Adding up on the NBC Nightly News

A reader writes:

Tonight, 26 Feb­ru­ary 2009, Brian Wil­li­ams repor­ted on NBC Nightly News that GM had lost $30.9 bil­lion for the year of 2008, and that to give view­ers an idea of what that means, it works out to burn­ing “$1,000 a minute.” 

[See below at 00:32]

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Now, that imme­di­ately struck me as impossible.  And it is eas­ily shown to be com­pletely incor­rect, as any middle-school stu­dent should be able to verify:

$30.9 bil­lion = $30,900,000,000 per year

divid­ing by 365 days per year gives:
$84,657,534.25 per day

divid­ing by 24 hours per day gives:
$3,527,397.26 per hour

divid­ing by 60 minutes per hour gives:
$58,789.95 per minute.

NOT $1,000 per minute.  What they incom­pet­ently were attempt­ing to say (prob­ably) was “about $1,000 per SECOND” as shown:

$58,789.95 per minute
divid­ing by 60 seconds per minute gives:

$979.83 per SECOND

Now, why is that an unfor­giv­able mistake?

Because they were doing that typ­ical mean­ing­less media activ­ity (usu­ally involving how many foot­ball fields some­thing is equi­val­ent to) of “put­ting it in per­spect­ive” or in other words, try­ing to give an inter­pret­a­tion of scale.

It almost always is an abso­lutely mean­ing­less exer­cise that involves such things as com­par­ing a lin­ear dis­tance to the num­ber of fish in the ocean (I actu­ally saw this on tele­vi­sion once) and almost always com­pletely fails to give any addi­tional inform­a­tion on the scale of some­thing… but if you are going to try to present a demon­stra­tion of scale, miss­ing it by a factor of 60… which is well over an order of mag­nitude (indeed, closer to two orders of mag­nitude, or a factor of 100) is incred­ibly incompetent.

Are we to believe that nobody who read that copy prior to air is cap­able of per­form­ing divi­sion three times?  Apparently.

Was this inten­tional?  Very very unlikely.  Just lazy, stu­pid journ­al­ism by people who should not in any situ­ation be allowed to use num­bers, let alone try to do some­thing, like com­pute three suc­cess­ive divi­sions, that is entirely too com­plic­ated for their capabilities.