Fox on StocksDaniel Gross takes readers' questions about Rupert Murdoch's new business TV channel.
Posted Thursday, Oct. 25, 2007, at 5:30 PM ETSlate columnist Daniel Gross was online at Washingtonpost.com on Thursday, Oct. 25, to discuss the new Fox Business Channel and what its launch signals about the economy. An unedited transcript of the chat follows.
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StumbleUponDan Gross: I'm not very good on all the e-mail jargon, but really: LOL.
On days that I'm in my office in New York I tend to have CNBC on. And the relentless optimism is enough to make your head explode. Gloom-and-doom? Short-sellers? I must have a different cable system.
Finally, ending an argument with the statement "Ben Stein agrees" as a proof text, is quite dubious.
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Where's the Ticker: On Fox Business Channel, they show the price of an individual stock for more than thirty seconds. I find this horribly annoying. On CNBC, the ticker rolls often to a stock I own or am following. Fox News has good graphics; why aren't they using the same philosophy? I watched for half an hour and couldn't find out how the Internet sector was doing today.
Dan Gross: Good question. I think Fox may be trying to select a smaller universe of widely held stocks rather than run the whole ticker. Although, you would think that the Internet sector might be one of the ones they highlight.
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jordon: Comcast continues to add ridiculous channels that are irrelevant to my life, like Fox Business, while ignoring Al Jazeera English. How many times do I have to suggest this channel before they put it on the air? The cynic in me is not surprised, but my idealistic streak finds it regrettable.
Dan Gross: I'm not all that surprised you can't get Al Jazeera English on Comcast. the big systems look for channels that will pay them to carry, and ones that will have broad appeal. not sure Al Jazeera English is there yet.
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lloyd667: What Roger Ailes realized long ago -- and what media critics and the mainstream media have yet to understand -- is that when it comes to TV no amount of pandering is too much pandering. (Blogs realize this, though.) So, Roger pandered to the hard-right with Fox News; the critics, with CNN and maybe BBC in mind, said that nobody would buy such an obviously biased news network; Fox was a hit, and CNN today looks a lot more like Fox than it looks like the CNN of yore.
Because Ailes is a right-winger, he naturally panders to the right -- but his success has been misunderstood (or deliberately misconstrued, not least by Ailes himself) as the result of meeting some unserved need for right-wing cant. I believe Ailes would have been just as successful if he had been a left-winger and pandered to left-wingers.
Dan Gross: lloyd667 -- you may be right re: the pandering. But when it comes to business/stock market coverage, the pandering stops working once the market goes south. It's highly cyclical, in other words. CNBC's financial results and viewership really plummeted after the dot-com/tech bubble of the 1990s crashed. Ultimately, the fortunes of CNBC and Fox Business Channel rest on how the Dow and Nasdaq do.
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ovation: Is there any utility in business reporting? How many investors decide to buy or sell upon learning that the Dow is a few dollars higher or lower than it was yesterday? Only a bond trader would care if interest rates were up or down a couple of basis points, and traders need this information much faster than they can get it from TV; to the rest of us, this kind of "news" is just more meaningless information.
Dan Gross: Is there any utility in business reporting? A question I ask myself (but I hope my editors don't ask.)
Take it for what it's worth, but in my opinion, CNBC's utility--and the value it has for advertisers -- doesn't lie in people listening to its reporting and making decisions about what stocks to buy. Rather, it lies in the fact that CNBC is the sort of background music to the financial world. Go on a trading floor, or in a bar in midtown, or in the office of pretty much anybody involved in finance -- from entry level associates to CEOs -- and you'll frequently find CNBC on with the noise off. It's a form of wallpaper. The crawl at the bottom of the screen enables people to keep up with where the markets are, what the top news items of the day are, and generally who is saying what. Not the sort of info. that will make or break investments, but info. that professionals like to have at their disposal.
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Overexpansion: Anyone who has studied Adam Smith knows that if a product has more demand than supply, additional people will make the product. With Bloomberg and CNBC, I don't see lack of product with business media. Is Murdoch hoping to produce something until his Wall Street Journal contract with CNBC expires and then go full-bore with business news? I'm afraid of what the WSJ could become.
Dan Gross: You're right. I think there is no lack of product. But, ultimately, from Murdoch's perspective, the money invested in the channel is a drop in the bucket (compared to the company's overall resources). What's more, he's just made a big business in financial media, buying Dow Jones, which owns, in addition to the Wall Street Journal, Barron's and MarketWatch. So one could see how it is a smart diversification move to build a television platform to supplement print and online business properties.
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Dan Gross: OK. Well, thanks for all the excellent questions!
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