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Neither ABC's David Muir nor NBC's Chris Jansing earned kudos for their economy features. Consider me confused.
As part of ABC's Made in America series, Muir went to Walmart. As is his schtick, he stopped shoppers in the parking lot to find plenty of Made in China labels -- even as he contradictorily told us that two-thirds of the goods Walmart sells are domestically produced. Then he reported on Walmart's announcement that it would increase its domestic procurement by $50bn over the next decade. Muir covered the pledge as if it were a big deal -- even as he quoted a Boston Consulting economist's estimate that it amounted to 170,000 jobs over ten years, which is only 17,000 new hires annually. It seemed like Muir was donating plenty of complimentary free publicity to Walmart for a rather inconsequential announcement, whose importance seems to consist of its convenient alignment with ABC's preordained worldview. As such, it functions more as propaganda than as journalism.
Jansing relied on CNBC's personal finance maven Suze Orman to criticize an unemployed couple for borrowing on their 401(k) to avoid bankruptcy in the gap between jobs. Orman's instruction was that a fortysomething couple should have three times their annual income in 401(k) savings. So how did the jobless Shanklands violate the Orman rule? With zero income, their 401(k) should be three times that -- in other words, nothing. Blaming them for borrowing against it seems like blaming the victim, as if recessionary layoffs were theirs to prevent.
CBS decided to take global warming seriously, up to a point. Bill Whitaker took a trip to Huntington Beach, where beachfront property will not last out the century. Then Elizabeth Palmer could not resist rainy puns about soggy London town. She put the seal on her rueful report with a seal.
CBS and ABC both closed their newscasts with children -- unhealthy on CBS with Seth Doane, healthy on ABC with Sharyn Alfonsi. Doane went to a fat farm in South Carolina, Alfonsi to a real one in New York State, where she really did milk Rosie the cow, and, yes, the cow really did belong to Ol' McDonald.
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