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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM OCTOBER 1, 2008
Since the Republican Convention ended in the first week of September, a pair of storylines have slugged it out for ownership of the news agenda. Which is more newsworthy? The crisis in financial capitalism? Or the Campaign '08 countdown to Election Day. Of the three network newscasts through the end of September (weekdays from Friday 5th through Tuesday 30th), CBS (153 min v ABC 80, NBC 100) has opted for politics while ABC (94 min v CBS 71, NBC 84) has focused on finance. So it was again Wednesday, when the financial story qualified as Story of the Day once more, for the ninth straight weekday. ABC and NBC both led from Capitol Hill, where the Senate closed in on a vote on the Treasury Department's $700bn bailout plan; CBS led with the election, kicking off with its own national opinion poll, conducted with The New York Times, that found Barack Obama in a commanding lead in the popular vote (49% v 40%) over John McCain.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR OCTOBER 1, 2008: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
ABC CHOOSES FINANCE; CBS PICKS POLITICS Since the Republican Convention ended in the first week of September, a pair of storylines have slugged it out for ownership of the news agenda. Which is more newsworthy? The crisis in financial capitalism? Or the Campaign '08 countdown to Election Day. Of the three network newscasts through the end of September (weekdays from Friday 5th through Tuesday 30th), CBS (153 min v ABC 80, NBC 100) has opted for politics while ABC (94 min v CBS 71, NBC 84) has focused on finance. So it was again Wednesday, when the financial story qualified as Story of the Day once more, for the ninth straight weekday. ABC and NBC both led from Capitol Hill, where the Senate closed in on a vote on the Treasury Department's $700bn bailout plan; CBS led with the election, kicking off with its own national opinion poll, conducted with The New York Times, that found Barack Obama in a commanding lead in the popular vote (49% v 40%) over John McCain.
The vote was highlighted by the appearance of two senators who have become strangers to the halls of Congress. Both Barack Obama and John McCain left the campaign trail to return to their day jobs to cast a vote in support of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's bill. "The candidates find themselves in a vastly different political place than they were just five days ago," when they last met, noted ABC's John Berman, referring to Friday's debate in Mississippi.
Berman's colleague Jake Tapper listed the Senate amendments to the bailout package since its defeat in the House on Monday, "additions that Senate leaders hope will attract more support--not just here in the Senate where the bill is expected to pass--but in the House." The add-ons consisted of a package of tax breaks to make it "now more attractive to conservatives," meaning Republican ones, since they "make the bill less palatable to some fiscally conservative Democrats because the tax cuts are not paid for."
CBS' Bob Orr speculated that economic events since Monday--"shaky markets and persistent warnings that Wall Street's woes could soon cost Main Street jobs"--might be a bigger persuader for opponents of the package than the amendments. "Lawmakers have been getting an earful from their voters back home who say they have lost money this week in their 401(k)s and their pension funds and their 529s," NBC's Tom Costello commented, "and they are worried."
WHISTLING PAST THE GRAVEYARD How bad is the credit crunch? Bad enough that General Electric went cap in hand to billionaire Warren Buffett to sell him a $3bn stake in order to raise capital. General Electric, let's remember, is Brian Williams' boss at NBC. The anchor brought in his fellow GEer Michelle Caruso-Cabrera from the cable news channel CNBC to cheer him up. She called GE "one of the more respected, biggest, strongest companies in the world" yet even it "needed to raise money." Here is Caruso-Cabrera's best effort: Buffett, "the savviest investor in the world, believes that this is a good company and will be around for the long haul." Williams smiled: "Ah! Ending on a good note! I see what you are doing."
TRACING THE TIGHTENING OF CREDIT ABC's Betsy Stark pointed to Wall Street where the indexes remained practically unchanged and warned: "If you were watching the stock market today you might have been lulled into a false sense of calm." She pointed instead to plummeting sales at auto dealerships where customers cannot get a loan and hundreds of college campuses struggling to meet payroll. On CBS, Cynthia Bowers looked at the suddenly sky-high interest rates municipalities have to pay on bonds. If Birmingham Ala cannot find an $83m payment for its sewer system, its government goes bankrupt. NBC's Roger O'Neil warned that "local budgets are beginning to mimic the national financial crisis" as property tax revenues decline and municipal services are shaved. Potholes go unrepaired. Grass goes unmown. Burned out street lights are allowed to go unreplaced. Police precincts and firehouses go dark.
