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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM MARCH 4, 2009
There was a tug-of-war along Pennsylvania Avenue over top spot on the day's agenda. The White House wanted the guidelines for its mortgage foreclosure prevention plan, unveiled at the Treasury Department's financialstability.gov, to make most news. Sure enough, all three newscasts led with those details. On Capitol Hill, the Senate wanted porkbarrel spending to grab headlines. Sure enough, all three Congressional correspondents covered the 9,000 earmarked projects in the continuing resolution for last year's budget. The foreclosure plan costs $75bn; the porkbarrel spending costs $7.7bn. By a faction of a minute, the pork qualified as Story of the Day.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR MARCH 4, 2009: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
PORKBARREL-FORECLOSURE TUG-OF-WAR There was a tug-of-war along Pennsylvania Avenue over top spot on the day's agenda. The White House wanted the guidelines for its mortgage foreclosure prevention plan, unveiled at the Treasury Department's financialstability.gov, to make most news. Sure enough, all three newscasts led with those details. On Capitol Hill, the Senate wanted porkbarrel spending to grab headlines. Sure enough, all three Congressional correspondents covered the 9,000 earmarked projects in the continuing resolution for last year's budget. The foreclosure plan costs $75bn; the porkbarrel spending costs $7.7bn. By a faction of a minute, the pork qualified as Story of the Day.
No matter that not a single earmark amounted to as much as one quarter of 1% of the $410bn omnibus legislation, all three Capitol Hill reporters--ABC's Jonathan Karl, NBC's Kelly O'Donnell and CBS' Nancy Cordes (no link)--peppered their reports with pet projects. There was the touristic: a convention center in Myrtle Beach (Karl), canoe tours in Hawaii (O'Donnell). There was the infrastructural: water taxis in Connecticut (Cordes). There was the educational: a planetarium in Chicago (O'Donnell). There was the historic: lighthouses in Maine (O'Donnell); a landmarked baseball stadium in Detroit (Cordes and O'Donnell). There was the agricultural, of course. All three correspondents quoted Sen Tom Harkin defending funds to fight the stench of swine manure as "not frivolous." Let that correspondent who is forced to live next to a porcine cesspool be the first to gainsay the Iowa senator.
ABC's Karl, as he did last week, misled us into thinking that all these earmarks amounted to more than a trivial portion of the legislation. "The bill would raise government spending by a near record 8%," he declared, referring to the entire package, before introducing Sen John McCain's condemnation of "unnecessary and wasteful earmarks." Thus Karl left the false impression that the "wasteful" earmarks and the "near record" increase happen to be one and the same.
So why is pork hard news rather than another jokey collection of zany schemes? Candidate Barack Obama had promised to excise earmarked spending on the campaign trail. "There is a small group of senators from both parties who are asking President Obama to veto it," reported NBC's O'Donnell. The White House is backing down from that pledge, calling the FY09 bill last year's business and will leave it intact.
While the Senate was debating, the Department of Transportation was writing checks. "It has greenlighted $1.5bn in road work across 20 states. They have got $25bn more for roads and bridges," ABC's David Muir told us, being careful not to use the term "porkbarrel." He showed us projects in Iowa and Maryland and Indiana and Ohio. His focus, instead, was on the hiring those federal funds are already setting in motion.
FORECLOSURE PREVENTION FINE PRINT Considering how much detailed coverage the networks lavished on the President's foreclosure prevention plan--and the opposition to it from so-called cable ranters--when it was unveiled two weeks ago it should come as no surprise that all three newscasts again selected it as their lead when the Obama Administration "rolled out the fine print," as ABC's Betsy Stark put it. Yet seeing that the fine print contained very few details that had not already been covered at the time, it is only appropriate that all that odorous pork should have nosed out foreclosures as Story of the Day.
As Barack Obama had announced, the foreclosure plan has two aspects. For those homeowners whose mortgage is held by FannieMae or FreddieMac, who are not behind in their payments, but whose home is worth less than the principal the owe, refinancing will now be permitted "even if the home is worth as much as 5% less," Diana Olick, CNBC's real estate correspondent, told us on NBC. For those who are in danger of default, the Treasury Department has a $75bn fund to subsidize a renegotiated loan to bring down monthly payments. If the bank lowers interest rates and extends the term of the note to get the payment schedule as low as 38% of the borrower's gross income, the federal subsidy will lower the payment further to 31%. "The whole program needs no approval by Congress. It starts now," CBS' Chip Reid declared. ABC's Stark warned that it "will not help people facing foreclosure because they lost their job."
