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TYNDALL HEADLINE: HIGHLIGHTS FROM APRIL 23, 2009
The President took center stage to portray himself as the populist leader of the beleaguered consumer. All three networks led with Barack Obama's White House meeting with executives of the 14 largest credit card companies. His key soundbite led the Story of the Day: "The days of any time, any reason rate hikes and late fee traps have to end." In total, consumers have run up a total of $962bn in credit card debt, on which they are paying an average annual interest rate of 14.6%--as well as forking over a total of $15bn each year in late fees and penalties.
TYNDALL PICKS FOR APRIL 23, 2009: CLICK ON GRID ELEMENTS TO SEARCH FOR MATCHING ITEMS
POPULIST PRESIDENT PICKS ON PLASTIC The President took center stage to portray himself as the populist leader of the beleaguered consumer. All three networks led with Barack Obama's White House meeting with executives of the 14 largest credit card companies. His key soundbite led the Story of the Day: "The days of any time, any reason rate hikes and late fee traps have to end." In total, consumers have run up a total of $962bn in credit card debt, on which they are paying an average annual interest rate of 14.6%--as well as forking over a total of $15bn each year in late fees and penalties.
Credit cards are a hot button issue. ABC's Jake Tapper told us that fully one-tenth of all the citizen mail that the White House receives concerns "unfair credit card practices" while NBC's Lisa Myers noted that "politicians have received a crescendo of complaints." Chief among them are hikes in interest rates "not just on future charges but on debts they already owe." The Federal Reserve Board has already drafted regulations that will not be implemented until July 2010. NBC's Myers reported on proposed legislation in the Senate to bring that deadline forward.
CBS' Anthony Mason ticked off the four reforms that President Obama called for: no retroactive interest rate increases, agreements written in plain English, easy comparison shopping between plans, and tougher enforcement. At present, Charles Geisst, author of Collateral Damaged, told Mason: "There is nothing stopping the credit card companies." As for the banks, ABC's Tapper quoted the industry's justification for its rates and fees as "doing what it needs to do to survive in a recession."
WILL LEAKS HELP LEWIS KEEP HIS JOB? Kenneth Lewis, the chief executive of the Bank of America, is in trouble with some shareholders because the bank's stock price has tanked. The selloff was precipitated, in part, by his decision to buy Merrill Lynch, the brokerage house. That is the context for Sharyl Attkisson's report on CBS, in which she lifted the curtain on behind-the-scenes power plays at the nadir of last fall's financial meltdown. Attkisson's report was based on depositions she obtained from Andrew Cuomo, the Attorney General of New York State. In them Lewis recounts the strong-armed tactics he claims then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson used on him to prevent him from reneging on his promise to take over Merrill Lynch.
The takeover was agreed to last September but three months later "a staggering amount of deterioration" was discovered in Merrill Lynch's books: over a span of just six days, the brokerage house lost $3bn. According to Attkisson's report, Lewis wanted to back out of the deal; Paulson threatened to have him fired as BofA CEO if he did; Lewis agreed to go ahead in exchange for billions of federal dollars; Paulson stated that he was requested to threaten to fire Lewis by Chairman Benjamin Bernanke of the Federal Reserve Board; Lewis claims he was instructed to keep the disastrous state of Merrill's books secret by Paulson and Bernanke.
Was this "improper or illegal?" Attkisson wondered. "Nothing like this has ever happened before."
LAYOFFS FROM EVANSTON TO GRAND RAPIDS NBC had Trish Regan of CNBC, its sibling financial news cable channel, update us on unemployment. There are now a recordbreaking 6.1m people claiming jobless benefits nationwide, the twelfth week in a row for that number to hit an all-time record. "The job market is growing ever weaker," she warned, as General Motors announced plans to idle its factories for longer than usual. "A long and unwanted summer vacation," was how ABC's Chris Bury put it, as 13 plants will be shuttered for up to nine weeks, cutting the company's production nearly in half, by 190,000 vehicles, to work off excess inventory. The shutdowns will likely spread to the supply chain, CBS' Dean Reynolds predicted, bringing bad news if you happen to make lubricants for metal moldings in Evanston or run a stamping machine in Grand Rapids.
