Feigned outrage is the worst kind of outrage

Yes, the Drudge Report is famously alarmist in nature, but when I read the headline "REPORT: Navy Spends $450K on Closed Roof Superbowl Flyover", it nevertheless piqued my interest. It definitely caught my eye on Sunday when the (butchered) pre-Super Bowl national anthem was followed by a fly-over, despite the fact that the roof to Cowboys Stadium was closed. The concept seemed a little silly to me, but then, there were a whole lot more people watching that game on TV than in the stadium, so more people saw the fly-over than missed it.

But the more I thought about Drudge's headline, the more upset I got. His attempt to spark outrage among anti-federalist conservatives is a hack move, and it fails the sniff test on a number of counts. First of all, $450k is a number that sounds large to most of us (and it is, for our personal budgets), but one that is in fact minuscule when we consider the massive size of our national budget (and deficit). Our cognitive dissonance in this regard is well explored in this video, which is an old classic:

Drudge is taking advantage of our psychological inclinations here, overblowing a story to make it seem indicative of a culture of wasteful government spending. (In fairness, he didn't write the article, The Daily Mail did, but his linking to it without any further explanation makes him nonetheless culpable).

The concept of government waste may have something to it, and it probably does. But we're not going to balance our budget simply by trimming some fat here and there, as is a common misconception--the deficit (and debt) is simply too large to be explained away by "government inefficiency". Furthermore, the more you chip away at this "REPORT", the less meat there is to it.

In my former life as a sports marketer, I helped to arrange and coordinate multiple fly-overs at sporting events. There is in fact a well-developed process for doing so, and it almost always involves rerouting a training flight for a local branch of the military--that is to say, no (or few) additional dollars are spent for sports arena flyovers. The planes are simply diverted from one patch of airspace to another, flying over Cowboys Stadium instead of flying over random non-descript land in eastern Texas. (Yes, these planes came from Virginia and not the Dallas area, which seems a bit strange, but the additional fuel costs to cover those 1,000 miles really don't move the needle much in terms of "wasteful spending".) As the Naval Air Force spokesman quoted in the Daily Mail article noted,

"These missions are included in the annual operating budget of all branches of the military and they are used as training... There was no additional money provided to us - Congress did not cut us a special cheque to do this flyover. This is considered a training mission whether they were to fly over the Super Bowl or not."

That last point, even more so than the cognitive dissonance point, is what makes this "news item" such a glaring example of bad journalism. The $450k is--for the most part--an accounting trick, a phantom "expense", newsworthy only on the merits of a technicality. If the headline had instead said "REPORT: Navy spends $450k on pilot training exercise", would anyone have cared? Of course not. But by twisting around the facts and perverting the accounting, Drudge and the Daily Mail have created a story where there was none. That sort of behavior is exactly what has dragged our political rhetoric so far down into the mud, and it simply needs to stop. Happy Friday.

[Daily Mail]