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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM NOVEMBER 24, 2008
All eyes turned to Chicago where President-elect Barack Obama officially confirmed the unofficial announcement that made headlines to end last week. New-York-based central banker Timothy Geithner is his nominee for Secretary of the Treasury and Lawrence Summers, a onetime Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, will direct his National Economic Council. Obama assigned them both to draft a fiscal stimulus package to finance 2.5m public works jobs. All three newscasts led with the Story of the Day from the transition headquarters in the Second City. CBS' newscast was introduced by substitute anchor Harry Smith.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR NOVEMBER 24, 2008: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
ECONOMIC STIMULUS TAKES PRECEDENCE OVER NATIONAL SECURITY All eyes turned to Chicago where President-elect Barack Obama officially confirmed the unofficial announcement that made headlines to end last week. New-York-based central banker Timothy Geithner is his nominee for Secretary of the Treasury and Lawrence Summers, a onetime Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, will direct his National Economic Council. Obama assigned them both to draft a fiscal stimulus package to finance 2.5m public works jobs. All three newscasts led with the Story of the Day from the transition headquarters in the Second City. CBS' newscast was introduced by substitute anchor Harry Smith.
It was a sign of what dire straits the economy finds itself in, CBS' Dean Reynolds observed, that Obama should "put his economic team in place before his national security team." Reynolds called crafting the stimulus an "unenviable job." ABC's George Stephanopoulos reckoned that "we have never seen an entire economic team appointed so quickly." NBC's Savannah Guthrie dubbed the President-elect the "de facto leader in the economic crisis." His hiring of Geithner for Treasury meant little on-the-job training concerning the financial crisis, ABC's Jake Tapper pointed out, since he "has been dealing with Wall Street's woes for months" as head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
CBS substitute anchor Harry Smith inquired about the need for a fiscal stimulus package of Arthur Levitt, former Chairman of the Securities & Exchange Commission. His answer was grim: "We are talking about three basic pillars of the economy--finance, automobile and housing. If all three of those are in the tank we have an economy absolutely in the depths of despair." ABC's Stephanopoulos assessed the size of the stimulus, once $175bn, now $500bn, or even $700bn over two years. He predicted that Speaker Nancy Pelosi can organize the House of Representatives to have a bill ready to sign on Inauguration Day. The slower Senate might insist on "full hearings and full debate."
FAST DRAW STACKS DECK FOR KEYNES As for the form that Barack Obama's economic stimulus legislation should take, CBS' Fast Draw animated feature team of Josh Landis and Mitch Butler turned into unabashed Keynesian propagandists. They favored public works spending on infrastructure over cash infusions for consumers through rebate checks. Quoting Professor Peter Morici, an economist at the University of Maryland, the Fast Draw team stated that a $100 investment in infrastructure produced a $350 boost to Gross Domestic Product over ten years whereas a $100 distribution to consumers produced a $125 boost over two years.
Landis & Butler did not explain why they chose such an apples-to-oranges comparison. What would the multiplier effect be of the $125 over the remaining eight years of the decade? That would have produced a fair comparison with the $350. Even if Morici's recommendations happen to be sound, why stack the deck in his favor by truncating the timeline for the policy he opposes?
PAULSON CHANGES HIS MIND ABOUT CHANGING HIS MIND Just two weeks ago, ABC's Betsy Stark reminded us, the current Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson made headlines by announcing that the $700bn Troubled Asset Relief Program that he controls would not be used to relieve financial institutions of troubled assets. Well that was two weeks ago. Paulson's latest announcement was the terms of the federal bailout of Citigroup. The partial nationalization of the bank has been expanded from a $20bn investment to $45bn and it "now seems to include dealing with toxic assets," mused Stark dryly. The taxpayer is now guaranteeing $306bn in Citigroup assets. CNBC's Erin Burnett called Citigroup, with 200m customers worldwide and 300,000 employees, "simply too big to fail." She reckoned that the federal government now owns 7.8% of the bank. "Why rescue Citigroup and not the Big Three automakers?" CBS' Kelly Wallace wondered. Paulson answered that his TARP "is for the financial sector only."
ECONOMIC RIPPLE EFFECTS Leaving the day's headlines aside, the economy continues to dominate the networks' news agenda even in its feature coverage. The collapse of the housing market has hit the inland economy of southern California--Riverside, San Bernardino, Ontario--harder than almost any other region, NBC's George Lewis told us. It has "some of the highest unemployment numbers in the country," predicted to rise to 12.5% by early 2010. "It would not be as bad as the Great Depression," was Lewis' consolation, "but bad enough if you are looking for work right now."
For a tearjerker, ABC's Neal Karlinsky brought us the plight of the homeless. Street people will be fed this Thanksgiving because of a food drive organized byBrendan Brenden Foster, an eleven-year-old boy. Foster saw the hungry homeless as he traveled home from hospital where he was told that his leukemia was terminal and he had two weeks to live. He "decided to focus all his remaining energy on feeding the homeless" until he died in his mother's arms last week.
