Maven's take on Rukeyser's influence

Marek Fuchs, who writes the Business Press Maven column at TheStreet.com, has his own take on the influence that Louis Rukeyser had on business journalism.

Fuchs writes, “His show, ‘Wall Street Week With Louis Rukeyser’ ran for three decades on PBS and influenced much of the good and a little of the bad in the modern business press.

“A lot of the ways investors understand and misread the market through what they read and watch about the markets is to Rukeyser’s everlasting credit. Or fault.

“For starters, Rukeyser was one of the first to understand that business news could appeal to a wide audience and one of the few to sense that humor could (in fact, should) go hand in hand with market news. He was dealing with the topics of big money, big egos and crowd thought — all the stuff, in the end, of human frailty and comedy.

“Sure, a good number of his puns were groaners, but the point was the honest attempt at levity. And that levity helped demystify high finance.

“Don’t forget, too, that at a time before computers and air travel carried Wall Street far beyond the canyons of lower Manhattan, Rukeyser was looking out at it all from Maryland. Any industry, especially Wall Street, can turn into an echo chamber of thought, and Rukeyser understood that distance brought perspective, something more business journalists should see.”

Read more here, as well as Fuchs’ take on the Maria Bartiromo–Ben Bernanke tete-a-tete last weekend.