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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM SEPTEMBER 15, 2008
NBC's broadcast newscast made full use of its sibling financial news cable channel to cover the crises of the financial capitalist system. Lehman Brothers, the 158-year-old investment bank, went bankrupt. Merrill Lynch, the nation's largest brokerage house, was taken over. AIG, the globe's largest insurance company, needs an immediate $75bn in capital to stay in business. The bear market accelerated on Wall Street as the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 504 points to close at 10917. All three newscasts led with Wall Street's woes, the Story of the Day. NBC sent anchor Brian Williams across the Hudson River to CNBC's headquarters for the most detailed coverage of this complex of financial stories (12 min v ABC 6, CBS 6), accounting for fully 62% of its newshole.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR SEPTEMBER 15, 2008: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
FINANCIAL NEWSERS HELP NBC DISSECT FINANCIAL FAILURES NBC's broadcast newscast made full use of its sibling financial news cable channel to cover the crises of the financial capitalist system. Lehman Brothers, the 158-year-old investment bank, went bankrupt. Merrill Lynch, the nation's largest brokerage house, was taken over. AIG, the globe's largest insurance company, needs an immediate $75bn in capital to stay in business. The bear market accelerated on Wall Street as the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 504 points to close at 10917. All three newscasts led with Wall Street's woes, the Story of the Day. NBC sent anchor Brian Williams across the Hudson River to CNBC's headquarters for the most detailed coverage of this complex of financial stories (12 min v ABC 6, CBS 6), accounting for fully 62% of its newshole.
CNBC's Carl Quintanilla kicked off the coverage in conventional fashion: "Not in generations has Wall Street absorbed the number of body blows it took today." His description of the carnage was matched by ABC's Betsy Stark and CBS' Anthony Mason. Mason announced that "two pillars of the Street tumbled over the weekend" while Stark saw "the bankruptcy of one major Wall Street investment bank, the shotgun wedding of another," referring to Bank of America's fire-sale acquisition of Merrill.
Then NBC anchor Williams walked through the crisis with CNBC's panel of experts. Economist Steve Liesman warned that it is hard to overstate the extent of the problem: "The financial system is holding but you can say it is severely strained." Of the nation's five major investment banks, only two are still in business; FannieMae and FreddieMac were nationalized just last week. Business reporter David Faber worried about AIG, "a huge player in the global derivatives market." Its bankruptcy would be an outcome "many people are very, very concerned about given it is so interconnected in the global financial system." Anchor Sue Herera was encouraged about the Bank of America combination with Merrill Lynch. She saw a "financial superpower" with "arguably the best financial advisors around--and some 20,000 of them." Anchor Erin Burnett offered both reassurances and warnings for the investor on Main Street: brokerage accounts and bank accounts are protected but "nobody is going to protect you against a drop in the stock market."
ABC and CBS followed up on their Wall Street reporting with the Main Street angle too. Dan Harris on ABC sought the silver lining: "When the stock market is down there are lots of buying opportunities for the brave." Jeff Glor, of CBS' Early Show consulted financial advisor Jill Schlesinger, who also told us to think of a bear market as "a sale: a 20% discount from where the market was." Glor claimed that there is "a growing consensus on Wall Street that this past weekend may have been the worst of it," without offering a single soundbite to represent that so-called consensus. The Pollyanna Glor is trying to catch a falling knife, as the saying goes.
WHAT ECONOMY ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? Financial capitalism was Topic A on the campaign trail. ABC's Jake Tapper and CBS' Dean Reynolds both filed from Barack Obama's rally where he answered John McCain's assertion that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong" with mocking disbelief: "Senator McCain, what economy are you talking about?" NBC assigned John Yang at the White House to file a Where They Stand feature contrasting the two platforms on finance. McCain "takes a free market approach and wants to break up FannieMae and FreddieMac into smaller pieces and then sell them to the private sector." Obama "wants more federal oversight and says investment banks should meet the same strict regulations as commercial banks." Yang consulted analysts and came to the conclusion that Obama's diagnosis was superior: "The current market upheaval makes regulatory change inevitable--the only question is how far-reaching it will be."
OBAMA’S WEASEL WORD CBS filed a couple of other Campaign '08 reports. Nancy Cordes is assigned to the Sarah Palin press corps. Cordes reported that the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee "continues to draw large and curious crowds at rallies but when she is not on stage she has kept as far as possible from the public eye. Palin has yet to hold a news conference." Wyatt Andrews continued with his Reality Check series on the candidates' tax policies. He rapped Barack Obama for focusing on the negative half of John McCain's tax credit proposal but not the positive half. McCain would tax workplace health benefits as income, offering the credit as an offset. Obama's ad warned of a "tax increase, potentially, on middle class families." That weasel word "potentially" referred to a decade after the change, when the positive credit would eventually fail to balance the tax on benefits.
