Charlie Gasparino Profile…

Well this slipped past everyone until TVNewser spotted it. The Financial Times’ John Gapper profiles CNBC’s Charles Gasparino…

The network also encouraged staff to express their opinions onscreen and even to contradict one another. Where tussles over markets and investments used to be left to guests, with anchors as referees, now CNBC journalists are in the ring themselves. “We think the viewer welcomes the intellectual tussle and the engagement of our team with each other,” says Tyler Mathisen, CNBC’s managing editor. “That is part of the magic sauce.” That sauce has also brought in viewers and profits and, with ratings further boosted by the financial ­crisis, helped it to crush Fox Business News, launched by Rupert Murdoch in October 2007. Fox had its eye on CNBC’s viewers, who have among the highest incomes of any US cable channel – a fact not lost on advertisers.. . .

Gasparino embodies this change of tone. Not only has he broken many stories about Wall Street’s troubles live on air during the financial crisis, but he picks fights with other CNBC figures with enthusiasm, sometimes venom. During one heated on-air confrontation about Citigroup with Dennis Kneale, a CNBC anchor, Gasparino said: “I’m doing what maybe you should do, Dennis, which is be a reporter and talk to people.” Kneale responded indignantly: “You know, it’s really bad for the CNBC brand to impugn the reporting skills of your colleagues.” On another occasion, Gasparino seemed openly contemptuous of a group of CNBC anchors, who asked him, television-style: “What have you got?” Instead of answering, he mused: “What have you got? Now that is almost Zen-like … I have many things in my arsenal, but what I have is not what I got.” After some tense sparring, they cut away in confusion.

Gasparino thrives on being awkward, even on being disliked, within CNBC. It burnishes his image as a tough outsider willing to go to battle with anyone – colleague or contact – in pursuit of the story. “People at CNBC will tell you that I’m a pain in the ass, hard to manage, that kind of thing, but they benefit from me being that way,” he says.