On Nov. 4, Anderson Cooper did the country a favor. He expertly deconstructed on his CNN show the bogus rumor that President Obama’s trip to Asia would cost $200 million a day. This was an important “story.” It underscored just how far ahead of his time Mark Twain was when he said a century before the Internet, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” But it also showed that there is an antidote to malicious journalism — and that’s good journalism.
Josh Haner/The New York Times

In case you missed it, a story circulated around the Web on the eve of President Obama’s trip that it would cost U.S. taxpayers $200 million a day — about $2 billion for the entire trip. Cooper said he felt impelled to check it out because the evening before he had had Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, a Republican and Tea Party favorite, on his show and had asked her where exactly Republicans will cut the budget.

Instead of giving specifics, Bachmann used her airtime to inject a phony story into the mainstream. She answered: “I think we know that just within a day or so the president of the United States will be taking a trip over to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day. He’s taking 2,000 people with him. He’ll be renting over 870 rooms in India, and these are five-star hotel rooms at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. This is the kind of over-the-top spending.”

The next night, Cooper explained that he felt compelled to trace that story back to its source, since someone had used his show to circulate it. His research, he said, found that it had originated from a quote by “an alleged Indian provincial official,” from the Indian state of Maharashtra, “reported by India’s Press Trust, their equivalent of our A.P. or Reuters. I say ‘alleged,’ provincial official,” Cooper added, “because we have no idea who this person is, no name was given.”

It is hard to get any more flimsy than a senior unnamed Indian official from Maharashtra talking about the cost of an Asian trip by the American president.

“It was an anonymous quote,” said Cooper. “Some reporter in India wrote this article with this figure in it. No proof was given; no follow-up reporting was done. Now you’d think if a member of Congress was going to use this figure as a fact, she would want to be pretty darn sure it was accurate, right? But there hasn’t been any follow-up reporting on this Indian story. The Indian article was picked up by The Drudge Report and other sites online, and it quickly made its way into conservative talk radio.”

Cooper then showed the following snippets: Rush Limbaugh talking about Obama’s trip: “In two days from now, he’ll be in India at $200 million a day.” Then Glenn Beck, on his radio show, saying: “Have you ever seen the president, ever seen the president go over for a vacation where you needed 34 warships, $2 billion — $2 billion, 34 warships. We are sending — he’s traveling with 3,000 people.” In Beck’s rendition, the president’s official state visit to India became “a vacation” accompanied by one-tenth of the U.S. Navy. Ditto the conservative radio talk-show host Michael Savage. He said, “$200 million? $200 million each day on security and other aspects of this incredible royalist visit; 3,000 people, including Secret Service agents.”

Cooper then added: “Again, no one really seemed to care to check the facts. For security reasons, the White House doesn’t comment on logistics of presidential trips, but they have made an exception this time." He then quoted Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, as saying, “I am not going to go into how much it costs to protect the president, [but this trip] is comparable to when President Clinton and when President Bush traveled abroad. This trip doesn’t cost $200 million a day.” Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said: “I will take the liberty this time of dismissing as absolutely absurd, this notion that somehow we were deploying 10 percent of the Navy and some 34 ships and an aircraft carrier in support of the president’s trip to Asia. That’s just comical. Nothing close to that is being done.”

Cooper also pointed out that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the entire war effort in Afghanistan was costing about $190 million a day and that President Bill Clinton’s 1998 trip to Africa — with 1,300 people and of roughly similar duration, cost, according to the Government Accountability Office and adjusted for inflation, “about $5.2 million a day.”

When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, we have a problem. It becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues — deficit reduction, health care, taxes, energy/climate — let alone act on them. Facts, opinions and fabrications just blend together. But the carnival barkers that so dominate our public debate today are not going away — and neither is the Internet. All you can hope is that more people will do what Cooper did — so when the next crazy lie races around the world, people’s first instinct will be to doubt it, not repeat it.

The main problem with good journalism fighting bad journalism is that there is a good percentage of the population that would ignore the facts because they'd prefer to believe the lie...

You're talking about the American people here, which is by definition a mob. You calculate the average intelligence of any mob by finding the least intelligent person in the mob, measuring his IQ, and dividing that number by the number of people in the mob. That's the mob's intellegence...

There's so much misinformation out there from both sides of the aisle I totally ignore main stream news. Both sides just have slants for their agenda. Its not news its biased BS. I respect Cooper for investigating the story. I said this before and i'll say it again; if the Republicans was truely conservative they'd work with the Democrats for budget cuts. They're only conservative when the agenda benefits them.

When it really comes down to it, politicians want your money, and the power to dictate a one-size-fits-all life. All else is usury...

(11-21-2010 06:58 PM)bitcruncher Wrote:  When it really comes down to it, politicians want your money, and the power to dictate a one-size-fits-all life. All else is usury...

Here's the thing though, I'm not seeing where the Democrats are doing this by and large. But I do see where the Republicans are doing this by and large. Sure the overwhelming majority of liberal or even third way Democrats want a ban on guns deep down inside. I'm not one of those mind you. On the other hand they want you to exercise that personal freedom, personal responsibility that Republicans espouse but never practice. For instance don't believe in abortions and you're faced with a situation where it one of the options don't get one. Just don't tell the thousands of women who will opt for the procedure they can't have one. As for gay marriage I would prefer myself to remove marriage as a legal state and replace with civil unions or some such term that is defined exactly as marriage is now but between any two consenting adults regardless of gender. Marriage is a religious term and thus is a violation of the separation of Church and State. Therefore if your religion doesn't believe in performing a marriage ceremony (also counts as the legal ceremony for the civil union) for a same-sex couple then they don't have to.

But the mainstream media while it can be useless sometimes, still remains the best source overall. The other sources are always slanted fairly heavily to the right or the left.

Brista I can see where you're coming from. In fact I believe that gay-rights should be more of a conservative/libertarian issue to be honest with you. Conservatives esp libertarians believe that the government should stay out of our business, so to speak. The same with drug decriminalization.

Sometimes I ask myself which party is which. Clinton was more fiscally conservative than Bush ever was. The fact that Bush called himself a fiscal conservative is a slap in the face.

Democrats control is often disguised as something good. Entitlement programs such as welfare is an awesome example of this. Welfare does nothing but keep poor people poor. If we're going to spend money on the poorest class, why not educate them in business or whatever they want so they can get out of their current situation. A small business loan to those people would go a lot further to help them than the current entitlement programs. If people are working and making good money there wouldn't be a need for other entitlement programs. Social Security for instance tells me that the Government can invest my money better than I can. I can go on for hours. Right now there is a bill in Senate that is "supposed to fight farms because of recalls" but there are sections that take away peoples right to have personal gardens, farms from selling sour milk. I personally wouldn't drink sour milk but why stop people from drinking it if they want to. Both sides sponsored and passed it. Its heading to the House for a vote.

Republican control is like the Patriot Act etc.

How come Michael Savage didn't post in this thread to defend his comments?