Fox & Friends on Tuesday mocked a new program being launched by a public-private partnership called Brand USA to increase tourism in the United States.

According to its website, Brand USA is launching the "Discover USA" campaign “for the purpose of encouraging travelers from all over the world to visit the United States of America.” The organization plans to use branding and social networking to create the first unified marketing effort to increase tourism in the United States.

But instead of focusing on the innovative nature of the campaign or the potential economic benefits of increased tourism, Fox & Friends obsessed on the cost.

From Fox & Friends:

GRETCHEN CARLSON (co-host): In the meantime, let's move on to another talking point for your morning. There's a new campaign. Did you know that we need to spend about a billion dollars to get people to come to the United States for tourism? I thought people just normally maybe thought all around the world, maybe the United States is a great place to visit.

Well, now it turns out that the Department of Homeland Security is using some of its dollars in a new campaign called “Discover America -- USA.” There's going to be everything from talking TV billboards in multiple languages to social networks in remote locales. Now they say that actually this will create jobs. Because for every 35 visitors who spend $4,000 to come to America, that creates one job. I'm not sure if that's better than the stimulus package.

STEVE DOOCY (co-host): It's cheaper than Solyndra, I think. I went to their website and there were all sorts of things at the top -- click on deals, you know, if you're an international traveler, click on the deals. I clicked on them, nothing there. I clicked on some other things on how to book travel, not there yet. So if this is what it's going to be, they got to get it up and running a little better.

Although co-host Brian Kilmeade “salute[d] people that say this is a positive thing” and described it as “very American” to use “advertising and marketing ability to let people know what we have here,” Fox & Friends decided to leave key details out of their coverage of the campaign.

For example, Fox & Friends noted the $1 billion cost, which is projected across the five-year lifetime of the campaign at $200 million per year. But they didn't make clear that, as Brand USA stated in a press release, no taxpayer money will be used to fund the campaign:

The program is funded through a combination of private sector investment and funds collected by the Department of Homeland Security from international visitors who visit the United States under the Visa Waiver Program. No U.S. taxpayer dollars are used to fund the program.

Moreover, the problem the campaign attempts to remedy is a real one. According to the Las Vegas Sun, the United States has “lost a potential global market share of 78 million visitors over 10 years, at an estimated value of $606 billion in spending”:

The United States has been one of the few industrialized nations without a coordinated international tourism marketing message. In the past 10 years, the world travel market increased by 60 million people, yet visitation to the United States was flat. Experts estimate the United States lost a potential global market share of 78 million visitors over 10 years, at an estimated value of $606 billion in spending.

The number of visitors from the United States' largest overseas market, Great Britain, has declined since a record 4.7 million visited in 2000.

The competition is fierce from other countries marketing their attractions, led by Mexico, which annually spends $173.8 million advertising the country. Other tourism budgets include Great Britain, $160 million; Australia, $107.6 million; and Turkey, $98.6 million.

And for states such as Nevada, international tourism plays a key role in their economies. As the Sun reported:

The Brand USA campaign fits right into the [Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority] strategy to attract more international visitors to the city.

The authority is developing a strategy to increase the percentage of Las Vegas visitors from other countries from the current 18 percent to 30 percent within 10 years. Last year, 6.7 million international visitors came to Southern Nevada and spent an estimated $6.6 billion, which would support 58,000 jobs.

International visitors are important to the city because they spend more and stay longer than their domestic counterparts.

But don't expect to hear any of this from Fox & Friends. For them, it's easier to default to attacking any kind of spending as a waste of money.

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