Good news? Sure, if you look
for it
D.J. TICE , Star Tribune
Ordinarily, I am inclined to
defend my profession against the familiar charge that we journalists
overemphasize bad news.
The accusation is perfectly
true, of course, in the sense that dramatically dark events make up a tiny
fraction of everything that actually happens in the world — but play a vastly
larger role in “the news.” Yet journalism that tried to represent these
proportions correctly might soon become tiresome and unwieldy.
“Nearly all Minnesotans survive
Tuesday,” would read the banner headline. “Here are their stories.” Or “Major
disasters few and far between again this week.”
What’s more, trouble, scandal
and conflict — admittedly, the holy trinity of the news business — often
genuinely need to be reported. They often are symptoms of situations that need
fixing.
And then, less nobly perhaps,
there’s this: Trouble is interesting. It makes a good story. Great tale tellers
from Homer and Shakespeare on down have seldom conjured fictional worlds where
mostly everything went just fine.
All that said, it is true that
dramatically good news often gets too little attention, or rather too quickly
becomes ho-hum old news. The result may be that we don’t learn all we can from
welcome events. Why things ever go right, after all, is at bottom just as
mysterious and worthy of study as why they too often go wrong.
The mood of the moment seems a
bit gloomy — or so, naturally, the news and the polls tell us. In honor of the
holiday season, devoted to being of good cheer, here are reminders of three
good-sized good-news stories worth keeping in mind.
First, the stunning decline in
crime. This story has surely been told, but polls suggest that the facts still
aren’t well and widely understood — especially the scale and durability of the
trend. Almost certainly this is in part because news coverage of crime has
declined much less than crime itself has — crime being important and
interesting and all.
Still, while some places
continue to endure chaos and carnage, the overall signs of a receding crime
wave — confirmed in the FBI’s release of 2013 statistics a couple months ago —
are remarkable.
The FBI reports that the rate
of violent crime across America (per 100,000 people) has been cut just about in
half over the past 20 years (down 48.4 percent). This includes a 50-percent
drop in the murder rate, 36 percent for rape, and 54 percent for robbery.
More than 1 million fewer
violent crimes were committed in 2013 than would have occurred if the 1994 rate
of mayhem had remained unchanged.
This magnitude of improvement
in a complex social ill almost defies explanation, especially because it has
happened nearly everywhere, even internationally. The debate over its causes —
everything from more incarceration to legalized abortion has been credited —
can quickly turn this good news into a source of strife. But much research
suggests that a significant part of the transformation remains simply
unexplainable, except as an abrupt generational shift in attitude, notably
among young minority males.
Of course, there is still too much crime, and
— as we know from the troubles in Ferguson, Mo., and New York and elsewhere —
too much suspicion and violence between minority communities and police. But
the overall story about crime in America today is good, inexplicably good.
That’s worth remembering just now.
Another place where
bloodletting has diminished is on our highways. Yet here again, one sometimes
hears transportation advocates or politicians, lamenting the sorry condition of
our infrastructure, slip into suggestions that roads have become more
dangerous. Happily, it’s not so, not even close.
According to “Crash Facts,”
published by the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, 387 people died on
Minnesota roads in 2013. That was down from 655 just a decade ago — and down
from 1,060 in the peak year of 1968.
Far more impressively, the
fatality rate (per million miles driven) was down last year by more than 87
percent from its peak in the late 1960s. (The national trend is similar, though
Minnesota’s is better.)
More than 2,500 additional
Minnesotans (about seven per day) would have died in crashes in 2013 if our
roads had remained as dangerous as they were half a century ago.
Arguments can certainly still
be had about government-mandated safety equipment, drunken-driving laws and
more. But there’s no denying that a combination of safer cars, safer roads and
safer drivers has brought about a stunning decline in highway tragedy in our
time.
Finally, on the world scene,
it’s easy in this age of economic stress and dissatisfaction in the rich West
to miss the historic progress made in recent decades in easing the worst
extremes of poverty and deprivation in the developing world. Levels of want and
disparity are still appalling. But a glimpse of the encouraging trend is found
in the United Nation’s “The World Population Situation in 2014: A Concise Report.”
The report shows that in the
early 1950s, well over 20 percent of the whole world’s children died before the
age of 5. In Africa, it was well over 30 percent. Today, the world rate is
about 5 percent and Africa’s about 10 percent.
Still much too high. Yet this
is one sign of our era’s economic and social progress in the world’s poorest
places, on a scale and at a pace never known before.
Surely worth noticing, just
like a lot of other good news — and even if one has to look a little harder to
find it.
