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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM MARCH 03, 2009
The government's economic elite dominated the Washington airwaves. Chairman Benjamin Bernanke was questioned by a Senate committee on the federal bailout of high finance. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner testified on the administration's budget plan to a House panel. President Barack Obama opined on stock market timing as he met with Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain. All three newscasts covered all three spokesmen: ABC's lead emphasized the President; NBC's chose the Chairman; CBS' mix gave most time to the Secretary. The unveiling of a logo to attach to new federally-funded infrastructure projects made recession stimulus the Story of the Day. ABC anchor Charles Gibson continued his field trip, filing from Los Angeles.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR MARCH 03, 2009: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
A CHAIRMAN, A SECRETARY AND A PRESIDENT WALK UP TO A MICROPHONE… The government's economic elite dominated the Washington airwaves. Chairman Benjamin Bernanke was questioned by a Senate committee on the federal bailout of high finance. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner testified on the administration's budget plan to a House panel. President Barack Obama opined on stock market timing as he met with Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain. All three newscasts covered all three spokesmen: ABC's lead emphasized the President; NBC's chose the Chairman; CBS' mix gave most time to the Secretary. The unveiling of a logo to attach to new federally-funded infrastructure projects made recession stimulus the Story of the Day. ABC anchor Charles Gibson continued his field trip, filing from Los Angeles.
ABC's Jake Tapper and NBC's Chuck Todd both showed us the recovery.org logo that will advertise 200-or-so transportation projects costing $28bn in all. NBC's Todd saw the Obama Administration "borrowing a page from FDR's New Deal WPA" although the graphics were hardly as cool. ABC's Tapper repeated the White House talking point that the $28bn would generate "more jobs than General Motors, Ford and Chrysler have lost in manufacturing over the past three years."
DO NOT TAKE STOCK TIPS FROM POLITICAL REPORTERS ABC's Jake Tapper called the day's welter of economic pronouncements "a day of cheerleading" and a "public relations blitz." The two White House correspondents both aired the President's soundbite on the stock market. NBC's Chuck Todd noted that "it is a rare day when a President hands out stock tips." Such rarity comes as no surprise considering the botch both he and ABC's Tapper made in reporting on the advice. What Obama actually said is that the market is "starting to get to the point where buying stocks is a potentially good deal." In other words: do not buy yet but be prepared to make a purchase soon. Here is how that got misreported: "Obama seemed to suggest to investors that they should buy"--ABC's Tapper…"advising Americans the time was right to buy low"--NBC's Todd.
ABC's Betsy Stark meanwhile took a trip to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, where prices have fallen by 19% in the six weeks since Inauguration Day. She asked Art Cashin, the floor trader who has been offering quotable soundbites on sentiment for 35 years, why selling continues. He did not disappoint: "We do not have a feeling whether there is one more shoe to fall or whether Imelda Marcos' closet is about to come down on us."
BENJAMIN LOSES HIS COOL NBC's Kelly O'Donnell covered the testimony by Chairman Benjamin Bernanke of the Federal Reserve Board from Capitol Hill. "Bernanke usually comes here to give a Just the Facts Ma'am assessment," she mused. This time he "added an unusual twist, his own personal outrage over big bailouts." In particular he targeted AIG, the underregulated insurance conglomerate that has cost the federal government $180bn so far and counting. "I am generally a pretty even tempered person," he confessed before voicing his anger at the "huge numbers of irresponsible bets" placed by AIG--"a hedge fund, basically, that was attached to a large and stable insurance company." The Federal Reserve Board announced that it was extending a $200bn line of credit to investors "to unlock the credit market," as CBS' Chip Reid put it. The capital would be used to purchase securitized paper from banks--"loans for cars, collage and credit cards"--so that those banks in turn could lend more money to consumers.
BORROW & INFLATE The huge amount of deficit spending that the federal government will incur was covered by ABC's John Berman and CBS' Chip Reid. Reid looked at the politics of the borrowing, noting that in his House testimony Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner "blamed the Bush Administration for all aspects of the crisis." ABC's Berman looked at the finances. "Is there a limit to how much the government can spend and how much the government can keep borrowing?" he wondered before answering with historical statistics: the deficit now accounts for 12% of the entire national economy; during World War II it was as high as 30%. Then he offered "the down side, down the line--all the government spending can cause inflation."
MEET RAJ AND ALBERT--AGAIN For those CBS Evening News viewers who are also public radio listeners, the appearance of Raj Bathia and Albert Behin should have struck a chord of recognition. They are the pair of real estate speculators from New Jersey that WNYC's Lisa Chow introduced us to in the Bad Bank special from Adam Davidson and Alex Blumberg last weekend. Raj and Albert are likely lads, snatching up soon-to-be-foreclosed mortgages at 45c on the dollar and then reselling the property back to the struggling homeowner with discounted monthly payments. Anthony Mason filed his approving profile of the fire sale pair, telling us that "the housing market will not find a bottom until the banks' toxic assets find a new home." Was Mason aware of them already before this weekend's radio show? If not, the question of journalistic ethics is whether This American Life deserved a tip of Mason's hat as part of his CBS report.
