Windshield bias is real: 2019 news coverage of pedestrian traffic fatalities in the United States

Abstract

Framing pedestrian traffic fatalities episodically rather than thematically, attributing responsibility to pedestrians for their own deaths and non-agential descriptions of traffic crashes reflects windshield bias. Pedestrian traffic fatality rates increased dramatically in the U.S. over the previous decade. Findings from this content analysis of 2019 U.S. news coverage supports conclusions that windshield bias is national in scope, varies between cities in the Sun Belt and Frost Belt, and is associated with reduced walkability and greater partisan segregation of cities. The 2016 vote for Republican Donald Trump was also positively associated with episodic framing. An inverse association between word length and windshield bias was also established. The data set analyzed included 366 news articles drawn from 78 news sources in 74 cities located in 30 states.