Always Check the Math
Having a platform or impressive credentials doesnât make someone infallible. People, even professionals, make mistakes all the time. Whenever someone claims a glaring error could never make it through a professional media room, I think about this.
In 2020, during a broadcast on Brian Williamsâ show, one of the guests was Mara Gay, who was a member of The New York Times editorial board at the time. Williams himself was a longtime national news anchor.
MSNBC aired this tweet:
âBloomberg spent $500 million on ads. The U.S. population is 327 million. He could have given each American $1 million and still had money left over. I feel like a $1 million check would be life-changing for most people. Yet he wasted it all on ads and STILL LOST.â
Williams read it on air, and both he and Gay treated the math as correct, calling it an incredible way of putting it and agreeing with the point being made. The actual math works out to about $1.53 per person.
What gets me is how far the mistake had to travel before it ever reached the screen. Someone had to write the original tweet. Enough people had to see it, like it, share it, or repeat it for it to eventually find its way into the media. Then someone involved with the broadcast had to find it, read it, and decide it was worth using. Someone else had to turn it into the graphic that appeared on screen, and it had to be loaded and prepared for the broadcast. We obviously donât know exactly how many people reviewed it along the way, but the point is that this was not just one person making a bad calculation. The mistake passed through multiple stages before it reached national television, and it still wasnât caught.
To their credit, they corrected it after the commercial break. Williams joked that he and Gay must have gotten the same grades in math, and Gay later joked that she was buying a calculator. But this is a great reminder that something can sound convincing, be repeated by smart people, make it through a professional process, and still be completely wrong. Always check the math
