Aljazeera has the article Smart people, stupid people, and budget politics by Dean Baker.

Blame the media

When a typical person hears that the government spends $445m a year on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, they are likely to think that this is a lot of money, since it is way more than most people will ever see in their lifetime. Almost no one has their nose in the budget books, so they are not able to recognise that this sum is just a bit more than one-hundredth of one percent of the budget.

The same is true for other categories of government spending. People hear huge numbers and think that programs involve lots of money, because to them these sums would be lots of money. They are not in a position to assess the importance of a program to the federal budget

This article is a beautiful attempt to put some meaning behind Greenberg’s Law of The Media – “If a news item has a number in it, then it is probably misleading.”

Quoting large dollar figures with no context to be able to judge significance is just one of the ways that news story seem to imply something for which there is no basis in the article.