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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM MARCH 13, 2009
After a two-day detour into a life of crime--Wednesday's shooting spree in Alabama and Thursday's guilty plea to fraud by Bernard Madoff--the three nightly newscasts returned to the year's dominant story line: the recessionbound economy and Barack Obama's efforts to revive its growth. All three White House correspondents covered the attempts of the President and his team to inspire confidence in an eventual recovery, which was the Story of the Day. CBS and NBC led with Obama's use of his bully pulpit. ABC led from Wall Street, where the Dow Jones Industrial Average finished its most bullish week since last November. NBC, by the way, used Ann Curry from Today as its substitute anchor.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR MARCH 13, 2009: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
EMPHASIZING GLIMMERS OF GOOD ECONOMIC NEWS After a two-day detour into a life of crime--Wednesday's shooting spree in Alabama and Thursday's guilty plea to fraud by Bernard Madoff--the three nightly newscasts returned to the year's dominant story line: the recessionbound economy and Barack Obama's efforts to revive its growth. All three White House correspondents covered the attempts of the President and his team to inspire confidence in an eventual recovery, which was the Story of the Day. CBS and NBC led with Obama's use of his bully pulpit. ABC led from Wall Street, where the Dow Jones Industrial Average finished its most bullish week since last November. NBC, by the way, used Ann Curry from Today as its substitute anchor.
"Optimist in Chief," was what NBC's Savannah Guthrie called the President when he advised that we keep focused on "all the fundamentally sound aspects of our economy" as opposed to all that other stuff. ABC's Jake Tapper called it "economic cheerleading" backed by members of his administration "putting on economic smiley faces." Citing a slowdown in the rate at which consumer spending is collapsing, CBS' Chip Reid found "some glimmers of good economic news" while NBC's Guthrie added the tidbits of "housing inventories starting to decline, an unexpected rise in retail sales and signs of less nervousness in the bond market." ABC's George Stephanopoulos put it this way: "Some good news in the economy, some good news from banks, some good news in the stock market."
WHAT THIS ECONOMY NEEDS IS GOOD SEX THE NIGHT BEFORE CBS' weekending Assignment America closer from Steve Hartman happened to recapitulate the search for optimism with which Barack Obama kicked off the newscast. Hartman's premise was that a cockeyed 8% of those surveyed in the latest CBS News opinion poll conducted with The New York Times had rated the economy as improving. Our intrepid reporter went in search of members of the Eight Percent Club and came up with Mark Jastrzembski, a 59-year-old bachelor and retired corrections officer from Muskegon Mich who happens to have between 10 and 15 close friends who have been laid off. "Confounding," is what Hartman called the Polyanna.
Hartman consulted economist Ben Stein--whom he did not identify as a contributor to his own network's Sunday Morning--about the theory of the feedback loop whereby pessimism breeds more pessimism and optimism breeds more optimism. "If collectively all the middle class and upper middle class people in America woke up in a good mood--the same thing as if they had good sex the night before--and went out shopping and investing and starting new businesses, the economy would turn around on a dime," Stein fanstasized.
No word on Stein's advice on the sex lives of working class and poor people.
NOT A SHAMELESS PLUG What about the week's 9% increase in the price of stocks on the financial markets? ABC's Betsy Stark found "a growing sense on Wall Street" that the federal government's investments in high finance "are beginning to pay off." This week the Bank of America and Citigroup and General Electric were collectively able to borrow $30bn "not from the government but from the open market, proof that once-frozen credit markets have thawed." On NBC, Trish Regan of CNBC picked up hints that the banks are making money and that consumers are spending money. "That said, we are not out of the woods yet," she warned, as the banks still have to write off toxic assets at the end of the quarter and consumer resilience may yet be undermined by continuing layoffs. As Anthony Mason (at the tail of the Chip Reid videostream) put it on CBS: "This may only be a bear market rally."
CBS' Mason advised us to check out 60 Minutes' profile of Chairman Benjamin Bernanke at the Federal Reserve Board. "This is not a shameless plug."
