Update on CNBC show to air in 100 countries

The Financial Times had a recent article examining CNBC’s attempt to run a business news show in 100 countries. It ran in the Los Angeles Times this morning.

The Times wrote: “The show, called ‘Global Players With Sabine Christiansen,’ is one of several new formats CNBC is testing to shake off its dry image as a real-time stock-exchange channel. The network, part of the NBC-Universal empire controlled by General Electric Co., recently hired the former Walt Disney Co. chief executive to anchor ‘Conversations With Michael Eisner,’ which will start airing in two months.

“To call Christiansen — a flight attendant-turned-journalist who anchored the nation’s top news program for a decade up to 1997 — a national icon is an understatement. ‘Sabine Christiansen,’ her weekly one-hour program on the ARD public channel, has topped audience ratings in talk-show-mad Germany for seven years and spawned countless imitations.

“Each week, 4 million to 8 million viewers tune in to watch politicians, businessmen and pundits cross swords on topics as diverse as worries about bird flu and the intricacies of the latest welfare state reform.

“Most of the German political class has sat under the trademark blue cupola of her Berlin studio. So have Bill and Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, Tony Blair and Condoleezza Rice.

“Such is the institutional status of Christiansen that Wolfgang Thierse, then-president of the German parliament, once grumpily complained that ‘there is more politics being done under the blue cupola these days than in the Bundestag.’

“The journalist and businesswoman, whose marital travails regularly make the front page of the tabloid Bild Zeitung, has attracted her share of criticism, mainly for her cushy, nonconfrontational style.”

Read the entire piece here.