Enjoying Bloomberg

After so many negative posts concerning business, economic and political coverage on CNBC, I was delighted to learn that I now receive Bloomberg from my cable provider.

So for the past few days, I've been liberally sampling the channel's offerings. What I've discovered is that Bloomberg has more energetic, objective and hard-hitting, unfiltered coverage of all three topics.

For example, on the day following Bernanke's press conference this week, there was a lot of criticism of his remarks by the anchors.

Similarly, there was quite a roasting of Buffett over the Lubrizol incident. He came under fire for essentially having been lax in probing Sokol's investment. Not something CNBC would ever dare suggest, since Becky Quick gets so many exclusive interview opportunities with Buffett.

Yet, from watching Bloomberg, it seems their own coverage of Berkshire's annual meeting and interviews with Munger and Buffett will be quite extensive.


Unlike CNBC, which has anchors who either ask questions so dumb and obvious that their heads must hurt, or voice no opinion at all, the Bloomberg on-air staff seem vibrant, well-informed and offer interesting commentary. It's an interesting mix, because the anchors seem better-informed and less hesitant to state facts. Their questions are sharper.

Additionally, the anchors and reporters did a fairly bare-knuckles story on Donald Trump, pointedly detailing each of his three corporate bankruptcy filings. They pulled no punches in declaring that he'd be torn to shreds by Republican opponents for his business missteps.

Perhaps the most notable difference from CNBC is Bloomberg's much more candid, objective coverage of the Fed and politics. I never saw a single sitting Fed official interviewed, so maybe it wasn't a coincidence that so much more of Bloomberg's coverage of that institution was negative and blunt regarding inflation and excessively easy monetary policy.

It really highlighted how much of a Fed and administration lapdog CNBC has become.

This morning I sampled some of the Bloomberg content opposite Squawkbox, and found it quite acceptable. And devoid of empty-headed commentary so often present on CNBC at that hour.

I expect that as time passes, I'll be viewing CNBC a lot less, and Bloomberg a lot more.