Squirrels And Squirrellers Alike, Beware, Says CNN

Please, can’t someone make them stop?  For when TV talking heads display ignorance over an O.J. Simpson trial or a missing child, that’s bad, true, but it is not life-shattering for millions.  In contrast, the economic illiteracy that pervades too much flippant reporting on business and the markets is not just painful and disgraceful, but downright irresponsible and dangerous for ALL of us.

Today’s examples come to us from that bastion of high intellect and analysis: CNN Headline News’s “Morning Express.” Apparently never having heard of the spring of 1933, just after 7:30 AM business correspondent Jennifer Westhoven spoke of how “many” people are saying they should take their money “out of the bank.”

Whoa there! Who? Imbeciles? And what does she then say? She quickly reminded viewers of FDIC protection (you know, what’s on the little sticker you see in banks’ windows), and appeared then to change gears in a hurry, talking down what she had just previously noted “many” are thinking.

You probably know that FDIC protection means that your money is governmentally “insured” up to $100,000 in each bank. However, the real reason for FDIC protection is to promote public confidence in order to help prevent “runs” on banks in the first place. But there’s Ms Westhoven, on national TV, actually raising the idiotic notion of depositors withdrawing all of their funds and hiding the money in a closet or squirrelling it away “in the mattress”?

Why not allude to that action in this business climate (that media seem so to enjoy)? As if it were 1932? You want real “financial panic”: yep, how about a run on the banks.

Yesterday, Ms Westhoven had also told us just after 7 AM that, if one has insurance with an AIG company (how hadn’t the “Morning Express” sports guy thought to point out — humorously, of course — that with the AIG takeover, the U.S. government now sponsors Manchester United?), you should continue to pay your premiums.

Helpful advice that.  As if you have a choice?  Try not paying premiums and see how long you keep your cover.

Tuesday was even more generally factually gem-filled.  In a quickie economics summation, just before 7:30 AM, we were treated to a flashed graphic comparing Lehman Brothers’ “total assets” of (I believe) “$629 billion” (actually, its 2007 financial report claimed $691 billion) to Worldcom’s $110 billion and Enron’s $80 billion.

Thus how much worse, clearly, is the Lehman situation?  Presumably, it is just like, uh, you know, weekend film box office receipts.  Lehman’s “Number 1?”

But wait, what do those absolute figures mean?  Are they “like for like?”  No one ventures a comment. They are just dropped out there, numbers whose significance is apparently to be left to viewers’ imaginations.

We then learned just before 8 AM in another graphic that there were around 20,000 job losses at Lehman, and also at Merrill Lynch . . . and a similar number at Hewlett-Packard.

HP?  The apparent implication?  That Hewlett-Packard’s job losses are due to the company ALSO being in serious trouble like those others?   The explanation that those coming job losses would be due to a rather typical “downsizing” because the company has purchased another company?  That went totally unmentioned.

What also might have gone unmentioned, but wasn’t, was when we were also breaking news informed just before 8 about how some hunters, someplace, evidently have been trying to take more than the legal 4 squirrels a day.  To do so, they are hiding them from wardens in rucksacks and shoes.  We learned also lightheartedly how anchor Robin Meade had, in her childhood, dined upon squirrel.

Having in previous weeks offered up the likes of a faked pregnancy, teen pregnancy, anti-Wasilla, sexism and ageism, you might wonder if this carrying on suddenly about a “depression” were a means also to try to boost Sen Obama?  Unthinkable, of course.  For the actual Great Depression was followed by WWII, which would mean that if this were a similar worldwide depression commencing about now, media would certainly know that a huge war is just a few years down the road, due to be started by some dictator, somewhere, and President Roosevelt Obama would have to steer us through it, and he is, as we know, all about global harmony, not warmongering.

Yet if media continues to cultivate the “1929″ card, eventually their own inane chatterings may end up impacting their own parent firms.  Then, when those same reporters suddenly find themselves walking out, unpaid, from their offices with all of their business possessions in boxes, they can post themselves usefully on street corners and shout out “the news” to any of us interested passersby.  And Ms Meade might well be relying on eating squirrel for her daily sustenance.

There is no question that the global financial situation is bad.  But is media making it worse?  At 8:40 AM this morning, Ms Westhoven was referring to people — presumably viewers who are historians and economists — “writing in” to her, asking “Where’s my [government] bail out?”  Yes, one wonders, seriously, how much harsher the Great Depression might have been if we had had today’s all-gossipy media in 1929-1932?

[Posted 9:25 AM NY time.]