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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM OCTOBER 07, 2008
The fall's pair of dominant topics on the news agenda continued doing double duty. Campaign '08 was Story of the Day, as most time was devoted to the pregame show for primetime's town hall style debate between John McCain and Barack Obama in Nashville. Tom Brokaw, former anchor of NBC Nightly News will moderate, selecting questions to be posed by members of the audience. None of the newscasts treated the debate as its lead, however, and, unlike the first Presidential debate in Mississippi eleven days earlier, none of the anchors traveled to Tennessee to cover the town hall in person. Charles Gibson of ABC was in Ohio on his Battleground Bus Tour; the other two anchors prepared to watch the debate on television from New York City. It was the financial crisis that kicked off all three newscasts, as the Federal Reserve Board announced it would use government money to try to restart the credit market in commercial paper by making short-term loans to corporations.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR OCTOBER 07, 2008: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
FEDERAL RESERVE BOARD BORROWS AS TENNESSEE HOLDS TOWN HALL The fall's pair of dominant topics on the news agenda continued doing double duty. Campaign '08 was Story of the Day, as most time was devoted to the pregame show for primetime's town hall style debate between John McCain and Barack Obama in Nashville. Tom Brokaw, former anchor of NBC Nightly News will moderate, selecting questions to be posed by members of the audience. None of the newscasts treated the debate as its lead, however, and, unlike the first Presidential debate in Mississippi eleven days earlier, none of the anchors traveled to Tennessee to cover the town hall in person. Charles Gibson of ABC was in Ohio on his Battleground Bus Tour; the other two anchors prepared to watch the debate on television from New York City. It was the financial crisis that kicked off all three newscasts, as the Federal Reserve Board announced it would use government money to try to restart the credit market in commercial paper by making short-term loans to corporations.
Pick your metaphor. CBS' Anthony Mason imagined winter plumbing seeing the Fed's decision to buy commercial paper as "a blowtorch to thaw the frozen credit markets." NBC's Tom Costello chose disability, calling it "a dramatic step to get the paralyzed credit markets moving again." ABC's Betsy Stark mixed the timber industry with a game of football: it was a "major new offensive to break the logjam in the credit market" yet there "is no playbook for this unprecedented crisis. Policymakers are making it up as they go along."
Yet bad news kept coming anyway. On Wall Street, the bears continued triumphant. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 508 points to 9447. The Congressional Budge Office estimate that the face value of retirement accounts has taken a $2tr haircut over the past 15 months. The International Monetary Fund predicted a major global recession. And CNBC's Michelle Caruso-Cabrera reported from Luxembourg for NBC that European financial ministers failed to agree on a coordinated course of action: "What you are seeing is this global interconnected financial system really locking up."
TOWN HALL FORMAT FAVORS MCCAIN Republican John McCain approached the Nashville debate after four straight days of personal attacks on Barack Obama "for his association with an education professor who was once a violent '60s radical," as ABC's Jake Tapper (embargoed link) put it, referring to the Democrat's Chicago neighbor William Ayers. Tapper relayed the McCain campaign's defense of its tactics: "It is not negativity. It is truth telling." The action on the stump did seem a tad negative to NBC's Andrea Mitchell: McCain's "jibes about Obama have increasingly provoked ugly crowd responses."
Wyatt Andrews filed a Reality Check for CBS on the attacks on Obama by McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin. "He voted 94 times for higher taxes"--"misleading" Andrews judged. An ad accusing Obama of disparaging US military forces in Afghanistan uses an abbreviated soundbite "that is just part of what Obama said." When Palin called Ayers "an unrepentant domestic terrorist," Andrews described him as "once a Vietnam War protestor linked to several bombings" who today is "a professor of education."
So will McCain continue those attacks when answering the questions Tom Brokaw selects? His aides told NBC's Mitchell "he will not get personal." "It is tough to launch those kinds of personal attacks…in front of these uncommitted voters, who probably want to talk about issues that matter to them," opined ABC's George Stephanopoulos. On CBS, Bob Schieffer (no link) made the opposite prediction: "He is going to try to make this race a referendum on Obama and his character--and try to get the attention off the economy."
ABC's Tapper told us that the town hall format is "thought to favor McCain." "This is his favorite format," asserted Schieffer. Mitchell agreed. The format "is one McCain likes. Obama in contrast prefers speeches and big rallies."
