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The Times Laments the End of the Irish Pub; American Husbands
Trevor Butterworth, February 12, 2007
If the epidemic of husbandless teens and the island of grounded drinkers are signals of how the New York Times is reorienting its coverage towards analysis, then please, can we go back to basic news?

The New York Times’s public editor Byron Calme pointed to what is perhaps the greatest problem facing journalism, at least in terms of content, when he asked this Sunday, “Can a 15-Year-Old Be a ‘Woman Without a Spouse’?”

The answer should have been obvious; nevertheless, it was the inclusion of 15 to 17 year-olds, 90% of whom still live with their parents, in a statistical analysis of marriage that led the Times to the front-page claim that more women are living without a husband than with one in the United States.

Embarrassing, yes; but hardly unusual, as this website endeavors to document and analyzse. Journalists constantly trip over numbers, or fail to see them as agents in a story playing a role, driving the narrative off in different, and sometimes counter-intuitive directions.

Or they and their editors ignore them altogether, as the Times did on Monday with a story about the Irish Government cracking down on drunk driving.

“The police decided to crack down on drunken driving about two years ago. But because of legal challenges, they only recently gained the authority to set up roadblocks and subject drivers to random breath checks. For many customers in sparsely populated districts, the risk of confronting a roadblock late one evening has spread fear of losing their driver’s licenses.

In traditional country life, that could ground a family. “It’s still a big factor in this area where the husband drives the wife to Mass, he drives her to the shop, he drives her to the pub,” Mr. Moore said.

“Just the fear of being stopped is terrible,” he added. “It is really having a major effect on rural pubs.”

Many rural pub owners, like Mr. Moore, view the law as a further blow from lawmakers “up in Dublin.” They say they do not want leniency from laws that will save lives. But they note that the convivial Irish rural pub is the focus for Irish gatherings, family celebrations, music-making and parish sports clubs, and that little attention has been paid to the potential threat to the Irish way of life if the rural pub dies.”

Bizarrely, the story pays no attention whatsoever to the reason for the crackdown: an escalating rate of road fatalities in Ireland, which reached a four-year high of 396 in 2005, but which dropped to 368 in 2006, after the partial introduction of random breath testing outside pubs and bars during the summer (there was a small but immediate decrease in average monthly fatalities for the remainder of the year).

As the recently published study “Alcohol in Fatal Road Crashes in Ireland in 2003” by Ireland’s Health Services noted, alcohol was a factor in 36.5% of fatal crashes, which is high by international standards (the factor was 25% for Australia and Finland).

In contrast to the Times, a story by Bloomberg managed to put the economic effects of the crackdown on drunk driving into this public health context. This article also noted that arrests for drunk driving in Ireland rose 33% last year to 17,788.

The high rate of road fatalities is, and has been for a number of years, a hot-button political issue in Ireland – so to ignore this angle leaves the Times story with the inflection of a dirge: Where will the poor Irishman be without his pint of plain in the evening?

In the decline [sic] of the American husband, numerous single women were interviewed to explain and support a statistical artifact; this wasn’t necessarily deceptive, but it turned the piece into a bad polemic when the numbers didn’t fully support the contention they were justifying.

Calme told Times readers that the paper was taking new steps to ensure stories driven by statistics would be better vetted by editors with the skill sets to do so. But in these two cases, one wonders whether it was the sentiment behind the statistics rather than innumeracy (disappearing husbands, pubs) that suckered editors.