Running Scared: CNBC vs. Fox Business Channel

It's week two of Fox's Business Channel, and I still haven't seen it. My Comcast system doesn't carry the channel yet. I guess Roger Ailes was right when he remarked in a Wall Street Journal interview, about which I wrote here, that FBC would debut in only a sliver of the market that CNBC reaches.

Still, CNBC's recent format changes show how it's running scared from the implied threat of, if not the actual new Fox Business Channel.

Watching or listening to the dominant cable financial news network has become like watching someone on speed. It's so frenetic you can barely digest what guests or reporters are saying.

Every other segment is a business version of the Brady Bunch- a group of bobbing heads, often all screaming at once to be heard. You know that the producers think a topic is big or deep when

they assemble a Task Force!

That's the cue for that screen full of moving heads that begin screaming at the anchor or other guests. For the next 120 seconds or so, you get this furious assault on your ears of sound bites representing the various headline positions on the issue du jour.

Justifiably worried that Fox will begin to erode CNBC's market share, the latter's producers have gone for a hectic, frenzied pace that virtually eliminates thoughtful consideration of business news developments.


The anchors are very full of themselves now, in a way they didn't use to be, and espouse this sort of puffed-up camaraderie, as if they, themselves, are the fonts of business knowledge and news.

As if.

The other morning, while Jack Welch engaged in meaningless chit-chat on a phone link with Warren Buffett, who was traveling with CNBC co-anchor Becky Quick, the network displayed a banner on the bottom of the screen reading something like,

'Jack and Warren Talking ONLY On CNBC'

I guess one might describe CNBC's new strategy as "All Business Celebrities, All The Time."

They clearly are attempting to literally corner the market on CEOs and other presumed business (g)literari. Too bad that the average CEO is, well, so average. Hardly a font of global business wisdom, actually.

Here's another indicator of CNBC's level of concern. I belong to their online panel, CNBC XChange, or somesuch named focus group. Last week, they sent me a very quick, three-page survey. It consisted of essentially three questions:

-have I heard of Fox Business Channel?
-can I get it on my cable system yet?
-whether or not I can get it, do/would I watch FBC vs. CNBC 100/80/60/50/40/30/20/0% of the time. Or some set of splits reflecting relative time spent with the two networks' programming.

Pretty focused on FBC, eh?

Look, I give the CNBC producers credit for having the good sense to take their former boss, Roger Ailes, seriously. And if they didn't, you know I'd be writing about their hubris and stodginess, to be stuck in neutral while a new competitor came at them like a pair of pruning shears.

Yet, somehow CNBC's response is so...... shallow. It smacks of aiming for a cheap, vapid, entertainment-style treatment of financial markets and related news.

When they could have shifted to a more in-depth, reasoned and value-creating approach, the dominant cable business channel instead intensified its attempt to reduce everything about financial markets to its most frequently uttered phrase,

"So, what's the trade?"

Because, on CNBC, despite years of good academic research to the contrary, they believe that their viewers, institutional and retail alike, should be constantly trading on whatever they have just seen on CNBC, rather than implementing a considered 'buy and hold' strategy.

Perhaps the good news is that the more reasoned, reflective approach to interpreting financial and general business news remains open to the new Fox Business Channel.

Now, all I have to do is get a chance to actually see it.....