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Friday made it a clean sweep. All five days this week saw an economic development qualify as Story of the Day: Monday's was corporate layoffs; Tuesday and Wednesday followed the fiscal stimulus debate on Capitol Hill; Thursday saw President Barack Obama blast Wall Street bonuses. Now the Commerce Department publishes statistics on the Gross Domestic Product for the final three months of 2008. The national economy is shrinking at a 3.8% annual rate, the steepest quarterly decline since 1982. ABC and NBC led with the recession. CBS, anchored by substitute Harry Smith, chose to kick off with the federal investigation into the salmonella outbreak's origin in a Georgia peanut processing factory.

Monday, Tyndall Report applauded ABC's use of a wheel format to cover accelerating corporate layoffs nationwide. Friday's recession statistics received the same wheel treatment: ABC's exaggerating Betsy Stark kicked off from the New Jersey suburbs where consumer spending "completely shut down at the end of last year;" she handed off to Barbara Pinto in Chicago who detailed how the crisis in the automobile sector has metastasized across the entire industrial midwest; Laura Marquez rounded off the wheel in San Francisco where she warned that the California economy is bracing for a suspension of $3.7bn in direct payments from the state government.

On NBC, Scott Cohn of CNBC took a similar angle to ABC's Pinto. Cohn filed from Indiana to show us how the demand for industrial production "just hit a chill" around the world: "Steel production has fallen by half." The corollary to the drop in global trade is the shuttering of factories in China's Guangdong export zone. NBC' Ian Williams covered the millions of jobless migrant workers from a village in Sichuan Thursday; now ABC's Terry McCarthy (embargoed link) covers the same crisis from the village of Zhangjiajie in Hunan.


Andrew Tyndall 2/2/09 7:49:39 pm

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