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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM OCTOBER 6, 2008
The world's bourses sold stocks from Indonesia to Russia, from France to Brazil. The ripple effect culminated on Wall Street where the Dow Jones Industrial Average reentered four-digit territory--closing down 369 at 9955--for the first time in four years. The continuing bear market was the lead item on all three newscasts and the Story of the Day. ABC, which covered high finance most heavily (97 min v CBS 64, NBC 88) during the month of September and spent least time on Campaign '08 (123 min v CBS 199, NBC 139), set out to redress its shortfall. Anchor Charles Gibson kicked off his Battleground Bus Tour from Dayton, where he gauged the mood in the swing state of Ohio.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR OCTOBER 6, 2008: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
STOCKS HAVE FLATLINED SO FAR THIS CENTURY The world's bourses sold stocks from Indonesia to Russia, from France to Brazil. The ripple effect culminated on Wall Street where the Dow Jones Industrial Average reentered four-digit territory--closing down 369 at 9955--for the first time in four years. The continuing bear market was the lead item on all three newscasts and the Story of the Day. ABC, which covered high finance most heavily (97 min v CBS 64, NBC 88) during the month of September and spent least time on Campaign '08 (123 min v CBS 199, NBC 139), set out to redress its shortfall. Anchor Charles Gibson kicked off his Battleground Bus Tour from Dayton, where he gauged the mood in the swing state of Ohio.
"Stomach churning is the operative word," declared CNBC's Carl Quintanilla as he surveyed the market action for NBC. He used his cable channel's resources to guide us round the globe. Ian Williams filed from India on the selloff in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Korea. The Indonesian market had "its worst one day drop ever." Next we heard from Yonatan Pomerenze in Moscow, where the Russian market suffered its "biggest one day drop ever." On to Anna Martin in England. She told us about London and Frankfurt, but unlike CBS' Richard Roth, omitted the detail that the fall in Paris "was the worst ever."
"The headline is: It Could Have Been a Lot Worse," was the gallows humor from ABC's Betsy Stark, who pointed out that the DJIA swooned by more than 800 points before rebounding. "It may amaze you to hear that it was just a year ago, almost to the day that the DJIA hit its all time high, closing above 14000. Now 4200 points, almost 30% of its value has disappeared." On NBC, Quintanilla used a clip of former anchor Tom Brokaw's Nightly News from 1999 to make his point. Brokaw was announcing the DJIA breaking through the 10,000 barrier. "A decade's worth of gains are now officially erased," Quintanilla calculated.
In the face of the statistic that there have been zero gains so far this century from invested capital on Wall Street, ABC's David Muir was quite the intrepid reporter when he repeated the buying advice from Kiplinger's Personal Finance that "now just might be the time to start eyeing those strong companies." CNBC's Quintanilla chose the opposite option, quoting his colleague Jim Cramer, host of Mad Money, who was "clearly rattled" on NBC's Today: "Whatever money you may need for the next five years, please take it out of the stock market right now, this week."
Both CNBC's Quintanilla and CBS' Anthony Mason found the "silver lining" that the global economy is slowing down so precipitously that crude oil prices are plummeting. A barrel now costs less than $88. Mason added that the Federal Reserve Board is expected "to step in with an emergency rate cut some time soon."
WERE GAINS ILL GOTTEN? NBC's Lisa Myers and CBS' Bob Orr both turned to Capitol Hill where the financial crisis was the topic of House hearings. Millionaire Richard Fuld, onetime chief executive of the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers brokerage house, was the "target of frustration," as Orr put it. Myers listed the homes Fuld has bought with his $340m in income over 14 years as Lehman's boss: a $21m apartment building in New York City, an $8m estate in Connecticut, a $13m property in Florida. She reported that the FBI is now investigating whether Lehman executives illegally misled the public, given that just five days after the firm issued the public statement that "our capital position at the moment is strong" they went broke.
