Last night I watched CNN and FoxNews for a while. Both shows had panelists discussing the recent incident with the Nigerian terrorist on the Northwest/Delta flight to Detroit from Amsterdam. Panelists discussed the fact that the terrorist’s father reported his concerns about his son’s radical activities to officials from Yemen, the U.S. embassy in Abuja, and the Central Intelligence Agency and yet, he did not land on a “do not fly” list.
The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall was a week ago on November 9. I remember it well. CNN was still in its infancy and yet its coverage of the emotion of the crowd was worth watching long into the night.
Precedents for the fall of the wall were the discussions between the West and Mikhail Gorbachev.
In 2003, Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske published the book Trading Up: Why Consumers Want New Luxury Goods…And How Companies Create Them. As partners at The Boston Consulting Group, Silverstein, Fiske (now the CEO of Eddie Bauer Holdings, Inc.) and others worked to research the consumer purchasing trends in the United States and overseas. The phenomenon that they identified was the willingness of consumers to pay a premium for certain goods even in times of economic downturns.