I just can't stop

Okay, tonight, it's an update on deadbeat dads, and a report on the roads where one is supposedly most likely to encounter a drunk driver. I just want to make a few notes about the latter. It did something that I noticed last night too. The reports are incredibly self-referential. "We tracked him down." "It took a lot of effort." "We searched for three weeks." Who cares? This stuff serves two apparent functions. First, it sensationalizes the story by creating a phony drama and suspense over whether the investigation will be successful. This is Geraldo outside Capone's vault. It's entertainment and it follows the strictures of entertainment. Nothing the I-Team does is newsworthy. They make the story about themselves to inject entertainment value into stories that would otherwise be simply news. Second, it's a big advertisement for the station -- look at us! Look see how hard we worked. This took a lot of effort. Be impressed. Now that I think about it, there's a third function: distract from the story so you won't see how deeply flawed it is.

Speaking of which, okay. The newsguys tallied reports of traffic arrests and noted the drunk driving arrest hotspots. Here's the big surprise -- the busiest major highways tended to be the source of the most arrests. One thing the report didn't ask anyone was, "Mr. Expert, is our methodology sound?" I'd have asked that before doing all that work. I suspect the answer would be, no.

Sections of the city that are more dense with roads are correspondingly likely to have more traffic and hence more arrests. Highways with higher speed limits and no stoplights simply see more traffic, even though the highways tend to be better lit, better maintained, and easier to drive (no intersections, constant speeds) than city streets. Some areas may have more arrests simply because they are better patrolled. Areas near police stations are likely to be more patrolled. One high arrest area is close to a part of the city that has late night traffic jams due to large public events -- unsafe, or just better patrolled?

A better methodology would be to compare number of accidents with city engineers' estimates of traffic flow. If a high ratio of cars on the road are involved in accidents, this is a sign of unsafety, rather than, "we counted more drunk driving arrests within a mile radius of the huge highway interchange near downtown than in any other circle with an area of pi miles." Duh!

Another thing which I neglected to mention last night is that within the report, they keep throwing in teasers: "you'll see" this, or "we'll show you" that, or "just wait until you see what we found." Just tell us, dammit. Don't make a 45-second report into a 3-minute report by telling us three times that you're going to show us something before you do. If you don't have a full report, then it isn't soup yet. Stick it back on the burner until it's ready.