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]

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

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.