TalkingPointsMemo on the undiebomber’s “one way ticket”:
In a remarkable example of how bad information can travel far and wide, dozens of media outlets around the world have said Umar Abdulmutallab was traveling on a one-way ticket to Detroit when he allegedly tried to blow up Flight 253, even though that has never been substantiated and appears to be flat wrong.
Abdulmutallab’s “one-way ticket” has been cited in recent days by the AP, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, even though the Nigerian government said Dec. 28 that Abdulmutallab had a round-trip ticket, and provided details to back it up.
[…..]It has been referenced repeatedly by commentators attacking the U.S. government for missing red flags about Abdulmutallab. See for example this Michael Gerson column in the Jan. 6 Post (“Airline attack shows Obama’s listless approach to terrorism”) and this Michael Mukasey Wall Street Journal effort (“The president’s job is not detecting bombs at the airport but neutralizing terrorists before they get there.”)
Krugman on Yurp:
Europe has its economic troubles; who doesn’t? But the story you hear all the time — of a stagnant economy in which high taxes and generous social benefits have undermined incentives, stalling growth and innovation — bears little resemblance to the surprisingly positive facts. The real lesson from Europe is actually the opposite of what conservatives claim: Europe is an economic success, and that success shows that social democracy works.
[….]Since 1980, per capita real G.D.P. — which is what matters for living standards — has risen at about the same rate in America and in the E.U. 15: 1.95 percent a year here; 1.83 percent there.
Why do so many apocryphal stories get so much traction, even within the so-called respectable media? I can’t help but think this has something to do with it:
Bob Steele, a journalism ethics scholar at the Poynter Institute, said that one of the pitfalls in this type of book is that “both accuracy and fairness can be in jeopardy when anonymous sources are overused and misused.” Also, those who supplied such insider information, Steele noted, “cannot be held easily accountable.
But all press, they say is good press. So regardless of whether members of the chattering class are pro, con, or have no fixed opinion, HarperCollins, the book’s publisher, is counting on a bestseller, or it wouldn’t have reportedly signed the authors to a six-figure contract. HBO executives will also follow the buzz closely, having already optioned the book before publication.
It’s Mark Halperin’s world, we’re just living in it.
ellaesther
Well… I would like to add one more reason that stories stick, even when they’re not true (maybe two reasons):
1) If it’s the first thing you heard, then that becomes your template. That’s the thing you treat as fact, because it’s the first thing you heard.
2) More to the point (this was my first reason, actually, but I think that it is related to #1, so…. Never mind. My point!), these stories generally suit our expectations. We expect a terrorist to behave in this way, so when we hear that he behaved in this way, we go “Ah-HA!” and our world makes sense.
The human brain is hard-wired to search for patterns. If we believe we’ve found one, it is very hard to dislodge it.
aimai
At the time of the failed bombing NPR located a man who claimed to have been a passenger on the Detroit flight. He gave them an onair interview in which he dramatically recounted seeing the undie bomber at the counter in NIgeria , or wherever. The purported eyewitness account included the dramatic information that the undie bomber “didn’t have a passport” and that an “older man/his father” was there trying to argue with the ticketing agent that he should be allowed to get on without a passport. The implication was that he had been accompanied by an older man, that the older man spoke for him, that he didn’t have a passport and that he was allowed to get on without a passport.
I heard about all this because NPR delicately retracted the story a few days later reporting that the NIgerian authorities (or amsterdam, can’t remember which) reviewed 200 hours of tape surrounding the incident and a) the guy did have a passport, b) no older man was with him as he approached the ticket counter, c) no argument took place etc…etc…etc… NPR said they’d contacted their “eyewitness” guy and he wouldn’t retract the story until he himself had been given a chance to review the tapes. (!) That’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to hearing a real retraction of anything on the radio, and I get a ton of my information from the radio these days.
aimai
The Grand Panjandrum
It is also a common practice for many people to pay cash for everything! How many people in Nigeria (even wealthy people) have credit cards? I think that entire line of argument was not only flawed (if not just plain wrong) but based on a Western cultural frame. Most of us have credit cards. How many Nigerians have them? I don’t care how wealthy people might be, credit cards are not prevalent. His father may have been wealthy but does that guarantee his son would have a credit card?
MBunge
Uh, I’m no economic-thinkin’ guy like Krugman, but isn’t .12% more GDP growth a year for 30 years kind of significant?
Mike
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
I wouldn’t waste a dime or my time on anything by Halperin. I would rather watch paint dry.
Nick
@MBunge: My quick calculations show no more than a 4% difference in per capita real G.D.P. when stretched out to 30 years. So no, that isn’t very significant.
Hopefully, someone who knows the real formula to use. I made a quick calculations using the first compound loan interest formula on this page using 1 for P and 30 for n (and 1 for q). I’ve tried a couple ways, using 0.0013 (0.13%) for i at first, then twice using 0.0195 and 0.0183 for i then getting the difference between the results).
