A pediatric doctor at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia was killed while riding her bike in Center City on Wednesday night.
https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/deadly-3-car-crash-rittenhouse-philadelphia/3915690/
The original post on the Philadelphia subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/philadelphia/comments/1e5wkv0/insane_accident_on_18th_and_spruce/
The use of passive voice in the first sentence does a lot of work shifting blame away from the driver and the car centric systems in an “objective” effort.
How about:
@apfelwoiSchoppen @ByteOnBikes Active voice would be, “A driver killed…”
They’re both active voice, they just have different verbs.
Yep, high school grammar 101. It isn’t that journalists don’t know this, it is how they are trained. Shift obvious blame away from parties for objectivity until a verdict or deference to the status quo.
I would argue the first isn’t active voice
“died when the driver of a car hit her” seems passive to me. It’s more accurate, but still passive.
Both killed and died are active voice.
@apfelwoiSchoppen But functionally, the victim didn’t die on her own, she died as the direct result of the driver hitting her. For the purpose of accurately portraying who took an action and who was acted upon, it should emphasize the driving, not the dying.
The discussion was active voice vs passive voice, not functionality of active voice vs functionality of differently-worded active voice. They’re both still active voice.
@PapaStevesy IMO active voice includes focusing the sentence on the subject that did the action, not the one that was acted upon but by all means let’s argue about grammatical definitions instead of the problem of motorists killing people and journalists normalizing it. 🙄
I mean, you’re literally the one who started the argument, being dismissive and condescending about it now just makes you look like a sore loser.
You’re the one doing that. Killed/died same difference, but I apologize for not using the same verb as the original quote for clarity.
They would probably need a conviction before they could publish that.
What that she died? Absolutely not. There is no accusation or assignment of guilt. It tells what happened, assignment comes later. A driver did hit her and kill her, for which there can be many reasons it occurred.
“Car driver kills doctor on bicycle”
“Car driver kills children’s doctor on bicycle”
While I agree with the car centric aspect of this, you should read the article. The top bullets are more specific, and the driver may have had a medical incident.
The bullets don’t say that now, but it’s possible they changed the article (they should indicate the changes made, but I don’t see any notes, so who knows). Currently the bullets say:
Barbara Friedes, a 30-year-old pediatric doctor, was killed on Wednesday when she was hit by a car while riding a bike near Rittenhouse Square.
Friedes was recently named a chief resident at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
At the time of the deadly crash, police say, Friedes was wearing a helmet and was riding in a protected bike lane. The driver of the vehicle that struck Friedes has not yet been charged.
There’s a comment in the article that says they don’t know if there was a medical issue:
My frustration here is that “medical issue” is ALWAYS the conclusion people jump to when a driver hits a cyclist, as if there’s no possible way a driver could do anything wrong - despite all evidence to the contrary. “Medical issue” almost never turns out to be the actual reason. It’s almost always drunk, distracted, just hates cyclists so much that they attack them, or some combination of the three. (There are also instances of cyclists being at fault, for example pulling out in front of a car. Those are rare, too, but they do happen.)
I recognize that a sudden, previously unknown medical condition could strike a driver, causing the driver to lose control and inflict damage and injuries. But it’s an extremely rare event.
Thanks, I did. Then I wrote the comment, copied the quote directly from the article. It is the first sentence of the article. I also said the cyclist died, made no indication that the person was “murdered” or anything.
That’s a because there is no speculation that she was murdered. If the driver had a stroke, or some other medical incident, it would not be murder.
Yes. That’s what I said.
Well, sort of. You edited your response to add a lot more context.
An hour before you commented.
Sounds like lemmy.world was behind on federation again. Booo