Assessing biz news on the idiot box

Elizabeth Spiers, a founder of the Gawker and Dealbreaker web sites, comments for Fast Company about business news on CNBC, Bloomberg TV and Fox Business Network.

Spiers wrote, “The problem is not that straight business news is too boring to work on TV; it’s that the channels perceive it to be too complex for the notoriously dumbed-down medium and its presumably dumb audience. On the Fox Business Web site, featured articles include ‘What Is Wall Street?’ and ‘Dating to Meet Your Match and Your Budget’ — online counterparts to the channel’s service-oriented on-air stories that, for instance, tell you how to avoid foreclosure if you default on your mortgage payments.

“From this we can deduce that the channel’s producers imagine its typical viewer to be someone tightly budgeted and single, so ignorant of the business world that ‘Wall Street’ is nearly if not completely unintelligible, and on the verge of having his or her house repossessed. CNBC and Bloomberg seem to think a bit more highly of their audiences, but their content still consists overwhelmingly of dry digests of market news and analysis generalized to the point of meaninglessness.

“In the process, something important is lost. In bending over backward to make business relevant to viewers and assuming that they aren’t sophisticated enough to understand or want anything beyond a rehash of whatever ran in the morning’s Wall Street Journal, televised business news misses an opportunity to really examine the influence of private-sector power in modern society.”

Read more here.