Comrade Jake
Of course the other thing you hear is that he didn’t have any luggage. That may be true (I’ve no idea), but it’s a lot less nefarious for a quick round trip to the states than it is when combined with a one-way ticket.
JasonF
Another reason these apocryphal stories have such traction is the media’s eternal struggle for “balance.” If one side of the argument has all the facts on its side, well, let’s print a myth for the other side and pretend it’s a fact because otherwise we’d have to admit that the other side is full of shit and we’d be “biased” if we did that!
MattR
The sad thing is that there are those on the right who will be convinced that he actually had a one way ticket and that the government(s) are covering this up and the media is being complicit.
@Comrade Jake: The other thing regarding luggage that no one brings up is the fact that he was traveling from a desert environment to a winter one. If there was someone else making a similar trip who was actually planning on staying for months, it would not be shocking to discover thye decided to buy winter gear once they arrived.
Gordon Schumway
@MBunge, @Nick: The difference over 30 years is 6.20%.
(That is using annual compounding, which I think is the right thing. Definitely, annual compounding is a lower bound. Using continuous compounding gives an upper bound of 6.35%.)
ricky
@Comrade Jake: @MattR:
His bags were on Southwest.
jl
The Talkingpointsmemo piece on the one-way round-trip ticket was alarming. What use is the corporate media? No wonder they are going broke. Why pay for something that seems to actively harm you an a regular basis?
Time for another blogger ethics panel, I guess.
Bob In Pacifica
In November and December I flew across the country back and forth, on one-way tickets (taking care of an ill relative so I couldn’t predict how long I’d be there). I would be curious to know what percentage of flights are one-way. I can’t believe that a one-way ticket is reason enough to get an extra special pat-down.
Brian J
The analogy isn’t perfect, but the way conservatives seem to approach taxation and social spending is similar to the way some people approach calorie counting and maintaining their weight. Ever meet a person who, by any reasonable standard, is healthy and isn’t overweight, or could even stand to gain some weight, but who acts like having anything that is even 10 calories more than what they hoped is going to kill them on the spot? That’s how conservatives approach any sort of tax increase or call to spend more on social programs. I can see how massive tax increases would do far more harm than good, but the sort of tax increases most Democrats call probably wouldn’t come close to the nightmare most on the right describe.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
HarperCollins? Isn’t that Murdoch’s book outfit? If so, then I am truly shocked!! Shocked!! Halperin as bad as Faux? Who woulda thunk it?
Hob
@Bob In Pacifica: Yeah, but if you say that, the answer is “But still, when the guy has no luggage and paid cash…” And then if you point out that he did have luggage: “But still, when he paid cash…” And then if you point out that everyone else in Nigeria paid cash too: “But still, the one-way ticket!” Etc. etc. Even on this blog, I bet we’re still hearing the same shit next week even on this blog.
GregB
Halperin sounds like a medication. It is probably an opiate for the asses.
-G
zhak
There’s a whole raft of this stuff floating around:
— Dems are soft on terror (not true)
— Dems in office = more attacks (demonstrably not true)
— Dems bloat the budget (are you freakin’ kidding me?)
— Repubs for small govt, limited interference (see: defense spending & Patriot Act)
These canards and so many more are accepted as graven facts and nobody ever ever calls them on it. Getting facts egregiously wrong to suit a political slant and agenda is accepted “journalism” and has been for some time. That’s why I blame the media as much as the two political parties for the sorry state of our country.
slag
It’s times like these when I desperately wish I could believe in the rapture.
MBunge
“My quick calculations show no more than a 4% difference in per capita real G.D.P. when stretched out to 30 years. So no, that isn’t very significant.”
The difference in growth rates might be significant if it continues for another 30 to 100 years. One other thing that would matter is population growth. How fast and how much your population is increasing obviously has a major effect on per capita GDP calculations.
Mike
Brachiator
Increasingly, media people are not honest brokers of information, but are willing propagandists (and this is currently more a problem with the desperate right, but there are some leftist liars as well). If a lie serves them, they keep repeating it.
Then, those who want to believe the lie will hold onto it, blog it, tweet it, pund it until the end of time.
Also, too, as the media dies, editors, fact checkers, reviewers get laid off. What remains ain’t very pretty.
And with respect to economics (and science) reporting, numbers are hard, and many reporters assigned to these areas don’t know squat and end up passing along the press releases of think tanks, etc.
different church-lady
Re Halperin: I’m starting to wonder if the problem that the GOP is having is that the attention span of the political press is now shorter than that of the public — they go off and play with their “tweetable nuggets” and the public on the left AND the right goes, “I don’t give a shit about Edwards’ love child, I need a freakin’ job!”
