When there is a train, plane, or bus crash, it's newsworthy: it doesn't happen very often, lots of lives at stake, lots of people are interested in it. Multiple news outlets will send out reporters, and we will hear a lot of details. On the other hand, a car crash does not get this treatment unless there is something unusual about it like a driverless car or an already newsworthy person involved.
The effects are not great: while driving is relatively dangerous, both to the occupants and people outside, our sense of danger and impact is poorly calibrated by the news we read. My guess is that most people's intuitive sense of the danger of cars versus trains, planes, and buses has been distorted by this coverage, where most people, say, do not expect buses to be >16x safer than cars. This also affects our regulatory system, where we push to make high-capacity transportation modes safer (usually) even when this makes them less competitive with cars, shifting more people to driving, and increasing risk overall.
News outlets deciding that car crashes are sufficiently routine that most are not worth deep coverage is probably a commercially reasonable decision, where they expect stories that wouldn't get enough readers or viewers to justify the time investment. But I wonder whether groups trying to shift people away from cars could make up the difference. They could fund a newspaper to deeply investigate crashes, looking into the circumstances that led to the incident and illustrating the human impact of the tragedy. Just because something happens often doesn't mean each time matters less.
(I'm somewhat nervous about "pay for more coverage of events that point in the direction you advocate". I don't know how much this is currently accepted, or what approaches news outlets have in place to keep this kind of arrangementf from producing distorted coverage?)
Well, averting your eyes from the road and your hands from the wheel at the same time in order to touch the screen (rather than reaching a calm spot and stop the car first) is so obviously risky that I was lumping it into "idiots looking at their smartphones".
Yes, I do know that even a minor distraction could be enough to crash your car. My point was that also bus drivers are humans and make errors all the time. I generally drive alone, in silence and with the phone turned off, in order to maximize my attention, and it doesn't seem obvious that a random bus driver should have a lower probability to crash their vehicle than me (given that the average bus driver is also older than me and drives a huge vehicle which is surely more difficult to handle than my small car).
Do you have actual numbers on fatalities caused by cautious drivers?