a driver used a pickup truck as a weapon to attack dozens of people in new orleans this morning and the news reflexively uses the passive voice to avoid explaining this
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Passive voice depends on what the headline Would have been. If you add the Actor back into the headline he becomes the subject. You remove him and the Object takes focus and it redirects the agency and focus.
So, no, it isn't using to-be verbs, but it's still very much journalistic passive voice.
A lot of people seemed to think that it was to disguise the attacker's ethnicity, and I'm like NO, that's standard headline house style for anyone doing murders with a car, you just didn't notice until someone with an Arabic name got behind the wheel.
Focusing on car rather than driver is passive. This wasn't someone losing control of their car, this was a calculated murderous rampage. The car was the weapon.
The passive voice is a grammatical form where the subject of the verb expresses the patient of the verb. In English, it is normally marked by 'to be' and a past participle. The passive version of 'A car drives into a crowd' would be 'A crowd was driven into by a car'.
This feels like splitting hairs. It’s not as though the headlines read “Truck Driver Considers New Sentiments of Fellow Citizens.” However it happened, all those headlines conveyed the events known at the time.
I don’t find it emblematic of the deeper problem vis-à-vis non-Foxish media and Trump.
That the media refers to these attacks as "tragedies" has bothered me since 9/11. A "tragedy" is a parent who dies young of cancer. A "tragedy" is something that people cannot control. These are attacks. The media downplays the intentional violent aspect of them by calling them "tragedies".
A horrific beginning to 2025. It is continually baffling to me that Bourbon Street is configured to allow vehicles at all. It is difficult to stop someone who is determined to cause mayhem, but we don’t have to make it easy.
"10 people were killed when they stood in the path of travel of a pickup truck Tuesday night. Other people standing in the truck's path of travel also were injured. An occupant of the truck is being questioned by the police about the collisions."
My mistake. "An occupant of the truck was standing in the path of one or more bullets traveling through the air at the scene and sustained life-ending injuries."
It's ridiculous to just put up with the wrong words being used, and people thereby misunderstanding what happened.
WORDS MATTER.
Journalists should not twist facts through shoddy English.
I’m guessing that at the time of writing they didn’t know why the pickup crashed into the crowd. Had it turned out to be because the driver had had a heart attack the would have had to report it differently
Yes as it happened within seconds. You are commenting on a trend that is well known by most people attuned to car culture. News outlets do this again and again and again with traffic violence.
Not to come off as defending car bloat or terrorism, but since the movies' plots include a global nuclear apocalypse that killed the vast majority of humanity, I might have to mildly push back that that would probably be worse....
The attack was reported using Passive Car Voice as soon as it happened, long before we knew anything about Taleb al-Abdulmohsen's political tendencies.
Nit-picky grammar point: 8 of the 10 headlines use the active voice, not the passive. But your larger point that they identify a "car" or "vehicle" rather than a person as doing the killing is correct.
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So, no, it isn't using to-be verbs, but it's still very much journalistic passive voice.
However, these aren't actually written in the "passive voice". If they were, they'd be like "The crowd was driven into by the car".
https://bsky.app/profile/obcycler.bsky.social/post/3leolzsasq22b
Damn Gun violence.
Damn the NRA.
Damn Trump
@momsdemand.bsky.social
@everytown.bsky.social
@fredguttenberg.bsky.social
@davidhogg.bsky.social
@marchforourlives.bsky.social
@raskin.house.gov
@ocasio-cortez.house.gov
@maxwellfrost.bsky.social
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/guns-from-us-ending-up-in-mexico-60-minutes/?ftag=CNM-00-10aab7d&linkId
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-orleans-vehicle-crash-bourbon-street-crowd-casualties-shooting/
Oof
*dick and cum jokes
Was it a Waymo or something? Oh, no?
Must be headline writing riots your brain and erodes the active voice.
Well look at what happened today?
America: will you feel secure with a conspiracy theorist, a felon, & baby oligarch running the show?
Terrorists know the USA is weakened byTrump.
Everyone needs to find their teeth. (MAGAs, yours are in a tumbler by your bed).
I don’t find it emblematic of the deeper problem vis-à-vis non-Foxish media and Trump.
Can't be questioning massive high-powered fuck off trucks and the rise of right-wing extremism (isis and white nationalism alike) now, can we?
If you want to go off about a road rage incident, or traffic accidents you can have at it. But this one has nothing at all to do with “car culture.”
WORDS MATTER.
Journalists should not twist facts through shoddy English.
It's just as possible had the addict at the wheel simply fell asleep.
100 are murdered by the Automobile industry in the US every day.
Also newsrooms covered it many minutes after both things happened near simultaneously.
I invite you to listen & learn rather than reflexively contradict.
"car plows into crowd" is active voice
Thanks,
America
/but not terrorism, I guess