too amused by distractions like entertainment, leisure, and laughter to realize they have been made powerless – rather than George Orwell’s 1984 – a tyrannical state that bans information to keep the public powerless.

The larger point that Postman made was that societies are molded by technologies atop which they communicate:

• Oral cultures teach us to be conversational.
• Typographic cultures teach us to be logical. Fire departments operate as a typographical culture – paper empires of logic and procedures.
• Televised cultures teach us that everything is entertainment and emotional.

I wonder how Postman¹ would evaluate social media memes, videos, and algorithms designed to maximize the time users spend in the application (Derakhshan 2016).

Artificial Images

Derek O. Hanley is a combat medic, EMS educator, photographer, editor, and founder of DOHP, which specializes in real-world product capture for EMS, public safety, and operational environments.² In this August 2026 LinkedIn post, he contrasts the differences between an actual image and a staged or AI-generated one:

Can you spot the difference? (Frontline professionals can.)
Spend thousands of hours working in an operational environment and you develop an enormous mental library of what real looks like.

The obvious details matter: uniforms, equipment, vehicles, clinical technique.
But so do the subtle ones.

Posture. Where people position themselves. How equipment is staged. What’s been moved out of the way. The clutter created by actual work. A cabinet secured because the ambulance is moving. The natural division of attention between multiple clinicians.

Even something as mundane as lockout/tagout can tell an insider: people were actually working here.

Most viewers won’t consciously inventory those details.
Experienced frontline personnel don’t have to.

Pattern recognition does much of the work automatically.

That’s why the difference between these two images matters.
The top image illustrates what someone thinks an ambulance call looks like.

The bottom image is visual evidence of one.

And when knowledgeable viewers encounter the first, something else can happen:
Instead of processing your message, they start finding what’s wrong.

Why is she positioned like that?
Why is everything spotless?
That doesn’t make sense.
I’ve seen this stock photo EVERYWHERE.

The image gets categorized as synthetic, staged or disconnected from their world.
Now your beautifully written copy and great product have to overcome a credibility problem the photograph created before the viewer even considered them.

The real image works differently.
Those tiny details create recognition.
I’ve been there. I know this. This is us.

That’s emotional resonance—and it gives the message attached to the photograph a better opportunity to land.

This is why I distinguish between illustrative imagery and visual evidence.

One depicts an idea of the work.
The other proves the work happened.

It is tough to find real-life photographs or videos to illustrate your learning point. One challenge in writing the Company Officer: Principles and Practice book was getting fireground pictures approved by the NFPA representative.

Jones and Bartlett Learning used multiple experienced fire service photographers who provided great images. Few fireground photos showed complete NFPA-compliant behavior. Please use your SCBA waist straps, gloves, and eye protection.

While We Are Talking About Artificial Intelligence

Firefighter Nation Editor-in-Chief Stephanie White weighed in:

I thought spending 60 hours on engine 9 was the pinnacle of exhaustion.
Nope.

It’s reading AI submissions.

Why? Thanks for asking – articles, posts, books – whatever it is you write it’s just a continuation of the sofa in the bay, the kitchen table while the chauffeur is cooking dinner, or the coffee on the front bumper with a buddy or two. It’s the conversations and stories we tell each other, and when you write with AI you completely sanitize that tone and warmth.

It’s the reading equivalent of listening to another teleconference meeting where the absent FC explains that they don’t know where all the money went or doing your HR training online. Again.

_______________________

¹Neil Postman (1931–2003) was chairman of the Department of Communication Arts at New York University and founder of its Media Ecology program. He wrote more than twenty books.

²I have licensed pictures and used an on-line DOHP Signal interview by Derek O. Hanley in my Idaho State University courses.

References

Derakhshan, H. (2016, Nov 29). Social Media is Killing Discourse Because It’s Too Much Like TV: We need more text and fewer videos and memes in the age of Trump. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/11/29/155271/social-media-is-killing-discourse-because-its-too-much-like-tv/

Hanley, D. O. (2026, August 27). Can you spot the difference? (Frontline professionals can.) Spend thousands of hours working in an operational environment and you develop an enormous mental library of what real looks like. The obvious details matter: uniforms, equipment, vehicles, clinical technique. But so do the subtle ones. [Post]. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/derekohanley_can-you-spot-the-difference-frontline-professionals-activity-7499125697441980416-05TO

PGFD Public Information Office. (2010 September 16) Departmental Crash Involving Ambulance and Civilian Vehicle. Prince George’s County Fire/EMS Department. https://pgfdpio.blogspot.com/2010/09/departmental-crash-involving-ambulance.html

Postman, Neil (1985/2005) Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse In The Age of Show Business. 20th-anniversary edition. New York, NY: Penguin Books.

Ward, M. J. (2020 February 17) Outrage, Optics, and Overreacting to Emergency Service Issues. CompanyCommander.com. https://companycommander.com/2020/02/17/outrage-optics-and-over-reacting-to-emergency-service-issues/

White. Stephanie. (2026 July). I thought spending 60 hours on engine 9 was the pinnacle of exhaustion. Nope. It’s reading AI submissions. [Post]. LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stephanie-white-754b0b26_fireservice-firedepartment-firefighters-activity-7470473592653361152-P71s