Worrying about “Communist propaganda” might sound like a dated pastime, but there are times when you read a media sentence and still wonder where the skepticism kicks in. On Monday’s NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams reported in passing that to reduce Beijing’s “notorious air pollution” for the Olympics, “They’re also planting 300 million trees around the city to increase oxygen levels.”

Three hundred million trees by August? Wouldn’t somebody wonder how that can be done? With how many people doing the planting? And how much area it would take up?

A little Googling shows that on March 30, 2007, Washington Post reporter Ariana Eunjung Cha reported “Several hundred million trees were planted in the capital, but moths descended on them, stripping much of the foliage that was supposed to absorb carbon dioxide emissions.” But she also claimed: “In all, by the time the Olympics begin Aug. 8, 2008, 300 million trees will have been planted, some on tops of buildings.”

There is no apparent measure in these American media reports of how long it will have taken to plant this volume of trees. China’s official Xinhua news agency recently implied that if any of this were true, it took decades of work: “Official figures showed that 168 million trees were planted in the 1981-2007 period in the Chinese capital, where air quality and sandstorm were long-time headaches.”