Bike Frames: Understanding the Implicit Portrayal of Cyclists in the News

Increasing the number of cyclists, whether for general transport or recreation, can provide health improvements and reduce the environmental impact of vehicular transportation. However, the public's perception of cycling may be driven by the ideologies and reporting standards of news agencies. For instance, people may identify cyclists on the road as "dangerous" if news agencies overly report cycling accidents, limiting the number of people that cycle for transportation. Moreover, if fewer people cycle, there may be less funding from the government to invest in safe infrastructure. In this paper, we explore the perceived perception of cyclists within news headlines. To accomplish this, we introduce a new dataset, "Bike Frames", that can help provide insight into how headlines portray cyclists and help detect accident-related headlines. Next, we introduce a multi-task (MT) regularization approach that increases the detection accuracy of accident-related posts, demonstrating improvements over traditional MT frameworks. Finally, we compare and contrast the perceptions of cyclists with motorcyclist-related headlines to ground the findings with another related activity for both male- and female-related posts. Our findings show that general news websites are more likely to report accidents about cyclists than other events. Moreover, cyclist-specific websites are more likely to report about accidents than motorcycling-specific websites, even though there is more potential danger for motorcyclists. Finally, we show substantial differences in the reporting about male vs. female-related persons, e.g., more male-related cyclists headlines are related to accidents, but more female-related motorcycling headlines about accidents. WARNING: This paper contains descriptions of accidents and death.