Distracted driving

This is going to be a pat-myself-and-my-paper-on-the-back entry, in case you don’t like those sorts of things.

You’ve probably seen the news yesterday about a study that came out of Virginia Tech that shows how dangerous distracted drivers are.

I got the embargoed press release the day before the announcement and read through the results. Then I went to the press conference.

I walked out thinking two things: 1) The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration just spent $4.1 million to discover what we already know, and 2) That every TV newscast is going to report it like it’s big news.

I refused to do that. I wanted to smack people on the head and say, “But we already know this!”

So I wrote my story. The lede I played around with was, “In a shocking development, researchers from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, working with the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, discovered that distracted and sleepy drivers have more accidents.”

But that would never fly, and sarcasm doesn’t carry well in print.

So I settled for:

If you’re distracted or drowsy while driving, you’re more likely to be in an accident than are people who pay attention to the road.

Researchers from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, working with the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, just spent $4.1 million over a 13-month period to discover that.

(The copy desk tweaked the second part a little.)

I decided that it would be inappropriate to be overtly sarcastic. I settled for playing it straight and letting people make up their own minds. For example:

“The biggest surprise was the prevalence of drowsiness during daylight hours,” said Tom Dingus, VTTI’s director. Researchers did not expect people to be sleepy during their morning commute, he explained.

As expected, all the TV news stations ran their versions of the story as if this was shocking revelation, rather than “New study confirms what anyone with common sense already knows.” The AP story, too, treated this as if it was true news. Even the Washington Post got excited. Also as expected, the folks at Fark gave the story its well-deserved “Obvious” tag.

But, thanks to an editor who trusted me, I was not only able to write a story that I thought more accurately portrayed the study, but also add a sidebar about a Popular Science story, “Science Confirms the Obvious.” Even the copy desk got into it. The caption for one photo begins, “A new government study has a high ‘Duh’ factor…”