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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM OCTOBER 13, 2008
High finance continued to hog headlines. For the seventh straight weekday--every newscast since the Vice-Presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin--all three networks led with the global financial crisis. ABC chose the action on Wall Street after last week's relentless selling as the Dow Jones Industrial Average rebounded with its largest daily point gain ever, closing up 936 at 9387. At 11%, it was the index' biggest daily percentage gain since a dead cat bounce during the depths of the Great Depression. NBC and CBS both led with the Story of the Day: the Treasury Department decided to part-nationalize major commercial banks.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR OCTOBER 13, 2008: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
STOCK SPECULATORS WELCOME BANK NATIONALIZATION High finance continued to hog headlines. For the seventh straight weekday--every newscast since the Vice-Presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin--all three networks led with the global financial crisis. ABC chose the action on Wall Street after last week's relentless selling as the Dow Jones Industrial Average rebounded with its largest daily point gain ever, closing up 936 at 9387. At 11%, it was the index' biggest daily percentage gain since a dead cat bounce during the depths of the Great Depression. NBC and CBS both led with the Story of the Day: the Treasury Department decided to part-nationalize major commercial banks.
"A bit of an about-face here," NBC's Tom Costello understated, as a Republican administration decided that the United States should invest $250bn in part-ownership of the private banking sector. Only a few weeks ago, mused CBS' Anthony Mason "free market libertarians…would have screamed bloody murder at this." Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson summoned the bosses of Bank of America, JP Morgan, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley to Washington to tell them about the new arrangement. Infusing capital by buying stock "can be done in days," Mason explained, "far more quickly than buying up the banks' toxic mortgage loans, which will take weeks." ABC's David Muir consulted a panel of top economists as to the wisdom of the buyout. Each "emphasized that this will be a short-term boost but the banks will still have to clean up their books."
Paulson "follows the European lead," explained NBC's Costello as Germany and France both announced plans over the weekend to back their banks. From London, CBS' Mark Phillips pointed to Prime Minister Gordon Brown as the first politician to put his government into the banking business. Brown "has gone from being the man without a plan to the man whose plan everyone is now following." Phillips teased Brown with the ethnic stereotype of the dour Scot, "no one has ever accused him of unnecessary charisma" before crediting his "no-nonsense manner and a lot of money"--$63bn in nationalization funds--with producing the first break in the "cloud of doom that has enveloped London's financial center." Phillips, meanwhile, showed us literal London fog literally enveloping its banking center. When Paul Krugman of Princeton University and The New York Times was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics, NBC's Costello quoted the professor as praising the British Brown as acting "most decisively to save the world's financial system."
ABC's Betsy Stark was astonished at the reaction from traders on Wall Street to the European financial developments. She called the single day's rise in stock prices an "astounding about-face," sensing "euphoria as extreme as the despair we witnessed last week." She warned that bullishness can only last if the bailout works: "The key measure of that will be the credit markets. Do banks start lending again?" NBC anchor Brian Williams consulted Michelle Caruso-Cabrera from his network's sibling financial news cable channel. "Historically when you see explosive moves like we have seen it often means a bottom for the stock market," the CNBC anchor hypothesized, before warning that it "does not mean a bottom for the economy. We think the economy definitely gets worse from here."
SIX-FOR-SIX STUMP COVERAGE The economy was Barack Obama's chosen theme on the stump. The Democratic Presidential candidate was in Toledo Ohio where he unveiled a four-part proposal to address the non-financial problems of the economy at large. All three newscasts assigned a correspondent to his speech--ABC's Jake Tapper, CBS' Dean Reynolds, NBC's Lee Cowan (at the tail of the O'Donnell videostream)--and all three ticked off the talking points: a three-month moratorium on home foreclosures; federal aid to state and municipal governments; incentives to small business to increase hiring; and penalty-free access to retirement savings. "Obama has been criticized for standing on the sidelines while the economy was tanking," Reynolds reflected. "Today he jumped into the fray with his new plan and both feet."
