The News - 2011 Road Toll

Good afternoon.  This is the Discombobula news for Friday, 30 December 2011.

In our leading story, the national holiday road toll rose to 31 last night after a Victorian man in his 20's crashed into a tree in Wangaratta.  He was unable to be revived by paramedics and died at the scene.  His passenger was injured.

Insert here a paragraph about empty chairs at Christmas dinner tables to emphasise how awful it is that 31 people have died since we all went on holidays and 31 families are grieving (well, hopefully) for 31 people who died.

That above paragraph is contained in this news report because we the media basically think you are all too stupid to be able to work out that 31 people dying on the roads in the holiday period is a bad thing.  If we didn't spell it out in extremely large capital letters we are concerned that you would confuse it with the cricket scores and think that we need to raise the road toll, resulting in an anarchic nation of souls taking to the roads seatbeltless and pissed, to see how many old people they can run over in a 24-hour period.

Because we know, deep down in our market research, that you are a bunch of morons.  Our polls show that neither you nor we are capable any more of any mode other than fearmongering mode, and that giving you the colour and the shape of the whole story is a pointless enterprise, given that you would not know what to do with it unless we spelled out to you what to do with it.   And we frankly can't be bothered.

This last paragraph of this news report is not actually really here.  For all of the abovementioned reasons, we are too scared to paint the entire picture, which is this:  despite there being thousands and thousands more cars on the roads since the 1970s, the amount of people who died in road fatalities in 1970 was 3978.  In 2010 it was 1367.  That is good news.

May your news be good news, and good afternoon.