Good news is not news
Sep 29th, 2007 by handolio
A few weeks ago I was trawling around on the internet trying to find road casualty figures for this post on Living. One thing which struck me at the time was how difficult it is to find global figures - the best I could come up with was a frighteningly large number I’d seen repeated on several sites, which equates to about one in 6,000 people dying in a traffic accident each year.
Yesterday I noticed this Department for Transport release, which lists the detailed UK road casualty figures for 2006. It refers to headline figures published in June, around a week after my post.
While maybe not the most exciting topic in the world, the numbers are pretty encouraging for anyone except motorcyclists and pedestrians, and the overall picture is that our roads are getting safer despite a spike in child fatalities.
Now, it’s easy to miss something when you’re getting on a bit and you’re writing news across a few sectors, but I don’t remember reading about this in the press. Conduct a quick search now and it doesn’t seem that anyone much covered it, other than What Car and various government and council websites.
Granted, journalists can’t and shouldn’t turn every GNN press release into a story, but wouldn’t a search on Google turn up anybody who’d used the figures to inform a longer feature on road safety?
Re: search
It doesn’t. Search for fewer people dying in road accidents or even (shudder) less people dying in road accidents and there’s nothing. How about fewer road casualties? Nah.
Road deaths fall looks promising, but the formatting and the hilarious photo of the (top-ranking) BBC article give away its 1999 origins.
Things begin to look up if you already know the number of people killed on UK roads in 2006, which was 3,172. Searching for that alone doesn’t help, but 3172 crash finally turns up a Times article from yesterday. Stick in 3172 deaths and you can find a Daily Mail article, but only after a quick detour through the forums at safespeed.org.uk.
Other search engines? Google News, Yahoo, Ask and MSN are all similarly unaware - so you pretty much have to know the statistics to find the statistics.
All of which seems rather odd when you consider that, if it’s just car crashes that you want to read about, a Google UK search for car crash death brings up one that never seems to be out of the news.
I live in Germany, where the number of traffic deaths is just under 5,000 per year. That was run as a good news story because the number is dropping every year, down from a peak of about 20,000 (!) in 1970.
But if just one percent of 5,000 people were killed in a terrorist bomb or plane crash, it would be headlining for a week. We are just so numb to the numbers, aren’t we?
It’s funny you should say that - I recently wrote about a similar problem with environmental stats for how many mobile phones and plastic bags get used.
The numbers just seem to bounce off people, but when an American photographer created images that represented the figures, people (including me) ended up assuming that the figures must be wrong.
As far as I could establish they’re the right numbers, which makes the pictures even more scary.