By the way, Andrews also caught Palin inflating her resume. "My job has been to oversee nearly 20% of the US domestic supply of oil and gas," she claimed. Andrews dug up Department of Energy data. Alaska accounts for less than 3% of the domestic natural gas supply; just over 14% of domestic oil.
IKE LEAVES MUD AND LITTER Absent the turmoil in financial markets, the devastation left by Hurricane Ike along the Gulf coast of Texas would have been Story of the Day. ABC's Ryan Owens (embargoed link) traveled by boat across Galveston Bay to the Bolivar peninsula, a community "covered in several inches of mud." The bay is "a body of water now littered with people's belongings, parts of homes, water heaters, even cattle." NBC's Janet Shamlian and CBS' Mark Strassmann were on Galveston Island, where the bridge from the mainland was closed with evacuated residents prohibited from returning. "Conditions are primitive," Shamlian declared. "There is no running water, no power, no food, no gas, no communications, no shelter." ABC's Sharyn Alfonsi and NBC's Don Teague filed from the mainland in Houston where FEMA had opened 20-or-so distribution centers, handing out ice, water and food. Most of Houston is still without electricity yet its "water supply is operating," Teague reassured us. "Storm clean-up is progressing and the damage to the city is less than initially feared."
NEGATIVE TRAIN CONTROL The head on collision of a Metrolink commuter train with a freight train during Los Angeles' Friday rush hour came too late for last week's newscasts. So this was the first weekday reporting on the crash that killed at least 25 on the networks' evening news. All three newscasts had reporters on the scene: NBC's transportation expert Tom Costello, CBS' Los Angeles based Ben Tracy and ABC's Terry McCarthy (embargoed link), whose regular beat happens to be Baghdad. Both Costello and McCarthy chose the National Transportation Safety Board angle. For 30 years, the NTSB has urged the railroad industry to install a safety system known as Positive Train Control. It remotely monitors railroad tracks for impending crashes and automatically applies brakes, overriding the engineer. The system operates along Amtrak's northeast corridor but not in southern California, where passenger trains routinely share tracks with freight.
CBS' Tracy mentioned the NTSB system too, but his angle was the claim by a couple of teenage trainspotters that the Metrolink engineer had been distracted just before the crash, exchanging text messages with them as he overlooked a red signal.
POST HOC, PROPTER HOC On such a busy day of news, only ABC chose a human interest feature to round out the agenda. John McKenzie traveled to rural West Virginia to profile Marianne Cook, a stroke patient who was airlifted, unconscious and paralyzed, to the Cleveland Clinic, assumed to be terminally stricken. Now five months later Cook is back home, walking and talking. What happened in the meantime? The clinic performed a three-hour operation and Cook's mother organized a prayer circle on her daughter's behalf, starting at her Arnett Chapel and spreading to 120 congregations. Cook thanked God for her recovery. McKenzie made no claims about cause and effect.
CNBC's Carl Quintanilla kicked off the coverage in conventional fashion: "Not in generations has Wall Street absorbed the number of body blows it took today." His description of the carnage was matched by ABC's Betsy Stark and CBS' Anthony Mason. Mason announced that "two pillars of the Street tumbled over the weekend" while Stark saw "the bankruptcy of one major Wall Street investment bank, the shotgun wedding of another," referring to Bank of America's fire-sale acquisition of Merrill.
Then NBC anchor Williams walked through the crisis with CNBC's panel of experts. Economist Steve Liesman warned that it is hard to overstate the extent of the problem: "The financial system is holding but you can say it is severely strained." Of the nation's five major investment banks, only two are still in business; FannieMae and FreddieMac were nationalized just last week. Business reporter David Faber worried about AIG, "a huge player in the global derivatives market." Its bankruptcy would be an outcome "many people are very, very concerned about given it is so interconnected in the global financial system." Anchor Sue Herera was encouraged about the Bank of America combination with Merrill Lynch. She saw a "financial superpower" with "arguably the best financial advisors around--and some 20,000 of them." Anchor Erin Burnett offered both reassurances and warnings for the investor on Main Street: brokerage accounts and bank accounts are protected but "nobody is going to protect you against a drop in the stock market."
ABC and CBS followed up on their Wall Street reporting with the Main Street angle too. Dan Harris on ABC sought the silver lining: "When the stock market is down there are lots of buying opportunities for the brave." Jeff Glor, of CBS' Early Show consulted financial advisor Jill Schlesinger, who also told us to think of a bear market as "a sale: a 20% discount from where the market was." Glor claimed that there is "a growing consensus on Wall Street that this past weekend may have been the worst of it," without offering a single soundbite to represent that so-called consensus. The Pollyanna Glor is trying to catch a falling knife, as the saying goes.
