There are several ways to spin the Louis Rukeyser story.
The bungled overthrow of the longtime host of “Wall Street Week With Louis Rukeyser” is indeed an example of a PBS that knows it needs to remake itself to attract younger viewers but isn’t sure how to do so gracefully.
A defiant Rukeyser told Larry King Thursday that he plans to announce a new, competing show this week, likely to air at his longtime time slot of 7:30 p.m. Fridays.
That’s also where “Wall Street Week” producer Maryland Public Television plans to go forward in June with the renamed “Wall Street Week With Fortune,” in partnership with the AOL-Time Warner financial magazine and starring 48-year-old Fortune editorial director Geoffrey Colvin.
But as we merrily anticipate that Old Coke-New Coke battle, it is undeniable that the recent firing of the punning 69-year-old Rukeyser, by far the most popular of financial television’s bevy of miked-up market watchers, can also be taken as a symbol of trouble in the genre that he founded 32 years ago.
Business television, riding nearly as high as the dot-coms themselves during the Internet stock bubble, now finds itself becalmed, deserted by many of its new-to-the-markets viewers, watching one wave roll away and waiting for a new one.
At the same time, closer scrutiny in this era of Enron has led to questions about ethics that are rattling the industry. When Rukeyser was fired for calling on viewers to complain about the fact that he was about to be fired, he was evincing an honesty about where the real strings and wires are that has not been a hallmark of financial television.
Most damning are accusations that the business has been lax about letting stock analysts go on the air to tout a stock without disclosing their huge stake in said stock’s performance.
But even Lou Dobbs, host of CNN’s “Moneyline” and probably the second best known business TV personality, is under fire. Dobbs is defending himself vigorously against charges that he has improperly used his show to back Arthur Andersen, which once paid the CNN “Moneyline” host to speak and sponsored a CNN show he hosted, “Business Unusual.” Critics also contend Dobbs is wrong to lend his recognizable voice to commercials for financial firms, such as Dreyfus.
Dobbs said he has railed against federal prosecution of the Andersen accounting firm for its role in Enron not because of old and minor business relationships but because he doesn’t think it’s right that so many should lose their jobs over the actions of so few. He is less persuasive in attempting to shrug off the idea that there is a problem in lending his well-known voice to pitches for companies he covers.
“There is a notion that business TV is in trouble and that’s because there hasn’t been diligence in requiring accountability,” says CNBC co-host James J. Cramer, himself no stranger to controversy. “All guests must talk about their records and stand by them. And we must be much more cautious about analysts who `act’ neutral when they have business on the line. The public has [lost] trust and that needs to be re-established if success if going to be achieved.”
Martin Smith is a New York-based investigative reporter who recently produced for PBS’s’ “Frontline” series a show called “Dot Con,” a tough look at the way analysts and brokers used business television to tout stocks their firms were taking public.
“I think they knew that this was a bubble,” Smith said of financial television generally. “I don’t think they were especially naive. They were just going along. They were cheerleading. There were people on there that said this was a bubble. The warnings were there. But they were overwhelmed. There were [also] too many analysts that we didn’t know were making their money touting their stocks.”
At one point during the height of the fever, Smith said, CNBC produced an hour-long program called “Watch and Make Money,” highlighting people who had done so. It was hosted by game show personality Alex Trebek.
“It was the epitome of bad judgment,” said Smith.
But the market was continuing to climb and ratings were rolling in. For one glorious quarter at the end of 1999, CNBC was able to boast that it beat CNN in daytime ratings. Back then people also thought Pets.com was a grand business proposition.
Now CNBC, while still the dominant player among the all-business channels, is undergoing its own makeover and struggling to bring viewers back.
Bruno Cohen, the channel’s executive vice president of business news, defends his operation against the “generic criticism that CNBC was cheerleading the market, which to me is horse manure. . . . [Host] Ron Insana’s cautionary tone pervaded CNBC. In fact, we got a lot of negative mail, criticism from people saying you ought to be part of the party.”
Cohen will not grant, either, that the channel was lax in vetting its guests for conflicts, though the “Frontline” documentary contends otherwise, as it does about “Wall Street Week.”
Downward trend
Whether the viewership decline stems from a lack of trust or, more likely, the bear market, the passing of a fad and the rise in serious world news, CNBC’s first-quarter average audience of 270,000 viewers was down by almost a fifth from the same period in 2001. It now trails CNN, with its 546,000 viewers, by more than half.
Over and above featuring the fetching Maria Bartiromo more prominently, one of the strategies for bolstering the audience under consideration, Cohen said, is signing up a new Louis Rukeyser show.