FOCUS ON SMALL BUSINESS In their campaign features, all three newscasts simultaneously made the strange decision to make the nation's 27m small business owners the most prominent segment of the electorate. In anchor Charles Gibson's Battleground Bus Tour through Ohio on ABC, he sat down for a vox pop on the economy with an insurance agent, a maker of Murphy beds and the proprietor of a bowling alley before moving on to the students at Bowling Green State. For NBC's In Depth preview of the debate in smalltown Tennessee, Roger O'Neil brought us the views of a beautician, a bakery owner and a community banker. Meanwhile CBS' Where They Stand series with Sandra Hughes turned to the candidates' policies on taxes, the credit crunch and healthcare as they applied to small business. Her examples were a California strawberry farmer with 30 full-time employees and the Gondola Getaway of Long Beach. Its four full-time gondoliers and 17 part-timers offer romantic cruises through the canals of Naples Island.
As one would expect, both of Hughes' entrepreneurs had little time for the Democratic policies of Barack Obama. The gondolier "bristles" at his tax plan while the farmer dismisses his healthcare proposal as "a bureaucracy."
AIG FOLLOWS LEHMAN Monday, NBC's Lisa Myers and CBS' Bob Orr filed from Capitol Hill as the House kicked off hearings on the financial crisis. First up to be grilled were the former bosses of Lehman Brothers. Now Myers, again, and ABC's Brian Ross followed the second day, with Martin Sullivan and Robert Willumstad on the hot seat, two former bosses of American International Group, the now-nationalized insurance conglomerate. Myers and Ross both told us about the $440,000 week-long resort-and-spa retreat on the California coast that management enjoyed just days after taxpayers saved AIG from bankruptcy. And both told us about Joe Cassano. He "ran a high-risk AIG investment division in London and is blamed for most of the losses," as Ross put it. When Cassano was fired he was given a $34m bonus and a $1m per month consultant's fee. Ross noted that both Sullivan and Willumstad reassured investors about AIG's financial health despite auditors' warnings to the contrary: "That is the kind of thing that put the executives of Enron behind bars."
DO NOT PANIC High financial anxiety can cause stress in ordinary citizens. CBS' Ben Tracy and NBC's in-house physician Nancy Snyderman both suggested psychological coping mechanisms. Snyderman recommended taking a walk, getting some fresh air, talking things over and breathing smoothly to avoid hyperventilation. Tracy's experts told him: "Do not focus on the past. Be realistic about your current situation. Do not panic."
WORDS HURT "Honey"…"sweetie"…"good girl"…condescending endearments lavished on the elderly amount to a "grown-up version of baby talk," as CBS' Nancy Cordes put it. This type of presumption gets on the nerves of the anchor's father, Katie Couric herself told us, as Cordes concluded her report. It turns out that such words are worse than irritating; they are harmful. Cordes reported on research conducted by the School of Nursing at the University of Kansas. When caregivers infantilize nursing home patients by using demeaning intimacies, the patients are less likely to cooperate and their condition deteriorates.
WHAT A NERVE ENDING! Robert Bazell filed part two of Back Story, NBC's series on chronic back pain. Monday, the series cited the astonishing statistics that the annual medical bill for bad backs amounts to $90bn. Now Bazell tells us that most of that is spent on surgery--1m procedures a year averaging $60,000 each--even though "several large studies have shown that back surgery is often only marginally effective" and frequently no better than physical therapy.
HERE’S GAFFNEY Adrienne Gaffney has joined our happy band of news junkies who "watched last night night's newscasts...so you do not have to." Here are her observations on the same content Tyndall Report just monitored at Vanity Fair magazine's Culture & Celebrity blog.
Pick your metaphor. CBS' Anthony Mason imagined winter plumbing seeing the Fed's decision to buy commercial paper as "a blowtorch to thaw the frozen credit markets." NBC's Tom Costello chose disability, calling it "a dramatic step to get the paralyzed credit markets moving again." ABC's Betsy Stark mixed the timber industry with a game of football: it was a "major new offensive to break the logjam in the credit market" yet there "is no playbook for this unprecedented crisis. Policymakers are making it up as they go along."
Yet bad news kept coming anyway. On Wall Street, the bears continued triumphant. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 508 points to 9447. The Congressional Budge Office estimate that the face value of retirement accounts has taken a $2tr haircut over the past 15 months. The International Monetary Fund predicted a major global recession. And CNBC's Michelle Caruso-Cabrera reported from Luxembourg for NBC that European financial ministers failed to agree on a coordinated course of action: "What you are seeing is this global interconnected financial system really locking up."
TOWN HALL FORMAT FAVORS MCCAIN Republican John McCain approached the Nashville debate after four straight days of personal attacks on Barack Obama "for his association with an education professor who was once a violent '60s radical," as ABC's Jake Tapper (embargoed link) put it, referring to the Democrat's Chicago neighbor William Ayers. Tapper relayed the McCain campaign's defense of its tactics: "It is not negativity. It is truth telling." The action on the stump did seem a tad negative to NBC's Andrea Mitchell: McCain's "jibes about Obama have increasingly provoked ugly crowd responses."
