Of hurricanes being braced for & Lehman's plummet CLICHE REPORTING

There's nothing worse for a reporter expected to report than there being nothing of interest to report yet. The 'stage setter' piece is expected but the setting of the stage is just boring.The leaden cliches roll from bored minds. Thus before Hurricane Ike reporter after reporter said that Houston was "bracing for" the onset of the storm. Imagine all that bracing action, whatever bracing is!

Or else they said everyone was "poised" – another of those terms that sounds earnest in the saying but means little.

You get this pap before every hurricane because reporters can't think of anything else to write or say. In desperation the brain throws up what's been said before. Editors expect it.

Plummets & scrambles

Following the good news Sunday that the federal government wasn't going to bail out the worthless Lehman bank the Wall Street Journal reported: "The American financial system was shaken to its core on Sunday..."

Hilariously the Journal still had stories speculating about a possible bankruptcy filing by Lehman hours after Lehman had a 2-page press release on their website officially announcing the company's decision to file for bankruptcy Monday moring. No one at Lehman had emailed the release to the Journal and no one at the Journal thought to look on the Lehman website.

They just speculated about a filing.

But what kind of reporting is it to say the financial system was "shaken to the core"?

Sounds dramatic but what does it mean? Nothing...

Because those reporters have no idea - and to be fair no one else has either - as to how investors will react to the bankruptcy filing of a major investment bank/brokerage.

Another piece of supposed news was that investors were in for a "gut-wrenching" day, Monday as a result of the Lehman Ch 11 and the Merrill sale.

The Merrill sale was surely good news because it showed the Bank of America thought Merrill had some value.

As for Lehman's demise, it was hardly a weekend surprise. Investors saw Lehman's stock price decline all last week. It was looking for a buyer, but possible buyers looked and walked away - last week.

The company was insolvent.

Did investors really think that the Feds would pony up billions or assume the risks of all those worthless default swaps and the like that were wiping out Lehman?

Maybe some did. But surely others didn't.

No one could know where the balance lay.

Any wrenching of guts may have already occurred.

Early on Monday the financial hacks reported there was lots of "scrambling" and that stocks were "sliding" and even "plummeting" though the numbers hardly seemed to warrant this.

A drop of 2.7% in the Dow Jones in a morning is a plummet? (By end of trading the drop was 2.9%)

Sad thing about this kind of hype is that it robs the word 'plummet' of its strength. What's left to describe a 20% drop in the first ten minutes of trading?

A 2.7% drop in the Dow in a morning's trading - which says that stocks retained 97.3% of their value - hardly strikes us as much to be surprised about after two of New York's big investment banks have just disappeared over the weekend.

Strikes us as a pretty moderate reaction.

Maybe the plummet is still to come? Or maybe there won't be any plummet.

No one knows, certainly not the financial reporters with their hype.

Tribute to a flack in LA

Here's a plaudit to an honorable and courageous press flack, Denise Tyrrell, spokesman for Metrolink for telling the truth as she knew it. She got into trouble the morning after the crash between a Metrolink passenger train and a freight train in Los Angeles that seems to have killed about 30 and seriously injured another 50 or so. So violent was the crash and so gorrendous the injuries it was compelling national news.

Tyrell told reporters that the Metrolink driver or 'engineer' appeared to be at fault in the crash because he ran a red signal. The commuter rail train he was driving should have gone into a siding but instead ran head-on into the freight train.

She's resigned after the Metrolink chairman Ron Roberts said Tyrrell's statement was "premature" and unauthorized. Roberts is one of these bureaucratic process guys who is more concerned about announcements being properly channeled, properly spun, and properly timed than about telling the truth.

Tyrrell says she suggested Metrolink take responsibility for the crash after they knew that the freight train had right of way and their train driver had run the red. Metrolink CEO David Solow had agreed she should put out the news. It was, she said, the truth and "the honorable thing to do."

She's right.

But truth and honor are nothing to the likes of chairman Roberts, a common but obnoxious executive type whose instinctive reaction is to hide the truth behind the excuse of an ongoing investigation hoping public interest in the tragedy will have ebbed by the time responsibility has to be accepted.

Here's to Denise Tyrrell for knowing what was right and doing it.

TOLLROADSnews 2008-09-15