Each of the three newscasts matched its Obama coverage with its correspondent in North Carolina with Republican John McCain. "The fact that McCain was campaigning in Virginia and North Carolina shows just what a tough spot he is in," ABC's Ron Claiborne observed. "These are Republican states that he is having to battle to hold on to." Battle was the operative word, as McCain "shifted his tone," according to NBC's Kelly O'Donnell, scaling back his negative attacks on Obama and casting himself in the role of the scrappy underdog. "I choose to fight," he exclaimed. O'Donnell calculated that "McCain used the word fight 18 times" in his speech. CBS' Chip Reid counted fight or fighter "nearly 20 times."
SARAH THE SCHLEPPER Comedian Sarah Silverman's campaign to rock the granny vote in the swing state of Florida by deploying legions of Jewish twentysomethings to descend on the condos of Boca to lobby their elderly relatives to vote for Barack Obama tickled Kelly Cobiella's funny bone at CBS. She found a granddaughter who had actually made the Great Schlep to visit grandma Dorothy in Brighton Beach: "Thousands signed up online and last weekend dozens of them crisscrossed the country armed with talking points." By mobilizing just dozens, the schlep apparently redounds more to the benefit of Silverman's comedy career than Obama's election prospects.
On the serious side, ABC News published its latest national opinion poll of the Presidential race--an unproductive exercise since the election is decided by the several states not the population at large--conducted with Washington Post. Still, George Stephanopoulos drew his lesson from Obama's 53%-43% lead in the popular vote over John McCain: "The fundamentals here are that the country wants change." President George Bush enjoys a lower approval rating even than Richard Nixon's at the depths of the Watergate crisis and the 90% of the population that the believes the country is on the wrong track also evokes Watergate woes: "That is a record going back to 1973."
GEORGETOWN DINNER PARTY NBC looked back to Presidential history with an Exclusive introduced by in-house historian Michael Beschloss. It was audiotape of then-senator John Kennedy in after dinner conversation in January 1960, just as he was preparing for the primary season of his victorious Presidential campaign against Richard Nixon. The tape has him chatting in his Georgetown townhouse with Benjamin Bradlee of Newsweek and another journalist, James Cannon. JFK anticipated an "interesting" campaign, a "checkerboard-chess struggle of the next seven months" and joked about lying to journalists about his ailing adrenal gland. Referring to his dark complexion, reporter Jack Anderson had asked him: "God, a guy with Addison's Disease looks sort of brown and everything." JFK replied: "Christ, that is the sun!"
FIRE SEASON The Santa Ana winds are whipping out of the California desert, as they do this time of year, spreading forest fires and attracting weather pornographers, as they do this time of year. "The wildfire began in an unpopulated national forest 20 miles north of downtown Los Angeles," NBC's Mark Mullen reported, and "quickly became an urban crisis." Some of the suburbs of the San Fernando Valley were evacuated as the Marek Fire jumped across an eight-lane freeway. ABC's Lisa Fletcher (embargoed link) showed us the scorched debris of an industrial park: "You can imagine how hot it must have been to just destroy these trucks." A homeless man had been on the scene and was burned to death. "Investigators say the original fire looks like arson," CBS' Bill Whitaker told us. "Arson plus one death makes this a murder scene."
MARKETING CHEWABLES The American Academy of Pediatrics attracted publicity from ABC's John McKenzie (embargoed link) and CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook for its boost to the multivitamin industry. The pediatricians are worried that children are using sunscreen so religiously to protect their skin from ultraviolet rays that they are suffering from Vitamin D deficiency as a result. The upshot is weakened bones and possible vulnerability to asthma, multiple sclerosis and diabetes. "Virtually every child should be on a daily D supplement," declared McKenzie. "Supplements are an easy remedy," was LaPook's prescription. The Flintstones must be delighted.