IRS CHASES UBS There was only a single report filed with an overseas dateline on all three newscasts combined. It was Jim Maceda's story on NBC about Switzerland--yet he filed it from London. "For more than 70 years its secret bank accounts have defined Switzerland as much as its neutrality or its clocks," Maceda recounted, illustrating his financial journalism with Hollywood fiction, using clips from The Thomas Crown Affair and The Bourne Identity. Now, following Austria and Liechtenstein, the Swiss government has relented and will allow the secrecy of its numbered accounts to be breached "on a case by case basis." Tax prosecutors in the United States want to look at 50,000 accounts belonging mostly to wealthy Americans at UBS. Not to have backed down "would have backlisted Swiss banks risking tens of thousands of jobs."
OBAMA TRANSITION UPDATE All three networks offered a progress report on the still forming Obama Administration. On ABC, Good Morning America anchor Robin Roberts (no link) claimed an Exclusive interview with First Lady Michelle as she visited military families at Fort Bragg. NBC's Rehema Ellis followed up on Barack Obama's speech on the reform of public education with a profile of Arne Duncan, his Education Secretary. Ellis noted that Duncan's budget has been more than doubled by recent stimulus spending. "There are funds to build and repair schools, to protect districts from teacher layoffs and program cutbacks, and to help states actually do what No Child Left Behind promised." The federal funds may boost spending on public schools--or they may simply replace cuts in spending by states and local school boards.
CBS' Congressional correspondent Nancy Cordes looked at the offices that still lie empty at the top levels of the executive branch. Of 19 senior positions at the Treasury Department, for example, "only five have been filled." Cordes mentioned the much publicized problem of "minor tax irregularities" but suggested two other obstacles arising from the President's code of ethics that are turning off potential applicants: his "reluctance to hire lobbyists or to let people take lobbying jobs after they leave;" and rules that require nominees to sell stocks that could present a conflict of interest. "That is a painful prospect when stocks are tanking."
NOT EXACTLY THE BIG HOUSE Bernard Madoff continues to generate buzz, even from his jail cell. NBC's Anne Thompson reported on the implications of the phrase in his guilty plea that "to the best of my recollection my fraud began in the early '90s." That would mean, Thompson told us, that his Palm Beach mansion, purchased in 1994, might be vulnerable to forfeiture but his Manhattan penthouse, owned since 1984, would be immune. CBS had Armen Keteyian paint a picture of the medium security federal penitentiary--"not exactly the Big House"--that awaits the disgraced financier: "two man cells…lights on and breakfast at 6am…lights off at 10pm…lunch at 11am…dinner at 5pm…five days a week work…hours and hours of mandatory headcounts and mindnumbing routine."
CNBC’S SHOUTFESTS: NOT SHOW BUSINESS BUT SERIOUS BUSINESS "Like a prosecutor bearing down on a decidedly uncomfortable witness, Stewart argued that the cable TV financial network--and by extension much of the business press--had given the public a false sense of financial security."
That was how CBS' Jeff Greenfield reviewed Thursday night's face-off (here, here and here) of the feuding cable personalities: Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's The Daily Show against Jim Cramer of CNBC's.
"Business Press" is the giveaway phrase in Greenfield's description. For years now, business journalism has been a misnomer. What makes news first and foremost about national economic activity is finance. The sole certain economic tidbit to be reported each night on the nightly newscasts is the status of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
People have jobs. Businesses engage in commerce. Importers and exporters conduct trade. Labor unions organize. Governments tax. Consumers spend. The poor are always with us. Yet the "business press" sees the entire economy through the prism of finance. Even the nightly newscasts have a bias in favor of finance. So far this year, for example, even in the depths of a recession, of the 376 stories the three networks have filed on general economic topics, almost a third (120 or 32%) have had a financial angle. CNBC, a "financial" news network, is the pinnacle of this distorted view of the economy.
