Originally Posted by
livedarklions
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".
i understand your point, perhaps mine was not well worded. more generally i am responding to the tendency to refer to incidents in which cyclists are killed or seriously injured by cars and their drivers are completely accidental with no fault or negligence ascribed to the driver, or with little or no mention of the fact that the vehicle which struck someone was pointed at that someone by a human driver.
other than the one initial fox headline, coverage of this incredibly sad event seems pretty fair given the information that is publicly available (which does not include the intoxication of the driver)
