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A very light day of news saw only one development considered important enough to be covered by a reporter on all three newscasts. That was the market action on Wall Street, where the bears had their fourth best day so far this year, selling off the Dow Jones Industrial Average by 362 points to 13567. Even the financial Story of the Day received cursory coverage: CBS and NBC gave it a brief live stand-up--although NBC did make the sell-off its lead. ABC and CBS each led with an Exclusive instead: CBS chose contractor fraud at the Pentagon; ABC kicked off with raids on steroids mills by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

NBC continues to assign most of its economic coverage to correspondents from its sibling cable channel CNBC, a smart use of resources for cross-promotion, as CNBC starts its rivalry with News Corp's new financial news entrant, Fox Business Network. So NBC's Wall Street lead--filed by CNBC's Erin Burnett--was followed by CNBC's real estate correspondent Diana Olick on home mortgage foreclosures and CNBC's auto industry expert Phil LeBeau on downsizing at Chrysler. Production of Chrysler's Pacifica and Crossfire models, its convertible version of the PT Cruiser and Dodge's Magnum will be discontinued. So far this year, Chrysler, now run by the privately-held Cerberus Capital fund, has announced the layoff of a full third of its workforce. Meanwhile in the housing market, Olick reported that some 500,000 homes were undergoing foreclosure during the third quarter of 2007, double the rate in the same quarter of 2006.

As for the stock market, this was one of those days that Bob Garfield (audio link) celebrated in his classic 2003 On The Media radio rant about the convention of financial journalists to shoehorn the complexities of the millions of trades of a single day on Wall Street into a simple cause-and-effect headline. CBS' Anthony Mason was definitive about the selloff: "It all goes back to the mortgage mess again…Financial stocks got creamed, down nearly 5%, as a group their worst day in five years." CNBC's Erin Burnett was on the same page: "Today's plunge all comes down to worries about the nation's biggest banks, specifically…Citigroup." Meanwhile over at ABC, higher energy prices, not lower housing prices, were the driving force. Chris Bury assured us that "the stock market tumbled after hints from the Federal Reserve it may pause in cutting interest rates, a red flag that it sees inflation led by energy around the corner."

Andrew Tyndall 11/3/07 11:56:44 pm

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