Wall Street Week’s Rukeyser has died

Wall Street Week host Louis Rukeyser has died, according to a story in the Baltimore Sun. He was 73. Rukeyser had not appeared on the show, which is now off the air, since 2003.

Rukeyser’s journalism career began in the 1950s, and he spent more than a decade at the Baltimore Sun as a political and foreign correspondent. He left the newspaper for a job at ABC News, where he began covering business and economics stories in 1968, before Levine began his stint covering the same beat at NBC. Rukeyser had developed a number of economic specials for ABC, but found that network executives weren’t as interested in his coverage as other correspondents.

“The trouble with most television executives and producers is they think the economy is too dull and too complicated to do on TV,” Rukeyser said after he left the network. “And that happens to be nonsense.”

Two years later, he began a show on the Public Broadcasting System called Wall Street Week. By 1973, the show had become so popular that Rukeyser left ABC to devote his full-time attention to it. The show became a fixture on PBS channels around the country.

Every Friday night, Wall Street Week was taped at Maryland Public Television, with Rukeyser and a group of investment professionals talking about the market, individual stocks, the economy and other business-related matters that concerned Wall Street. Rukeyser became known for his puns and his dry wit, and the show attracted millions of watchers. What was so interesting was how Rukeyser structured the show to cater to the average viewer.

“I think there is a hunger in the American public for clear, believable, understandable, usable pocketbook information,” he once said.

In 2002, when Maryland Public Television dropped Rukeyser for a similar show with Fortune magazine, he quickly moved his show to CNBC, where he remained for two years before retiring. The Fortune show was cancelled in 2005.

Throughout the history of Rukeyser’s show, it was the most-watched business program on television. The quality of his business journalism was recognized when he received a Loeb Award, becoming the first broadcaster ever to receive the honor.

Read the obituary here.