Wyatt Andrews filed a Reality Check for CBS on the attacks on Obama by McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin. "He voted 94 times for higher taxes"--"misleading" Andrews judged. An ad accusing Obama of disparaging US military forces in Afghanistan uses an abbreviated soundbite "that is just part of what Obama said." When Palin called Ayers "an unrepentant domestic terrorist," Andrews described him as "once a Vietnam War protestor linked to several bombings" who today is "a professor of education."
So will McCain continue those attacks when answering the questions Tom Brokaw selects? His aides told NBC's Mitchell "he will not get personal." "It is tough to launch those kinds of personal attacks…in front of these uncommitted voters, who probably want to talk about issues that matter to them," opined ABC's George Stephanopoulos. On CBS, Bob Schieffer (no link) made the opposite prediction: "He is going to try to make this race a referendum on Obama and his character--and try to get the attention off the economy."
ABC's Tapper told us that the town hall format is "thought to favor McCain." "This is his favorite format," asserted Schieffer. Mitchell agreed. The format "is one McCain likes. Obama in contrast prefers speeches and big rallies."
FOCUS ON SMALL BUSINESS In their campaign features, all three newscasts simultaneously made the strange decision to make the nation's 27m small business owners the most prominent segment of the electorate. In anchor Charles Gibson's Battleground Bus Tour through Ohio on ABC, he sat down for a vox pop on the economy with an insurance agent, a maker of Murphy beds and the proprietor of a bowling alley before moving on to the students at Bowling Green State. For NBC's In Depth preview of the debate in smalltown Tennessee, Roger O'Neil brought us the views of a beautician, a bakery owner and a community banker. Meanwhile CBS' Where They Stand series with Sandra Hughes turned to the candidates' policies on taxes, the credit crunch and healthcare as they applied to small business. Her examples were a California strawberry farmer with 30 full-time employees and the Gondola Getaway of Long Beach. Its four full-time gondoliers and 17 part-timers offer romantic cruises through the canals of Naples Island.
As one would expect, both of Hughes' entrepreneurs had little time for the Democratic policies of Barack Obama. The gondolier "bristles" at his tax plan while the farmer dismisses his healthcare proposal as "a bureaucracy."
AIG FOLLOWS LEHMAN Monday, NBC's Lisa Myers and CBS' Bob Orr filed from Capitol Hill as the House kicked off hearings on the financial crisis. First up to be grilled were the former bosses of Lehman Brothers. Now Myers, again, and ABC's Brian Ross followed the second day, with Martin Sullivan and Robert Willumstad on the hot seat, two former bosses of American International Group, the now-nationalized insurance conglomerate. Myers and Ross both told us about the $440,000 week-long resort-and-spa retreat on the California coast that management enjoyed just days after taxpayers saved AIG from bankruptcy. And both told us about Joe Cassano. He "ran a high-risk AIG investment division in London and is blamed for most of the losses," as Ross put it. When Cassano was fired he was given a $34m bonus and a $1m per month consultant's fee. Ross noted that both Sullivan and Willumstad reassured investors about AIG's financial health despite auditors' warnings to the contrary: "That is the kind of thing that put the executives of Enron behind bars."
DO NOT PANIC High financial anxiety can cause stress in ordinary citizens. CBS' Ben Tracy and NBC's in-house physician Nancy Snyderman both suggested psychological coping mechanisms. Snyderman recommended taking a walk, getting some fresh air, talking things over and breathing smoothly to avoid hyperventilation. Tracy's experts told him: "Do not focus on the past. Be realistic about your current situation. Do not panic."
WORDS HURT "Honey"…"sweetie"…"good girl"…condescending endearments lavished on the elderly amount to a "grown-up version of baby talk," as CBS' Nancy Cordes put it. This type of presumption gets on the nerves of the anchor's father, Katie Couric herself told us, as Cordes concluded her report. It turns out that such words are worse than irritating; they are harmful. Cordes reported on research conducted by the School of Nursing at the University of Kansas. When caregivers infantilize nursing home patients by using demeaning intimacies, the patients are less likely to cooperate and their condition deteriorates.
WHAT A NERVE ENDING! Robert Bazell filed part two of Back Story, NBC's series on chronic back pain. Monday, the series cited the astonishing statistics that the annual medical bill for bad backs amounts to $90bn. Now Bazell tells us that most of that is spent on surgery--1m procedures a year averaging $60,000 each--even though "several large studies have shown that back surgery is often only marginally effective" and frequently no better than physical therapy.
HERE’S GAFFNEY Adrienne Gaffney has joined our happy band of news junkies who "watched last night night's newscasts...so you do not have to." Here are her observations on the same content Tyndall Report just monitored at Vanity Fair magazine's Culture & Celebrity blog.
