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Both NBC and CBS continued their feature series, one on real estate, the other on teenage Internet habits. After yesterday's report by Mark Potter for NBC's The Housing Bust on the adverse ripple effect of the collapse of home sales on the central Florida construction industry, CNBC's Diana Olick offered generous free publicity to Countrywide Financial for a tiny piece of outreach. She profiled the mortgage lender's collaboration with the Boston-based Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America to renegotiate loans for homeowners facing foreclosure because adjustable rates kicked in and hiked monthly housing costs, "a move Countrywide would not even have considered just months ago." Yet the outreach has benefited only 200 homeowners "just a small piece of the pie in what is fast becoming a foreclosure epidemic."
On CBS' The Secret Lives of Teens, Daniel Sieberg confusingly followed up on his approving report of yesterday about parents spying on a teenage girl's every online act with a debunking of such supervision. "Teens know how to get around these controls," Sieberg asserted. "Just Googling the words parental controls yields hundreds of Websites with instructions." He introduced us to Megan Kirszenbaum in the Baltimore suburbs, whose mother's complaints about her sexually provocative and drug using MySpace friendships alienated the then 15-year-old. "Megan disappeared for two days," Siebert stated. "I did not run away. I just needed some space," Megan punned in her own defense. The struggle by mother Malissa to restrict daughter Megan's social networking "became a cat and mouse game" as Megan kept changing her password. In the end Malissa gave up her parental controls and Megan cut back on her time online: "The Kirszenbaum women are making peace with each other through something very low-tech, sitting together and talking."
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