WILLIAM AYERS ANSWERED BY KEATING FIVE On the campaign trail, both ABC's Ron Claiborne (embargoed link) and CBS' Dean Reynolds were in New Mexico to listen to Republican John McCain's latest tactics against Democrat Barack Obama. Claiborne called it "by far" McCain's "fiercest, most sustained, harshest attack" on his rival. Reynolds tarred the two candidates with the same brush, saying they both "downshifted from policy to personality" before conceding that it was "the trailing Republican ticket making the first move." The downshift in response by Obama that Reynolds was referring to was his campaign's release of a 13-minute online minidocumentary rehashing McCain's membership of the Keating Five during the Savings & Loan scandal of the late '80s. An Senate Ethics Committee investigation found that McCain "used poor judgment" but did "nothing improper," Claiborne reminded us.
It was not clear what precisely McCain was driving at with his insinuations. "For a guy who has already authored two memoirs he is not exactly an open book" and "Whatever the question, whatever the issue, there is always a back story with Sen Obama." Reynolds cited a new McCain ad that "packs the words 'dangerous,' 'dishonorable,' 'liberal' and 'risky' into just 30 seconds." Both correspondents turned to Sarah Palin, McCain's running mate, for specifics. Obama is "imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists," she alleged. Reynolds corrected her use of the plural: "She is actually referring to one person," he noted, William Ayers "a university professor and a neighbor." They are "acquaintances not pals," mutual friends told Reynolds. Ayers is "the founder of the Weather Underground, which carried out anti-government bombings in the late '60s, when Obama was eight years old."
PIVOT FROM POLICY TO PERSONAL NBC News released a new poll with The Wall Street Journal, whose results Andrea Mitchell cited to account for McCain's pivot from policy to personal. Voters' perceptions that the country is headed in the wrong direction are "the worst numbers in 40 years of polling," she noted, and McCain gets lower marks than Obama on economic issues. CBS' Jeff Greenfield noted how "remarkably candid" the McCain campaign is: "We have got to change the topic from the economy to raise doubts about Obama or we lose," was how Greenfield quoted advisors. "In the past it has worked," Greenfield added, citing GOP victories over Al Gore, John Kerry and Michael Dukakis. Each relied on "pounding away about character, judgment and values," in the words of Godfather Republican Karl Rove.
NBC political director Chuck Todd looked at the details of his network's poll to conclude that Obama and Joe Biden did a better job than the Republican ticket in the first two debates and that Palin "has made no progress" in persuading voters that she is qualified to be Vice President--50% say she is not. ABC's George Stephanopoulos checked out the Electoral College map and found Obama with a "clear lead" in enough states to bring him to 264 of the 270 votes he needs. He can achieve victory by adding just one of eight swing states--Nev, Colo, Mo, Ind, Ohio, Va, NC, Fla--to his column. If this contest turns into a "state by state war of attrition," judged Stephanopoulos, McCain "cannot win."
BUS TOUR & JUSTICES CBS has been the network that has concentrated on campaign features this fall. It took a day off. NBC had Pete Williams file a Where They Stand summary of the two candidates' platforms on selecting a Supreme Court nominee. ABC began its weeklong Battleground Bus Tour of midwestern swing states in Dayton. "No Republican, not one, has ever won the Presidency without winning Ohio," anchor Charles Gibson pointed out, accounting for John McCain's 30 visits to the state and Barack Obama's 23 since each clinched his party's nomination. How important is the collapse of the employment base to these rustbelt voters? Listen to John Heitman, professor at the University of Dayton: "Before World War II, 100,000 of 200,000 people who lived in the city of Dayton were directly tied to the economic fortunes of General Motors." Now that GM has closed its last Dayton factory, an SUV plant, its presence consists of "a handful of minor suppliers."
As for those Justices, NBC's Williams reckoned that Obama's nominees would likely "hold the Court's current line" while a McCain Presidency would "shift the Court decidedly to the right." Williams reeled off a quartet of rulings that would change were a McCain Justice to join the bench: gun control, affirmative action, the role of religion in the public square and abortion.