Drowning jokes aside, generally speaking, what is wrong with living in a house that is underwater, as the saying goes, with more principal owed than its market value? CBS' Ben Tracy answered from a Los Angeles neighborhood, where Aaron and Jessica Jenkins bought their house in 2005 for $700K. It is now worth $350K on which they owe $540K, making them ineligible for the FannieMae-FreddieMac portion of the President's plan. The couple is at no risk of foreclosure. They can make their payments as long as they stay. Their situation "really matters when you need to sell…You are under water. You lose your job. You need to relocate to find work. You are stuck."
CORPORATE DAMAGE It was a negative day for General Electric, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals and Boeing Aerospace.
NBC anchor Brian Williams looked at the stock market ticker and saw "grim" news about his employer. General Electric owns NBC Universal, which operates NBC News and CNBC, the financial news cable channel. So Williams sat down with CNBC's David Faber and asked what was happening to GE. The Meatball, "an enormous company" that employs 300,000, was once capitalized at $500bn; today about $60bn. Faber blamed its overextended financial services arm, which "makes loans around the world" on mortgages, credit cards, real estate development. "A feeding frenzy," he called it nihilistically. "Nobody believes anything anymore."
Wyeth, the manufacturer of Phenergan, a migraine headache medicine, knew that the drug had caused gangrene, sometimes leading to amputation, in 20 cases when administered intravenously. Yet it did not add an IV warning to its label because the Food & Drug Administration had not ordered it. When Diana Levine, "a popular Vermont musician," as NBC's Pete Williams called her, had the IV Push, the drug got into an artery. Her hand had to be cut off. Levine sued in state court and was awarded $7m in damages. The Supreme Court rejected Wyeth's appeal, calling the firm responsible for its own labels. "This ruling means that future drug safety cases--the next Vioxx, the next Fen-Phen--can move forward," CBS' Wyatt Andrews concluded, "as can other state court claims against the railroads or carmakers."
On ABC, Lisa Stark found trouble for Boeing in the investigation of last week's crash of a 737 jetliner on approach to Amsterdam Airport. Turkish Airlines Flight 1951 was flying on autopilot when it plowed into a field, leaving nine dead. The autopilot was following a faulty altimeter, which registered that the plane was about to land when it was in fact 1950 ft airborne. The autopilot reduced power and "it was not until they were 450 ft above that ground, after a stall warning, that the crew applied full power but they were too low and too slow." Boeing sent out an alert to the nine airlines operating some 1300 737s nationwide. "Are more warnings needed?" Stark asked. "Does Boeing need to tale a look at how the altimeter and autopilot work together?"
SUDAN IS OFF CBS’ RADAR As Today's Ann Curry predicted when she visited the refugee camps of Chad last month for NBC, President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan has been indicted on charges of war crimes by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Both NBC and ABC covered the warrant for his arrest. That CBS did not mention it is true to form: of the 22 stories filed on the atrocities in Darfur by reporters on the three nightly newscasts over the past 30 months, just one has been filed by CBS.
The charges cover murder, rape, torture and ethnic cleansing but do not amount to genocide. NBC's Curry replayed the President's defense from her 2007 interview with him: "We can never target citizens. We have targeted rebels." ABC's David Wright told us that Bashir has ruled Sudan "with an iron fist" for 20 years. "It is not at all clear who would ever arrest Bashir. There is no international police force to enforce the indictment." For his part, Bashir told the court to "stir and drink" its indictment and revoked permission for international humanitarian organizations to work inside Sudan's borders. "Suffering is likely to increase," NBC's Curry foretold.
RECESSION SPREADS TO MEXICO, GUATEMALA The first two parts of NBC's series We the People on Latinos in the United States concerned the growth of the native-born Hispanic population. Lee Cowan told us about the Latino babyboom in "smaller metropolitan areas that had virtually no Hispanic population say 20 years ago." Carl Quintanilla told us that 20% of all children in this country are Hispanic and so the Boy Scouts of America is adapting with a six-city bilingual recruiting drive. Now Mark Potter turns to immigrants from Mexico and Central America. "They had made a promise to their families back home to work hard and support them" but the recession has forced 73%, according to Pew Center research, to send back smaller remittances.
MADOFF’S IN-LAWS WERE CATSKILLS RECRUITERS ABC's Brian Ross kept an eye on the Bernard Madoff investigation with a telephoto lens peering into the financier's $7m Manhattan penthouse apartment windows. "The focus is now on his wife Ruth," Ross announced, as she claimed that even if her husband is imprisoned for running his investment fund as a Ponzi scheme, she has a separate $62m fortune "from money she had inherited from her parents." Ross was skeptical that the married Madoffs separated their finances: she worked as his bookkeeper when he started his business; she kept an office in his fund's headquarters; her father left her no more than $39,000 in Pitney Bowes stock in his will. Furthermore, Ross reported, Bernard had Ruth ask her parents to recruit investors for him. Check out the home video of Madoff's in-laws on a recruiting vacation at a Catskills resort.
