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The fall's pair of dominant topics on the news agenda continued doing double duty. Campaign '08 was Story of the Day, as most time was devoted to the pregame show for primetime's town hall style debate between John McCain and Barack Obama in Nashville. Tom Brokaw, former anchor of NBC Nightly News will moderate, selecting questions to be posed by members of the audience. None of the newscasts treated the debate as its lead, however, and, unlike the first Presidential debate in Mississippi eleven days earlier, none of the anchors traveled to Tennessee to cover the town hall in person. Charles Gibson of ABC was in Ohio on his Battleground Bus Tour; the other two anchors prepared to watch the debate on television from New York City. It was the financial crisis that kicked off all three newscasts, as the Federal Reserve Board announced it would use government money to try to restart the credit market in commercial paper by making short-term loans to corporations.

Pick your metaphor. CBS' Anthony Mason imagined winter plumbing seeing the Fed's decision to buy commercial paper as "a blowtorch to thaw the frozen credit markets." NBC's Tom Costello chose disability, calling it "a dramatic step to get the paralyzed credit markets moving again." ABC's Betsy Stark mixed the timber industry with a game of football: it was a "major new offensive to break the logjam in the credit market" yet there "is no playbook for this unprecedented crisis. Policymakers are making it up as they go along."

Yet bad news kept coming anyway. On Wall Street, the bears continued triumphant. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 508 points to 9447. The Congressional Budge Office estimate that the face value of retirement accounts has taken a $2tr haircut over the past 15 months. The International Monetary Fund predicted a major global recession. And CNBC's Michelle Caruso-Cabrera reported from Luxembourg for NBC that European financial ministers failed to agree on a coordinated course of action: "What you are seeing is this global interconnected financial system really locking up."


Andrew Tyndall 10/13/08 2:43:49 pm

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