Brian Williams And NYT Journalist Roasted After They Fail Basic Math On Air
Math, as many of us know, is hard. Journalism is also hard. But fact-checking this tweet that had Brian Williams and a NYT journalist agog on the air should have been pretty easy.
Mike Bloomberg dropped out of the presidential primary Wednesday morning after spending an astronomical $500 million on television ads in the race and failing to win a single state (Bloomberg did win American Samoa). The massive waste of cash naturally led people to imagine the better causes on which Bloomberg could have spent that money. Writer Mekita Rivas came up with a simply jaw-dropping statistic: in America, there are 327 million people, and if Bloomberg instead gave one million dollars to each American, he would have over 170 million dollars leftover.
If you had to read the tweet a few times to understand the issue here, you're not alone. Many were stunned at the statistic and it quickly went viral, before people pointed out the obvious error: 1 million times 327 million is 327 trillion. Bloomberg would need more money than there is on the planet to pull off this act of incredible philanthropy. Rivas locked her account shortly after the gaffe and added, "I know, I'm bad at math" to her bio.
The story should have ended there, but because we live in hell world, it made it all the way to MSNBC, where Brian Williams and NYT editorial board member Mara Gay repeated Rivas' tweet unironically to gawk at Bloomberg's wealth.
Rightfully, the pair were roasted for uncritically repeating Rivas' incorrect math.
While the trio of Rivas, Gay and Williams each got the math catastrophically wrong, I believe it's safe to say that we all agree Mike Bloomberg should start giving people a million dollars and we'll see what happens. I volunteer.
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Mike
DirkDiggums
TBH it took me 10 seconds to add up the math in my head, the fact that these two journalists did this on air with no oversight says a lot about MSNBC's lack of credibility.
Isn't Brian williams the one who fawned at the "beauty of our weapons" during the Iraq war, basically cumming his pants for the slaughter of Iraqi civilians? Fuck these people, they can sit there and bash bloomberg for wasting money but they are all corporate bought and paid for mouthpieces.
ClubFlourish
I think what bothers me the most, is when she says "it's true". So sure of herself, you can see the social justice crazy coming out, it just feels so arrogant.
Q_Hung
Those two are not "otherwise intelligent people". They are both idiots, all the time.
mammon
>The thing about the MSNBC math mistake is that it wasn't even really a math mistake. It's two otherwise intelligent people who don't feel competent to even attempt math
This statement actually got me thinking… was american education really this obtuse?
Bobbobbobbob
Even without the math fail it's a pretty dumb argument.