The Turkeys on Your TV

I don’t mean to pick on Good Morning America because it’s bad. It’s not. In fact, it is the only TV news I regularly subject myself to anymore. They probably do as well or better than any of the other networks.

Which is sad, because what passes for news these days is not news, it’s wrong.

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Home for the Holidays

The ongoing TSA Security Theater drama still has us in suspense. Will they, or won’t they Touch My Junk?

The screening procedures — and the proposed backscatter boycott — have many people thinking about how they’ll get home (or where they’re headed) for Thanksgiving.

Under such a climate, we get this report from Bianna Golodryga.

Bianna is talking about a rise in gas prices, which never ever seem to go down around the holidays when people are using more of it!

Yes, prices are slightly up, which may come as a shock to anyone who has never, ever driven a vehicle during the Fourth of July, Memorial day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, or the New Years’ Day holidays.

That’s the part that’s not news.

Now let me break down the part that is just plain wrong.

Further into her piece, she tries to demonstrate how much cheaper it is to drive than to fly:

We did the math; we looked at a flight from Chicago to Minneapolis. The cheapest we found was $347. Now doing the math, that’s 400 miles. Let’s say your car gets 25 miles to the gallon, that’s still going to cost you less than 100 dollars.

So it’s all relative, it’s still cheaper.

It’s a good thing you’re not an accountant, Bianna.

Partial Costs

Let’s look at that flight a little closer.

I did a quick check at cheapflights.com, and as of Tuesday morning you could get a round-trip ticket between Minneapolis to Chicago for that $347 figure, and for each of the days through the extended holiday weekend.

Figuring 400 miles between the cities, and 25 miles per gallon, and $2.88 per gallon, that works out to $46.08 — if you’re only going one way. Double that, and you get $92.16.  Point for Bianna? Not a chance.

Gasoline only gets you so far. There are other costs when the rubber meets the road. Like, say, the rubber that you leave behind on the road. There will be wear on your tires that factors into this. Oh, and the partial cost of that oil change that you’ll need soon. And your transmission. And general vehicle maintenance. And the insurance you carry on that car…

That’s a lot to keep up with, which is why businesses handle it a different way. Last time I checked, the mileage rate for personal vehicles was 52-cents per mile. The IRS hasn’t released its figures for the purposes of calculating 2010 tax deductions, but in 2009 it was 50-cents per mile.

Which takes us up to $400 for the trip.  (I am going to ignore the time element… but suffice it to say that in this example, you’ll spend 6 hours getting to the airport, through security, on the plane, in the air, and land… as opposed to 8 hours driving.)

To be fair, if you flew, you might have a couple of taxi rides to and from the airport, but that ends up taking you up to the cost of driving. All things being equal, which leaves you less stressed? And all things being equal, the statistics are clear that flying is safer.

(Full disclosure, your cheapest alternative would be to rent a car, and pay for the gas.)

Information and Direction

I don’t know that I fault GMA for trying to be helpful. After all, it’s what we want.

Look at the changing philosophy of how we find things on the internet. Yahoo started with a human-curated index. The problem was that the volume of information quickly scaled to a level that humans couldn’t keep up, and there are many cultural differences in the way we ask for and classify information.

Google went with brute force processing power, and an algorithm that could crunch vast quantities of data. It also incorporated what amounts to a Behavioral element. Instead of actively getting people to classify the information, it would be sorted by the relevance of what people did, passively. You don’t consciously go to Google and sort and shuffle. Google measures what people click on, and how they link to other things.

Bing is taking a new direction — one that recognizes that we don’t really care if we have 500 results or 500-million results, because we’re not clicking that far anyway. Bing wants to figure out what you want to do based on what you asked for, and provide information that helps you do that thing faster.

Happiness is an Individual Pursuit

The great thing about Bing and Google and the rest is that they get to know you after a while. (Possibly by invading your privacy, but I’ll take that trade-off for more relevant results.)

The not-so-great thing about newsrooms adopting this philosophy is they aren’t equipped to individualize the results. Broadcast models aren’t about delivering choices — if TV were a Google search, you’d learn to be happy with the results of the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.

There are so many variables to the original question, of driving versus flying:

• Between which cities are you traveling?
• Is there road construction?
• Do you have a car?
• Are you having to take extra days off work to drive?

That’s why reporters should avoid bold pronouncements like “as always, driving is cheaper than flying.” That’s not the sort of context we’re clamoring for. Give me the information about the rise in gas prices — even if it’s not a surprise — and let me work that into my own calculation.

Now, pass the cranberry sauce, please.