Cycles of Violence: Analysing Media Discourse in the Newspaper Reporting of Bicycle Users and Road Fatalities

How are cyclist and pedestrian deaths depicted in newspaper reports, and how do these reports help shape understandings of cycling, walking, driving and road safety? This is an important question because the reporting of cyclist and pedestrian fatalities shapes public and political understanding of what problems exist, what the causes are, and therefore what policies and interventions might address them. In his research for his master’s dissertation, David Fevyer found that current news reporting of cyclist fatalities was narrowly focused upon the cyclists themselves rather than on institutional or infrastructural factors that might account for such incidents.