COUNTING THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE Meanwhile back on the campaign trail, CBS had Nancy Cordes lead off its newscast with its own national opinion poll, even though we all know that Presidential elections are decided state-by-state in the Electoral College. So CBS followed up with a computer simulation for Jeff Greenfield that applied a conservative 5% Barack Obama lead (the networks' national poll had the gap at 9%) to its model of the states. Greenfield announced that Obama's current lead amounts to 302-236 in the college, even without assigning him an edge in the statistically tied states of Florida, Ohio and Indiana. McCain has less than two weeks to redress his deficit, CBS' Greenfield suggested: "History says that by mid-October preferences tend to be locked into place," before he second-guessed history, "but this is a year when, I think, you have to throw out all the other historical models." Greenfield did not say why.
ABC's George Stephanopoulos, too, calculated that Obama's current status accounted for at least 270 Electoral College votes. He counted three recent successes for the Democrat: a "steadier hand" in the fiscal crisis; a win in last week's debate; and Sarah Palin turning into "a bit of a drag" on John McCain's popularity.
MODERATOR IFILL IS AUTHOR TOO The Vice-Presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden takes place in St Louis Thursday night. NBC had Andrea Mitchell file a preview and Ron Allen return to Biden's hometown of Scranton, where he is working an solidifying white work class support for the Democratic ticket in Pennsylvania. Mitchell called Biden "experienced and talkative--critics say too talkative" while she quoted Palin's "fumbling" answer to CBS anchor Katie Couric Tuesday on her favorite newspaper and magazine titles: "All of them…any of them that have been in front of me over all these years."
Mitchell did point out that Palin had more than two dozen debates during her successful run for Governor of Alaska "often scoring points with her personality." She then turned to Breakthrough: Politics & Race in the Age of Obama. That is the title of a book being written by PBS' Gwen Ifill, the journalist selected to moderate the Veeps' gabfest. Does Ifill's desire for successful book sales next January mean that she has a personal financial interest in an Obama victory in November? "Ifill's colleagues and the McCain campaign say she is a respected professional," Mitchell insisted.
All Tyndall Report readers are encouraged to rate Ifill's performance during the debate on our Citizen's Media Scorecard hosted by freepress.net. We attracted a panel of almost 5,000 for last Friday's debate. We need as many volunteers as possible, especially Republicans, so please forward this link to everyone, especially GOP partisans.
PALIN ON THE WISDOM OF THE PEOPLE CBS anchor Katie Couric filed her own preview to the St Louis debate with a couple of Vice-Presidential Questions contrasting the answers of Joe Biden and Sarah Palin to questions on abortion rights and the separation of church and state. "I think the liberty clause of the 14th Amendment offers a right to privacy. Now that is one of the big debates I have with my conservative scholar friends," insisted Biden. He will not be having that debate with Palin, apparently. "Do you think there is an inherent right to privacy in the Constitution?" "I do. Yes, I do."
Couric's second question allowed Gov Palin to display, once more, the unique sentence structure of her rhetorical style: Thomas Jefferson's intention in expressing a separation "was so government did not mandate a religion on the people and Thomas Jefferson also said 'Never underestimate the wisdom of the people' and the wisdom of the people, I think, in this issue, is that people have the right, and the ability, and the desire, to express their own religious views, be it on a very personal level--which is where I choose to express my faith--or in a more public forum, and the wisdom of the people, thankfully ingrained in the foundation of our country, is so extremely important and Thomas Jefferson wanted to protect that."