GRANNY BECOMES A YOUTUBE STAR It is a perennial crowd pleaser to close a newscast--an elderly character gets exposed to modern technology and finds a new lease on life. When Nintendo Wii was first released, NBC's George Lewis publicized the software by following a virtual bowling league at a Seattle retirement home…ABC's David Wright brought us the geriatric Zimmers singing My Generation on YouTube from England…also on YouTube, ABC's Ron Claiborne found Feed Me Bubbe, the Yiddish grandmother's recipe show…now CBS' Michelle Miller potters around the kitchen with Clara Cannucciaria, aged 93, as she hosts Depression Cooking by Clara, a frugal how-to for making meals at 50c a serving. Stale bread drenched in water and olive oil "is good for old people that do not have teeth."
No matter that not a single earmark amounted to as much as one quarter of 1% of the $410bn omnibus legislation, all three Capitol Hill reporters--ABC's Jonathan Karl, NBC's Kelly O'Donnell and CBS' Nancy Cordes (no link)--peppered their reports with pet projects. There was the touristic: a convention center in Myrtle Beach (Karl), canoe tours in Hawaii (O'Donnell). There was the infrastructural: water taxis in Connecticut (Cordes). There was the educational: a planetarium in Chicago (O'Donnell). There was the historic: lighthouses in Maine (O'Donnell); a landmarked baseball stadium in Detroit (Cordes and O'Donnell). There was the agricultural, of course. All three correspondents quoted Sen Tom Harkin defending funds to fight the stench of swine manure as "not frivolous." Let that correspondent who is forced to live next to a porcine cesspool be the first to gainsay the Iowa senator.
ABC's Karl, as he did last week, misled us into thinking that all these earmarks amounted to more than a trivial portion of the legislation. "The bill would raise government spending by a near record 8%," he declared, referring to the entire package, before introducing Sen John McCain's condemnation of "unnecessary and wasteful earmarks." Thus Karl left the false impression that the "wasteful" earmarks and the "near record" increase happen to be one and the same.
So why is pork hard news rather than another jokey collection of zany schemes? Candidate Barack Obama had promised to excise earmarked spending on the campaign trail. "There is a small group of senators from both parties who are asking President Obama to veto it," reported NBC's O'Donnell. The White House is backing down from that pledge, calling the FY09 bill last year's business and will leave it intact.
While the Senate was debating, the Department of Transportation was writing checks. "It has greenlighted $1.5bn in road work across 20 states. They have got $25bn more for roads and bridges," ABC's David Muir told us, being careful not to use the term "porkbarrel." He showed us projects in Iowa and Maryland and Indiana and Ohio. His focus, instead, was on the hiring those federal funds are already setting in motion.
FORECLOSURE PREVENTION FINE PRINT Considering how much detailed coverage the networks lavished on the President's foreclosure prevention plan--and the opposition to it from so-called cable ranters--when it was unveiled two weeks ago it should come as no surprise that all three newscasts again selected it as their lead when the Obama Administration "rolled out the fine print," as ABC's Betsy Stark put it. Yet seeing that the fine print contained very few details that had not already been covered at the time, it is only appropriate that all that odorous pork should have nosed out foreclosures as Story of the Day.
As Barack Obama had announced, the foreclosure plan has two aspects. For those homeowners whose mortgage is held by FannieMae or FreddieMac, who are not behind in their payments, but whose home is worth less than the principal the owe, refinancing will now be permitted "even if the home is worth as much as 5% less," Diana Olick, CNBC's real estate correspondent, told us on NBC. For those who are in danger of default, the Treasury Department has a $75bn fund to subsidize a renegotiated loan to bring down monthly payments. If the bank lowers interest rates and extends the term of the note to get the payment schedule as low as 38% of the borrower's gross income, the federal subsidy will lower the payment further to 31%. "The whole program needs no approval by Congress. It starts now," CBS' Chip Reid declared. ABC's Stark warned that it "will not help people facing foreclosure because they lost their job."
Drowning jokes aside, generally speaking, what is wrong with living in a house that is underwater, as the saying goes, with more principal owed than its market value? CBS' Ben Tracy answered from a Los Angeles neighborhood, where Aaron and Jessica Jenkins bought their house in 2005 for $700K. It is now worth $350K on which they owe $540K, making them ineligible for the FannieMae-FreddieMac portion of the President's plan. The couple is at no risk of foreclosure. They can make their payments as long as they stay. Their situation "really matters when you need to sell…You are under water. You lose your job. You need to relocate to find work. You are stuck."
CORPORATE DAMAGE It was a negative day for General Electric, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals and Boeing Aerospace.
NBC anchor Brian Williams looked at the stock market ticker and saw "grim" news about his employer. General Electric owns NBC Universal, which operates NBC News and CNBC, the financial news cable channel. So Williams sat down with CNBC's David Faber and asked what was happening to GE. The Meatball, "an enormous company" that employs 300,000, was once capitalized at $500bn; today about $60bn. Faber blamed its overextended financial services arm, which "makes loans around the world" on mortgages, credit cards, real estate development. "A feeding frenzy," he called it nihilistically. "Nobody believes anything anymore."
