this seems to me like it's designed to shift the blame from unilaterally on the VRU (bad), to unilaterally on the driver (also bad).
You pay lip service to systemic problems, but this is not a systemic approach to reducing crashes; it just implies that the driver is at fault, which is not always the case in these things. As another comment noted, reporters would do well to highlight the context around the crash if there's no clear fault (such as an intoxicated or negligent driver, or a pedestrian running into the road within minimum braking distance), such as lack of bike lanes, blind corners, etc that would apply pressure to authorities to make the roads safer.
Not all crashes can be default-blamed on the driver.
If a Cessna crashes into a car, is it safe to blame the Cessna and not the car, rather than treat it as a special case? I'm sure a car could swerve onto a runway mid-landing, but it would be the exception to the rule, right?
When operating a car you should be expected to be in a heightened state of awareness and responsibility because of your capacity to cause damage, compared to a pedestrian.
The bias in the current narrative (against pedestrians who have little autonomy vs a car) is so strongly on the wrong side that I don't think asking for a middle-ground approach is worth arguing.
I think that's a false choice; rather than choosing between anti-VRU bias (as present) and anti-driver bias (as proposed), why not choose to report the specific facts of the incident at hand? Blaming one party all the time is stupid, because one party is not always at fault.
Edit:
Your cessna example makes no sense, as cars and planes do not generally share space. Should bikes and cars share space? No, but that's part of the systemic aspect of the problem.
I am arguing people and cars don't generally share space either. When a car hits a person, it's rare and I do think it should bias against the large, dangerous hardware, while also examining the facts. We have a century of bias-towards-cars coverage which permeates all society, police officers writing their reports are biased from what they've read and how they are trained, I don't think it's an over correction to default to assuming the larger, more regulated and dangerous side of any collision is by default assumed to be at fault, and for the other side to be the exception to the rule.
I say this as a person who's driven a car for 25 years and never hit any people, and who has been hit by a car by a driver who wasn't paying attention multiple times. What's worse, is drivers are often angry at cyclists for even existing, rather than taking responsibility for being aware of their surroundings.
The cessna example is a little over the top, but not totally out of line as a metaphor.
You pay lip service to systemic problems, but this is not a systemic approach to reducing crashes; it just implies that the driver is at fault, which is not always the case in these things. As another comment noted, reporters would do well to highlight the context around the crash if there's no clear fault (such as an intoxicated or negligent driver, or a pedestrian running into the road within minimum braking distance), such as lack of bike lanes, blind corners, etc that would apply pressure to authorities to make the roads safer.
Not all crashes can be default-blamed on the driver.