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…..
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….
I think this used to be said in the 70’s, that the president (pick one) spending the weekend at Camp David was costing the public “xxx,xxx” dollars. It assumes that every person on the government payroll (military, secret service, whatever) are on a switch, and if the president doesn’t need them just now, they suddenly aren’t paid and the tax payers are “saving” something. In reality all the sailors on all those ships cost something every day, 24 hours a day. The ships don’t have office hours when it doesn’t cost something. If the president stayed home or decided to sail around the world it would cost as much. It’s a bipartisan lie, and an old one.
Could it have been in rupees?