The World Health Organization characterizes traffic deaths as a preventable health epidemic. Despite the scale of the problem, this issue has not led to a concerted call to action. Why not? The field of media studies offers potential insight. Not only does media coverage help determine which issues merit attention, coverage also shapes how issues are framed. The aim of this paper is to examine local news coverage of vehicle crashes involving someone walking or biking. To that end, this paper used content analysis of 200 local news articles to answer the research questions: (1) How do articles apportion blame between vulnerable road users (VRUs) and drivers?; (2) To what extent do articles frame crashes as a public health issue? The results reveal that local news coverage tends to shift blame toward VRUs and away from drivers. Coverage almost always treats crashes as isolated incidents, obscuring the public health nature of the problem. This pattern of coverage likely contributes to the limited public outcry about pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities. Journalists can counteract these patterns by subtly altering their coverage. Planners can assist these efforts by making their expertise readily available to journalists. These simple changes would help the public identify links between seemingly isolated events and increase public pressure to reduce road deaths.
The residential landscape of a city is key to its economic, social, and cultural functioning. Following the collapse of communist rule in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, urban residential dynamics and household mobility have been critical to urban change under new economies and political systems. This article explores neighbourhood perception, which is a link in the chain to better explanation of socio-spatial processes (and their interruption by the socialist system). We use a novel data set – opinions expressed on one of social media (Twitter), and a novel empirical method – neural network analysis, to explore people’s current attitudes and perceptions about the neighbourhoods and districts in Tartu, Estonia. The findings suggest that Twitter comments about urban neighbourhoods display attitudinal and perceptual commentary, which is subdued compared to other subjects. The socialist goal of homogeneity in neighbourhoods is not reflected in present day perspectives about urban neighbourhoods, 25 years after the disintegration of the USSR. Ambivalence about neighbourhoods persists, but this ambivalence may be in flux. Older, formerly neglected neighbourhoods, the subject of positive perception on social media, are currently experiencing increased investment, and the observed trends in our data support a narrative of neighbourhood transition.
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