Hob
Also, the idea of a one-way ticket being a red flag for terrorism is self-cancelling – it can’t be a red flag if it’s commonly known to be a red flag, because then only the stupidest terrorists will do that. Unless Al Qaeda is so strapped for cash that they have no choice. In that case, airlines should start offering special Suicide Discounts and see who bites.
El Cid
@Hob: One-half way tickets?
Roger Moore
@Gordon Schumway:
Which is probably within the margin of error of the measurement. There’s a lot of false precision in long-term economics measurements. I’d expect that differences in CPI calculations alone could account for a 6.2% difference over 30 years.
Nick
@MBunge: And that is not Krugman was talking about as it isn’t a projection. I refuse to play your “moving the goalpost” troll game and am done here.
@Gordon Schumway: Thanks, you might be right with that. I may not be an economist, but I do know that scientifically speaking, 6.20% is not a significant difference over 30 years.
Citizen_X
The best summation belongs to Chris Hayes: “Just when you think the news cycle can’t get any stupider, Mark Halperin publishes a book.”
(H/t to Greenwald.)
JasonF
One would also need to consider how much of that 6.2% advantage is wasted. If we have a 6.2% higher GDP, but we spend an additional 5% of our GDP on health care compared to Europe with no discernable difference in outcomes, then we really only have a 1.2% advantage, right?
Tokyokie
When I was living in Japan, most people bought their plane tickets through ticket brokers, and you had to pay the ticket brokers in cash. Could be the same in Nigeria, I don’t know, but in Japan, it sure wasn’t a “red flag.” Also, I was under the impression that a return ticket is a precondition for obtaining a tourist visa if you’re traveling to the U.S. from a third world country.
CalD
But Al Gore did claim to have invented the internet, right? And John Kerry really said “Who among us does not love NASCAR?”
:-b
jl
Since other commenters brought it up, I have a comment on the US versus Europe growth rate kerfluffle.
I am not sure relatively small differences in per capita growth rates make much difference, at least for northern European countries because the different structures of the economy imply that you should see some difference in both levels and growth rates in per capita GDP even if economic welfare and living standards were the same and growing at similar rates.
The reason has to do with definition of GDP, labor market participation and level of activity, and different mix of market and non-market activities in the two societies.
For example, there is less employment and labor market participation in Sweden for teens, young adults and elderly. Fewer hours worked and less GDP produced per year among adults.
But if you count actually hours people spend in what common-sensically would be called ‘work’ Swedes and American work about the same hours. And elderly are less often institutionalized, so they do more work that is not counted in GDP stats.
The deal is that Swedes spend much of their greater leisure time doing household maintenance and production than people in the US, who more often buy these services on the market. So similar activities get included in GDP in the US but not in Sweden. And this divergence has been growing with time.
Put simply, Swedes spend much of their leisure time puttering around the house or making stuff. So, in that context, I do not think such small differences in levels and growth rates mean much in that context.
The structure of the economies are not identical, and one has to take that into account when making comparisons.
Whether one is better than the other can be a subject of debate. But the numbers are not as straightforward as they seem. Also, to some extent the conclusion about which is ‘beter’ will depend on your attitude towards the relative merits of market versus various non-market social decision making mechanisms (and I believe that the hatred of non-market social decision making mechanisms among many US economsts is unreasonable, and also unprofessional since it comes from ignoring the last twenty years of research in that area).
Anecdotally, the Swedish males’ complaint I have heard about the their womens’ weaving and home economics obsessions finally made some sense after I read about the problems in comparing GDP statistics. I have not heard similar complaints from Swedish women about the men, so I will have to look into that next time I visit.
asiangrrlMN
@ellaesther: Just wanted to say that I think your number two point is spot-on. There was a study (and yeah, I’m too lazy to Google it) about how politically, people filter out the things that don’t match their preconceived notions and only notice information that reinforces said notions. This works in a similar way. The collective we expect terrorists to act in a certain way. So, we look to confirm our biases.
@GregB: Well done, Sir!
@Hob: This, too. It’s the way to not have to change any bias that one does not want to change. And if you came up with a satisfactory response to the one-way ticket thing, then it’s back to, “But he had no luggage!” It’s a never-ending cycle.
SiubhanDuinne
@ricky:
Ah, well done, Ricky! LOL!
Snarla
Here are some more not-truths the press continues to parrot:
– Major Hasan shouted Allahu Akbar before opening fire. In reality, the private who originally reported that has since admitted he doesn’t know what Major Hasan shouted.
– Major Hasan had a relationship with Anwar al-Awlaki. In reality, Anwar al-Awlaki is a preacher in a very large mosque and he has a website where people all over the world send him messages. That he had contact with Major Hasan is totally meaningless.
– Anwar al-Awlaki is Yemeni. No, so sorry, he is an American citizen, born and bred here.