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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM MARCH 16, 2009
"How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers?" demanded the President as he led the chorus of complaints against American International Group. The mostly-nationalized insurance conglomerate disbursed $165m in bonuses to the very rogue traders in its London office who had written the reckless contracts that ruined their firm. AIG's Financial Products Division has cost the Federal Reserve Board $180bn and counting. No matter that the offending bonuses amount to less than one-thousandth of the federal bailout, all three newscasts agreed that the scandal of rewards for such ruinous behavior qualified as the Story of the Day. ABC and CBS--with substitute anchor Russ Mitchell--led with Barack Obama from the White House. NBC chose the AIG business angle.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR MARCH 16, 2009: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
MILLIONS IN BONUSES FOR BILLIONS IN LOSSES "How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers?" demanded the President as he led the chorus of complaints against American International Group. The mostly-nationalized insurance conglomerate disbursed $165m in bonuses to the very rogue traders in its London office who had written the reckless contracts that ruined their firm. AIG's Financial Products Division has cost the Federal Reserve Board $180bn and counting. No matter that the offending bonuses amount to less than one-thousandth of the federal bailout, all three newscasts agreed that the scandal of rewards for such ruinous behavior qualified as the Story of the Day. ABC and CBS--with substitute anchor Russ Mitchell--led with Barack Obama from the White House. NBC chose the AIG business angle.
NBC's Tom Costello spelled out the ways in which AIG had been too big to fail when it was bailed out last fall. Its customer base is huge--74m worldwide covering "real estate, aircraft, cargo shippers, healthcare providers, life-commercial-property insurance, financial institutions, business & personal loans, cities & states--and its losses are huge too, $62bn in the final quarter of 2008, "the biggest corporate loss ever." Dwarfing the payouts for bonuses, Costello listed the major banks that received settlements from AIG, courtesy of federal funds: Goldman Sachs $13bn, Deutsche Bank $12bn, Societe Generale $12bn, Bank of America plus Merrill Lynch $12bn, Barclay's $8bn and so on.
NBC's Chuck Todd (no link) misplaced the decimal point when he pointed out that the bonus money "only accounts for less that 1%" of the bailout. He meant less than one tenth of 1%. ABC's Jake Tapper reported that the bonus package contracts had been agreed to in March of last year, before AIG was 80% nationalized, and that the Obama Administration only learned of their existence by reading The New York Times this weekend. CBS' Chip Reid forgot when the nationalization happened when he noted that "some Republicans blame the Obama economic team for not barring big bonuses when they bailed out the banks." The bailout happened under the Republican administration of George Bush--and AIG is an insurance company not a bank.
Tiny the bonuses may be in percentage terms--but they still represent a giant reward for "reckless behavior that torpedoed the economy," as NBC's Costello quoted Chairman Benjamin Bernanke. ABC assigned David Muir to check whether those contractual payments can legally be clawed back. "Leverage will be far more powerful than any legal option," he concluded, since the bonus contracts "however outrageous are binding." Muir anticipated that AIG will need yet more federal funds and cited the example of the automobile industry: "Federal help came with a catch, breaking those longtime union contracts."
CBS' Reid quoted another solution to the bonus problem from Charles Grassley, the Republican Senator from Iowa. Addressing AIG executives, he suggested: "Resign or go commit suicide."
CHIEF JUSTICE CHAUDHRY BACK ON BENCH Both NBC and CBS positioned a correspondent in Pakistan in anticipation of a showdown in Islamabad between street protestors demanding the reinstatement of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and riot police loyal to President Asif Zardari. No such clash eventuated, CBS' Richard Roth reported: "The jubilant crowd surrounded the Chief Justice after the government gave in and gave him back his job." Zardari had held out so long because Chaudhry had accused him of corruption, NBC's Richard Engel pointed out. Engel suggested that a factor in Zadari's change of heart had been a warning by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that US aid to Pakistan might be discontinued. Perhaps. More plausible is Engel's reporting that "Zardari called the chief of the Pakistani army on Sunday to stop the protests but the army chief refused."
TOURIST TRAVELOGUE IN IRAQ ABC filed its annual update of its Where Things Stand survey of Iraq. Each year, together with BBC and NHK, ABC News conducts an opinion poll of the state of the post-war reconstruction. Terry McCarthy was dispatched to illustrate the results.
We were treated to a travelogue from Baghdad to Karbala to Basra to Kurdistan to northern Christian villages that could have been filed by the Iraqi Tourist Board. "You can walk on the streets at night and without body armor. We could eat in restaurants," McCarthy marveled. "We went on a road trip. This is the first time in five years that I have actually driven in a car outside of Baghdad without any military escort." What about the continuing military occupation by the United States? "Everywhere we went Iraqis told us that it was time for the US to leave."