CHECKING FOR TYPOS No Match No Vote is the name of the law in Florida designed to prevent fraud at the ballot box. It insists that newly registered voters must include a driver's license or a Social Security number that matches an identity in a state or federal database. The problem is that the matching software rejects would-be voters for such non-fraudulent reasons as a name variation or a simple typo. CBS' Kelly Cobiella told us that the state has seen 228,000 new registrations in September alone, a volume that the is unlikely to be checked by Election Day. "Observers worry that one mistyped number could disqualify a ballot."
UNINTELLIGENT SPINE DESIGN Got an aching back? Blame evolution, suggested Robert Bazell as he kicked off NBC's Back Story series. He crawled around a barnyard with pigs to illustrate skeletal anatomy. Backs "are designed for creatures with four legs." Stand upright like a human being and the shock absorber disks between the vertebrae are subjected to stress and strain that evolution has not prepared us for. Bazell argued that it has only been in the last 300 years or so that humans have expected to live past 45. So babyboomers with aching backs are suffering the consequences of living beyond their disks' due date.
THE BIRDS FROM IPANEMA Cute animal pictures are usually the most eyecatching way of filing a warning feature about the potential hazards of global warming. NBC's Miami based Kerry Sanders narrated just such footage from the International Fund for Animal Welfare to illustrate the collapse of the Benguela Current in the southern Atlantic Ocean, a shift that might be the consequence of climate change. In normal ocean conditions, the collision of the warm Benguela from Africa with the cold northwards Falklands Current along the coast of Patagonia signals to flocks of Magellanic penguins that they have reached their northern limits. Not so this year. The cold weather birds found themselves swimming another 2,000 miles farther north and landed, half dead, on the tropical beaches of Rio de Janeiro.
WELCOME ADRIENNE 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.
HEADING FOR NASHVILLE’S TOWN HALL Rate the Debate again as Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama meet in Nashville in primetime on Tuesday in a town hall format. Former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw is the moderator. Tyndall Report has again teamed up with freepress.net to host a Citizen's Media Scorecard (log in here). Here are the scorecard's results from the first Presidential debate in Mississippi with PBS' Jim Lehrer and from the Vice-Presidential debate in St Louis with PBS' Gwen Ifill. Rate the Debates has its own promotional video posted on YouTube and here are some of my reflections on the perceptions of liberal media bias in Joe Biden's confrontation with Sarah Palin. Remember our panel needs more McCain supporters, so circulate this alert to as many Republicans as possible. And do not forget to log on once the debate is finished to fill in the scorecard yourself.
"Stomach churning is the operative word," declared CNBC's Carl Quintanilla as he surveyed the market action for NBC. He used his cable channel's resources to guide us round the globe. Ian Williams filed from India on the selloff in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Korea. The Indonesian market had "its worst one day drop ever." Next we heard from Yonatan Pomerenze in Moscow, where the Russian market suffered its "biggest one day drop ever." On to Anna Martin in England. She told us about London and Frankfurt, but unlike CBS' Richard Roth, omitted the detail that the fall in Paris "was the worst ever."
"The headline is: It Could Have Been a Lot Worse," was the gallows humor from ABC's Betsy Stark, who pointed out that the DJIA swooned by more than 800 points before rebounding. "It may amaze you to hear that it was just a year ago, almost to the day that the DJIA hit its all time high, closing above 14000. Now 4200 points, almost 30% of its value has disappeared." On NBC, Quintanilla used a clip of former anchor Tom Brokaw's Nightly News from 1999 to make his point. Brokaw was announcing the DJIA breaking through the 10,000 barrier. "A decade's worth of gains are now officially erased," Quintanilla calculated.
