No News Is Good News

Good news for media and politicians is whatever garners readers or viewers or wins voters. Such news need not have any actual news value and may in fact be no news at all. One form this takes is the presenting of numbers without statistical context. Thus the following item from the Associated Press on May 18, 2022: 

Nearly 43,000 people were killed on U.S. roads last year [2021], the highest number in 16 years as Americans returned to the roads after the coronavirus pandemic forced many to stay at home.

One has to read far into the article to come across the following statement, which pulls the rug out from under all the rest: 

Government estimates show the rate of road deaths declined slightly from 2020. Last year there were 1.33 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, compared with 1.34 in 2020.

This shows both that driving is incredibly safe and that its safety has increased (or at least stayed pretty much the same), not decreased, since the depths of the pandemic (and before?). 

Endless media and marketing "mileage" and political capital are and will forever be achieved through the specious choice of metric. Statistics are hard enough to interpret when adduced legitimately, but ignoring them entirely leaves one in a numerological vacuum. I'm beginning to pay no attention whatever to quantitative proclamations of crises at hand.

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