As for leveraging - Robert Feinman displays his complete ignorance and utter lack of intellect. Companies should endeavour to minimise their cost of capital - raising equity when debt is expensive or risky, raising debt when it can manage the payments and it costs less than equity. IBM is simply re-arranging its balance sheet to something closer to the optimum for its current situation and the prevailing rates. To despair over a simple act of raising money betrays ones total, abject ignorance and indicates that you should be ignored on all political questions, since they are all inherently economic questions and you have demonstrated that you don’t even have a basic grasp of micro-economics. Further, you’re relying on a columnist, in the NYT no less, and not an actually competent business paper, to give you information about a company that you presumably have invested in. An actually competent investor would be following his companies of interest in EDGAR, the investor relations section of the IBM site, and the various financial news sites (free like Yahoo or Google, or subscription such as WSJ). Raising debt or equity is an activity that must be announced publicly and forms filed with the SEC (even with shelf registrations), so the columnist was just being a crotchety ignoramus like yourself.

“Giving people enough time to discuss their points seems to be a lost art on TV.” is directly related to that boring thing. Sadly, it was the only good thing about the Don Imus show, and it will be missed.

Last, the anchor is a holdover from the early days of TV, when that person in your living room actually was a trusted soul who might even tell you the truth. Try to find that in an anchor now! The lies of omission are crushing.

Admittedly, Jim Lehrer is ‘the’ main anchor…however, it’s one of the few shows I know where other contributing reporters - Margaret Warner, Gwen Ifel, Ray Suarez, Judy Woodruff…take TURNS anchoring, depending on when Jim’s away. Gwen, of course, has her own show (Washington Week in Review), but I never fail to find it refreshing to see one of the other members of the show’s staff filling Jim’s chair. This has a very levelling effect to the whole anchor-chair thing - and somehow, for me at least, enhances the level of trust I place in the show.

Instead of one ‘anchor,’ it would seem the solution would be to enable any of the reporting staff to assume control, depending on the story being reported. A very egalitarian and neat solution to the whole ’supersized salary’ issue, too…

We already have that — it’s called CSPAN. You can get all of the raw news you want, if you’re willing to devote days and days to sift through the boredom.

I think Jeff’s battle cry should be, “let them watch (eat?) CSPAN!”

Without commerce theres no jobs.

End of cycle.

Its a matter of Balance.

IMO Wall Street and corporate raiders don’t get. I guess they do, its their game. Its Us who don’t get it.

Last week NY Times columnist Floyd Norris wrote about IBM borrowing money to finance buying back its stock. This is an important story for investors since it shows the degree of folly firms will participate in to boost their stock price.

I doubt that this will be covered by the TV news, not because it is too wonky, but because there is no visual hook.

Even when non-event stories are covered, they are illustrated with superfluous graphics. A story of gasoline prices will always show someone filling up their car. The underling of what the narration says (every noun gets a picture) weakens the impact of the narration since the viewer is concentrating on the more captivating visual instead of the spoken material.

Now with divided screens it is even harder to focus on a story. Bill Moyers provided a stark contrast the other night on his new series. He spent half the show talking to Jon Stewart and half talking to Josh Marshall. The only graphics were video clips which acted as quoted material to put the discussion in context. Giving people enough time to discuss their points seems to be a lost art on TV.