Academic

NANNY-STATISM FAIL: Texting-While-Driving Bans Don?t Work. Plus this: ?I don?t see how checking e?

By Glenn Reynolds

NANNY-STATISM FAIL: Texting-While-Driving Bans Don’t Work. Plus this: “I don’t see how checking email while driving is much worse than fiddling with the radio or the air conditioner or talking to the person in the passenger seat or reading the roadside billboards. But the whole situation is a great example of how incentives work in journalism. The New York Times won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for its series Driven to Distraction about the supposed dangers of texting while driving. The guy at USA Today, Larry Copeland, who wrote the article about how the laws the Times got passed don’t actually work is just going to get some praise from me, which is worth $10,000 less than a Pulitzer Prize. And the chances of the Pulitzer Board taking the Pulitzer back from the Times reporter for having whipped everyone up into a frenzy for which the cure is worse than the supposed problem are about 0%.”

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on September 28, 2010 (boomark / email).