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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM SEPTEMBER 17, 2008
For the third day in a row, all three network newscasts led with the financial markets. American International Group, the world's largest insurance conglomerate, was taken over by the federal government. The Federal Reserve Board extended AIG a loan of $85bn to save it from going bust in return for 80% ownership. "You are now the proud owner of a massive insurance company," was the way NBC anchor Brian Williams kicked off his newscast, congratulating the taxpaying public. CBS led with the AIG angle. NBC and ABC led with the impact of the bailout on the stock market--which was bearish. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 449 points to 10609. Stocks were the Story of the Day.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR SEPTEMBER 17, 2008: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
CONGRATULATIONS! YOU ARE NOW IN THE INSURANCE BUSINESS For the third day in a row, all three network newscasts led with the financial markets. American International Group, the world's largest insurance conglomerate, was taken over by the federal government. The Federal Reserve Board extended AIG a loan of $85bn to save it from going bust in return for 80% ownership. "You are now the proud owner of a massive insurance company," was the way NBC anchor Brian Williams kicked off his newscast, congratulating the taxpaying public. CBS led with the AIG angle. NBC and ABC led with the impact of the bailout on the stock market--which was bearish. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 449 points to 10609. Stocks were the Story of the Day.
As it did on Monday, NBC again used the resources of its sibling financial news cable channel, CNBC, to kick off its newscast. Carl Quintanilla led off with the disappointed hopes that the bailout of AIG would "calm the market--investors today sold anyway." Anchor Brian Williams inquired whether the Federal Reserve had enough capital to continue a policy of bailouts: "It sound strange but the Feds' wallet is, in the words of one Fed official, infinite…The ability to raise money, rescue funds, is basically without end." The only problem with "printing money until the cows come home," Quintanilla commented, is "sparking inflation."
Next Williams moved on to CNBC's trio of financial reporters Sue Herera, Joe Kernen and David Faber. Faber warned that, after AIG, Washington Mutual, a huge savings and loan, and Morgan Stanley, a leading investment bank, could be the next financial institutions to disappear. AIG's bailout, he added, has the nickname The Bridge Loan to Nowhere "because it really did not get us that far." Herera told us that "global cash was going into gold--the biggest move to the upside in gold in history." Kernen confessed that he once worked as a broker at the now bankrupt Lehman Brothers and the now taken over Merrill Lynch. "What are the other shoes that are going to drop here?" Williams asked. "It could be a millipede."
On ABC, Betsy Stark variously described the financial mood as "terrified" and "frantic," concluding that "Wall Street has been turned upside down." She checked off the bailouts so far: Bear Stearns $29bn, FannieMae and FreddieMac $200bn, AIG $85bn, not to mention new FHA loans for distressed homeowners. In her excitement, Stark told us that "London based Lloyds insurance is selling itself to a big Scottish bank" when she meant that a Scottish mortgage broker was being bought by Lloyds TSB, a London based bank. CBS' financial coverage concentrated on the overnight negotiations to take over AIG. Anthony Mason offered the tick-tock.
GREENBERG THE CANARY ABC also ran a financial feature and a financial interview. The interview was with Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody's economy.com. His diagnosis--"Wall Street is shaking to the core"--was a sign that the bear market had come to an end. "At the bottom of all markets you have this kind of cathartic event where people just capitulate," he told anchor Charles Gibson. "They sell." In these dicey economic times, Bill Weir had the unenviable task of making his feature on the Forbes 400, the magazine's list of the richest American billionaires, not seem tasteless and tin-eared. Weir's college try concentrated on the 126 members of the 400 who happened to be less wealthy than they were twelve months ago: "While they may not get your sympathy"--well, in fact, they do not--"their eroding wealth should get your attention. Think of them as art collecting, polo playing canaries in the American economic coalmine." Weir's Exhibit A was Hank Greenberg, founder and former boss of AIG: he "fell off the list even before losing $800m this week."
THE REGULATOR ABC and CBS both followed the financial fallout on the campaign trail. "John McCain was against the government bailout of AIG before he was reluctantly for it," observed ABC's David Wright. Wright played McCain's pledge from the stump--"We are going to put an end to the reckless conduct, corruption and unbridled greed that have caused a crisis on Wall Street"--before pointing out that for 25 years on Capitol Hill, "McCain has fashioned himself as a champion of smaller government, less regulation." Wyatt Andrews filed a Reality Check for CBS. While McCain admitted that he did not anticipate the collapse of the real estate bubble, Obama "claims that he saw the meltdown from the start and introduced a law to stop the shaky mortgages." Andrews' assessment: "This is true."
As for McCain's bona fides as a financial regulator, he did indeed advocate stricter oversight of FannieMae and FreddieMac in 2005, Andrews agreed--yet until July of this year he also took formal campaign advice from Phil Gramm, lobbyist for the UBS investment bank, who was "one of the godfathers of banking deregulation," as Andrews put it, when he was McCain's Senate colleague.