A cheerful Thanksgiving note was struck by ABC's Ryan Owens (embargoed link). He showed us filling station signs with gasoline priced in the ones. A family minivan trip from Dallas to grandmother's house in St Louis and back would have cost $205 for the Fourth of July holiday, Owens calculated. For Thanksgiving the tag for the round trip will be $94.
CBS' Anthony Mason brought us the Fisker Karma, the plug-in hybrid automobile, backed by the government of Qatar, that will go on sale before Chevrolet's Volt. The Karma is designed by Henrik Fisker, who has worked for BMW and Aston Martin. Its top speed is 125 mph; its efficiency is 100 mpg; its entire roof is a curved solar panel; its purchase price is $80,000.
Tiger Woods felt the downside of the automobile news coming out of Detroit as Buick Motors canceled its sponsorship contract with the golf star, even though he is "the gold-plated brand of American advertising," as NBC's Mike Taibbi put it. Taibbi generalized that hard corporate times will blow a cold wind through the world of big-time sports, even though bailed-out Citigroup is still naming the New York Mets' new ballfield and part-nationalized AIG still has its logo on Manchester United's players' chests. General Motors has not only cut Woods, it will not run a single commercial during the NFL's Super Bowl telecast and has axed its sponsorship for NBC Sports' marquee event, the Olympic Games.
DIRTY GOLF COURSES New York City and Washington DC and Chicago are on guard for so-called dirty bombs, Bob Orr told us in a CBS Exclusive. They are conventional explosions that emit a cloud of radioactive gas that would contaminate urban centers. Orr accompanied counterterrorist teams as they conducted a drill to search for cesium, a radioactive ingredient in a dirty bomb. Their problem: "Naturally occurring radiation is everywhere." The teams cannot tell whether extra isotopes have been introduced into a city without knowing first about the non-dirty radiation we absorb every day. Who knew? Granite emits radiation. The tombstones at Arlington Cemetery are radioactive. Heavily-fertilized lawns on suburban golf courses glow for a Geiger counter.
HER LEGS ARE TOO HEAVY CBS sent Celia Hatton back to Chengdu, where she had covered Sichuan's killer earthquake six months ago. She revisited He Chuan Tao, the chemist who had both legs amputated after being pulled from rubble. She is one of 50,000 newly disabled amputees in the province, which suffered a death toll of 80,000. "Tao is literally at a standstill. Her doctors say her government-issued prosthetic legs are too heavy for her and her poor farming family cannot afford lightweight ones." Tao told Hatton: "I do not want to use a wheelchair my whole life."
SOD OR RICE NBC sent Ian Williams to the Philippines to launch its series on the global threat to the food supply Against the Grain. The archipelago nation of 90m is no longer self-sufficient in rice agriculture, he warned, as farmers find it more profitable to grow sod for suburban subdivisions than grow grain for the hungry. Costs for seed, fertilizer and irrigation have shot upwards. Market prices of rice have doubled in a year and food protests are threatening the Manila government.
HUMP BACK NBC's closer by Anne Thompson consisted of free Our Planet publicity for National Geographic. Thompson profiled NGTV's Greg Marshall, the inventor of its crittercam back in 1987. Video recorders are strapped to animals' backs to provide a creature's eye, human free, view of their habitats. See the sea turtle swim…the bear cub frolic…the emperor penguin dive…the monk seal feed…and the humpback whale do whatever it is that the pod of humpback whales gets up to.
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.
It was a sign of what dire straits the economy finds itself in, CBS' Dean Reynolds observed, that Obama should "put his economic team in place before his national security team." Reynolds called crafting the stimulus an "unenviable job." ABC's George Stephanopoulos reckoned that "we have never seen an entire economic team appointed so quickly." NBC's Savannah Guthrie dubbed the President-elect the "de facto leader in the economic crisis." His hiring of Geithner for Treasury meant little on-the-job training concerning the financial crisis, ABC's Jake Tapper pointed out, since he "has been dealing with Wall Street's woes for months" as head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
CBS substitute anchor Harry Smith inquired about the need for a fiscal stimulus package of Arthur Levitt, former Chairman of the Securities & Exchange Commission. His answer was grim: "We are talking about three basic pillars of the economy--finance, automobile and housing. If all three of those are in the tank we have an economy absolutely in the depths of despair." ABC's Stephanopoulos assessed the size of the stimulus, once $175bn, now $500bn, or even $700bn over two years. He predicted that Speaker Nancy Pelosi can organize the House of Representatives to have a bill ready to sign on Inauguration Day. The slower Senate might insist on "full hearings and full debate."
FAST DRAW STACKS DECK FOR KEYNES As for the form that Barack Obama's economic stimulus legislation should take, CBS' Fast Draw animated feature team of Josh Landis and Mitch Butler turned into unabashed Keynesian propagandists. They favored public works spending on infrastructure over cash infusions for consumers through rebate checks. Quoting Professor Peter Morici, an economist at the University of Maryland, the Fast Draw team stated that a $100 investment in infrastructure produced a $350 boost to Gross Domestic Product over ten years whereas a $100 distribution to consumers produced a $125 boost over two years.
