Business Channel Wars Heat Up…
The AP’s David Bauder writes about biz channel mania with an emphasis on recent CNBC slip ups…
Bloomberg Television and Fox Business Network both extended live coverage on Friday night, when the Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services downgraded the United States’ debt rating for the first time. The scenario was similar the previous Sunday night, when President Barack Obama announced an agreement with legislative leaders to raise the nation’s debt ceiling.
CNBC noted that it ran a Sunday special featuring Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s first public comments on the debt downgrade and was pre-empting programming for a two-hour special Monday on the volatile economic markets.
Fox was quick to leap, however, running a full-page ad in Monday’s Wall Street Journal with onscreen pictures from July 31, contrasting its live debt ceiling coverage with the show CNBC was airing, “How I Made My Millions.”
“It shows that we are always looking out for the audience, always trying to find an inroad and, frankly, our competition isn’t working as hard as we are,” said Kevin Magee, executive vice president at Fox Business Network.
To drive this point home J$ reports that FBN will dump Imus all week in favor of wall to wall business coverage…
Inside Cable News 
August 8, 2011 at 11:18 pm
Cue PR.
August 8, 2011 at 11:20 pm
Since Imus’ brother died (only heard it on Twitter), he might be a tad distracted anyway.
August 8, 2011 at 11:23 pm
Imus In The Mourning?
I’m terrible. What else is new?
August 9, 2011 at 4:48 am
Fox “Business” should probably work on keeping the viewers they’ve got instead of worrying about how CNBC covers breaking news.
Last Thursday, during the (first) market plunge:
CNBC total day – 240k
FBN total day – 107k (probably their best ever?)
Next day (Friday) during a very volatile day:
CNBC total day – 245k
FBN total day – drops 30% to 76k
And FBN’s Friday prime, which included the live breaking news coverage, averaged 69k total viewers. Meanwhile, the CNBC show that the WSJ was poking at (How I made my millions), got 65k in the DEMO alone.
Enough said.
August 9, 2011 at 6:25 pm
god bless fox noise/business pr we can only pray they grow up. once they do they will be able to compete in a grown up world!
August 9, 2011 at 6:44 pm
^ Irony Alert
August 9, 2011 at 10:24 pm
^ That’s funny, I don’t care who ya are.
August 10, 2011 at 1:14 am
The constant, repetitive stories about the credit downgrade is really getting boring….yes, Wall Street and international markets acting like meth addicts is amusing for a while, but these stories have already died until Congress reconvenes to screw it up while kicking the can further down the road, and that probably will take weeks.
I do believe the unexpected death of Fred Imus – not only his younger brother but a well-known guest on “Imus In The Morning” – had something to do with this week’s schedule manipulations – Imus is also off WABC Radio in NYC and his nationwide network, and that was not pre-scheduled.