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."

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