There is a lot to unpack about the case of Jerry Ross, who in May decided to drive into a group of cyclists.
We could firstly ask whether a man who we now know suffers from a multitude of severe health conditions should be driving in the first place; but then again, his health conditions almost certainly weren’t anything to do with why he drove into a group of cyclists. He did it deliberately and calculatedly because, in his words: “You know, just tired of it, man. They just, you know. Do what the hell they want.”
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Is it a story about delusion? Possibly, after all he claims “I’ll take this to the Supreme Court,” and that he will not spend a day in jail.
However, rather than this simply being the story of a delusional, bigoted man, I believe this is a tale charting the progression of the dehumanisation of cyclists. It’s an attempt to create another ‘us vs them’ narrative by a media ecosystem in the US that focuses on clicks and outrage over justice, or holding the powerful to account.
On this occasion, that narrative has been reaffirmed by a senior reporter writing for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who published a bizarre article titled ‘A driver passed too close to cyclists. Now he could die in prison.’
Rather than opening the article by describing the video that unequivocally shows Ross leaning on his horn and deliberately driving into a group of cyclists, knocking one down and fracturing his spine, we have this:
“Ross is 73 years old, weakened by stroke and heart attack, with a scar down the middle of his chest and a collection of pills on the kitchen counter. Beta blockers, blood thinners and so forth. Sometimes he gets dizzy coming up the stairs in the garage and he leans so hard against the wall that he scrapes his arm and leaves a little trail of his thinned-out blood.”
I know the US has a lot of awful people in it, with most of them feeling particularly emboldened at the moment, but trying to make a martyr of a man who has been caught bang to rights trying to hurt people because they decided to ride a bike seems particularly disgusting. What is the material difference between this and somebody mowing down pedestrians because they disagreed with something they were doing? Not much, but I can’t imagine the writer would be interviewing the person who hit three pedestrians outside a bar in Atlanta on the 10th of October with such soft gloves.
The article isn’t packaged in the shock jock style you’d expect from how I’ve described it so far, but that doesn’t stop it from perhaps being the most egregious case of othering I’ve ever seen regarding cyclists in my 16 years of writing about bikes and cycling. It’s not entirely surprising that it’s coming from the US, given the quality of journalism that we’ve seen there in the last decade.
Here’s what worries me: although the old adage that ‘when America sneezes, the world catches a cold’ traditionally refers to economics, I think it’s increasingly becoming true with social and media trends too. Think about how the Telegraph seems to have gone from something a bank manager buys for the crossword to a far right-supporting rag, and how that esteemed TV and radio channel GB News is just Fox News in a bowler hat.
So, while I can say that in my opinion the writer of the hideous Atlanta Journal article is a shill who’s moral compass is more skewed than a certain building in Pisa, and that Jerry Ross has a conscience you’d need a sniffer dog to find, and a temper you’d need a bomb squad to defuse, the real problem is that both appear to have a willing army of nodders agreeing with them.
There has been so much programming done about cyclists in the media that driving into a group of people who have the audacity to exist on a road, is expressed as a story with equal blame on both sides. That is morally repugnant, and whilst I hope we don’t see this kind of garbage come to the UK, we are seeing the seeds being sewn already. Whether that’s the nonsense Rupert Lowe spouts about e-bikes, the seemingly constant harassment of cyclists by Telegraph journalists, or the thousands of videos online showing people abusing cyclists.
Unfortunately, we are living during a time where anger sells, and cyclists are an easy target. While this may be in Atlanta today, we need to call it out now, or it might be happening in Abingdon before we know it.
