Toeing the Line
Reported by Melanie - August 18, 2004 -
The first guest today (August 18, 2004) on Your World w/Neil Cavuto was Condoleezza Rice. After a full fledged "FOX NEWS ALERT" (for news that was already several hours old) about Muqtada al Sadr's willingness to negotiate a truce in Najaf, Cavuto said "Wall Street breathed a huge sign of relief on the news."
COMMENT: The Dow was up 110.32 points, the Nasdaq up 36.12 points. I heard other business and financial "experts" today say that the jump was "just a technical trading bounce," that we need "oil to come down," inflation to stay tame and job creation before we can have a sustained rise. I didn't hear others making connections between the Dow or Nasdaq and al Sadr. Here's an AP summary of the business day from the New York Times. The RNC (and therefore Fox News) knows that having things go well in Iraq, and having the stock market on the rise, will help Bush in November. Fox is happy to weave them together whenever they can.
By the way, Rice talked about the al Sadr situation for a minute and then she and Cavuto got down to the real work, which was refuting Kerry's remarks that Bush's plan to reorganize troop deployment is a bad idea.
