New CNBC show to premiere Jan. 24

Business news cable network CNBC said Friday that the first episode of its new show “Business Nation” will air on Wednesday, Jan. 24, at 10 p.m.

The new show is billed as a monthly business magazine hosted by correspondent David Faber, and the plan is to include a blend of features, profiles and investigative reports. The announcement is the second program expansion disclosed this week by CNBC. Earlier this week, it said it would make “Fast Money,” previously a once-a-week show, a five-day-per-week program.

“Business Nation” is also part of a broad-reaching CNBC strategy to distance itself from being known only as a network that covers the stock market and to help buttress it against the coming Fox Business News Channel, slated to debut later this year.

The show was originally expected to debut on Dec. 6, but was delayed for unknown reasons. It apparently is being patterned after HBO’s “Real Sports.”

Faber, who was known as “The Brain” during the CNBC hey-days of the late ’90s, has been with the network for the past 13 years and is considered one of its best business journalists.

In November 2006, Faber’s two-hour documentary “Big Brother, Big Business,” investigated the increasing number of ways ordinary Americans are monitored and affected by the encroaching world of surveillance and how this convert spying has become big business.

Faber also received the two most prestigious awards in broadcast journalism in 2005 when CNBC’s two-hour documentary, “The Age of Wal-Mart,� garnered both a Peabody Award and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for Broadcast Journalism. Both were firsts for the network.

Faber launched the network’s long-form, original documentaries in 2003 with the Maxwell Award-winning and Emmy-nominated “The Big Heist: How AOL Took Time Warner.” The day after its initial airing, AOL Chairman Steve Case resigned. Faber followed “The Big Heist” with the acclaimed “The Big Lie: Inside the Rise and Fraud of WorldCom.” “The Big Lie” was selected as a finalist for the Gerald Loeb Awards and received a National Headliner Award.