- cross-posted to:
- fuckcars@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuckcars@lemmy.world
A driver plowed a car into a crowd at a street festival celebrating Filipino heritage in Vancouver on Saturday night, killing at least nine people and injuring others.
Some of those attending the festival helped arrest the suspect at the scene, who police identified as a 30-year-old man.
…
“It’s something you don’t expect to see in your lifetime,” Kris Pangilinan, a Toronto-based journalist, told Canadian public broadcaster CBC. “[The driver] just slammed the pedal down and rammed into hundreds of people. It was like seeing a bowling ball hit — all the bowling pins and all the pins flying up in the air.”
He continued, “It was like a war zone… There were bodies all over the ground.”
Cars need to go, streets need to pedestrianize, and bollards need to go up to make sure cars stay the hell out.
To your point, imagine if this were a mass-shooting and the title were: “Nine people killed after gun shoots into crowd at Vancouver Filipino Festival”. “Nine people killed after knife stabs into crowd at Vancouver Filipino Festival.” It’s so fucking passive as to be sickening. It reminds me of the “Man dies in officer-involved shooting” trope we see in US media because extrajudicial murder by the police is so routine and heavily whitewashed.
The AP gives it the same treatment. The only equivalent I could think of is “Nine people killed after bomb explodes into crowd”, and you know why that might be written that way? Because it’s not immediately obvious who placed the bomb. This mass-murdering psychopath is in custody; we can say “Nine people killed after man drives into crowd at Vancouver Filipino festival.”
Edit: the death toll is now eleven, not nine.
While I agree that it skews the narrative, it’s likely that media at early stages of the story use passive language like that to leave open the possibility of various causes, such as mechanical malfunction or even an algorithmic failure.
It’s not nessisarily skewing the narrative, it’s just not providing context. Terrorist acts have a narrow definition in Canadian law. This guy could be a spree killer motivated by racism but unless that killing is for premeditated ideological, religious or political reasons to coerce a specific result or change of policy from the population / Government it doesn’t fall under the definition.
No manifesto or claim of reasoning or connections found to groups that claim responsibility - no terrorist designation.
This is true, though the declaration being avoided is a wider set than just terrorism.
When I say skew I am not implying intent to mislead, just that paranoid interpretations by readers are kind of inevitable in such a situation.
Yes, but you’re mixing several points here, primarily environmental and direct harm. Car-centric city design is harmful, but a highway doesn’t up and kill people one day in the same way that a driver hitting someone with their car does.
The other thing you’re mixing into this one comment is the attribution of harm, the “car plows into crowd” thing. Yes, the car didn’t do it, a driver drove their car into the crowd. Having the reporting properly attribute the action is a separate issue from the actions themselves.