Rhythm Thief said:By "absence of evidence" I presume you mean "absence of evidence which supports my world view". As I said, if we'd been presented with an article saying how a car driver had punched a cyclist, we wouldn't have been trying to find "evidence" that it was the cyclist's fault, would we? And yet here most of you are trying to make excuses for this idiot.
No, I mean 'absence of evidence'. There is no evidence that the cyclist started the fight.
And as for how we'd respond in a similar situation where the motorist was protrayed as the aggressor, speak for yourself, if you merely swap the motorist and cyclist around in that article and slant it such as the motorist started it, I'd still be uneasy with it. I'm leaning more against the motorist here than I would if this were from a source that isn't uniformly and regularly against cyclists, but thats as far as I'd take it.