As the US military turns its attention away from Iraq towards Afghanistan, CBS' Lara Logan filed an Exclusive with Stuart Bowen, the Inspector General who uncovered waste, fraud and abuse in Iraq's reconstruction effort: "He was shocked by what he found" in more than 250 audits and inspections. Bowen warned that $32bn has already been misspent in Afghanistan and the US effort there "is headed the same way."
NO EXPLANATION FOR THE AFRICAN COMPARISON Washington DC has a 3% rate of infection with the HIV/AIDS virus among its post-pubescent population, NBC's Robert Bazell reported, warning that even that statistic "could be way too low because officials estimate that less than half of the people who are infected know it." Some gay men "think newer treatments have solved the problem," Bazell explained, accounting for some of the spread. Mostly it is a disease of poor African-Americans, with "a big jump in heterosexual spread, often from drug users to their partners and often through prostitution."
Without spelling out what similarity he was hinting at, Bazell concluded that the District of Columbia has the same level of HIV/AIDS infection "as many West African nations." What point was he making?
P-I, THE PAPERLESS NEWSPAPER "It is a grim race to see who goes under first," announced NBC's Chris Jansing as she compiled the shortlist of the next newspaper to abandon the printed page. Rocky Mountain News closed its doors last month. Now Seattle Post-Intelligencer has switched from newsprint to digital. Its newsroom is retaining a skeleton 10%-or-so of its staff "with lower pay and fewer benefits." Here is Jansing's death watch: Daily News in Philadelphia; Star Tribune in Minneapolis; Globe in Boston; Chronicle in San Francisco; Herald in Miami; Sun-Times in Chicago.
WIMPY CASTING CALL "They are conducting online movie auditions right now," Jim Axelrod advised any stagestruck fifth-grade boys there might be in CBS' audience. The part is Greg Heffley, the hero of Jeff Kinney's bestselling book series The Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Axelrod likes the cartoonist-author: "Kinney is pretty much a normal guy. Actually, strike that--he is much nicer than a normal guy."
German speakers! Axelrod challenges you to translate Kinney's title.
LONG DISTANCE RUNNERS Chile to Antarctica to California to Australia to Hong Kong to South Africa to England. ABC's John Berman was all geared up to celebrate the recordbreaking seven marathons in seven continents in seven days to be run by Chris Cuddihy and Stuart Kershaw in a world record breaking fundraising adventure for a Ugandan orphanage. However, "the biggest roadblock came before they even started," bemoaned Berman. "Someone else did it first." Irishman Richard Donovan already set the record last month--but Cuddihy and Kershaw were not even the first seven-continent marathoners to make it onto the nightly newscasts. Last December, the omnicontinental Linda Quirk was introduced to us by CBS' Mark Strassmann.
NBC's Tom Costello spelled out the ways in which AIG had been too big to fail when it was bailed out last fall. Its customer base is huge--74m worldwide covering "real estate, aircraft, cargo shippers, healthcare providers, life-commercial-property insurance, financial institutions, business & personal loans, cities & states--and its losses are huge too, $62bn in the final quarter of 2008, "the biggest corporate loss ever." Dwarfing the payouts for bonuses, Costello listed the major banks that received settlements from AIG, courtesy of federal funds: Goldman Sachs $13bn, Deutsche Bank $12bn, Societe Generale $12bn, Bank of America plus Merrill Lynch $12bn, Barclay's $8bn and so on.
NBC's Chuck Todd (no link) misplaced the decimal point when he pointed out that the bonus money "only accounts for less that 1%" of the bailout. He meant less than one tenth of 1%. ABC's Jake Tapper reported that the bonus package contracts had been agreed to in March of last year, before AIG was 80% nationalized, and that the Obama Administration only learned of their existence by reading The New York Times this weekend. CBS' Chip Reid forgot when the nationalization happened when he noted that "some Republicans blame the Obama economic team for not barring big bonuses when they bailed out the banks." The bailout happened under the Republican administration of George Bush--and AIG is an insurance company not a bank.
Tiny the bonuses may be in percentage terms--but they still represent a giant reward for "reckless behavior that torpedoed the economy," as NBC's Costello quoted Chairman Benjamin Bernanke. ABC assigned David Muir to check whether those contractual payments can legally be clawed back. "Leverage will be far more powerful than any legal option," he concluded, since the bonus contracts "however outrageous are binding." Muir anticipated that AIG will need yet more federal funds and cited the example of the automobile industry: "Federal help came with a catch, breaking those longtime union contracts."
