SB,"People did not want to hear it," Haines said
>October 21, 2001
As CNBC anchor Mark Haines delivered the news that terrorists had attacked the World Trade Center, the worried words of astronaut Alan Shepard echoed in his head: "Don't screw up."
Across the Hudson River from CNBC's New Jersey studios, Maria Bartiromo, the CNBC anchor who pioneered live broadcasts from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, reported the crash of the second plane from her cell phone on Wall Street as she watched it happen.
And Ron Insana, host of CNBC's "Business Center," dragged himself into an unlocked car to escape suffocating dust and debris as the first tower collapsed while he was rushing downtown to report the story.
When it comes to television business news, CNBC is the leader in reporting on Wall Street, so it was no surprise that the network's staff found itself covering what had suddenly become a war zone. But CNBC's spot as a prominent news source on Sept. 11 speaks as much to its rise as a broadcast power as to its beat.
In more than a decade of covering stock market news, CNBC transformed dull-as-depreciation business coverage into a smart, breezy romp through the world's financial markets. In the process, experts said, CNBC has helped democratize investing and demystify Wall Street for those who do not regularly prowl its canyons.
Now, in a stock market that has soured and in a world where military maneuvers could easily surpass investing as a national obsession, CNBC is trying to evolve with the times. At the same time, the network is coping with criticism that its fun approach to business news helped feed the stock-market frenzy.
And competitors, including CNNfn and Bloomberg TV, are nipping relentlessly at CNBC's heels.
Bruno Cohen, CNBC's executive vice president for business news, is unfazed.
"We're not like other networks," he said, simultaneously answering questions and keeping an eye on the six television screens in his office. CNBC is a niche network, he said, with a specific mission for a specific kind of viewer.
On average, CNBC had about 329,000 viewers per minute on any given day this year, but that number has reached as high as 1.3 million per minute since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Until its competitors improve their distribution, a process that involves complicated negotiations with cable companies, CNBC, which is owned by General Electric Corp., will have the largest potential audience, and one that, by the definition of who watches business news, is affluent. This audience allows CNBC to charge relatively high rates for its advertising.
With interest in news galvanized by the events of Sept. 11, CNBC has been able to go even deeper into the inner workings of the markets, the economy and politics, Cohen said. For example, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal has appeared twice since the attacks.
"Who would have sat still for that on Sept. 9?" Cohen asked.
CNBC always produced serious fare -- stock charts, conversations about EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization), and interviews with one pinstriped chief executive after another.
But what distinguished the network was its coverage of the markets as if they were raucous sports events. Chief executives are the quarterbacks. Stock prices are the scores.
Personalities also have defined CNBC. It hired people from a variety of backgrounds who were capable of much more than reading a TelePrompTer.
If a director had to cast someone as the hard-boiled newsman with a sharp wit, Mark Haines, host of CNBC's morning show "Squawk Box" would be an obvious choice.
He wears suits and ties on camera. But as he shuffles off the set carrying a big, plastic bag of Cheerios that was breakfast, his white athletic socks and battered dock shoes peek out from beneath his gray pants. The 55-year-old newscaster graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's law school but has stuck with a career in journalism.
CNBC has often been criticized for not asking enough skeptical questions, but Haines, at least, has played Mike Wallace.
When Peter Goettner, chief executive officer of DigitalThink, an online learning company, appeared the day his company completed its initial public offering in February 2000, Haines asked about competition.
There wasn't much, Goettner contended.
"Really?" Haines shot back. "Because your S-1 (filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission) says you 'operate in a highly competitive industry with relatively low barriers to entry.' "
Not exactly the kind of publicity a company seeks for its IPO.
Across the studio from Haines sits David Faber -- whose "Faber Report" keeps viewers up to date on earnings, mergers and other news -- and Joe Kernen, who tracks which stocks are moving and why.
Faber ("The Brain" to CNBC viewers) and Kernen ("The Kahuna") split the news and the jokes down the middle. When Faber got married last year, instead of getting a substitute, his colleagues filled his seat with a cardboard cut-out of movie spy Austin Powers.
During the morning show, CNBC's cameras switch rapidly from Haines to Faber and Kernen to Bartiromo at the New York Stock Exchange. Bartiromo, nicknamed "The Money Honey" for her looks, does a report about every 10 minutes from 8 to 10 a.m. before driving to CNBC headquarters in Fort Lee, N.J., to host later shows.
She does her own reporting -- "I don't trust other people with my stuff" -- and delivers what she learns in rapid-fire speech that still bears a trace of her native Brooklyn accent.
With the Dow Jones industrial average and the Nasdaq composite index having taken beatings, some critics have questioned whether CNBC hyped the market, lulling individuals into a sense that stocks would always go up.
"It's both good and bad," said Robert Shiller, a Yale University professor who wrote "Irrational Exuberance," about the stock market's unrealistic heights in the 1990s. "I think they were very educational. People learned a lot of sophistication from that, and I think they got overconfident from that. They were amateur investors thinking they were smart, when really it was the bull market making them rich. I think there was a natural instinct for CNBC to put on cheerleader types. They did ask the tough questions, but they would keep bringing the same people back."
Haines accepts some of the criticism, but mostly, he disagrees.
"A legitimate criticism would be, especially with regard to 'Squawk Box,' that we made it appear to be fun, and a lot of people might make the leap that if it's fun, it must be easy," he said.
As the bull market raged on in the late 1990s, he found that what he thought were his tough questions were just bouncing off a Teflon-coated market.
"It got to the point where the stock would jump when we announced a company was going to be on our show," Haines said. He is still flabbergasted.
"What's my role? Am I supposed to question (investors' choices)?" Haines said. "I can't say, 'Folks, this is a mistake.' "
When CNBC questioned the market's rise and the talk of a "new economy" that would never suffer recessions, viewers called and complained.
"People did not want to hear it," Haines said.
On Sept. 11, Haines, for the first time in his career, didn't know what to say. In a few seconds, he found words -- "I believe the North Tower is gone as well. It is gone. Yes, both towers of the World Trade Center have been destroyed."
A few minutes later: "I've been in this business for 35 years, and I'm not prepared to deal with this."
The CNBC staff felt the losses personally. David Alger, who ran a money-management firm that bears his family's name, was a frequent guest on the show. He died. So did another popular guest, Bill Meehan, market strategist for Cantor Fitzgerald. One of Bartiromo's high school friends died, too.
Initially, some in the financial community were reluctant to start talking about the markets and the economy, given the human losses, but Insana urged them to do so.
"I felt it was important," Insana said, "because they were waging a war on our economy as well as on our people." |