Landis & Butler did not explain why they chose such an apples-to-oranges comparison. What would the multiplier effect be of the $125 over the remaining eight years of the decade? That would have produced a fair comparison with the $350. Even if Morici's recommendations happen to be sound, why stack the deck in his favor by truncating the timeline for the policy he opposes?
PAULSON CHANGES HIS MIND ABOUT CHANGING HIS MIND Just two weeks ago, ABC's Betsy Stark reminded us, the current Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson made headlines by announcing that the $700bn Troubled Asset Relief Program that he controls would not be used to relieve financial institutions of troubled assets. Well that was two weeks ago. Paulson's latest announcement was the terms of the federal bailout of Citigroup. The partial nationalization of the bank has been expanded from a $20bn investment to $45bn and it "now seems to include dealing with toxic assets," mused Stark dryly. The taxpayer is now guaranteeing $306bn in Citigroup assets. CNBC's Erin Burnett called Citigroup, with 200m customers worldwide and 300,000 employees, "simply too big to fail." She reckoned that the federal government now owns 7.8% of the bank. "Why rescue Citigroup and not the Big Three automakers?" CBS' Kelly Wallace wondered. Paulson answered that his TARP "is for the financial sector only."
ECONOMIC RIPPLE EFFECTS Leaving the day's headlines aside, the economy continues to dominate the networks' news agenda even in its feature coverage. The collapse of the housing market has hit the inland economy of southern California--Riverside, San Bernardino, Ontario--harder than almost any other region, NBC's George Lewis told us. It has "some of the highest unemployment numbers in the country," predicted to rise to 12.5% by early 2010. "It would not be as bad as the Great Depression," was Lewis' consolation, "but bad enough if you are looking for work right now."
For a tearjerker, ABC's Neal Karlinsky brought us the plight of the homeless. Street people will be fed this Thanksgiving because of a food drive organized by
A cheerful Thanksgiving note was struck by ABC's Ryan Owens (embargoed link). He showed us filling station signs with gasoline priced in the ones. A family minivan trip from Dallas to grandmother's house in St Louis and back would have cost $205 for the Fourth of July holiday, Owens calculated. For Thanksgiving the tag for the round trip will be $94.
CBS' Anthony Mason brought us the Fisker Karma, the plug-in hybrid automobile, backed by the government of Qatar, that will go on sale before Chevrolet's Volt. The Karma is designed by Henrik Fisker, who has worked for BMW and Aston Martin. Its top speed is 125 mph; its efficiency is 100 mpg; its entire roof is a curved solar panel; its purchase price is $80,000.
Tiger Woods felt the downside of the automobile news coming out of Detroit as Buick Motors canceled its sponsorship contract with the golf star, even though he is "the gold-plated brand of American advertising," as NBC's Mike Taibbi put it. Taibbi generalized that hard corporate times will blow a cold wind through the world of big-time sports, even though bailed-out Citigroup is still naming the New York Mets' new ballfield and part-nationalized AIG still has its logo on Manchester United's players' chests. General Motors has not only cut Woods, it will not run a single commercial during the NFL's Super Bowl telecast and has axed its sponsorship for NBC Sports' marquee event, the Olympic Games.
DIRTY GOLF COURSES New York City and Washington DC and Chicago are on guard for so-called dirty bombs, Bob Orr told us in a CBS Exclusive. They are conventional explosions that emit a cloud of radioactive gas that would contaminate urban centers. Orr accompanied counterterrorist teams as they conducted a drill to search for cesium, a radioactive ingredient in a dirty bomb. Their problem: "Naturally occurring radiation is everywhere." The teams cannot tell whether extra isotopes have been introduced into a city without knowing first about the non-dirty radiation we absorb every day. Who knew? Granite emits radiation. The tombstones at Arlington Cemetery are radioactive. Heavily-fertilized lawns on suburban golf courses glow for a Geiger counter.
HER LEGS ARE TOO HEAVY CBS sent Celia Hatton back to Chengdu, where she had covered Sichuan's killer earthquake six months ago. She revisited He Chuan Tao, the chemist who had both legs amputated after being pulled from rubble. She is one of 50,000 newly disabled amputees in the province, which suffered a death toll of 80,000. "Tao is literally at a standstill. Her doctors say her government-issued prosthetic legs are too heavy for her and her poor farming family cannot afford lightweight ones." Tao told Hatton: "I do not want to use a wheelchair my whole life."
SOD OR RICE NBC sent Ian Williams to the Philippines to launch its series on the global threat to the food supply Against the Grain. The archipelago nation of 90m is no longer self-sufficient in rice agriculture, he warned, as farmers find it more profitable to grow sod for suburban subdivisions than grow grain for the hungry. Costs for seed, fertilizer and irrigation have shot upwards. Market prices of rice have doubled in a year and food protests are threatening the Manila government.
HUMP BACK NBC's closer by Anne Thompson consisted of free Our Planet publicity for National Geographic. Thompson profiled NGTV's Greg Marshall, the inventor of its crittercam back in 1987. Video recorders are strapped to animals' backs to provide a creature's eye, human free, view of their habitats. See the sea turtle swim…the bear cub frolic…the emperor penguin dive…the monk seal feed…and the humpback whale do whatever it is that the pod of humpback whales gets up to.
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.