Wyeth, the manufacturer of Phenergan, a migraine headache medicine, knew that the drug had caused gangrene, sometimes leading to amputation, in 20 cases when administered intravenously. Yet it did not add an IV warning to its label because the Food & Drug Administration had not ordered it. When Diana Levine, "a popular Vermont musician," as NBC's Pete Williams called her, had the IV Push, the drug got into an artery. Her hand had to be cut off. Levine sued in state court and was awarded $7m in damages. The Supreme Court rejected Wyeth's appeal, calling the firm responsible for its own labels. "This ruling means that future drug safety cases--the next Vioxx, the next Fen-Phen--can move forward," CBS' Wyatt Andrews concluded, "as can other state court claims against the railroads or carmakers."
On ABC, Lisa Stark found trouble for Boeing in the investigation of last week's crash of a 737 jetliner on approach to Amsterdam Airport. Turkish Airlines Flight 1951 was flying on autopilot when it plowed into a field, leaving nine dead. The autopilot was following a faulty altimeter, which registered that the plane was about to land when it was in fact 1950 ft airborne. The autopilot reduced power and "it was not until they were 450 ft above that ground, after a stall warning, that the crew applied full power but they were too low and too slow." Boeing sent out an alert to the nine airlines operating some 1300 737s nationwide. "Are more warnings needed?" Stark asked. "Does Boeing need to tale a look at how the altimeter and autopilot work together?"
SUDAN IS OFF CBS’ RADAR As Today's Ann Curry predicted when she visited the refugee camps of Chad last month for NBC, President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan has been indicted on charges of war crimes by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Both NBC and ABC covered the warrant for his arrest. That CBS did not mention it is true to form: of the 22 stories filed on the atrocities in Darfur by reporters on the three nightly newscasts over the past 30 months, just one has been filed by CBS.
The charges cover murder, rape, torture and ethnic cleansing but do not amount to genocide. NBC's Curry replayed the President's defense from her 2007 interview with him: "We can never target citizens. We have targeted rebels." ABC's David Wright told us that Bashir has ruled Sudan "with an iron fist" for 20 years. "It is not at all clear who would ever arrest Bashir. There is no international police force to enforce the indictment." For his part, Bashir told the court to "stir and drink" its indictment and revoked permission for international humanitarian organizations to work inside Sudan's borders. "Suffering is likely to increase," NBC's Curry foretold.
RECESSION SPREADS TO MEXICO, GUATEMALA The first two parts of NBC's series We the People on Latinos in the United States concerned the growth of the native-born Hispanic population. Lee Cowan told us about the Latino babyboom in "smaller metropolitan areas that had virtually no Hispanic population say 20 years ago." Carl Quintanilla told us that 20% of all children in this country are Hispanic and so the Boy Scouts of America is adapting with a six-city bilingual recruiting drive. Now Mark Potter turns to immigrants from Mexico and Central America. "They had made a promise to their families back home to work hard and support them" but the recession has forced 73%, according to Pew Center research, to send back smaller remittances.
MADOFF’S IN-LAWS WERE CATSKILLS RECRUITERS ABC's Brian Ross kept an eye on the Bernard Madoff investigation with a telephoto lens peering into the financier's $7m Manhattan penthouse apartment windows. "The focus is now on his wife Ruth," Ross announced, as she claimed that even if her husband is imprisoned for running his investment fund as a Ponzi scheme, she has a separate $62m fortune "from money she had inherited from her parents." Ross was skeptical that the married Madoffs separated their finances: she worked as his bookkeeper when he started his business; she kept an office in his fund's headquarters; her father left her no more than $39,000 in Pitney Bowes stock in his will. Furthermore, Ross reported, Bernard had Ruth ask her parents to recruit investors for him. Check out the home video of Madoff's in-laws on a recruiting vacation at a Catskills resort.
GRANNY BECOMES A YOUTUBE STAR It is a perennial crowd pleaser to close a newscast--an elderly character gets exposed to modern technology and finds a new lease on life. When Nintendo Wii was first released, NBC's George Lewis publicized the software by following a virtual bowling league at a Seattle retirement home…ABC's David Wright brought us the geriatric Zimmers singing My Generation on YouTube from England…also on YouTube, ABC's Ron Claiborne found Feed Me Bubbe, the Yiddish grandmother's recipe show…now CBS' Michelle Miller potters around the kitchen with Clara Cannucciaria, aged 93, as she hosts Depression Cooking by Clara, a frugal how-to for making meals at 50c a serving. Stale bread drenched in water and olive oil "is good for old people that do not have teeth."
