Categories: OLD Media Moves

CNBC destroys tech stocks? Get serious

Tim Beyers of The Motley Fool writes Friday about how some tech industry CEOs have been blaming TV business journalists for their bad rap.

Beyers wrote, “During a Wednesday afternoon conference call with analysts to discuss his company’s solid but unspectacular second-quarter earnings, [Cisco CEO John] Chambers whined about TV news coverage of the tech industry:

I think we are actually talking ourselves into this [economic] slowdown. Over the last three or four months, I felt pretty good about business until I got on the treadmill — and then I quit early because of the pessimism that exists in the market.

“So let me get this straight. Squawk Box is responsible for the so-called tech meltdown? Chambers can’t be serious, right?

“Wrong. Just ask Intel CEO Paul Otellini. Quoting from his remarks in the chipmaker’s fourth-quarter conference call:

I have the same caution that I think everybody in America who watches CNBC has today. You hear all of the pundits saying that the world is going to go to a trash basket and you worry. It may be a self-fulfilling prophecy.””

Read more here. Beyers doesn’t believe the reasoning.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.