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Pastimes : CNBC -- critique. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ally who wrote (6179)	7/12/2000 1:10:15 AM
From: Gary M. Reed	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 17683

Indeed. I enjoyed the occasional and well-placed one-liners Kernan delivered up until around a year ago. I can still remember some of his finest lines...such as around Nov/Dec '98 when the dot.com BS was going haywire (remember when crap penny stocks would quadruple in a day because they threw up a website--remember the K-Tel nonsense?)...around that same time, Faber was talking about some stock that had gone from around $40 to $2...Faber throws up a chart of the stock going from $40 to $2, Kernan interrupts him, with absolutely PERFECT timing and says, "Uhh, I think these guys could use a website." That was classic comedy, I about fell off my chair laughing. But now, everyone's jokes and supposed comedy are as stale as 2-week-old bread. Griffeth's Power Lunch was always trying to become the noontime edition of the Today Show, but Squawk was a must-see for any serious investor. But now the whole 7 a.m. through 6 p.m. slate is aimed at the Today Show/Oprah crowd. Ted David himself posted earlier on this thread that the reason commodities weren't covered as much was because they didn't fit into what the average viewer wanted to see...what a shame, as I always tuned into CNBC to learn something new...if the new marketing "mantra" is "since Joe 6Pack wants to hear about his latest mo-mo stock non-stop, then that's what we're going to give him and to hell with talking about what's really happening in the market." I have to laugh when some bad news comes out on a Naz-100 stock...CNBC goes out of their way to defend it, as if they're too afraid to report the real story and tell it like it is, for fear of offending the masses. But, if some micro-cap disappoints and gets slammed, the "crew" is on the set yukking it up over the stock getting sliced in half. Me thinks--since comedy is the new name of the game at CNBC--that the funniest thing CNBC could show is a stock that a bunch of fund managers and "me too" players got duped into buying that got sliced in half a week later. In fact, I used to watch the old FNN a lot in college and the stuff I learned was what prodded me into wanting to get into the securities biz when I got out of college. Pity the poor college grad of 2000 who watches CNBC and thinks "the only way to make money is to buy what everyone else is buying." The Squawk disintegration is really disappointing...I used to have it tuned in non-stop, but I now find myself watching CNNfn and Bloomberg more and more...the only time it is must-see TV is when they have a guest like Rick Schottenfeld or Seth Tobias on. I guess if I had a portfolio of all the latest "me too" stocks and couldn't bear to hear a negative word on them, I'd tune into CNBC, but since I'm looking for tomorrow's winners (vis-a-vis last month's moon shots), it's quite easy to become disinterested with CNBC, since they seem so fixated on what was working the previous month and are so loathe to tell it like it is on any stock that is widely-held among their target viewership. I'll go out on a limb and predict that in five years, B-schools will do case-studies on how CNBC took their eye off the ball and lost a great deal of marketshare to CNNfn and Bloomberg as a result. The thing that made CNBC successful was that they didn't cater to the masses, they delivered timely info on stocks you might want to consider as investments...you tuned in because you were in the market and wanted to know what was going on...now it is just one big cheerleading outfit aimed at the masses. By the way, does anyone know the next time Squawk is going to host a pro wrassler giving his top stock picks? I just never can get enough of those "exclusive" stock picks from some dope on steroids who barely graduated from junior high.