Davis Merritt: Knightfall

Knight Ridder, which owned the Wichita Eagle, sold itself out recently to McClatchy Newspapers, the new owner of the Eagle. While Knight Ridder had plenty of problems itself -- see the book by former Eagle editor Davis Merritt, Knightfall: Knight Ridder and How the Erosion of Newspaper Journalism Is Putting Democracy at Risk -- they've done a consistently better job of reporting from Iraq than any other major US news organization. One always worries when one bunch of capitalists sell out to another, richer, group -- after all, being richer is most often a sign of being more corrupt these days. And the general trend in media is toward concentration of ownership with all of the political connections that implies, and toward the propagation of the trivial. Still, the first McClatchy byline I've noticed in the Eagle came as a shock. I may have repressed something, but this is about as stupid as any news article I can recall. The reporter is Ely Portillo, and the title is "Costs of teen drinking add up to $62 billion":

Underage drinking costs Americans $62 billion every year in injuries, deaths and lost work time, according to a tally released Thursday. That's more than three times what the federal government had spent on relief for Hurricanes Katrina and Rita by mid-June.

The highest costs are those associated with rapes, murders, assaults and other violent crimes committed by underage people who have been drinking, which add up to $34.7 billion. The second-highest cost was drunken-driving accidents, totaling $13.5 billion. Researchers took into account immediate costs, such as hospital bills, and long-term damage, such as lost work hours and lowered quality of life.

Dividing the total cost of teen drinking by the estimated number of teen drinkers, the study, from the nonprofit research group Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, estimates that every underage drinker costs society an average of $4,680 a year.

After car crashes and violent crime, the next highest estimated costs of teen drinking were those associated with high-risk sex (nearly $5 billion), property crime ($3 billion) and addiction treatment programs (nearly $2 billion).

"Alcohol kills four times the number of kids that illegal drugs do," Ted Miller, one of the study's lead researchers. "We're not spending much at all on this problem, despite the size of it."

The first paragraph starts off with an apples-to-oranges error, comparing costs of one thing (teenage drinking) to expenses on another (Katrina reconstruction). What the federal government has paid to date for Katrina reconstruction isn't a very good measure of Katrina's damage. Estimates of Katrina damage start at $100 billion and go up from there. But to be comparable you'd have to come up with a set of Katrina damage estimates that was consistent with the methods and valuations used in the teenage drinking study. The Katrina estimates rarely consider anything beyond property damage. Certainly there is a lot more cost "such as lost work hours and lowered quality of life," but putting a value on that sort of thing is hard to do, and the result would mostly be to inflate the costs and confuse the issues.

Most likely, that's why these researchers do just that. They want to get attention, and one easy way to con the gullible is by running up a huge tab. No problem: that's why spreadsheets were invented: just fudge the numbers until you get the results you want. Sometimes, as this story demonstrates, you can even fudge the numbers so far the results become absurd. $62 billion is a lot of money: two Buffetts, half a Katrina, several months of Iraq war (no clear agreement on how to audit that; the US budget there shortchanges the real costs worse than the US budget for Katrina repair). It's hard to see how we never noticed a cost of that magnitude, although I suppose there are other examples -- e.g., global warming.

However, repeating the study's headlines isn't news -- just PR. To make any sense out of this as a story, we need more info: who are these clowns? who do they work for? what are their methods? how do those methods stack up against standard scientific practices? This isn't on-the-spot reporting, like at a car wreck or plane crash, where limited information may still be newsworthy. This type of story only matters if you can put it into some sort of context. Otherwise, it's just nonsense. Which in this case is probably what in depth analysis would finally conclude. Guess McClatchy had some space to kill. It's not like there's any real news to report.

posted 2006-07-02