US DOLLARS PAID TO TALIBAN TO FIGHT US TO GET MORE DOLLARS Only CBS assigned a correspondent to Wednesday's testimony by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on truce in Pakistan between government forces and Taliban guerrillas. Lara Logan quoted Madame Secretary as "slamming the peace deal Pakistan's government made with militants in the Swat Valley." Referring to the ambition of Sufi Muhammad, an Islamist leader, to expand a system of religious law across the entire country, Rodham Clinton warned: "We cannot underscore the seriousness of the existential threat posed to the state of Pakistan." She presumably meant either that "we cannot understate" or "we must underscore."
Anyway, ABC's Martha Raddatz filled us in on conditions in the Swat Valley, which she visited 18 months ago. The Taliban now has "a solid safe haven," including the Buner District just 60 miles from Islamabad, where it has "imposed strict Islamic law, destroying schools and flogging people publicly for defying them" Unidentified "officials" told Raddatz that some of the $10bn paid to Islamabad by Washington under George Bush's administration as part of its War on Terrorism was actually passed on to the Taliban to pay them "to keep fighting the Americans so that the Pakistanis would continue to get US dollars."
VACATION SPOT IS TOO DARNED HOT Wildfires provide eyecatching visuals so it was no surprise that all three newscasts would send a correspondent to coastal South Carolina where sparks in "thick, dry underbrush," as NBC's Ron Mott put it, set forests ablaze, fanned by high overnight winds. Subdivisions have been "developed in the middle of Carolina pine forests," ABC's Stephanie Sy explained, so evacuations were ordered, displacing 2,500 residents. The other reason why a local fire should receive such national attention is that Myrtle Beach is such a popular tourist destination that viewers nationwide feel a connection. CBS' Mark Strassmann showed us the map where the flames were advancing towards the ocean, just two miles away. "The Intercoastal Waterway, firefighters hope, will act as a natural break to protect popular vacation spots."
MORE ON MURTHA John Murtha, the master appropriator, is finding himself a regular spot on the nightly news. Monday he was the topic of CBS' Follow the Money when Sharyl Attkisson needled him for urging defense contractors who receive his earmarked funds to set up offices in his hometown of Johnstown Pa. Now ABC chimes in with a Your Money feature from Jonathan Karl on the Democratic Congressman. Murtha succeeded in raising $150m in federal aviation funds to build an airport in his home town--but this was not a case of If You Build It…. "It pretty much looks like an airport ghost town." For all of its state-of-the-art radar and runways, the John Murtha Johnstown Cambria County Airport handles only three flights a day. All three fly to Washington's Dulles Airport. The average daily passenger load is 20. And federal subsidies pay United Airlines $100 for each seat filled.
FROM OUR SCUBA CORRESPONDENT Taking advantage of General Electric's corporatewide Green is Universal environmental commitment, scubadiving Ian Williams landed a trip to Saipan in the Marianas Islands as part of NBC's Sea Change series on marine ecosystems. Williams filed Wednesday from Tasmania. Poor Anne Thompson. She landed the short straw when she kicked off the series, never venturing farther than Bar Harbor. The Marianas Trench, at seven miles below sea level the deepest canyon on the planet, is part of a protected national monument, conserved from fishing and drilling. Williams took off his goggles to file a floating stand up: "The challenge now is how best to manage these vast new protected areas."
COMING GOBI ATTRACTIONS The Horse Boy, a new movie from Zeitgeist Films, received plenty of free publicity from Don Teague on CBS. Director Rupert Isaacson ostensibly tells the story of the horse-riding therapy that treated the autism that afflicted his son Rowan, now aged seven. Yet the clips Teague showed that made The Horse Boy worth seeing were not about autism. Check out the Isaacson family's trip to find a cure by visiting an equine shaman on the steppes of Mongolia. "Every family goes to Mongolia in their own way," Isaacson asserted in a New Age sort of a way.
