Each year, Republican Senator Tom Coburn releases a “Wastebook” reviewing government projects that he views as wasteful, and each year, the media eagerly promote his report. Yet television news ignored a report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) finding that U.S. taxpayers are being stiffed by coal companies buying federal land for less than its worth, which a previous report estimated has cost taxpayers nearly $30 billion over the last 30 years.

On Tuesday, the GAO found that the Bureau of Land Management was not adequately documenting reasons for accepting bids below the determined market value. Furthermore, as many states are not considering exports in their market value analyses, they may be underestimating the value in the first place. Sen. Edward Markey (D-MA), who requested the study, stated that “Given the lack of market competition in coal leases” -- the GAO found the vast majority did not have a single competitor, as seen in the chart below -- “if the fair market value set by Interior is low, it can lead to significant losses for taxpayers. For instance, for every cent per ton that coal companies decrease their bids for the largest coal leases, it could mean the loss of nearly $7 million for the American people.”

Based on the report, Sen. Markey's office estimated that recent leases could have yielded an additional $200 million in revenue and “possibly hundreds of millions more.” A previous report from the Institute for Energy Economics estimated that selling federally-owned coal for less than fair market value has cost taxpayers $28.9 billion in lost revenue over the last 30 years. That finding adds to the economic damages that coal pollution and disasters exact on the economy. A 2011 study, for instance, found that air pollution from coal-fired power plants imposes more costs on society than the value added to the economy by the industry -- and that study did not include climate change damages. Recently, the spill of a chemical used to clean coal in West Virginia cost the local economy $61 million, according to a preliminary study that did not include the cost of clean-up or emergency expenditures.

Yet none of the major television networks covered the GAO report confirming that coal companies are underpaying the federal government*.

The “Wastebook” received considerably more attention when it was released in December 2013, drawing uncritical coverage from all the major television networks except MSNBC (ABC, CBS, CNN, and Fox News uncritically touted the report at least once, and NBC hosted Sen. Coburn where he raised the report without pushback). LiveScience reported that nearly a quarter of the projects Sen. Coburn's office listed in 2013 were science-related and that the “Wastebook” often distorts the studies. Last year, for instance, Fox News promoted the Wastebook's attack on a “government study” on Tea Party intelligence that was actually a non-government funded blog post. CNN's S.E. Cupp and others  also attacked a study of duck penises included in the “Wastebook,” contributing to the pattern of basic research being cut in the face of what MSNBC's Chris Hayes called “ignorant mockery.”

*Based on a search in Nexis and an internal video database for “coal” since February 3 for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News.