It makes sense. PBS figures for Rukeyser’s audience this season show that it, too, is down from about 2.18 million weekly viewers in 1999-2000 but still drawing 1.74 million viewers each Friday, making “Wall Street Week,” as Rukeyser has been fond of saying, the dominant player on the financial TV block and the only category leader left on PBS. “They’ve always had the No. 1-ranked money show,” Rukeyser told King on Thursday. “Why they were not proud of that I do not know.”
He also points out that he runs (for his own profit) the two most popular financial and mutual funds newsletters and the most popular annual “financial cruises.”
His Web site’s promotions for the twice-annual cruises brag of luxury and enough good advice, apparently, to offset the minimum $12,310-per-couple fees: “From the world-class amenities and award-winning cuisine to our powerful investment seminars-at-sea, you’ll be sure to profit from this marvelous Mediterranean adventure.”
Media columnist Howard Kurtz questioned Rukeyser’s ethics for being in business with some of the financial experts he brings along. But Fortune does essentially the same thing with conferences it sponsors, including a $1,995 “Leadership Forum” at Chicago’s Four Seasons Hotel Tuesday and Wednesday featuring Geoffrey Colvin, CNN anchor Aaron Brown and CEOs including ex-GE man Jack Welch, Tribune Co.’s John Madigan and Dell Computer’s Michael Dell.
When Rukeyser brings up his cruises on “Larry King Live,” the point he’s trying to make is not about the ethical gray line but about his popularity: Even if his financial show is, like its peers, losing a little viewer steam, there’s still no bigger brand name, and PBS throws that over lightly at its peril.
Mixed into the discussion is talk, as in the recent Ted Koppel-David Letterman controversy, of age, Rukeyser’s 69 years and an average age of his viewers that approaches 60. But the average age for PBS in general approaches 60 (56) and tends to get older on Friday nights. It’s a big part of the reason the service believes it needs to reinvigorate its offerings for long-term survival, but it hardly seems fair to blame a popular host for a problem that is systemic.
Maryland Public Television officials say Rukeyser’s charge that he was blindsided is poppycock, that he had known for years there were rumblings within PBS that the show’s little-changed format needed reinvigoration.
`A personality’
Some public television programmers, like WTTW-Ch. 11’s Dan Soles, noted that Rukeyser was “a personality, and probably one of the things you could say about public television is that we don’t have too many personalities on the air.”
But others, dating back at least to an organized evaluation effort in 1997, felt “Wall Street Week’s” format of a wry opening monologue from the host, a quick hearing from market watchers, then more detailed chat with rotating panelists did not pass the test of contemporary “engagingness,” to use the evaluation’s word.Whatever the level of support, the public-relations debacle is reminiscent, though in a more extreme way, of the awkward replacement several years ago of aged Ken Bode as host of PBS’ other Friday night public-affairs show, “Washington Week in Review.”
New management atop PBS has given new life to such concerns as a number of signature programs are under the microscope. And Maryland Public Television’s overthrow of Rukeyser as host, to be replaced by Colvin and a co-host to be named, was done with approval of the national organization.
Rukeyser’s specific charge is that in a conference call two days before his artful March 22 on-air jeremiad, the new partnership with Fortune and his ouster as host was presented to him as a done deal. He was careful, on the King show, to answer all questions about management dissatisfaction with the repeated assertion that he was never given any “specific” suggestions for change.
The dust-up has brought supporters and detractors of Rukeyser out of the woodwork. Dobbs told the Tribune that Maryland Public Television’s was “a pathetic and graceless act to be so insensitive. . . . They had an audience. They had a show with a strong imprimatur for that audience and have just thrown it away unceremoniously.”
Cramer asked, “Where was the loyalty for the 30 years that he gave them? I do not think that changing hosts alone will get you a younger audience. You could put Drew Carey up there and it wouldn’t matter. It is the topical discussions that determine audience demographics. If you speak their language in regard to investments, you will pull the new audience in.”
James Grant, publisher of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer and one of the few willing panelists found for the first non-Rukeyser show (it’s being hosted, temporarily, by 72-year-old Marshall Loeb), said that, “professional investors had no great respect for the analytical content of the show, but I think to the man and woman they respected the achievement implicit in its very longevity.”
Picking up pace
With that longevity, though, came what some regard as ossification. The model for contemporary, albeit less popular, business shows is fast-paced banter and frequent disagreement, rather than the more clubby atmosphere on “Wall Street Week.”
“There is a sense that the show is tired,” Smith said.
The great thing about this controversy is that, as Rukeyser has preached, the final say will be determined by the market.
“It’s all about markets,” Dobbs said. “If the viewers of PBS insist upon his return and decide not to watch what could be styled `Wall Street Week With Fortune and Without Louis Rukeyser,’ the market will speak.”