MUCH ADO Roger O'Neil was clearly perplexed as to why NBC had assigned him to cover Chicago's celebration of William Shakespeare's 445th birthday. After all, what is Chicago to him, or he to Chicago? "He never saw the Cubs play. He probably does not know what Da Bears are. Chicago, methinks, was not even Chicago 445 years ago." Finally O'Neil found why the Bard's words are suited to the toddlin' town that Billy Sunday could not shut down. He knows how to curse: "Thou rank white livered canker blossom!"
Credit cards are a hot button issue. ABC's Jake Tapper told us that fully one-tenth of all the citizen mail that the White House receives concerns "unfair credit card practices" while NBC's Lisa Myers noted that "politicians have received a crescendo of complaints." Chief among them are hikes in interest rates "not just on future charges but on debts they already owe." The Federal Reserve Board has already drafted regulations that will not be implemented until July 2010. NBC's Myers reported on proposed legislation in the Senate to bring that deadline forward.
CBS' Anthony Mason ticked off the four reforms that President Obama called for: no retroactive interest rate increases, agreements written in plain English, easy comparison shopping between plans, and tougher enforcement. At present, Charles Geisst, author of Collateral Damaged, told Mason: "There is nothing stopping the credit card companies." As for the banks, ABC's Tapper quoted the industry's justification for its rates and fees as "doing what it needs to do to survive in a recession."
WILL LEAKS HELP LEWIS KEEP HIS JOB? Kenneth Lewis, the chief executive of the Bank of America, is in trouble with some shareholders because the bank's stock price has tanked. The selloff was precipitated, in part, by his decision to buy Merrill Lynch, the brokerage house. That is the context for Sharyl Attkisson's report on CBS, in which she lifted the curtain on behind-the-scenes power plays at the nadir of last fall's financial meltdown. Attkisson's report was based on depositions she obtained from Andrew Cuomo, the Attorney General of New York State. In them Lewis recounts the strong-armed tactics he claims then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson used on him to prevent him from reneging on his promise to take over Merrill Lynch.
The takeover was agreed to last September but three months later "a staggering amount of deterioration" was discovered in Merrill Lynch's books: over a span of just six days, the brokerage house lost $3bn. According to Attkisson's report, Lewis wanted to back out of the deal; Paulson threatened to have him fired as BofA CEO if he did; Lewis agreed to go ahead in exchange for billions of federal dollars; Paulson stated that he was requested to threaten to fire Lewis by Chairman Benjamin Bernanke of the Federal Reserve Board; Lewis claims he was instructed to keep the disastrous state of Merrill's books secret by Paulson and Bernanke.
Was this "improper or illegal?" Attkisson wondered. "Nothing like this has ever happened before."
LAYOFFS FROM EVANSTON TO GRAND RAPIDS NBC had Trish Regan of CNBC, its sibling financial news cable channel, update us on unemployment. There are now a recordbreaking 6.1m people claiming jobless benefits nationwide, the twelfth week in a row for that number to hit an all-time record. "The job market is growing ever weaker," she warned, as General Motors announced plans to idle its factories for longer than usual. "A long and unwanted summer vacation," was how ABC's Chris Bury put it, as 13 plants will be shuttered for up to nine weeks, cutting the company's production nearly in half, by 190,000 vehicles, to work off excess inventory. The shutdowns will likely spread to the supply chain, CBS' Dean Reynolds predicted, bringing bad news if you happen to make lubricants for metal moldings in Evanston or run a stamping machine in Grand Rapids.
US DOLLARS PAID TO TALIBAN TO FIGHT US TO GET MORE DOLLARS Only CBS assigned a correspondent to Wednesday's testimony by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on truce in Pakistan between government forces and Taliban guerrillas. Lara Logan quoted Madame Secretary as "slamming the peace deal Pakistan's government made with militants in the Swat Valley." Referring to the ambition of Sufi Muhammad, an Islamist leader, to expand a system of religious law across the entire country, Rodham Clinton warned: "We cannot underscore the seriousness of the existential threat posed to the state of Pakistan." She presumably meant either that "we cannot understate" or "we must underscore."