PRESIDENTIAL QUESTIONS Anchor Katie Couric's innovation during the primary season of asking the same battery of questions to ten different Presidential contenders does not work so well during the General Election. Primary Questions has been revived as Presidential Questions yet the answers offer less contrast when just two are juxtaposed. Anyway Couric chose one issues question and one character question: "Why do you think there has not been another terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11?" and "What one personal flaw do you think might hinder your ability to be President?"
On the former issue the key difference between Barack Obama and John McCain was a surprise: the Republican, whose expertise is assumed to be in foreign policy, emphasized domestic counterterrorism and high-tech espionage; the Democrat, with a domestic orientation, emphasized the military campaign in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda.
On the latter question both engaged in self-criticism about their decision-making. Interestingly, each was a mirror image of the other. Obama worried that he spent too much time thinking through all his options: "You are never going to have 100% information and you have just got to make the call quickly and surely." McCain worried about relying on a small circle of yes-men: he has to make sure "I do not make any decisions that are not fully informed by every source of information that is as credible as I can possibly get."
FUDGING ON FACTS AND WAFFLING ON ISSUES NBC, too, ran a couple of Campaign '08 features. Savannah Guthrie caught up with Sarah Palin in Michigan. She fact-checked some of the lines the Republican running mate routinely uses. No, Alaska is not the source of 20% of domestic oil and natural gas. No, she has never visited Iraq. No, she was not a consistent opponent of that Bridge to Nowhere. NBC's issues series Where They Stand moved on to each candidate's platform on immigration. George Lewis portrayed neither as a profile in courage: "The candidates perform a delicate balancing act," was the euphemism he used for waffling, "tiptoeing around an issue that just will not go away." Neither wants to countenance visaless cross-border entry yet neither wants to alienate a crucial swing vote. "When they speak to Latino audiences the emphasis changes."
HOUSTON HAS A PROBLEM If it were not for the financial meltdown and a Presidential election, the aftermath of Hurricane Ike would be major news. All three newscasts filed follow-ups. ABC's Mike von Fremd (embargoed link) and CBS' Mark Strassmann covered the continued electricity outages afflicting 1.4m in Houston. "No lights, no air conditioning, no hot meals," von Fremd found. Strassmann told us that 14 powerless hospitals have been closed throughout the region. On NBC, Don Teague focused on the continued evacuation of Galveston Island. "Yesterday officials tried to let residents return just long enough to look and leave but that caused so much chaos and an eight-mile-long back-up that roadblocks went back up."
INTELLIGENTLY DESIGNED Spore, "perhaps the most ambitious computer game ever conceived," got a boost of free publicity from CBS. Daniel Sieberg gave high marks to Electronic Arts' create-a-species videogame in part two of CBS' series Games Our Children Play. Sieberg likes the genre. Tuesday he reassured parents that gameplaying teenagers are not violence-obsessed loners. Now Spore "is considered good for boys and girls."
As it did on Monday, NBC again used the resources of its sibling financial news cable channel, CNBC, to kick off its newscast. Carl Quintanilla led off with the disappointed hopes that the bailout of AIG would "calm the market--investors today sold anyway." Anchor Brian Williams inquired whether the Federal Reserve had enough capital to continue a policy of bailouts: "It sound strange but the Feds' wallet is, in the words of one Fed official, infinite…The ability to raise money, rescue funds, is basically without end." The only problem with "printing money until the cows come home," Quintanilla commented, is "sparking inflation."
Next Williams moved on to CNBC's trio of financial reporters Sue Herera, Joe Kernen and David Faber. Faber warned that, after AIG, Washington Mutual, a huge savings and loan, and Morgan Stanley, a leading investment bank, could be the next financial institutions to disappear. AIG's bailout, he added, has the nickname The Bridge Loan to Nowhere "because it really did not get us that far." Herera told us that "global cash was going into gold--the biggest move to the upside in gold in history." Kernen confessed that he once worked as a broker at the now bankrupt Lehman Brothers and the now taken over Merrill Lynch. "What are the other shoes that are going to drop here?" Williams asked. "It could be a millipede."
On ABC, Betsy Stark variously described the financial mood as "terrified" and "frantic," concluding that "Wall Street has been turned upside down." She checked off the bailouts so far: Bear Stearns $29bn, FannieMae and FreddieMac $200bn, AIG $85bn, not to mention new FHA loans for distressed homeowners. In her excitement, Stark told us that "London based Lloyds insurance is selling itself to a big Scottish bank" when she meant that a Scottish mortgage broker was being bought by Lloyds TSB, a London based bank. CBS' financial coverage concentrated on the overnight negotiations to take over AIG. Anthony Mason offered the tick-tock.
