• by Wayne Friedman , September 22, 2008

For the stock market, two straight monstrously big days--Thursday and Friday--rocketed many media company shares to similarly strong results.

All this came after a wild week in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average managed to regain virtually all that it lost, down just 40 points on the week to 11,388.44. This followed a week in which the major indices were all up and down 3% to 4% or more for 4 of 5 days.

Media analysts believe most media companies went along for the ride. It probably didn't hurt that media executives were not ruffled by current stock market volatility.

Major media executives--the likes of News Corp. Rupert Murdoch, CBS Corp.'s Les Moonves, and others--spoke at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference last week, offering positive news in many areas such as the steadily improved trending of network and cable advertising revenue.

On Friday, the biggest capitalized media companies took strong gains similar to the markets indices--News Corp. was up 5% to $13.99; Time Warner was 4.3% higher to $14.55; Viacom added 3.7% to climb to $26.90; and Walt Disney improved 2.8% to reach $34.39.

Some of the smaller capitalized broadcast and cable-specific stocks showed bigger improvements. The best came from TV station group Nexstar Broadcasting, which soared 10.5% to $3.37. Journal Communications rose 7.5% to $5.85, and Mediacom Communications had a 6% hike to $7.35.

On the cable system side of the business, Cablevision System Corp. blossomed a big 8.4% to $27.53. Charter Communications was up 4.3% to $0.98.