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Reporting on road traffic collisions in German-speaking countries is often not neutral and instead shifts the blame from motorists to cyclists and pedestrians. Journalists tend to relate road accidents as isolated incidents and thus play down structural problems in policy and infrastructure. This is the finding of a new study published in the journal "Mobilities." Prepared by an interdisciplinary team of researchers, the study also offers guidance for more precise reporting, with the aim of promoting safe mobility.
"In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, common formulations applied in reporting on road accidents obscure causes and effects. Based on a content analysis of 229 articles, our study shows that linguistic devices such as passive constructions, metonymies and reflexive verbs are frequently used to shift responsibility for accidents from car drivers to people travelling on foot or by bicycle," says lead author Dirk von Schneidemesser from RIFS, the Research Institute for Sustainability at the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences. In doing so, the reports convey a distorted picture and hinder reforms that would improve safety.
The authors describe four types of linguistic obfuscation:
1. When journalists identify the vehicle as the actor instead of the driver – "Car hits cyclist”, for example – this shifts the focus away from the actor and obscures responsibility for the collision. In rhetoric, this substitution of an object or concept for a person is known as metonymy.
2. A second common linguistic device that can be used to move a social actor into the background is the use of a passive construction with a prepositional phrase, as in "Pedestrian hit by car driver." (In contrast to the active construction: "Car driver hits pedestrian.") This wording pushes the actor into the background.
3. A third way of shifting responsibility through language is suppression, whereby the actor involved is not mentioned at all. This occurs when, for example, journalists use the passive form without a prepositional phrase (“Pedestrian struck").
4. A fourth way of shifting responsibility is to use reflexive verbs, for example “Pedestrian injures herself” (this form is commonly used in German but is rare in English-language reporting). This has a similar effect to the passive form. Firstly, the responsible party is omitted and secondly, the focus is placed on the injured party, suggesting that they inflicted an injury on themselves without any outside influence.
The authors advise using language that clearly identifies the actors involved. In the articles they analysed, victims featured in 76 percent of the headlines, while only 15 percent mentioned a second person involved. The people responsible for the harm were rarely the focus of attention in these headlines.
In addition to the wording, the lack of contextual information is also a frequent problem, Schneidemesser explains: "For example, if readers learn from the article that there are frequent collisions at an intersection or that there are no traffic lights on a busy road, they are more likely to be in favour of measures to install safety-enhancing infrastructure."
Experts from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, including RIFS researchers, published a set of detailed recommendations for journalists in March of this year in Unfallsprache – Sprachunfall (The language of accidents - An accident of language).
Dr. Dirk von Schneidemesser
dirk.vonschneidemesser@rifs-potsdam.de
von Schneidemesser, D., Bettge, S., Caviola, H., Sedlaczek, A., Reisigl, M., Schindler, F., & Wirz, M. (2025). How linguistic patterns obscure responsibility in newspaper coverage of traffic crashes in German-speaking countries: an interdisciplinary study. Mobilities, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2025.2534634
Impersonal language is often used in reports about traffic accidents.
Copyright: Sprachkompass "Unfallsprache - Sprachunfall"/Julia Weiss
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Impersonal language is often used in reports about traffic accidents.
Copyright: Sprachkompass "Unfallsprache - Sprachunfall"/Julia Weiss
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