WIND FACTOR In August of 2007, ABC sent Neal Karlinsky to the Arctic Circle to make Kathy Parker its Person of the Week. She was the Floridian football fan who turned fundraiser to build an artificial turf playing field for the high school in Barrow on the Alaskan shores of the Arctic Ocean. For his pains, Karlinsky now returns to cover the Frozen Tundra Playoff, where the wind factor is the "ultimate home field advantage" for the Whalers. He pointed to a line of school buses along one sideline: "They have been parked close together to try to block the wind blowing in from the Arctic Ocean which is just on the other side of the street over there," Karlinsky shivered. "It is not working very well." Whalers win 46-18.
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.
"A bit of an about-face here," NBC's Tom Costello understated, as a Republican administration decided that the United States should invest $250bn in part-ownership of the private banking sector. Only a few weeks ago, mused CBS' Anthony Mason "free market libertarians…would have screamed bloody murder at this." Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson summoned the bosses of Bank of America, JP Morgan, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley to Washington to tell them about the new arrangement. Infusing capital by buying stock "can be done in days," Mason explained, "far more quickly than buying up the banks' toxic mortgage loans, which will take weeks." ABC's David Muir consulted a panel of top economists as to the wisdom of the buyout. Each "emphasized that this will be a short-term boost but the banks will still have to clean up their books."
Paulson "follows the European lead," explained NBC's Costello as Germany and France both announced plans over the weekend to back their banks. From London, CBS' Mark Phillips pointed to Prime Minister Gordon Brown as the first politician to put his government into the banking business. Brown "has gone from being the man without a plan to the man whose plan everyone is now following." Phillips teased Brown with the ethnic stereotype of the dour Scot, "no one has ever accused him of unnecessary charisma" before crediting his "no-nonsense manner and a lot of money"--$63bn in nationalization funds--with producing the first break in the "cloud of doom that has enveloped London's financial center." Phillips, meanwhile, showed us literal London fog literally enveloping its banking center. When Paul Krugman of Princeton University and The New York Times was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics, NBC's Costello quoted the professor as praising the British Brown as acting "most decisively to save the world's financial system."
ABC's Betsy Stark was astonished at the reaction from traders on Wall Street to the European financial developments. She called the single day's rise in stock prices an "astounding about-face," sensing "euphoria as extreme as the despair we witnessed last week." She warned that bullishness can only last if the bailout works: "The key measure of that will be the credit markets. Do banks start lending again?" NBC anchor Brian Williams consulted Michelle Caruso-Cabrera from his network's sibling financial news cable channel. "Historically when you see explosive moves like we have seen it often means a bottom for the stock market," the CNBC anchor hypothesized, before warning that it "does not mean a bottom for the economy. We think the economy definitely gets worse from here."
SIX-FOR-SIX STUMP COVERAGE The economy was Barack Obama's chosen theme on the stump. The Democratic Presidential candidate was in Toledo Ohio where he unveiled a four-part proposal to address the non-financial problems of the economy at large. All three newscasts assigned a correspondent to his speech--ABC's Jake Tapper, CBS' Dean Reynolds, NBC's Lee Cowan (at the tail of the O'Donnell videostream)--and all three ticked off the talking points: a three-month moratorium on home foreclosures; federal aid to state and municipal governments; incentives to small business to increase hiring; and penalty-free access to retirement savings. "Obama has been criticized for standing on the sidelines while the economy was tanking," Reynolds reflected. "Today he jumped into the fray with his new plan and both feet."
Each of the three newscasts matched its Obama coverage with its correspondent in North Carolina with Republican John McCain. "The fact that McCain was campaigning in Virginia and North Carolina shows just what a tough spot he is in," ABC's Ron Claiborne observed. "These are Republican states that he is having to battle to hold on to." Battle was the operative word, as McCain "shifted his tone," according to NBC's Kelly O'Donnell, scaling back his negative attacks on Obama and casting himself in the role of the scrappy underdog. "I choose to fight," he exclaimed. O'Donnell calculated that "McCain used the word fight 18 times" in his speech. CBS' Chip Reid counted fight or fighter "nearly 20 times."
