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Following Tuesday night's second Presidential debate in Tennessee, Democratic candidate Barack Obama caught up with ABC's Battleground Bus Tour as anchor Charles Gibson traveled through Indiana. Obama's two-part Exclusive interview on ABC took up fully 43% of ABC's newshole (8 min out of 19), enough to qualify his candidacy as Story of the Day. Yet the global financial crisis still grabbed headlines. All three networks led with the coordinated decision by central banks in Europe and the Americas to cut short-term interest rates simultaneously by 0.5%. The Federal Reserve Board now charges banks a mere 1.5% rate.

"The financial crisis Made in America is officially a US export," declared CNBC's Carl Quintanilla, kicking off NBC's newscast, as the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve Board joined forces with the central banks of Canada, England, Sweden and Switzerland to charge less for funds. CBS' Anthony Mason called it "an extraordinary global move" while ABC's Betsy Stark used the words "historic" and "unprecedented." She heard organ music: "economic policymakers pulling out the stops, trying things never tried before."

NBC used CNBC's global financial resources to include Michelle Caruso-Cabrera from London in Quintanilla's report and Steve Sedgewick in Reykjavik. Iceland applied to Russia for a $5bn loan to keep going: "An entire country faces economic collapse." CBS' Mason warned that "recession worries are growing" in the United States, with retail sales during September rated as "disappointing." CNBC's Quintanilla concluded with another statistic. Recessions since World War II have been preceded by an average stock market selloff of 34%. "We are just past that point now. The only question is whether this downturn is going to be average--or something worse."

ABC's Stark gave us an idea of how much money is being pulled out of the stock market: on average checking and savings accounts at banks grow by $5bn every two weeks; in the last two weeks $185bn have been stashed there. In aggregate that amounts to a $2tr smaller face value of pension funds and 401(k) account holdings over the past year. NBC assigned Mark Potter to put a human face on evaporating assets. He chose a landlord of a Florida apartment complex and a pair of retirees--a minister and a schoolteacher--in California, "troubling numbers felt very personally from coast to coast."


Andrew Tyndall 10/13/08 2:51:35 pm

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