MOST CARS LAST CLOSE TO A DECADE The treat awaiting ABC anchor Charles Gibson during his field trip to California was a test drive of the $109,000 Tesla sports car: "You do not hear any engine noise because there is no engine noise. It is an all-electric sports car--range 240 miles, zero-to-60-mph in under four seconds, faster than a Porsche." The free publicity for Tesla was part of Gibson's futuristic speculation that energy efficiency--autos, solar, wind--will be the next transformational industry to emerge from Silicon Valley. Gibson was given a glimpse of a prototype of Tesla's next model, a $55,000 all-electric sedan, on sale two years from now. CNBC's automobile expert Phil LeBeau poured some cold water on the prospects for new car sales on NBC. He cited the latest statistics from RL Polk that fewer people need to replace their current jalopy with shiny new chrome: in 1999 half the automobiles on the road were at least 8.3 years old; by 2008 a car's median age had grown to 9.4 years.
C’MON KID, DRIVE MY TRAIN Only ABC assigned a correspondent to the safety investigation into the crash of the Metrolink commuter train in suburban Los Angeles last September that killed 25 people, including engineer Robert Sanchez. ABC's Lisa Stark reported at the time that Sanchez had been text-messaging immediately before the accident. Now she adds the content of his final message: he was "actually planning to have a young train enthusiast take over the controls later that night."
RATHER VINDICATED, WILLIAMS FALLS SHORT Back in 2001 when Dan Rather was anchor of CBS Evening News he made the courageous and correct decision not to turn his newscast over to tabloid sensation by following the speculation that Rep Gary Condit, the California Democrat, was implicated in the disappearance of Chandra Levy, a 24-year-old intern in his office. NBC Nightly News, by contrast, discredited itself, especially during the dog days of summer when then-anchor Tom Brokaw was away and Brian Williams was his substitute. During the second week in July, substitute Williams chose to lead every single weekday newscast with Levy even as Rather ignored the story altogether. For the year of 2001 as a whole, Levy amounted to a wholly-owned NBC subsidiary (86 min v ABC 28, CBS 6).
So the least NBC could do now, as District of Columbia prosecutors formally announce that Condit is not implicated in Levy's death, is to assign a reporter to publicize their announcement. Funnily enough, the lone newscast that found the time to do so was CBS. Bob Orr named Ingmar Guandique, a Salvadoran immigrant incarcerated on unrelated charges, as the feds' official suspect. As for Condit, he "denied any involvement and was never charged," Orr reminded us. "Condit lost his bid for reelection and moved to Arizona where he opened two ice cream shops, which failed."
DEMARCHE TO MEDVEDEV Both ABC and CBS assigned a correspondent to cover a demarche by President Barack Obama to Dmitri Medvedev, his counterpart in Moscow. A secret letter suggested that NATO might not build an anti-missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic, as planned, if Moscow, in turn, helped stymie Teheran's plans to acquire nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles. CBS' Lara Logan called Obama's offer "a dramatic reversal" of the policies of George Bush, under whom US-Russia relations had deteriorated "to their lowest point since the break-up of the Soviet Union." Logan's anchor Katie Couric pointed out that the secret missive had been made public not in Washington but in Moscow. "What do you think motivated the Russians?" "For the last few years they have been demonizing the United States and now they are preparing their people for a change…This could be a new era of friendlier relations."
ABC covered the diplomacy from the point of view of US-Iran relations. Martha Raddatz, in Jerusalem in Hillary Rodham Clinton's entourage, asked the Secretary of State about the letter. "We are trying to enlist the assistance of every nation." Raddatz' follow-up concerned Teheran not Moscow. She asked about the detention of journalist Roxana Saberi by Iranian authorities, "a 31-year-old former Miss America contestant who told her father she was arrested for buying a bottle of wine…Is there anything you can do about that?" "We hope so."
SOMALIA’S TROUBLES REACH MINNESOTA The abu-Bakar Islamic Center, a mosque that serves the 70,000-strong Somali-American community in Minneapolis, invited CBS' Dean Reynolds for a show-and-tell. Last year, 20-or-so young men from the mosque returned to their civil-war-torn ancestral homeland. "The Somalis here are deeply troubled. Who is behind the exodus? Who is paying for it? Who may be the next to go?" In October, Shirwa Ahmed, one of the 20, committed suicide by blowing himself up, murdering 30 others near Mogadishu in he process. The abu-Bakar Center had a dual message of damage control: it has no role in turning worshippers into radicals; instead the mosque itself has become the target of threats and harassment.