GREENBERG THE CANARY ABC also ran a financial feature and a financial interview. The interview was with Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody's economy.com. His diagnosis--"Wall Street is shaking to the core"--was a sign that the bear market had come to an end. "At the bottom of all markets you have this kind of cathartic event where people just capitulate," he told anchor Charles Gibson. "They sell." In these dicey economic times, Bill Weir had the unenviable task of making his feature on the Forbes 400, the magazine's list of the richest American billionaires, not seem tasteless and tin-eared. Weir's college try concentrated on the 126 members of the 400 who happened to be less wealthy than they were twelve months ago: "While they may not get your sympathy"--well, in fact, they do not--"their eroding wealth should get your attention. Think of them as art collecting, polo playing canaries in the American economic coalmine." Weir's Exhibit A was Hank Greenberg, founder and former boss of AIG: he "fell off the list even before losing $800m this week."
THE REGULATOR ABC and CBS both followed the financial fallout on the campaign trail. "John McCain was against the government bailout of AIG before he was reluctantly for it," observed ABC's David Wright. Wright played McCain's pledge from the stump--"We are going to put an end to the reckless conduct, corruption and unbridled greed that have caused a crisis on Wall Street"--before pointing out that for 25 years on Capitol Hill, "McCain has fashioned himself as a champion of smaller government, less regulation." Wyatt Andrews filed a Reality Check for CBS. While McCain admitted that he did not anticipate the collapse of the real estate bubble, Obama "claims that he saw the meltdown from the start and introduced a law to stop the shaky mortgages." Andrews' assessment: "This is true."
As for McCain's bona fides as a financial regulator, he did indeed advocate stricter oversight of FannieMae and FreddieMac in 2005, Andrews agreed--yet until July of this year he also took formal campaign advice from Phil Gramm, lobbyist for the UBS investment bank, who was "one of the godfathers of banking deregulation," as Andrews put it, when he was McCain's Senate colleague.
PRESIDENTIAL QUESTIONS Anchor Katie Couric's innovation during the primary season of asking the same battery of questions to ten different Presidential contenders does not work so well during the General Election. Primary Questions has been revived as Presidential Questions yet the answers offer less contrast when just two are juxtaposed. Anyway Couric chose one issues question and one character question: "Why do you think there has not been another terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11?" and "What one personal flaw do you think might hinder your ability to be President?"
On the former issue the key difference between Barack Obama and John McCain was a surprise: the Republican, whose expertise is assumed to be in foreign policy, emphasized domestic counterterrorism and high-tech espionage; the Democrat, with a domestic orientation, emphasized the military campaign in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda.
On the latter question both engaged in self-criticism about their decision-making. Interestingly, each was a mirror image of the other. Obama worried that he spent too much time thinking through all his options: "You are never going to have 100% information and you have just got to make the call quickly and surely." McCain worried about relying on a small circle of yes-men: he has to make sure "I do not make any decisions that are not fully informed by every source of information that is as credible as I can possibly get."
FUDGING ON FACTS AND WAFFLING ON ISSUES NBC, too, ran a couple of Campaign '08 features. Savannah Guthrie caught up with Sarah Palin in Michigan. She fact-checked some of the lines the Republican running mate routinely uses. No, Alaska is not the source of 20% of domestic oil and natural gas. No, she has never visited Iraq. No, she was not a consistent opponent of that Bridge to Nowhere. NBC's issues series Where They Stand moved on to each candidate's platform on immigration. George Lewis portrayed neither as a profile in courage: "The candidates perform a delicate balancing act," was the euphemism he used for waffling, "tiptoeing around an issue that just will not go away." Neither wants to countenance visaless cross-border entry yet neither wants to alienate a crucial swing vote. "When they speak to Latino audiences the emphasis changes."
HOUSTON HAS A PROBLEM If it were not for the financial meltdown and a Presidential election, the aftermath of Hurricane Ike would be major news. All three newscasts filed follow-ups. ABC's Mike von Fremd (embargoed link) and CBS' Mark Strassmann covered the continued electricity outages afflicting 1.4m in Houston. "No lights, no air conditioning, no hot meals," von Fremd found. Strassmann told us that 14 powerless hospitals have been closed throughout the region. On NBC, Don Teague focused on the continued evacuation of Galveston Island. "Yesterday officials tried to let residents return just long enough to look and leave but that caused so much chaos and an eight-mile-long back-up that roadblocks went back up."
INTELLIGENTLY DESIGNED Spore, "perhaps the most ambitious computer game ever conceived," got a boost of free publicity from CBS. Daniel Sieberg gave high marks to Electronic Arts' create-a-species videogame in part two of CBS' series Games Our Children Play. Sieberg likes the genre. Tuesday he reassured parents that gameplaying teenagers are not violence-obsessed loners. Now Spore "is considered good for boys and girls."
