thumb|Report in [[The China Mail on a 1958 bus plunge in Prestonsburg, Kentucky]]
The term bus plunge is an idiom referencing a journalistic practice of reporting bus accidents in short articles that describe the vehicle as "plunging" from a bridge or hillside road. The phenomenon has been noted in The New York Times, which published many bus plunge stories from the 1950s through the 1980s, running about 20 such articles in 1968 alone. The development of computerized layout tools in the 1970s eventually reduced the need for such filler stories, but newswires continue to carry them.