Here’s a short post on a long story. The NYTimes’s Matt Richtel on p. 1 today has nailed nearly all the important news that the public needs to know about driving while texting, talking on the cell phone, checking email, and monitoring dispatchers’ orders. It has some science in it on cognition and with references to the growing literature that blames such electronic multi-tasking for terrible accidents. The main reason for journalists to read it is to admire its construction. The first portion builds a theme that drives one to despair: can anything possibly be done about this? Then it hits readers, late and when they need it, with examples of remedies already arising spontaneously in some quarters. It has a passage, also near the very end, on one safety lecturers’ slide show that reduced this reader to sobbing. And if he reads this, one multi-tasking driver who permitted his habits to be photographed by the Times may well decide to sign up for a seven-step rehab course in unitask driving while keeping his eye and mind on the road and on oncoming traffic.

Richtel and the Times have been hammering this theme for some time. The story links to a collection of stories in the series, Driven to Distraction. This is public service, crusading journalism of a high caliber.

-Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Health & Medicine Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.