Anyway, ABC's Martha Raddatz filled us in on conditions in the Swat Valley, which she visited 18 months ago. The Taliban now has "a solid safe haven," including the Buner District just 60 miles from Islamabad, where it has "imposed strict Islamic law, destroying schools and flogging people publicly for defying them" Unidentified "officials" told Raddatz that some of the $10bn paid to Islamabad by Washington under George Bush's administration as part of its War on Terrorism was actually passed on to the Taliban to pay them "to keep fighting the Americans so that the Pakistanis would continue to get US dollars."
VACATION SPOT IS TOO DARNED HOT Wildfires provide eyecatching visuals so it was no surprise that all three newscasts would send a correspondent to coastal South Carolina where sparks in "thick, dry underbrush," as NBC's Ron Mott put it, set forests ablaze, fanned by high overnight winds. Subdivisions have been "developed in the middle of Carolina pine forests," ABC's Stephanie Sy explained, so evacuations were ordered, displacing 2,500 residents. The other reason why a local fire should receive such national attention is that Myrtle Beach is such a popular tourist destination that viewers nationwide feel a connection. CBS' Mark Strassmann showed us the map where the flames were advancing towards the ocean, just two miles away. "The Intercoastal Waterway, firefighters hope, will act as a natural break to protect popular vacation spots."
MORE ON MURTHA John Murtha, the master appropriator, is finding himself a regular spot on the nightly news. Monday he was the topic of CBS' Follow the Money when Sharyl Attkisson needled him for urging defense contractors who receive his earmarked funds to set up offices in his hometown of Johnstown Pa. Now ABC chimes in with a Your Money feature from Jonathan Karl on the Democratic Congressman. Murtha succeeded in raising $150m in federal aviation funds to build an airport in his home town--but this was not a case of If You Build It…. "It pretty much looks like an airport ghost town." For all of its state-of-the-art radar and runways, the John Murtha Johnstown Cambria County Airport handles only three flights a day. All three fly to Washington's Dulles Airport. The average daily passenger load is 20. And federal subsidies pay United Airlines $100 for each seat filled.
FROM OUR SCUBA CORRESPONDENT Taking advantage of General Electric's corporatewide Green is Universal environmental commitment, scubadiving Ian Williams landed a trip to Saipan in the Marianas Islands as part of NBC's Sea Change series on marine ecosystems. Williams filed Wednesday from Tasmania. Poor Anne Thompson. She landed the short straw when she kicked off the series, never venturing farther than Bar Harbor. The Marianas Trench, at seven miles below sea level the deepest canyon on the planet, is part of a protected national monument, conserved from fishing and drilling. Williams took off his goggles to file a floating stand up: "The challenge now is how best to manage these vast new protected areas."
COMING GOBI ATTRACTIONS The Horse Boy, a new movie from Zeitgeist Films, received plenty of free publicity from Don Teague on CBS. Director Rupert Isaacson ostensibly tells the story of the horse-riding therapy that treated the autism that afflicted his son Rowan, now aged seven. Yet the clips Teague showed that made The Horse Boy worth seeing were not about autism. Check out the Isaacson family's trip to find a cure by visiting an equine shaman on the steppes of Mongolia. "Every family goes to Mongolia in their own way," Isaacson asserted in a New Age sort of a way.
MUCH ADO Roger O'Neil was clearly perplexed as to why NBC had assigned him to cover Chicago's celebration of William Shakespeare's 445th birthday. After all, what is Chicago to him, or he to Chicago? "He never saw the Cubs play. He probably does not know what Da Bears are. Chicago, methinks, was not even Chicago 445 years ago." Finally O'Neil found why the Bard's words are suited to the toddlin' town that Billy Sunday could not shut down. He knows how to curse: "Thou rank white livered canker blossom!"
