CBS and NBC differ on Dow coverage

Business & Media Institute’s Ken Shepherd noted that CBS and NBC took widely divergent reporting tacks when covering the record close of the Dow Jones industrial average on Tuesday.Shepherd wrote, “While CBS’s Anthony Mason offered qualified praise for the market’s recent rally, he sowed seeds of doubt about the market’s strength. Mason highlighted a retiree who ‘doesn’t trust this new rally’ and then warned that ‘some Wall Street analysts see another bubble in the economy’ with real estate.

“The business reporter opened his story with the good news. ‘It took nearly seven years for the closing bell to ring in a new high for the Dow, but Wall Street was hardly going wild,’ he told viewers. Then he aired a market analyst who downplayed the new record and compared it to a tied baseball game.

“Mason helped him out, further undercutting the good news. ‘But while the Dow’s finally recovered, the tech-heavy Nasdaq is still worth less than half what it was six years ago,’ he added.

“That wasn’t all. Mason made it clear that some were ‘suspicious’ about the market. ‘She’s not alone,’ he said of one retiree who was still worried about the economy. ‘With existing home prices falling for the first time in more than a decade, and a new study showing homeowners spending more and more of their incomes on housing costs, some Wall Street analysts see another bubble in the economy.’

“Yet over on NBC’s ‘Nightly News,’ market watcher Maria Bartiromo told anchor Brian Williams that a rising stock market and falling gasoline prices are boosting confidence in the economy as Americans head into the end-of-year shopping season. ‘People will be able to spend money, they don’t have that pressure of high oil prices, high heating oil costs, and gasoline on their backs. So people are feeling good about the economy now,’ Bartiromo noted.”

Read more here. Just for the record, the Dow closed at another all-time high on Wednesday.