The raison d'etre of a "financial" news network is to persuade its audience that the best measure of prosperity is the value of financial assets. To that end, the financial markets are assumed to be a rational, efficient and civic-minded method of assigning capital. With finance occupying the commanding heights, the real economy--labor, wages, commerce, business, trade, poverty, infrastructure--is covered by the financial networks as a secondary sideshow.
In that context, CNBC's fulsome cheerleading for a bull market--and its consternation in the face of the bear--has not been an error of judgment. It is a fact of its identity. CNBC is by nature unable to report a bubble in financial assets as bad news, even if it is fueled by lax monetary policy and reckless leverage. It is unable to report the bursting of that bubble as good news, even if that represents a return to sane levels of valuation and a productive allocation of capital.
If CNBC practiced objective journalism, with no rooting interest in the direction of stock prices, it would be an economics news network not a financial news network.
That was why Jon Stewart paraphrased Carly Simon in his Daily Show interview with Cramer: "It is not all about you." Even though the face-off was pitched as the Stewart vs Cramer Feud of the Century, Stewart's critique was against the entire CNBC enterprise.
Not that Cramer's Mad Money was let off the hook. David Muir used the following, bleeped, critique in his coverage of the confrontation on ABC next night. "I understand that you want to make finance entertaining but it is not a fucking game." Cramer justified his colleagues' Fast Money style: "There is a market for it and we give it to them." Stewart's response: "There is a market for cocaine and hookers." NBC's nightly newscast, by the way, unlike CBS and ABC did not find the Stewart-Cramer showdown newsworthy enough to cover.
Take your pick. Mad Money's mixture of bells & whistles and inside tips and carnival barker intensity is either entertaining. Or it vindicates Stewart's criticism that CNBC favors casino-style speculation at the expense of long-term investments. "How is that different from an infomercial?" the comedian inquired.
Yet we should not confuse Cramer's Mad Money antics with so much of the shouting that takes place at other dayparts on CNBC's schedule from the likes of Rick Santelli or Larry Kudlow or Dennis Kneale. Michael Calderone at Politico (in an article that quotes me) attributes the CNBC shoutfests to a house style at NBC News: "The increasingly opinionated dispatches from CNBC's stars parallels MSNBC's shift during the 2008 campaign to more aggressively opinionated commentary."
A close viewing of CNBC's market coverage reveals that the shouting stands for something more serious. As persuasive as Stewart may have seemed on Comedy Central that the recently collapsed bull market consisted of "giant piles of money going in and out and people trading them. It is transactional and it is fast but it is dangerous. It is ethically dubious" or "a Sherman's March through their companies financed by our 401(k)s and all the incentives were for short term profit and they burned the fucking house down with our money and walked away rich as hell," those insights are still vigorously challenged inside CNBC itself.
There are plenty of holdouts at CNBC who adamantly believe that high finance does--and should--occupy the commanding heights of the economy and that therefore financial journalism has the appropriate perspective on the economy at large. Growth in the real economy depends on inexpensive access to capital, subject to lower taxes and less regulation. The shouting Ludlow and the shouting Kneale are joined by the softer spoken Melissa Francis and Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, for example, in insisting that the system of financial capitalism that CNBC was founded to validate is not broken.
The CNBC shouting represents a genuine intellectual and ideological crisis at the network. The received wisdom of the last 30 years--Chicago School, supply side, laissez faire--is being challenged by the current facts on the tape. Much of the shouting is targeted at pundits, experts, analysts and correspondents, led by in-house economist Steve Liesman, who take the other side--the Keynesian, demand side, supporters of government intervention in the economy at the expense of unregulated finance.
The reason voices are raised is because the disagreement is stark and crucial. The entire neo-liberal economic orthodoxy is at risk of being discredited. If that goes, CNBC's foundational identity goes with it.
As ABC's Muir said of Stewart's questions: the "comedy show was anything but funny." Or as CBS' Greenfield concluded, it was a "very serious question the late-night comedian was raising."