SARAH THE SCHLEPPER Comedian Sarah Silverman's campaign to rock the granny vote in the swing state of Florida by deploying legions of Jewish twentysomethings to descend on the condos of Boca to lobby their elderly relatives to vote for Barack Obama tickled Kelly Cobiella's funny bone at CBS. She found a granddaughter who had actually made the Great Schlep to visit grandma Dorothy in Brighton Beach: "Thousands signed up online and last weekend dozens of them crisscrossed the country armed with talking points." By mobilizing just dozens, the schlep apparently redounds more to the benefit of Silverman's comedy career than Obama's election prospects.
On the serious side, ABC News published its latest national opinion poll of the Presidential race--an unproductive exercise since the election is decided by the several states not the population at large--conducted with Washington Post. Still, George Stephanopoulos drew his lesson from Obama's 53%-43% lead in the popular vote over John McCain: "The fundamentals here are that the country wants change." President George Bush enjoys a lower approval rating even than Richard Nixon's at the depths of the Watergate crisis and the 90% of the population that the believes the country is on the wrong track also evokes Watergate woes: "That is a record going back to 1973."
GEORGETOWN DINNER PARTY NBC looked back to Presidential history with an Exclusive introduced by in-house historian Michael Beschloss. It was audiotape of then-senator John Kennedy in after dinner conversation in January 1960, just as he was preparing for the primary season of his victorious Presidential campaign against Richard Nixon. The tape has him chatting in his Georgetown townhouse with Benjamin Bradlee of Newsweek and another journalist, James Cannon. JFK anticipated an "interesting" campaign, a "checkerboard-chess struggle of the next seven months" and joked about lying to journalists about his ailing adrenal gland. Referring to his dark complexion, reporter Jack Anderson had asked him: "God, a guy with Addison's Disease looks sort of brown and everything." JFK replied: "Christ, that is the sun!"
FIRE SEASON The Santa Ana winds are whipping out of the California desert, as they do this time of year, spreading forest fires and attracting weather pornographers, as they do this time of year. "The wildfire began in an unpopulated national forest 20 miles north of downtown Los Angeles," NBC's Mark Mullen reported, and "quickly became an urban crisis." Some of the suburbs of the San Fernando Valley were evacuated as the Marek Fire jumped across an eight-lane freeway. ABC's Lisa Fletcher (embargoed link) showed us the scorched debris of an industrial park: "You can imagine how hot it must have been to just destroy these trucks." A homeless man had been on the scene and was burned to death. "Investigators say the original fire looks like arson," CBS' Bill Whitaker told us. "Arson plus one death makes this a murder scene."
MARKETING CHEWABLES The American Academy of Pediatrics attracted publicity from ABC's John McKenzie (embargoed link) and CBS' in-house physician Jon LaPook for its boost to the multivitamin industry. The pediatricians are worried that children are using sunscreen so religiously to protect their skin from ultraviolet rays that they are suffering from Vitamin D deficiency as a result. The upshot is weakened bones and possible vulnerability to asthma, multiple sclerosis and diabetes. "Virtually every child should be on a daily D supplement," declared McKenzie. "Supplements are an easy remedy," was LaPook's prescription. The Flintstones must be delighted.
WIND FACTOR In August of 2007, ABC sent Neal Karlinsky to the Arctic Circle to make Kathy Parker its Person of the Week. She was the Floridian football fan who turned fundraiser to build an artificial turf playing field for the high school in Barrow on the Alaskan shores of the Arctic Ocean. For his pains, Karlinsky now returns to cover the Frozen Tundra Playoff, where the wind factor is the "ultimate home field advantage" for the Whalers. He pointed to a line of school buses along one sideline: "They have been parked close together to try to block the wind blowing in from the Arctic Ocean which is just on the other side of the street over there," Karlinsky shivered. "It is not working very well." Whalers win 46-18.
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.
