The problem with Fox Business Network

Liza Featherstone of Columbia Journalism Review writes in the March/April issue about why Fox Business Network hasn’t been successful yet in attracting viewers away from CNBC.

Featherstone wrote, “Fox Business Network can be fun to watch, and its semi-populist perspective is a refreshing change from CNBC’s business jargon and narrow Wall Street-centered worldview. Sure, it can be silly, and politically biased. But what’s really missing from Fox is, oddly, the actual perspective and experience of the average Joe, to whom extensive lip service is given on air.

“What television can do that print and the Internet cannot is to show what a situation looks like, and allow us to hear what the people affected by it have to say. To hear opinions and read numbers, peppered with updates on Britney Spears, we can read blogs. Fox Business Network talking heads drone on at length. Opinions are expressed and guesses are industriously hazarded, all without much reporting on what those numbers look like out there in America.

“And if FBN were to be intellectually honest in early 2008, some of that reporting would necessarily be less than upbeat. We don’t meet—or hear the voices of—people losing their homes in foreclosure, telecom workers losing their jobs, small-business people struggling with health-care costs. We never even meet FBN’s favorite protagonist: the consumer trying to make ends meet. We don’t see the neighborhoods in Cleveland that have been devastated by the mortgage mess.”

Read more here.