“I NEVER thought I’d interview a naked man, and I’ve done it live in Times Square on the first morning of Fox Business Network,” says the pretty hostess of “Money for Breakfast”.
“Take that as a metaphor,” says her dashing male co-host, back in the studio, before he and the stocks tipper start to strip. Happily, the commercial break arrives to spare their blushes.
[ Watch the video discussed here. ]
After months of speculation about what business television Rupert Murdoch-style would be like, at least the new Fox Business Network has arrived with a sense of humour. The interview with the Naked Cowboy was also an unexpected business scoop. Who knew that the singer, who plays guitar in all weather in Times Square, clad only in a pair of cowboy boots, a cowboy hat and a pair of white briefs, is earning $250,000 a year?
That does not include royalties from a growing number of advertising contracts and sales of Naked Cowboy merchandise, including briefs ($25 unused, $50 if he has worn them).
The Fox people say they want to be more mainstream than CNBC, the reigning business-channel champion, which is highly profitable and owned by GE. CNBC is a data-driven fix for market addicts, delivered in the quickfire, rah-rah style of a sports show.
The Fox breakfast show certainly achieved a similar chatty tone to mainstream wake-up shows, like ABC’s “Good Morning America”. As well as the inevitable discussion of hard business news, such as rising oil prices, the big bank plan to solve the sub-prime mortgage crisis and a product problem at Medtronic, there was a new stock market index, the “Fox 50”: “An index of the largest US companies that make the products you know and use every day. Think of it as the stock index of your life.”
There was also a steady supply of more populist stuff, justified as “what people will be talking about around the water cooler”. As well as the Naked Cowboy, there was a puff piece about a new Bugati sports car, priced at $1.5m, which was spoilt only a bit by the host’s failure to get the car to start. And there was a strong sporting theme, including an appearance by the owner of the New England Patriots, a valuable American football franchise, and two former American football players who now work on Wall Street discussing which chief executives would make a good coach. Answer? GE’s Jeff Immelt.
Once the market opened, Fox was indistinguishable from CNBC, though its team rang the bell at the Nasdaq headquarters, whereas its rival usually kicks off with the New York Stock Exchange bell. Fox also boasted a scoop, getting a camera on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile exchange – although with the decline of floor trading, that is not the remarkable crowd scene it once was.
Mr Murdoch apparently wants his channel to be more “pro-capitalism” than CNBC—which is hardly a pinko outfit—and, sure enough, there was soon a discussion about the pharmaceutical industry entitled “Capitalism cures cancer”, which—let’s be “fair and balanced”, as the Fox News slogan puts it—it does. Most guests were treated with respect bordering on sycophancy.
There was also a lot more politics than has traditionally been the case on CNBC, including a feature on the first baby boomer to register for social security, and interviews with presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Fred Thompson and Wall Street’s favourite Republican, private-equity tycoon Mitt Romney.
Fox wheeled out as many of the other giants of business that ordinary Americans may have heard of, including Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Sir Richard Branson, who heads Virgin. Former HP boss, Carly Fiorina, appeared as a “contributor”.
CNBC has nothing to compare with the 5pm show, “Happy Hour”, filmed in the Bull & Bear bar at the Waldorf. It remains to be seen if Main Street will be grabbed by a group of good looking young New Yorkers chatting amiably about, say, how “metrosexuals are out and menergy is in”, after work in a bar—but, hey, “Friends” did okay.
To liven up the first evening, there was a feature claiming that Ivanka Trump is likely to be more successful in business than her famous father, who is busy promoting his new book, “Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life”.
Of course, the popularity of Donald Trump’s reality show, “The Apprentice”, is perhaps the strongest reason for believing that main street may have an appetite for business television—though there was nothing on the first day of Fox Business to get viewers hooked in the way hearing The Donald say “You’re fired” does.
To succeed, Fox Business will need to deliver an audience attractive to advertisers. As The Economist noted last week, audiences for business television tend to rise and fall with the stock market, so it was a touch ominous that the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell on the day Fox Business launched.
That day, the most striking ads were for CNBC—which was willing to give its rival a few dollars in order to be able to remind viewers that it, not Fox, had the real stars of business television, such as Maria “Money Honey” Bartiromo. At one point, the sound failed, returned for the CNBC ad, and then failed again.
Expect Fox Business to fight back, perhaps by trying to poach Ms Bartiromo. Seeing these two well-financed channels go to war is likely to be a perfect illustration of why competition is such a wonderful force in business. It should be well worth watching, even if they don’t give the Naked Cowboy his own show.
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