When covering car-cyclist collisions
When a person driving a vehicle hits a cyclist or a pedestrian, the common newswriting construct is to craft the sentence in the passive voice, so that the victim of the crash is the subject of the sentence. Journalists will write, "A cyclist was hit..." or a "A pedestrian was injured..." This grammatical choice puts the reader's attention on the person who was hurt or killed. Journalists often finish the sentence by writing that the person was "hit by a car" or, less frequently, "hit by a driver."
Today we address a letter from a reader who viewed the use of the phrase "hit by a car" in an NPR headline as a failure to acknowledge the driver of the vehicle and their role in the crash. The story was about a car-bike collision that killed a teenage star in the world of competitive cycling.
Turns out the writer and the editor behind the story had their