HUMANS TRY TO MAKE THINGS RIGHT NBC was the newscast with the animal closer. Species of the Day was the right whale, the slow-moving, 30-ton, endangered, Atlantic Ocean mammal that has only 400 surviving members. Kerry Sanders joined a NOAA crew of marine biologists off the coast of Georgia. They have discovered three whales that are slowly strangling to death from entanglement in fishing line attached to tracking buoys. NOAA supplied the videotape of one whale being cut free. "Right whales face only one other threat--ship collisions," Sanders told us, so freighters now have to observe speed limits in whale waters. They have "no natural predator--only man."
ABC's Jake Tapper and NBC's Chuck Todd both showed us the recovery.org logo that will advertise 200-or-so transportation projects costing $28bn in all. NBC's Todd saw the Obama Administration "borrowing a page from FDR's New Deal WPA" although the graphics were hardly as cool. ABC's Tapper repeated the White House talking point that the $28bn would generate "more jobs than General Motors, Ford and Chrysler have lost in manufacturing over the past three years."
DO NOT TAKE STOCK TIPS FROM POLITICAL REPORTERS ABC's Jake Tapper called the day's welter of economic pronouncements "a day of cheerleading" and a "public relations blitz." The two White House correspondents both aired the President's soundbite on the stock market. NBC's Chuck Todd noted that "it is a rare day when a President hands out stock tips." Such rarity comes as no surprise considering the botch both he and ABC's Tapper made in reporting on the advice. What Obama actually said is that the market is "starting to get to the point where buying stocks is a potentially good deal." In other words: do not buy yet but be prepared to make a purchase soon. Here is how that got misreported: "Obama seemed to suggest to investors that they should buy"--ABC's Tapper…"advising Americans the time was right to buy low"--NBC's Todd.
ABC's Betsy Stark meanwhile took a trip to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, where prices have fallen by 19% in the six weeks since Inauguration Day. She asked Art Cashin, the floor trader who has been offering quotable soundbites on sentiment for 35 years, why selling continues. He did not disappoint: "We do not have a feeling whether there is one more shoe to fall or whether Imelda Marcos' closet is about to come down on us."
BENJAMIN LOSES HIS COOL NBC's Kelly O'Donnell covered the testimony by Chairman Benjamin Bernanke of the Federal Reserve Board from Capitol Hill. "Bernanke usually comes here to give a Just the Facts Ma'am assessment," she mused. This time he "added an unusual twist, his own personal outrage over big bailouts." In particular he targeted AIG, the underregulated insurance conglomerate that has cost the federal government $180bn so far and counting. "I am generally a pretty even tempered person," he confessed before voicing his anger at the "huge numbers of irresponsible bets" placed by AIG--"a hedge fund, basically, that was attached to a large and stable insurance company." The Federal Reserve Board announced that it was extending a $200bn line of credit to investors "to unlock the credit market," as CBS' Chip Reid put it. The capital would be used to purchase securitized paper from banks--"loans for cars, collage and credit cards"--so that those banks in turn could lend more money to consumers.
BORROW & INFLATE The huge amount of deficit spending that the federal government will incur was covered by ABC's John Berman and CBS' Chip Reid. Reid looked at the politics of the borrowing, noting that in his House testimony Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner "blamed the Bush Administration for all aspects of the crisis." ABC's Berman looked at the finances. "Is there a limit to how much the government can spend and how much the government can keep borrowing?" he wondered before answering with historical statistics: the deficit now accounts for 12% of the entire national economy; during World War II it was as high as 30%. Then he offered "the down side, down the line--all the government spending can cause inflation."
MEET RAJ AND ALBERT--AGAIN For those CBS Evening News viewers who are also public radio listeners, the appearance of Raj Bathia and Albert Behin should have struck a chord of recognition. They are the pair of real estate speculators from New Jersey that WNYC's Lisa Chow introduced us to in the Bad Bank special from Adam Davidson and Alex Blumberg last weekend. Raj and Albert are likely lads, snatching up soon-to-be-foreclosed mortgages at 45c on the dollar and then reselling the property back to the struggling homeowner with discounted monthly payments. Anthony Mason filed his approving profile of the fire sale pair, telling us that "the housing market will not find a bottom until the banks' toxic assets find a new home." Was Mason aware of them already before this weekend's radio show? If not, the question of journalistic ethics is whether This American Life deserved a tip of Mason's hat as part of his CBS report.
