Not a great day for Business News…
Today markets endured serious declines all over the world because of this story. Problem is this is the day after Thanksgiving and neither FBN or CNBC put their best foot forward.
In the morning, if you didn’t want to sit through jokes waiting for more news, you had to switch from FBN to CNBC. FBN kept telling people that for those who wanted more analysis they should tune in to their live webcast. Not good enough. Not everyone wants to tie up their computer bandwidth in the morning like that. But it wasn’t a massively bad day in the offing. People were already speculating that US markets would not get hit as hard. One wonders what FBN would do if it was a really bad day in the making. Would it really stick with Imus and send business viewers packing to either CNBC or the FBN webcast, or would it bump Imus and go wall to wall? We’ll have to wait and see if that day ever comes and what the network ends up doing. But, for whatever shortcomings FBN had in handling the story early, it made up ground later in the day. It stayed live long past the point that markets closed and CNBC went to tape.
So it wasn’t a great day all around for the business nets. FBN kept Imus on while the story was breaking all over the world while CNBC was in full business news coverage mode. But later on in the day CNBC closed up shop while FBN stayed live. Nobody won this day. Both sides need to do some re-thinking.
November 27, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Well I’m kinda torn about your analysis. On the one hand, I agree that both networks could have done more today with their coverage.
But I think overall, FBN was the bigger loser because their coverage was lacking during the pre-market hours (when the futures, at their lows, were down over -230 points). After 1pm, there was nothing of significance….Asian, Euro & US markets are all closed until Monday anyways….so I can see why CNBC didn’t bother to extend their coverage after 1pm.
Today would have been a good morning to give the I-man a long weekend, and go ‘balls to the wall’ with strong AM coverage…considering this story broke yesterday, I’m sure they could have prepared accordingly.
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