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Politics : High Tolerance Plasticity -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (15118)	7/16/2002 10:13:37 AM
From: kodiak_bull	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23153

Stockman: As per CNBC, your link guy needs to lay off the mocha latte a little bit. CNBC is not journalism, financial or otherwise. It's "specified content," and is similar to the "Today Show" or "Good Morning, America." Actually it's more like ESPN, but instead of the sports arena we have the financial arena. CNBC takes as its main content the numbers and news from the financial world. It does this for the same reason that Oprah brings on twins separated at birth or Jerry Springer brings on "My boy friend don't know that he ain't the father of our baby" types. Because there is viewer interest. CNBC stretches out its coverage for about 16 hours or so by using some photogenic but not particularly profound announcers (Martha, Ted, Bill, Maria, Michelle), adds in a little bit of specific reporting (Joe, David) and then gloms onto whatever headlined the WSJ via Becky and the Dow Jones boys. Then there's a parade of mutual fund managers and CEOs with something good to say or some damage to spin and voila you have CNBC. It's not a bad (uneconomic) way to provide 16 hours of cable programming, but its viewership and advertising revenues may be soft for some time into the future. Most of its costs for studios, cameras, news updates, etc. are more along the fixed than the variable line, and come from parent NBC (and are also used and reused on MSNBC), and the news (numbers) creates and re-creates itself every market day. Its anchors and "reporters" don't appear to be too highly paid. One attempt to put David Faber over into real news fizzled a while back, and nobody knows what Tyler is doing in Washington, or why that guy left the WSJ for CNBC (he should go back). CNBC's main course is serving up, as close to real time as possible, quotes and moving stocks from the market, making sure that if you play tennis at 5 and some working stiff says what happened in the market, you pretty much know. But journalism? No more than the nightly recapping of baseball scores on ESPN. Kb