MORE FLASHING THAN SEXTING "That seems extreme," judged ABC's Gigi Stone when she told us about the latest pending prosecution of a child pornography case in Falmouth Mass. The alleged perverts turned out to be a pair of 13-year-old boys who forwarded a cellphone photograph of a partially naked female classmate. The law in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts categorizes the possession or dissemination of any photograph of someone under the age of 18 "in the state of nudity" as an act of child pornography. Stone did not tell us what body part the "partially naked" girl was flashing to qualify her as being in that nude state. The sharing is nicknamed "sexting," Stone added, even though often no sexual activity is depicted, just teens "using cell phones to swap nude pictures of themselves. To many teens it is little more than a hi-tech way of flirting, what the teens see as innocent fun."
"Optimist in Chief," was what NBC's Savannah Guthrie called the President when he advised that we keep focused on "all the fundamentally sound aspects of our economy" as opposed to all that other stuff. ABC's Jake Tapper called it "economic cheerleading" backed by members of his administration "putting on economic smiley faces." Citing a slowdown in the rate at which consumer spending is collapsing, CBS' Chip Reid found "some glimmers of good economic news" while NBC's Guthrie added the tidbits of "housing inventories starting to decline, an unexpected rise in retail sales and signs of less nervousness in the bond market." ABC's George Stephanopoulos put it this way: "Some good news in the economy, some good news from banks, some good news in the stock market."
WHAT THIS ECONOMY NEEDS IS GOOD SEX THE NIGHT BEFORE CBS' weekending Assignment America closer from Steve Hartman happened to recapitulate the search for optimism with which Barack Obama kicked off the newscast. Hartman's premise was that a cockeyed 8% of those surveyed in the latest CBS News opinion poll conducted with The New York Times had rated the economy as improving. Our intrepid reporter went in search of members of the Eight Percent Club and came up with Mark Jastrzembski, a 59-year-old bachelor and retired corrections officer from Muskegon Mich who happens to have between 10 and 15 close friends who have been laid off. "Confounding," is what Hartman called the Polyanna.
Hartman consulted economist Ben Stein--whom he did not identify as a contributor to his own network's Sunday Morning--about the theory of the feedback loop whereby pessimism breeds more pessimism and optimism breeds more optimism. "If collectively all the middle class and upper middle class people in America woke up in a good mood--the same thing as if they had good sex the night before--and went out shopping and investing and starting new businesses, the economy would turn around on a dime," Stein fanstasized.
No word on Stein's advice on the sex lives of working class and poor people.
NOT A SHAMELESS PLUG What about the week's 9% increase in the price of stocks on the financial markets? ABC's Betsy Stark found "a growing sense on Wall Street" that the federal government's investments in high finance "are beginning to pay off." This week the Bank of America and Citigroup and General Electric were collectively able to borrow $30bn "not from the government but from the open market, proof that once-frozen credit markets have thawed." On NBC, Trish Regan of CNBC picked up hints that the banks are making money and that consumers are spending money. "That said, we are not out of the woods yet," she warned, as the banks still have to write off toxic assets at the end of the quarter and consumer resilience may yet be undermined by continuing layoffs. As Anthony Mason (at the tail of the Chip Reid videostream) put it on CBS: "This may only be a bear market rally."
CBS' Mason advised us to check out 60 Minutes' profile of Chairman Benjamin Bernanke at the Federal Reserve Board. "This is not a shameless plug."
IRS CHASES UBS There was only a single report filed with an overseas dateline on all three newscasts combined. It was Jim Maceda's story on NBC about Switzerland--yet he filed it from London. "For more than 70 years its secret bank accounts have defined Switzerland as much as its neutrality or its clocks," Maceda recounted, illustrating his financial journalism with Hollywood fiction, using clips from The Thomas Crown Affair and The Bourne Identity. Now, following Austria and Liechtenstein, the Swiss government has relented and will allow the secrecy of its numbered accounts to be breached "on a case by case basis." Tax prosecutors in the United States want to look at 50,000 accounts belonging mostly to wealthy Americans at UBS. Not to have backed down "would have backlisted Swiss banks risking tens of thousands of jobs."