In the face of the statistic that there have been zero gains so far this century from invested capital on Wall Street, ABC's David Muir was quite the intrepid reporter when he repeated the buying advice from Kiplinger's Personal Finance that "now just might be the time to start eyeing those strong companies." CNBC's Quintanilla chose the opposite option, quoting his colleague Jim Cramer, host of Mad Money, who was "clearly rattled" on NBC's Today: "Whatever money you may need for the next five years, please take it out of the stock market right now, this week."
Both CNBC's Quintanilla and CBS' Anthony Mason found the "silver lining" that the global economy is slowing down so precipitously that crude oil prices are plummeting. A barrel now costs less than $88. Mason added that the Federal Reserve Board is expected "to step in with an emergency rate cut some time soon."
WERE GAINS ILL GOTTEN? NBC's Lisa Myers and CBS' Bob Orr both turned to Capitol Hill where the financial crisis was the topic of House hearings. Millionaire Richard Fuld, onetime chief executive of the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers brokerage house, was the "target of frustration," as Orr put it. Myers listed the homes Fuld has bought with his $340m in income over 14 years as Lehman's boss: a $21m apartment building in New York City, an $8m estate in Connecticut, a $13m property in Florida. She reported that the FBI is now investigating whether Lehman executives illegally misled the public, given that just five days after the firm issued the public statement that "our capital position at the moment is strong" they went broke.
WILLIAM AYERS ANSWERED BY KEATING FIVE On the campaign trail, both ABC's Ron Claiborne (embargoed link) and CBS' Dean Reynolds were in New Mexico to listen to Republican John McCain's latest tactics against Democrat Barack Obama. Claiborne called it "by far" McCain's "fiercest, most sustained, harshest attack" on his rival. Reynolds tarred the two candidates with the same brush, saying they both "downshifted from policy to personality" before conceding that it was "the trailing Republican ticket making the first move." The downshift in response by Obama that Reynolds was referring to was his campaign's release of a 13-minute online minidocumentary rehashing McCain's membership of the Keating Five during the Savings & Loan scandal of the late '80s. An Senate Ethics Committee investigation found that McCain "used poor judgment" but did "nothing improper," Claiborne reminded us.
It was not clear what precisely McCain was driving at with his insinuations. "For a guy who has already authored two memoirs he is not exactly an open book" and "Whatever the question, whatever the issue, there is always a back story with Sen Obama." Reynolds cited a new McCain ad that "packs the words 'dangerous,' 'dishonorable,' 'liberal' and 'risky' into just 30 seconds." Both correspondents turned to Sarah Palin, McCain's running mate, for specifics. Obama is "imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists," she alleged. Reynolds corrected her use of the plural: "She is actually referring to one person," he noted, William Ayers "a university professor and a neighbor." They are "acquaintances not pals," mutual friends told Reynolds. Ayers is "the founder of the Weather Underground, which carried out anti-government bombings in the late '60s, when Obama was eight years old."
PIVOT FROM POLICY TO PERSONAL NBC News released a new poll with The Wall Street Journal, whose results Andrea Mitchell cited to account for McCain's pivot from policy to personal. Voters' perceptions that the country is headed in the wrong direction are "the worst numbers in 40 years of polling," she noted, and McCain gets lower marks than Obama on economic issues. CBS' Jeff Greenfield noted how "remarkably candid" the McCain campaign is: "We have got to change the topic from the economy to raise doubts about Obama or we lose," was how Greenfield quoted advisors. "In the past it has worked," Greenfield added, citing GOP victories over Al Gore, John Kerry and Michael Dukakis. Each relied on "pounding away about character, judgment and values," in the words of Godfather Republican Karl Rove.
NBC political director Chuck Todd looked at the details of his network's poll to conclude that Obama and Joe Biden did a better job than the Republican ticket in the first two debates and that Palin "has made no progress" in persuading voters that she is qualified to be Vice President--50% say she is not. ABC's George Stephanopoulos checked out the Electoral College map and found Obama with a "clear lead" in enough states to bring him to 264 of the 270 votes he needs. He can achieve victory by adding just one of eight swing states--Nev, Colo, Mo, Ind, Ohio, Va, NC, Fla--to his column. If this contest turns into a "state by state war of attrition," judged Stephanopoulos, McCain "cannot win."
