Irritating Media Coverage
Last weekend, when I was driving home from a wedding, I was listening to Cross Country Checkup talk about the G8/G20 security costs. This was a classic example of the media greasing their own palms whipping the public up into a furor.
Item 1
One of the early guests was Ward Elcock who said that the $1B price tag included a "chunk" for contingency (i.e. it won't be spent unless it's needed). This was an earlier-recorded interview, but the host (Andrew Nichols) and everyone else completely ignored this and continued to cite the $1B number. Do you think they bothered to find out how much that contingency was? Nope. They just continued to report the $1B number.
Item 2
The Mr. Nichols emphasized the ridiculousness of this by citing that Pittsburg hosted the G20 for $18M, and London hosted the G8 for $30M. The host then offers a key observation that Canada is including the salaries of police officers in that ($50K/year for a Toronto police cadet x 1/12 of the year in prep x 10000 officers > $40M right there, it's not hard to do a few back-of-the-envelope calculations that demonstrate you can't compare the numbers). Mr. Elcock also cited that other countries (he doesn't say whether this applies to the US or UK) don't release costs allocated to intelligence agencies the way we do.
So, with misleading context and at-best-questionable veracity, Cross Country Checkup and the CBC radio news, starting on Friday and continuing until the newscasts on Sunday, reported the cost of the security for the G8/G20 summit as expected to be one billion dollars. That's great journalism, guys.
Item 1
One of the early guests was Ward Elcock who said that the $1B price tag included a "chunk" for contingency (i.e. it won't be spent unless it's needed). This was an earlier-recorded interview, but the host (Andrew Nichols) and everyone else completely ignored this and continued to cite the $1B number. Do you think they bothered to find out how much that contingency was? Nope. They just continued to report the $1B number.
Item 2
The Mr. Nichols emphasized the ridiculousness of this by citing that Pittsburg hosted the G20 for $18M, and London hosted the G8 for $30M. The host then offers a key observation that Canada is including the salaries of police officers in that ($50K/year for a Toronto police cadet x 1/12 of the year in prep x 10000 officers > $40M right there, it's not hard to do a few back-of-the-envelope calculations that demonstrate you can't compare the numbers). Mr. Elcock also cited that other countries (he doesn't say whether this applies to the US or UK) don't release costs allocated to intelligence agencies the way we do.
So, with misleading context and at-best-questionable veracity, Cross Country Checkup and the CBC radio news, starting on Friday and continuing until the newscasts on Sunday, reported the cost of the security for the G8/G20 summit as expected to be one billion dollars. That's great journalism, guys.