OBAMA TRANSITION UPDATE All three networks offered a progress report on the still forming Obama Administration. On ABC, Good Morning America anchor Robin Roberts (no link) claimed an Exclusive interview with First Lady Michelle as she visited military families at Fort Bragg. NBC's Rehema Ellis followed up on Barack Obama's speech on the reform of public education with a profile of Arne Duncan, his Education Secretary. Ellis noted that Duncan's budget has been more than doubled by recent stimulus spending. "There are funds to build and repair schools, to protect districts from teacher layoffs and program cutbacks, and to help states actually do what No Child Left Behind promised." The federal funds may boost spending on public schools--or they may simply replace cuts in spending by states and local school boards.
CBS' Congressional correspondent Nancy Cordes looked at the offices that still lie empty at the top levels of the executive branch. Of 19 senior positions at the Treasury Department, for example, "only five have been filled." Cordes mentioned the much publicized problem of "minor tax irregularities" but suggested two other obstacles arising from the President's code of ethics that are turning off potential applicants: his "reluctance to hire lobbyists or to let people take lobbying jobs after they leave;" and rules that require nominees to sell stocks that could present a conflict of interest. "That is a painful prospect when stocks are tanking."
NOT EXACTLY THE BIG HOUSE Bernard Madoff continues to generate buzz, even from his jail cell. NBC's Anne Thompson reported on the implications of the phrase in his guilty plea that "to the best of my recollection my fraud began in the early '90s." That would mean, Thompson told us, that his Palm Beach mansion, purchased in 1994, might be vulnerable to forfeiture but his Manhattan penthouse, owned since 1984, would be immune. CBS had Armen Keteyian paint a picture of the medium security federal penitentiary--"not exactly the Big House"--that awaits the disgraced financier: "two man cells…lights on and breakfast at 6am…lights off at 10pm…lunch at 11am…dinner at 5pm…five days a week work…hours and hours of mandatory headcounts and mindnumbing routine."
CNBC’S SHOUTFESTS: NOT SHOW BUSINESS BUT SERIOUS BUSINESS "Like a prosecutor bearing down on a decidedly uncomfortable witness, Stewart argued that the cable TV financial network--and by extension much of the business press--had given the public a false sense of financial security."
That was how CBS' Jeff Greenfield reviewed Thursday night's face-off (here, here and here) of the feuding cable personalities: Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's The Daily Show against Jim Cramer of CNBC's
"Business Press" is the giveaway phrase in Greenfield's description. For years now, business journalism has been a misnomer. What makes news first and foremost about national economic activity is finance. The sole certain economic tidbit to be reported each night on the nightly newscasts is the status of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
People have jobs. Businesses engage in commerce. Importers and exporters conduct trade. Labor unions organize. Governments tax. Consumers spend. The poor are always with us. Yet the "business press" sees the entire economy through the prism of finance. Even the nightly newscasts have a bias in favor of finance. So far this year, for example, even in the depths of a recession, of the 376 stories the three networks have filed on general economic topics, almost a third (120 or 32%) have had a financial angle. CNBC, a "financial" news network, is the pinnacle of this distorted view of the economy.
The raison d'etre of a "financial" news network is to persuade its audience that the best measure of prosperity is the value of financial assets. To that end, the financial markets are assumed to be a rational, efficient and civic-minded method of assigning capital. With finance occupying the commanding heights, the real economy--labor, wages, commerce, business, trade, poverty, infrastructure--is covered by the financial networks as a secondary sideshow.
In that context, CNBC's fulsome cheerleading for a bull market--and its consternation in the face of the bear--has not been an error of judgment. It is a fact of its identity. CNBC is by nature unable to report a bubble in financial assets as bad news, even if it is fueled by lax monetary policy and reckless leverage. It is unable to report the bursting of that bubble as good news, even if that represents a return to sane levels of valuation and a productive allocation of capital.
