U.S. Media's Olympic Math: 1 Gold = 1 Silver = 1 Bronze

Price per Oz, as of 8/22/2008
Gold: $ 827.40
Silver: $ 13.48
Bronze: $ 0.50 to $0.75

When one looks at the Olympics medals tally at yahoo.com , she finds the Medals Count with US on top (107), followed by China (96) and Russia (69). All data as of 9 PM 8/23/2008.
NYT has the same data, ranking the countries in the same order.
WSJ has similar rankings.

Adding the number of gold, silver and bronze medals to come up with the 'total' does not "add up" as it is beyond logic, and is equivalent to adding blackberries, bananas and grapes.

What is rather dubious and self-congratulatory about this is that China has 49 gold medals, followed by US (34) and Russia (22). While there are no established equivalencies or conversion rates between the medals, if one considers the market value of the metals a gold medal is worth 61 times the value of a silver medal, and more than a 1000 times that of bronze. It is rather transparent that China is WAY AHEAD of other countries in the overall "medals" in the Olympics. Why are the news media resorting to this deliberate distortion in portraying the "Olympic" medals performance? It is precisely this behavior that encourages jingoist behavior and ignorance and then hatred of other countries and cultures. In other countries, the media rank nations on their gold medal performances. One can look at BBC's medals tally, as an example. FT.com also has an interesting outsider perspective on this phenomenon of self aggrandizement- see Outside Edge: Fool’s gold consoles unloved America.