How far ahead of his time Mark Twain was when he said a century before the Internet: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

So said The New York Times’ Thomas L Friedman this week, writing about the bogus rumour that President Obama’s trip to Asia would cost $200 million a day, or more specifically, commending CNN’s Anderson Cooper for tracing the misinformation and debunking it.

But that’s not before the story made its way from its original source — a senior unnamed Indian official from Maharashtra talking about the cost of an Asian trip by the American president cited in India’s Press Trust — to:

  • Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, Republican and Tea Party favorite, on CNN: “I think we know that just within a day or so the president of the United States will be taking a trip over to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day. He’s taking 2000 people with him. He’ll be renting over 870 rooms in India, and these are five-star hotel rooms at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. This is the kind of over-the-top spending.”
  • The Drudge Report
  • Rush Limbaugh: “In two days from now, he’ll be in India at $200 million a day.”
  • Glenn Beck: “Have you ever seen the president, ever seen the president go over for a vacation where you needed 34 warships, $2 billion — $2 billion, 34 warships. We are sending — he’s traveling with 3000 people.”
  • Conservative radio talk-show host Michael Savage: “$200 million? $200 million each day on security and other aspects of this incredible royalist visit; 3000 people, including Secret Service agents.”

As Friedman writes: “When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, we have a problem. It becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues — deficit reduction, health care, taxes, energy/climate — let alone act on them.”

That’s where good journalists like Cooper come in. They must — someone has to — test these sound bites, and call media outlets, and public figures, out on them. That way, the hope is, says Friedman: “When the next crazy lie races around the world, people’s first instinct will be to doubt it, not repeat it.”

Here’s hoping that instinct kicks in just in time for Palin 2012.