If CNBC practiced objective journalism, with no rooting interest in the direction of stock prices, it would be an economics news network not a financial news network.
That was why Jon Stewart paraphrased Carly Simon in his Daily Show interview with Cramer: "It is not all about you." Even though the face-off was pitched as the Stewart vs Cramer Feud of the Century, Stewart's critique was against the entire CNBC enterprise.
Not that Cramer's Mad Money was let off the hook. David Muir used the following, bleeped, critique in his coverage of the confrontation on ABC next night. "I understand that you want to make finance entertaining but it is not a fucking game." Cramer justified his colleagues' Fast Money style: "There is a market for it and we give it to them." Stewart's response: "There is a market for cocaine and hookers." NBC's nightly newscast, by the way, unlike CBS and ABC did not find the Stewart-Cramer showdown newsworthy enough to cover.
Take your pick. Mad Money's mixture of bells & whistles and inside tips and carnival barker intensity is either entertaining. Or it vindicates Stewart's criticism that CNBC favors casino-style speculation at the expense of long-term investments. "How is that different from an infomercial?" the comedian inquired.
Yet we should not confuse Cramer's Mad Money antics with so much of the shouting that takes place at other dayparts on CNBC's schedule from the likes of Rick Santelli or Larry Kudlow or Dennis Kneale. Michael Calderone at Politico (in an article that quotes me) attributes the CNBC shoutfests to a house style at NBC News: "The increasingly opinionated dispatches from CNBC's stars parallels MSNBC's shift during the 2008 campaign to more aggressively opinionated commentary."
A close viewing of CNBC's market coverage reveals that the shouting stands for something more serious. As persuasive as Stewart may have seemed on Comedy Central that the recently collapsed bull market consisted of "giant piles of money going in and out and people trading them. It is transactional and it is fast but it is dangerous. It is ethically dubious" or "a Sherman's March through their companies financed by our 401(k)s and all the incentives were for short term profit and they burned the fucking house down with our money and walked away rich as hell," those insights are still vigorously challenged inside CNBC itself.
There are plenty of holdouts at CNBC who adamantly believe that high finance does--and should--occupy the commanding heights of the economy and that therefore financial journalism has the appropriate perspective on the economy at large. Growth in the real economy depends on inexpensive access to capital, subject to lower taxes and less regulation. The shouting Ludlow and the shouting Kneale are joined by the softer spoken Melissa Francis and Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, for example, in insisting that the system of financial capitalism that CNBC was founded to validate is not broken.
The CNBC shouting represents a genuine intellectual and ideological crisis at the network. The received wisdom of the last 30 years--Chicago School, supply side, laissez faire--is being challenged by the current facts on the tape. Much of the shouting is targeted at pundits, experts, analysts and correspondents, led by in-house economist Steve Liesman, who take the other side--the Keynesian, demand side, supporters of government intervention in the economy at the expense of unregulated finance.
The reason voices are raised is because the disagreement is stark and crucial. The entire neo-liberal economic orthodoxy is at risk of being discredited. If that goes, CNBC's foundational identity goes with it.
As ABC's Muir said of Stewart's questions: the "comedy show was anything but funny." Or as CBS' Greenfield concluded, it was a "very serious question the late-night comedian was raising."
MORE FLASHING THAN SEXTING "That seems extreme," judged ABC's Gigi Stone when she told us about the latest pending prosecution of a child pornography case in Falmouth Mass. The alleged perverts turned out to be a pair of 13-year-old boys who forwarded a cellphone photograph of a partially naked female classmate. The law in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts categorizes the possession or dissemination of any photograph of someone under the age of 18 "in the state of nudity" as an act of child pornography. Stone did not tell us what body part the "partially naked" girl was flashing to qualify her as being in that nude state. The sharing is nicknamed "sexting," Stone added, even though often no sexual activity is depicted, just teens "using cell phones to swap nude pictures of themselves. To many teens it is little more than a hi-tech way of flirting, what the teens see as innocent fun."
