Originally Posted by
Daniel4
It is disrepectful to any victim of a collision for any news article or story not to acknowledge the crash was due to another human being but by simply as identifying it as an accident by an inanimate object.
Originally Posted by
mschwett
yes, agreed. this is part of what’s frustrating about the coverage of these things, e.g. “cyclist struck by car.” may as well say that someone was “punctured by a flying bullet” when they’re shot.
It's disrespectful to any victim to use their death as an occasion for nitpicking the wording of headline.
This is a ridiculous objection and it only applies to the headline. You can only put so much information in a headline, and the cyclist was indeed struck by the car, not by the driver. If it was the driver who hit him, he likely would be alive today. The article made it clear that there was an unidentified driver, and nowhere implied in the slightest that the car was driving itself. The phrase "struck by driver" is factually incorrect or at least ambiguous. It could mean that he was hit by a golf club, but it sure sounds like he was hit by a person. If I have to choose between being struck by a car and being struck by a person, I'm going with the person every time.
The bullet comparison is just bizarre--there's lots of situations where people are struck by bullets and it is unknown where the shots even came from. And I believe "shot" in this sense is literally a synonym for "hit by a bullet".