WHAT ECONOMY ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? Financial capitalism was Topic A on the campaign trail. ABC's Jake Tapper and CBS' Dean Reynolds both filed from Barack Obama's rally where he answered John McCain's assertion that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong" with mocking disbelief: "Senator McCain, what economy are you talking about?" NBC assigned John Yang at the White House to file a Where They Stand feature contrasting the two platforms on finance. McCain "takes a free market approach and wants to break up FannieMae and FreddieMac into smaller pieces and then sell them to the private sector." Obama "wants more federal oversight and says investment banks should meet the same strict regulations as commercial banks." Yang consulted analysts and came to the conclusion that Obama's diagnosis was superior: "The current market upheaval makes regulatory change inevitable--the only question is how far-reaching it will be."
OBAMA’S WEASEL WORD CBS filed a couple of other Campaign '08 reports. Nancy Cordes is assigned to the Sarah Palin press corps. Cordes reported that the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee "continues to draw large and curious crowds at rallies but when she is not on stage she has kept as far as possible from the public eye. Palin has yet to hold a news conference." Wyatt Andrews continued with his Reality Check series on the candidates' tax policies. He rapped Barack Obama for focusing on the negative half of John McCain's tax credit proposal but not the positive half. McCain would tax workplace health benefits as income, offering the credit as an offset. Obama's ad warned of a "tax increase, potentially, on middle class families." That weasel word "potentially" referred to a decade after the change, when the positive credit would eventually fail to balance the tax on benefits.
By the way, Andrews also caught Palin inflating her resume. "My job has been to oversee nearly 20% of the US domestic supply of oil and gas," she claimed. Andrews dug up Department of Energy data. Alaska accounts for less than 3% of the domestic natural gas supply; just over 14% of domestic oil.
IKE LEAVES MUD AND LITTER Absent the turmoil in financial markets, the devastation left by Hurricane Ike along the Gulf coast of Texas would have been Story of the Day. ABC's Ryan Owens (embargoed link) traveled by boat across Galveston Bay to the Bolivar peninsula, a community "covered in several inches of mud." The bay is "a body of water now littered with people's belongings, parts of homes, water heaters, even cattle." NBC's Janet Shamlian and CBS' Mark Strassmann were on Galveston Island, where the bridge from the mainland was closed with evacuated residents prohibited from returning. "Conditions are primitive," Shamlian declared. "There is no running water, no power, no food, no gas, no communications, no shelter." ABC's Sharyn Alfonsi and NBC's Don Teague filed from the mainland in Houston where FEMA had opened 20-or-so distribution centers, handing out ice, water and food. Most of Houston is still without electricity yet its "water supply is operating," Teague reassured us. "Storm clean-up is progressing and the damage to the city is less than initially feared."
NEGATIVE TRAIN CONTROL The head on collision of a Metrolink commuter train with a freight train during Los Angeles' Friday rush hour came too late for last week's newscasts. So this was the first weekday reporting on the crash that killed at least 25 on the networks' evening news. All three newscasts had reporters on the scene: NBC's transportation expert Tom Costello, CBS' Los Angeles based Ben Tracy and ABC's Terry McCarthy (embargoed link), whose regular beat happens to be Baghdad. Both Costello and McCarthy chose the National Transportation Safety Board angle. For 30 years, the NTSB has urged the railroad industry to install a safety system known as Positive Train Control. It remotely monitors railroad tracks for impending crashes and automatically applies brakes, overriding the engineer. The system operates along Amtrak's northeast corridor but not in southern California, where passenger trains routinely share tracks with freight.
CBS' Tracy mentioned the NTSB system too, but his angle was the claim by a couple of teenage trainspotters that the Metrolink engineer had been distracted just before the crash, exchanging text messages with them as he overlooked a red signal.
POST HOC, PROPTER HOC On such a busy day of news, only ABC chose a human interest feature to round out the agenda. John McKenzie traveled to rural West Virginia to profile Marianne Cook, a stroke patient who was airlifted, unconscious and paralyzed, to the Cleveland Clinic, assumed to be terminally stricken. Now five months later Cook is back home, walking and talking. What happened in the meantime? The clinic performed a three-hour operation and Cook's mother organized a prayer circle on her daughter's behalf, starting at her Arnett Chapel and spreading to 120 congregations. Cook thanked God for her recovery. McKenzie made no claims about cause and effect.