ELSEWHERE… Both NBC and ABC filed from their Los Angeles bureaus on a hiker's discovery near Mammoth Lakes in the Sierra Nevada. Preston Murrow came across some crumpled $100 bills and some weathered pieces of aviator's identification. ABC's Lisa Fletcher and NBC's John Larson concluded that this was probably the 13-month-old crash site of missing millionaire aviator Steve Fossett…ABC's Jeffrey Kofman landed the plumb assignment of a trip to the Galapagos Islands now UNESCO has named them an endangered World Heritage Site. So many ecotourists follow in Charles Darwin's footsteps that the unique environment is becoming degraded. Kofman hardly helped that cause by showing us the giant tortoises and blue-footed boobies and specialized finch species. His report served as irresistible tourist advertising…And ABC's closer warmed the heart of anchor Charles Gibson, a Chicagoan for the first dozen years of his life. Both the Cubs and the White Sox have qualified for baseball's post-season but no one there is allowed to wish both teams well, noted Chris Bury: "Neutrality is for Switzerland! This is Chicago!"
The vote was highlighted by the appearance of two senators who have become strangers to the halls of Congress. Both Barack Obama and John McCain left the campaign trail to return to their day jobs to cast a vote in support of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's bill. "The candidates find themselves in a vastly different political place than they were just five days ago," when they last met, noted ABC's John Berman, referring to Friday's debate in Mississippi.
Berman's colleague Jake Tapper listed the Senate amendments to the bailout package since its defeat in the House on Monday, "additions that Senate leaders hope will attract more support--not just here in the Senate where the bill is expected to pass--but in the House." The add-ons consisted of a package of tax breaks to make it "now more attractive to conservatives," meaning Republican ones, since they "make the bill less palatable to some fiscally conservative Democrats because the tax cuts are not paid for."
CBS' Bob Orr speculated that economic events since Monday--"shaky markets and persistent warnings that Wall Street's woes could soon cost Main Street jobs"--might be a bigger persuader for opponents of the package than the amendments. "Lawmakers have been getting an earful from their voters back home who say they have lost money this week in their 401(k)s and their pension funds and their 529s," NBC's Tom Costello commented, "and they are worried."
WHISTLING PAST THE GRAVEYARD How bad is the credit crunch? Bad enough that General Electric went cap in hand to billionaire Warren Buffett to sell him a $3bn stake in order to raise capital. General Electric, let's remember, is Brian Williams' boss at NBC. The anchor brought in his fellow GEer Michelle Caruso-Cabrera from the cable news channel CNBC to cheer him up. She called GE "one of the more respected, biggest, strongest companies in the world" yet even it "needed to raise money." Here is Caruso-Cabrera's best effort: Buffett, "the savviest investor in the world, believes that this is a good company and will be around for the long haul." Williams smiled: "Ah! Ending on a good note! I see what you are doing."
TRACING THE TIGHTENING OF CREDIT ABC's Betsy Stark pointed to Wall Street where the indexes remained practically unchanged and warned: "If you were watching the stock market today you might have been lulled into a false sense of calm." She pointed instead to plummeting sales at auto dealerships where customers cannot get a loan and hundreds of college campuses struggling to meet payroll. On CBS, Cynthia Bowers looked at the suddenly sky-high interest rates municipalities have to pay on bonds. If Birmingham Ala cannot find an $83m payment for its sewer system, its government goes bankrupt. NBC's Roger O'Neil warned that "local budgets are beginning to mimic the national financial crisis" as property tax revenues decline and municipal services are shaved. Potholes go unrepaired. Grass goes unmown. Burned out street lights are allowed to go unreplaced. Police precincts and firehouses go dark.
COUNTING THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE Meanwhile back on the campaign trail, CBS had Nancy Cordes lead off its newscast with its own national opinion poll, even though we all know that Presidential elections are decided state-by-state in the Electoral College. So CBS followed up with a computer simulation for Jeff Greenfield that applied a conservative 5% Barack Obama lead (the networks' national poll had the gap at 9%) to its model of the states. Greenfield announced that Obama's current lead amounts to 302-236 in the college, even without assigning him an edge in the statistically tied states of Florida, Ohio and Indiana. McCain has less than two weeks to redress his deficit, CBS' Greenfield suggested: "History says that by mid-October preferences tend to be locked into place," before he second-guessed history, "but this is a year when, I think, you have to throw out all the other historical models." Greenfield did not say why.
