Well I expect you did a better job of capturing the who, what, when, where and why of that B17 than the few times I’ve been interviewed by local, state and trade news. Most made glaring mistakes including my first name. Oddly enough, the trade publication made no mistakes.
I hope I did! I always did love that tri-jet. 
In seriousness, I used to tell station management that a profession which starts people at $17,000 a year and in which you’re lucky to cap $45,000 a year is going to attract only two kinds of people - the very dedicated, and the very dumb, and the majority is gonna be in the latter category.
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Why should an innocent child suffer because the parent is hopelessly stupid? If that’s a little joke, it is minuscule. Referring to the Darwin Award in this case is way out of line.
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You’ll never get locked out of USA Today. There are a lot of ads, but I just put up with them and move on to the article. In the on line edition, when they make an assertion, they provide a back up link. When President Trump said that traditional news outlets covered terrorism unevenly, they puplished every terror incident across the world in the past year Andy identified if they’d were covered at the time or not. Almost every on was covered.
Just like you, I read the local paper, too. The Baltimore Sun has a columnist that is your kindred spirit. He is originally from Milwaukee and understands what you mean about biased coastal news outlets. That bothers him too. He is also troubled by the breadth and depth of President Trump’s lies. So am I.
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Without going back and reading it again, (you have to go into “incognito” to open the lock again which is a hassle) I’m still wondering what the whole purpose of the article was other than filling space. I understand everyone needs to write an article in order to get paid but I don’t think I have a better understanding of the causes of death of youth in car accidents than I had before. And it still puzzles me how they could say most of the deaths were for unrestrained kids and then 43% of the deaths were unrestrained. I’m not a math major but I understand 100 minus 43 equals 57 and 57 is greater than 43. So what was the point of the article?
I would like to know how many died because they were in rural areas and the hospital was 75 miles away. Or travelers on unfamiliar roads. Or how many were in older cars or pick up trucks. But alas, no such answers, just more questions.
The only time I read USA Today though is when I’m traveling and usually better than the local papers but their website is really bad.
Quoth the article, 'On average across all states, 20% of
children involved in a fatal crash were unrestrained or
inappropriately restrained at the time of the crash, 13% were
inappropriately seated in the front seat, and nearly 9% of drivers
carrying a child passenger were under the influence of alcohol.'
http://www.jpeds.com/pb/assets/raw/Health%20Advance/journals/ympd/9153Wolf.pdf
Bakalar seems to have bungled.
The denominator was fatal accidents, not all accidents. Accidents in
which seat belts saved lives weren’t counted.
No children were harmed in the production of my previous post.
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The actual odds of a kid surviving a car crash is over 90%, maybe even 99%. This study counted only fatal crashes. There are some crashes so bad that no amount of seat belt use will save you.
In the vast majority of crashes, the passengers are able to walk away from the crash.
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I was never a wiz at math but I know 43% is definitely not “most”. I stood between my parents on the front bench seat of their 1952 Chevrolet. On clear nights I would lay on the rear parcel shelf and stargaze. Their first car with seatbelts was a 1967 Chevrolet.
@bing and others - you should try looking at the news from places outside the US, too. www.dw.com from Germany is interesting, and so is www.bbc.com. Look at www.thehindu.com or www.straitstimes.com from Singapore. There are certainly many news sources in English throughout the world, and while each one has its own biases and manipulations of an event, if you look at several you may well get some perspective. The truth is complicated.
Just to be clear I do look at other news sources around the world such as the BBC. I read them but I don’t listen to them because of their heavy British accent. It’s easy to dismiss diverse opinions simply by saying you are uninformed or only listen to one cable channel. As they say the jig is up.
I simply say that I take some of these news sources like NYT and WP and LAT with a huge grain of salt and some folks go nuts.
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That 43%of kids who died were unrestrained tell you nothing. If an accident has unsurvivable impact then all kids in the car will die if they are belted or not. The real question is how many kids are dying just because they are unbelted.
We just had a local case, Mother was driving with 2 boys 4 and 6, Mother was not killed, 2 boys , unbelted, were thrown from the car and killed. I doubt they would have been killed if they had their seat belts on.
Considering that this article doesn’t cite the source of the 43% statistic (or the other numbers in the same paragraph), I don’t blame you for being skeptical. When I clicked the link* in the paragraph after those statistics, leading to a study, I didn’t find that number anywhere.
One of the problems with coming up with those statistics is that if a child survives a car accident, it’s hard to prove that it was the seat belt that save it. So many people survived accidents in pre-seat belt cars and even motorcycles.
It’s real easy to put a “the sky is falling” spin on statistics by selecting what does and doesn’t go into the denominator.
The main stream news media is actually a form of entertainment and so you get a lot of sensationalized “the sky is falling” types of news stories that keep viewers on the edge of their seats and watching the ads by the sponsors. This is especially the case of the TV news magazine shows such as 20/20, 48 Hours, 60 Minutes and even Frontline.
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Many people did survive–despite the extremely high death rates in those days–but for those who did survive, sometimes the scars left by the accident were horrific. I went to elementary school with a kid who survived a car accident, but one side of his face was so scarred that he looked like something out of a horror movie if you viewed him from that side.
In addition to the physical scars that this kid bore, his father bore the psychological scars of having been at least partly at fault in the accident that so badly scarred his son. The family had a bit of money, so I hope and assume that they got plastic surgery for this kid when he got a bit older–but that is just a guess. I lost track of him after high school, and he had not yet undergone any plastic surgery procedures by the age of 17.
A lot of space taken on a car board about a political person. I think a lot of people don’t understand why Trump was elected. As bad as you think he is, people were that offended at what the other politicians have been doing that they don’t care about his negatives. They prefer that to the status quo. Those who have been happy with past politics should think until they really understand this.
All I can say is…covfefe.
As I pointed out in my previous post, the author of the article made a mistake. He seems to have added up 3 separate causes to get to 43, then ascribed them all to belts. The NY Times science & health section hires reporters to ‘read’ dozens of articles daily and write summaries quickly for publication. I read the major medical journals carefully (as a hobby: I’m not a physician) but there are dozens more that one can’t read carefully, even as a full-time job. I sent them a correction, to which they haven’t responded; they respond when I send in an incorrect correction, so I assume that means they agree with me, though they hadn’t corrected it last time I looked. I don’t think they have an agenda to push seat belts, a foregone issue. I don’t know why they decided to cover this article.
It means I’ll stand up to it, and the Arabic pronunciation sounds the same as-can’t say it here but the nice version is go to heck. So this is one tough hombre. And they thought he passed out or misspelled it. They just can’t comprehend it.
Arab words respelled in English are spelled exactly how they are pronounced, or spelled as closely as they can be spelled to the right pronunciation using the Roman alphabet.
I have a little daughter myself and the first thing I do while I drive is to secure her. I wouldn’t know what to do if something were to happen to her. Safety should always come first and it is never an excuse to neglect a child’s safety. I really hope all parents start getting their act together. I mean what is more important your own child…