MOST CARS LAST CLOSE TO A DECADE The treat awaiting ABC anchor Charles Gibson during his field trip to California was a test drive of the $109,000 Tesla sports car: "You do not hear any engine noise because there is no engine noise. It is an all-electric sports car--range 240 miles, zero-to-60-mph in under four seconds, faster than a Porsche." The free publicity for Tesla was part of Gibson's futuristic speculation that energy efficiency--autos, solar, wind--will be the next transformational industry to emerge from Silicon Valley. Gibson was given a glimpse of a prototype of Tesla's next model, a $55,000 all-electric sedan, on sale two years from now. CNBC's automobile expert Phil LeBeau poured some cold water on the prospects for new car sales on NBC. He cited the latest statistics from RL Polk that fewer people need to replace their current jalopy with shiny new chrome: in 1999 half the automobiles on the road were at least 8.3 years old; by 2008 a car's median age had grown to 9.4 years.
C’MON KID, DRIVE MY TRAIN Only ABC assigned a correspondent to the safety investigation into the crash of the Metrolink commuter train in suburban Los Angeles last September that killed 25 people, including engineer Robert Sanchez. ABC's Lisa Stark reported at the time that Sanchez had been text-messaging immediately before the accident. Now she adds the content of his final message: he was "actually planning to have a young train enthusiast take over the controls later that night."
RATHER VINDICATED, WILLIAMS FALLS SHORT Back in 2001 when Dan Rather was anchor of CBS Evening News he made the courageous and correct decision not to turn his newscast over to tabloid sensation by following the speculation that Rep Gary Condit, the California Democrat, was implicated in the disappearance of Chandra Levy, a 24-year-old intern in his office. NBC Nightly News, by contrast, discredited itself, especially during the dog days of summer when then-anchor Tom Brokaw was away and Brian Williams was his substitute. During the second week in July, substitute Williams chose to lead every single weekday newscast with Levy even as Rather ignored the story altogether. For the year of 2001 as a whole, Levy amounted to a wholly-owned NBC subsidiary (86 min v ABC 28, CBS 6).
So the least NBC could do now, as District of Columbia prosecutors formally announce that Condit is not implicated in Levy's death, is to assign a reporter to publicize their announcement. Funnily enough, the lone newscast that found the time to do so was CBS. Bob Orr named Ingmar Guandique, a Salvadoran immigrant incarcerated on unrelated charges, as the feds' official suspect. As for Condit, he "denied any involvement and was never charged," Orr reminded us. "Condit lost his bid for reelection and moved to Arizona where he opened two ice cream shops, which failed."
DEMARCHE TO MEDVEDEV Both ABC and CBS assigned a correspondent to cover a demarche by President Barack Obama to Dmitri Medvedev, his counterpart in Moscow. A secret letter suggested that NATO might not build an anti-missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic, as planned, if Moscow, in turn, helped stymie Teheran's plans to acquire nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles. CBS' Lara Logan called Obama's offer "a dramatic reversal" of the policies of George Bush, under whom US-Russia relations had deteriorated "to their lowest point since the break-up of the Soviet Union." Logan's anchor Katie Couric pointed out that the secret missive had been made public not in Washington but in Moscow. "What do you think motivated the Russians?" "For the last few years they have been demonizing the United States and now they are preparing their people for a change…This could be a new era of friendlier relations."
ABC covered the diplomacy from the point of view of US-Iran relations. Martha Raddatz, in Jerusalem in Hillary Rodham Clinton's entourage, asked the Secretary of State about the letter. "We are trying to enlist the assistance of every nation." Raddatz' follow-up concerned Teheran not Moscow. She asked about the detention of journalist Roxana Saberi by Iranian authorities, "a 31-year-old former Miss America contestant who told her father she was arrested for buying a bottle of wine…Is there anything you can do about that?" "We hope so."
SOMALIA’S TROUBLES REACH MINNESOTA The abu-Bakar Islamic Center, a mosque that serves the 70,000-strong Somali-American community in Minneapolis, invited CBS' Dean Reynolds for a show-and-tell. Last year, 20-or-so young men from the mosque returned to their civil-war-torn ancestral homeland. "The Somalis here are deeply troubled. Who is behind the exodus? Who is paying for it? Who may be the next to go?" In October, Shirwa Ahmed, one of the 20, committed suicide by blowing himself up, murdering 30 others near Mogadishu in he process. The abu-Bakar Center had a dual message of damage control: it has no role in turning worshippers into radicals; instead the mosque itself has become the target of threats and harassment.
HUMANS TRY TO MAKE THINGS RIGHT NBC was the newscast with the animal closer. Species of the Day was the right whale, the slow-moving, 30-ton, endangered, Atlantic Ocean mammal that has only 400 surviving members. Kerry Sanders joined a NOAA crew of marine biologists off the coast of Georgia. They have discovered three whales that are slowly strangling to death from entanglement in fishing line attached to tracking buoys. NOAA supplied the videotape of one whale being cut free. "Right whales face only one other threat--ship collisions," Sanders told us, so freighters now have to observe speed limits in whale waters. They have "no natural predator--only man."
