Lorrie, me thinks you protest too much whenever someone offers a valid criticism of the Ferr-- (oops) err, Maria. No one is resentful towards her. Rather, many (myself included) see her as nothing more than a carnival barker from the floor of the NYSE. Personally I find her "rah-rah, woo-hoo" style insulting and anything but professional.
She has two things going for her--a great agent who does one helluva job of promoting her as CNBC's sex symbol and a small-but-rabid contingent of 30-something men living out of their parents' basement who have bought into the hype and think she is to the financial markets what Farrah Fawcett was in the '70s. Which I never have understood...I mean she is attractive in her own way, but these people who think she's the cat's meow must not get out much.
As I've said many times before, watch how CNNfn's floor commentators conduct themselves and compare them to Maria. No shouting, no hype, just matter-of-fact reporting of what's going on at the open. Case in point: watch how she gets indignant when a floor trader blocks the camera view of her from the floor. "EXCUSE ME, I'M ON LIVE TV HERE, YOU'RE BLOCKING THE CAMERA SHOT OF ME..." I'd love to see a trader reply to her, "listen Toots, what I'm doing IS the story--you're just down here to report on it."
As far as the MU "conspiracy" theories, I don't think anything is wrong here. I'm sure CNBC's compliance/legal department would go bonkers if such a thing were true. Matter of fact, I've seen her go out of her way to slam stocks that were on hubby's Magic 25 list. I think Mark M. hit the nail on the head when he said the reason she beats the drum so hard on stocks like MU and AOL is out of sheer laziness...it gets pretty ridiculous when she is screaming about a Nifty 50 stock up 1/4 pt when there are stocks she's never heard of that open up 10% or more. Plus, I wouldn't be surprised if her producers periodically provide her with a list of the stocks CNBC gets the most e-mail about, instructing her to go out of her way to mention these stocks early and often.
As far as the commercials for her new show, they are a joke, as is the premise for the show. Those commercials just scream "It's all about ME folks..." I didn't watch it (trust me, I've got better things to do at 6:00 on a Friday afternoon than to watch her read analyst upgrades she pulled off of a First Call machine, calling it "stories I've broken"), but I think Faber's old "Bull Session" shows were a much better use of programming time. The reason she's got a show and Bull Session is mothballed is because sex sells. And that sucks, because Bull Session was a pretty cool show with a lot of informative content.
Again, CNBC would do us all a favor by creating a new channel called "CNBC Lite" where Maria could don her pom-poms and talk about the same 5-10 stocks she always does, and Griffeth could spend entire afternoons doing "how-to" segments on how to balance your checkbook, interviews with financial planners hawking annuities and the "Cool Websites" schtick, plus they could have Jack Welch on once a week and all the anchors could do their usual nauseating suck-up-to-the-boss routine. Then have a separate premium channel for serious investment coverage, for those of us who would pay an extra $10-$15 per month so as to not be subjected to the sophomoric "stocks are fun" programming that they need to draw in the mainstream crowd. |
