Critiquing the April 24 edition of NPR's "increasingly vacuous and self-indulgent" Planet Money show, blogger Brian (NPR Check, 4/24/09) notices that the "five long minutes" spent discussing "how long it would take to count to 165 million (the AIG executive bonuses), 45 billion (Bank of America's bailout so far), and 1.2 trillion (total estimated federal bailouts of banks so far)," came right after "a long week of severely deficient coverage of actual financial news" like "40 seconds Morning Edition spent pararaphrasing a New York Times article on the looming Chrysler bankruptcy":

The sad thing is that it actually might have been helpful to provide some real context for the scale of the federal bailouts. However, rather than counting to 1.2 trillion, it would be much more useful to place the bailout figures into contexts that matter, such as comparing the AIG bonuses to the median U.S. household income ($50.2 K in 2007); comparing the $45 B to BOA's ownership equity ($146 B); or comparing the $1.2 T in bailout funds to the U.S. GDP ($14.3 T) or the annual U.S. federal spending (approximately $3 T).

Admitting that these examples are "still not exciting, to be sure," Mytwords considers them "perhaps a little more meaningful than counting for 39,000 years."

Characterizing an "Incredibly Bad Economic Piece on NPR" as having "helped a blackmail effort," blogging economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 2/27/09) says "the piece concluded by telling listeners that 'the problem is us,' that we had borrowed too much and therefore we have to pay the cost in the form of big taxpayer bailouts":

Okay, this is wrong, wrong and wrong. First, the excessive borrowing wasn't just shear frivolity, it was attributable to something that got very little notice from NPR at the time and unfortunately still gets very little notice from NPR: an $8 trillion housing bubble.

People borrowed against this bubble wealth because the experts that NPR and other media outlets present to the public all said that this run-up in house prices was real and would persist. Economists who warned about the housing bubble were almost completely excluded from NPR.

That "these reporters now want the taxpayers, rather than the bankers who profited from the bubble, to pay for this failure" has Baker thinking the NPR segment's name, Planet Money, "may be appropriate because most listeners probably would not think it belongs on Planet Earth."

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Busted Bubble: The Press Fell Down on the Job on Housing Prices" (11-12/08) by Veronica Cassidy