ABC's George Stephanopoulos, too, calculated that Obama's current status accounted for at least 270 Electoral College votes. He counted three recent successes for the Democrat: a "steadier hand" in the fiscal crisis; a win in last week's debate; and Sarah Palin turning into "a bit of a drag" on John McCain's popularity.
MODERATOR IFILL IS AUTHOR TOO The Vice-Presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden takes place in St Louis Thursday night. NBC had Andrea Mitchell file a preview and Ron Allen return to Biden's hometown of Scranton, where he is working an solidifying white work class support for the Democratic ticket in Pennsylvania. Mitchell called Biden "experienced and talkative--critics say too talkative" while she quoted Palin's "fumbling" answer to CBS anchor Katie Couric Tuesday on her favorite newspaper and magazine titles: "All of them…any of them that have been in front of me over all these years."
Mitchell did point out that Palin had more than two dozen debates during her successful run for Governor of Alaska "often scoring points with her personality." She then turned to Breakthrough: Politics & Race in the Age of Obama. That is the title of a book being written by PBS' Gwen Ifill, the journalist selected to moderate the Veeps' gabfest. Does Ifill's desire for successful book sales next January mean that she has a personal financial interest in an Obama victory in November? "Ifill's colleagues and the McCain campaign say she is a respected professional," Mitchell insisted.
All Tyndall Report readers are encouraged to rate Ifill's performance during the debate on our Citizen's Media Scorecard hosted by freepress.net. We attracted a panel of almost 5,000 for last Friday's debate. We need as many volunteers as possible, especially Republicans, so please forward this link to everyone, especially GOP partisans.
PALIN ON THE WISDOM OF THE PEOPLE CBS anchor Katie Couric filed her own preview to the St Louis debate with a couple of Vice-Presidential Questions contrasting the answers of Joe Biden and Sarah Palin to questions on abortion rights and the separation of church and state. "I think the liberty clause of the 14th Amendment offers a right to privacy. Now that is one of the big debates I have with my conservative scholar friends," insisted Biden. He will not be having that debate with Palin, apparently. "Do you think there is an inherent right to privacy in the Constitution?" "I do. Yes, I do."
Couric's second question allowed Gov Palin to display, once more, the unique sentence structure of her rhetorical style: Thomas Jefferson's intention in expressing a separation "was so government did not mandate a religion on the people and Thomas Jefferson also said 'Never underestimate the wisdom of the people' and the wisdom of the people, I think, in this issue, is that people have the right, and the ability, and the desire, to express their own religious views, be it on a very personal level--which is where I choose to express my faith--or in a more public forum, and the wisdom of the people, thankfully ingrained in the foundation of our country, is so extremely important and Thomas Jefferson wanted to protect that."
ELSEWHERE… Both NBC and ABC filed from their Los Angeles bureaus on a hiker's discovery near Mammoth Lakes in the Sierra Nevada. Preston Murrow came across some crumpled $100 bills and some weathered pieces of aviator's identification. ABC's Lisa Fletcher and NBC's John Larson concluded that this was probably the 13-month-old crash site of missing millionaire aviator Steve Fossett…ABC's Jeffrey Kofman landed the plumb assignment of a trip to the Galapagos Islands now UNESCO has named them an endangered World Heritage Site. So many ecotourists follow in Charles Darwin's footsteps that the unique environment is becoming degraded. Kofman hardly helped that cause by showing us the giant tortoises and blue-footed boobies and specialized finch species. His report served as irresistible tourist advertising…And ABC's closer warmed the heart of anchor Charles Gibson, a Chicagoan for the first dozen years of his life. Both the Cubs and the White Sox have qualified for baseball's post-season but no one there is allowed to wish both teams well, noted Chris Bury: "Neutrality is for Switzerland! This is Chicago!"