CBS' Reid quoted another solution to the bonus problem from Charles Grassley, the Republican Senator from Iowa. Addressing AIG executives, he suggested: "Resign or go commit suicide."
CHIEF JUSTICE CHAUDHRY BACK ON BENCH Both NBC and CBS positioned a correspondent in Pakistan in anticipation of a showdown in Islamabad between street protestors demanding the reinstatement of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry and riot police loyal to President Asif Zardari. No such clash eventuated, CBS' Richard Roth reported: "The jubilant crowd surrounded the Chief Justice after the government gave in and gave him back his job." Zardari had held out so long because Chaudhry had accused him of corruption, NBC's Richard Engel pointed out. Engel suggested that a factor in Zadari's change of heart had been a warning by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that US aid to Pakistan might be discontinued. Perhaps. More plausible is Engel's reporting that "Zardari called the chief of the Pakistani army on Sunday to stop the protests but the army chief refused."
TOURIST TRAVELOGUE IN IRAQ ABC filed its annual update of its Where Things Stand survey of Iraq. Each year, together with BBC and NHK, ABC News conducts an opinion poll of the state of the post-war reconstruction. Terry McCarthy was dispatched to illustrate the results.
We were treated to a travelogue from Baghdad to Karbala to Basra to Kurdistan to northern Christian villages that could have been filed by the Iraqi Tourist Board. "You can walk on the streets at night and without body armor. We could eat in restaurants," McCarthy marveled. "We went on a road trip. This is the first time in five years that I have actually driven in a car outside of Baghdad without any military escort." What about the continuing military occupation by the United States? "Everywhere we went Iraqis told us that it was time for the US to leave."
As the US military turns its attention away from Iraq towards Afghanistan, CBS' Lara Logan filed an Exclusive with Stuart Bowen, the Inspector General who uncovered waste, fraud and abuse in Iraq's reconstruction effort: "He was shocked by what he found" in more than 250 audits and inspections. Bowen warned that $32bn has already been misspent in Afghanistan and the US effort there "is headed the same way."
NO EXPLANATION FOR THE AFRICAN COMPARISON Washington DC has a 3% rate of infection with the HIV/AIDS virus among its post-pubescent population, NBC's Robert Bazell reported, warning that even that statistic "could be way too low because officials estimate that less than half of the people who are infected know it." Some gay men "think newer treatments have solved the problem," Bazell explained, accounting for some of the spread. Mostly it is a disease of poor African-Americans, with "a big jump in heterosexual spread, often from drug users to their partners and often through prostitution."
Without spelling out what similarity he was hinting at, Bazell concluded that the District of Columbia has the same level of HIV/AIDS infection "as many West African nations." What point was he making?
P-I, THE PAPERLESS NEWSPAPER "It is a grim race to see who goes under first," announced NBC's Chris Jansing as she compiled the shortlist of the next newspaper to abandon the printed page. Rocky Mountain News closed its doors last month. Now Seattle Post-Intelligencer has switched from newsprint to digital. Its newsroom is retaining a skeleton 10%-or-so of its staff "with lower pay and fewer benefits." Here is Jansing's death watch: Daily News in Philadelphia; Star Tribune in Minneapolis; Globe in Boston; Chronicle in San Francisco; Herald in Miami; Sun-Times in Chicago.
WIMPY CASTING CALL "They are conducting online movie auditions right now," Jim Axelrod advised any stagestruck fifth-grade boys there might be in CBS' audience. The part is Greg Heffley, the hero of Jeff Kinney's bestselling book series The Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Axelrod likes the cartoonist-author: "Kinney is pretty much a normal guy. Actually, strike that--he is much nicer than a normal guy."
German speakers! Axelrod challenges you to translate Kinney's title.
LONG DISTANCE RUNNERS Chile to Antarctica to California to Australia to Hong Kong to South Africa to England. ABC's John Berman was all geared up to celebrate the recordbreaking seven marathons in seven continents in seven days to be run by Chris Cuddihy and Stuart Kershaw in a world record breaking fundraising adventure for a Ugandan orphanage. However, "the biggest roadblock came before they even started," bemoaned Berman. "Someone else did it first." Irishman Richard Donovan already set the record last month--but Cuddihy and Kershaw were not even the first seven-continent marathoners to make it onto the nightly newscasts. Last December, the omnicontinental Linda Quirk was introduced to us by CBS' Mark Strassmann.
