Earlier this week, the CBC published this Bike to Work Week story, with the laziest, dumbest and most unhelpful photo illustration I could imagine. Their illustration showed Tour-de-France-like championship-caliber hyper-athletic young men in elaborate lycra costumes riding in a pack in a thunderstorm amid what looked like a rush hour traffic jam. Right. Bike to Work Week in Vancouver. Right. Thanks a lot.
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If the illustration had been chosen by fiendish propaganda experts specifically to terrify and drive away potential people from riding their bikes to work (or at all), I don’t think they could have chosen a worse one.
But now it’s much better.
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CBC News story here.
That’s not rush hour traffic: that car is clearly covered in decals. Not only does this look like a race, it is a race, and that’s the guide car or whatever it’s called. Someone clearly didn’t know or bother to read what the story was actually about before picking the photo.
It’s a pace car following the breakaway in the Pyrennes in the 2014 Tour de France. The camera bike is to the right.
It was captioned as a TdF scene, but of course completely unrelated to the story at hand. I called them out on it via twitter right away, too, glad they changed that misleading image. Goes to show what many perceive as ‘city cycling’ is still based in sport and not normalcy.
Oh, it’s typical of the old media establishment and how they present stuff they don’t really approve of. This one is called the cod-liver oil technique. “This is good for you but you won’t like it.” They can appear to be supportive but they present it in a way that also communicates that it won’t be like.