BUS TOUR & JUSTICES CBS has been the network that has concentrated on campaign features this fall. It took a day off. NBC had Pete Williams file a Where They Stand summary of the two candidates' platforms on selecting a Supreme Court nominee. ABC began its weeklong Battleground Bus Tour of midwestern swing states in Dayton. "No Republican, not one, has ever won the Presidency without winning Ohio," anchor Charles Gibson pointed out, accounting for John McCain's 30 visits to the state and Barack Obama's 23 since each clinched his party's nomination. How important is the collapse of the employment base to these rustbelt voters? Listen to John Heitman, professor at the University of Dayton: "Before World War II, 100,000 of 200,000 people who lived in the city of Dayton were directly tied to the economic fortunes of General Motors." Now that GM has closed its last Dayton factory, an SUV plant, its presence consists of "a handful of minor suppliers."
As for those Justices, NBC's Williams reckoned that Obama's nominees would likely "hold the Court's current line" while a McCain Presidency would "shift the Court decidedly to the right." Williams reeled off a quartet of rulings that would change were a McCain Justice to join the bench: gun control, affirmative action, the role of religion in the public square and abortion.
CHECKING FOR TYPOS No Match No Vote is the name of the law in Florida designed to prevent fraud at the ballot box. It insists that newly registered voters must include a driver's license or a Social Security number that matches an identity in a state or federal database. The problem is that the matching software rejects would-be voters for such non-fraudulent reasons as a name variation or a simple typo. CBS' Kelly Cobiella told us that the state has seen 228,000 new registrations in September alone, a volume that the is unlikely to be checked by Election Day. "Observers worry that one mistyped number could disqualify a ballot."
UNINTELLIGENT SPINE DESIGN Got an aching back? Blame evolution, suggested Robert Bazell as he kicked off NBC's Back Story series. He crawled around a barnyard with pigs to illustrate skeletal anatomy. Backs "are designed for creatures with four legs." Stand upright like a human being and the shock absorber disks between the vertebrae are subjected to stress and strain that evolution has not prepared us for. Bazell argued that it has only been in the last 300 years or so that humans have expected to live past 45. So babyboomers with aching backs are suffering the consequences of living beyond their disks' due date.
THE BIRDS FROM IPANEMA Cute animal pictures are usually the most eyecatching way of filing a warning feature about the potential hazards of global warming. NBC's Miami based Kerry Sanders narrated just such footage from the International Fund for Animal Welfare to illustrate the collapse of the Benguela Current in the southern Atlantic Ocean, a shift that might be the consequence of climate change. In normal ocean conditions, the collision of the warm Benguela from Africa with the cold northwards Falklands Current along the coast of Patagonia signals to flocks of Magellanic penguins that they have reached their northern limits. Not so this year. The cold weather birds found themselves swimming another 2,000 miles farther north and landed, half dead, on the tropical beaches of Rio de Janeiro.
WELCOME ADRIENNE 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.
HEADING FOR NASHVILLE’S TOWN HALL Rate the Debate again as Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama meet in Nashville in primetime on Tuesday in a town hall format. Former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw is the moderator. Tyndall Report has again teamed up with freepress.net to host a Citizen's Media Scorecard (log in here). Here are the scorecard's results from the first Presidential debate in Mississippi with PBS' Jim Lehrer and from the Vice-Presidential debate in St Louis with PBS' Gwen Ifill. Rate the Debates has its own promotional video posted on YouTube and here are some of my reflections on the perceptions of liberal media bias in Joe Biden's confrontation with Sarah Palin. Remember our panel needs more McCain supporters, so circulate this alert to as many Republicans as possible. And do not forget to log on once the debate is finished to fill in the scorecard yourself.
