On November 3, 2010, Eric Bolling, host of the Fox Business cable TV show Follow The Money, asserted that President Obama's trip to India would "cost 200 million dollars per day." We find this claim to be false, because we could not find any conclusive factual evidence to support it, and most neutral observers view this number as vastly exaggerated. The original source of this rumor, the Press Trust of India, cites an anonymous Indian government official, but provides no verifiable evidence to back up its findings.

Yet, many right-wing news outlets such as the Drudge Report, Fox News and the Glenn Beck Show ran with this story anyway, turning it viral. White House and Pentagon officials attempted to refute this claim as "wildly inflated," offering what they felt was unusual openness on the costs of a presidential state visit, but since they wouldn't produce an exact figure "due to security concerns," the rumor was able to cling to life in clearly biased reports.

The burden of proof is on people touting this figure to demonstrate that the trip could even cost this much. Many of their reports, such as the Fox Business video from which we sourced this quote, try to suggest the astronomical cost with an exhaustive litany of the personnel and equipment involved in the trip. None of these sources are able to actually account for $200 million.

More »

On November 3, 2010, Eric Bolling, host of the Fox Business cable TV show Follow The Money, asserted that President Obama's trip to India would "cost 200 million dollars per day." We find this claim to be false, because we could not find any conclusive factual evidence to support it, and most neutral observers view this number as vastly exaggerated. The original source of this rumor, the Press Trust of India, cites an anonymous Indian government official, but provides no verifiable evidence to back up its findings.

Yet, many right-wing news outlets such as the Drudge Report, Fox News and the Glenn Beck Show ran with this story anyway, turning it viral. White House and Pentagon officials attempted to refute this claim as "wildly inflated," offering what they felt was unusual openness on the costs of a presidential state visit, but since they wouldn't produce an exact figure "due to security concerns," the rumor was able to cling to life in clearly biased reports.

The burden of proof is on people touting this figure to demonstrate that the trip could even cost this much. Many of their reports, such as the Fox Business video from which we sourced this quote, try to suggest the astronomical cost with an exhaustive litany of the personnel and equipment involved in the trip. None of these sources are able to actually account for $200 million.

Meanwhile, as pointed out by The Daily Show and FactCheck, and confirmed in this study from the Congressional Research Service, the daily cost of the entire war in Afghanistan is $10 million less than the figure cited by Fox Business and others for the president's peaceful state visit. We find it unlikely that the presidential trip to India could possibly cost more per day than the land, sea, and air war in Afghanistan.

Furthermore, Pentagon officials publicly challenged that the number of military units supporting the trip was even as large as Fox, Glenn Beck, and others were reporting. While Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell did not cite exact numbers, he framed the number of ships reported by Bolling, Beck, et. al. as unrealistic:

"I will take the liberty this time of dismissing as absolutely absurd this notion that somehow we were deploying 10 percent of the Navy -- some 34 ships and an aircraft carrier -- in support of the president's trip to Asia... That's just comical. Nothing close to that is being done."

- Geoff Morrell, 11/4/10

At its worst, news coverage propagating this story was totally misleading. The Eric Bolling clip, which was picked out on The Daily Show as the most egregious example, used its flashy animations to suggest that Obama's entourage would be renting the actual Taj Mahal mausoleum in Agra, not the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai. Though the accommodations for the trip were certainly lavish, as reported in detail by the Economic Times, they stopped short of renting out a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Though the administration has not produced a verifiable account of the expenses of the trip, the $200 million price tag has not been substantiated anywhere. This claim was widely reported by mainstream sources without any evidence to support it, while the facts suggest that this cost is extremely unlikely, if not impossible.

-- By Jon Mitchell, on behalf of NewsTrust Editors


UPDATE: Our partners at MediaBugs.org have filed a bug report against Fox Business on this claim.
Less «