Viewers switch off business channel

With a steely gaze, the pin-striped CNBC television host Larry Kudlow gazes meaningfully into the camera.

"We believe that free-market capitalism is the best path to prosperity," he declares, reciting his trademark "creed" before enthusiastically launching into the day's financial action.

Share prices flicker across the bottom of the screen. Traders bicker about the fundamentals of the market. A "breaking news" flash delivers US non-farm payroll numbers. Welcome to CNBC, the world's top business television channel, which broadcasts across the globe from the suburban town of Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

Courting constant controversy for its evangelism of financial speculation, CNBC has never had so much attention. It devotes 16 hours of live coverage every day to the markets and has analysed every detail of the credit crunch. So why are its ratings slumping?

According to figures supplied by Nielsen, the television tracking agency, the average number of Americans watching CNBC at any point on the 24-hour clock was 188,000 last month, a drop of 11 per cent on last year. A more detailed breakdown leaked on the internet reveals a 28 per cent plunge in CNBC viewers during the core business day, between 5am and 7pm.

Executives at the network say the numbers are a return to "normality", after a record spike at the height of last year's financial drama. Ratings in Europe and Asia are holding up more impressively, hits on the network's website are up 150 per cent year-on-year and page views via mobile phones are rocketing. But in the core US television sphere, a fall-back to 2007 levels means CNBC has kept none of the new fans who tuned in during the crunch. The channel is slinking back to a dark corner of the cable spectrum.

The drop in ratings is irresistible fodder for CNBC's critics. The channel is loathed by many on the left for its shouty style and unrestrained embrace of Ayn Rand-style capitalism. It apes the machismo of the trading floor and in gaps between genuinely informative reportage, its presenters jostle to out-opinion each other. Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Centre's Project for Excellence in Journalism, says many of its shows are built around "punditry and personality", rather than any genuine attempt to report business news.

CNBC has had an accident-prone 2009. Reporter Rick Santelli got carried away with an on-air rant in February, whipping traders around him into a frenzy at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange by blasting President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package for subsidising "losers' mortgages". White House press secretary Robert Gibbs urged him to switch to decaffeinated coffee.

In March, CNBC's Mad Money stockpicker Jim Cramer suffered a skewering from The Daily Show's Jon Stewart for turning finance into a "game" by encouraging laymen to channel their hard-earned pension money into speculative punts. Last week, presenter Erin Burnett described Australia's Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, as a "serial killer" over a camel cull in the Outback, prompting a swift retreat.

This would be good knockabout stuff if CNBC was succeeding in its core mission, but many are unconvinced. Rosenstiel says that despite devoting its entire output to finance, the channel failed to flag up warning signs sufficiently prominently before the credit crunch began.

He said the channel had fallen into a common trap: "Any 24-hour news channel faces the problem of what can you talk about that isn't simply repetitive? It leads to analysing minute-by-minute market moves, rather than tracking deeper changes in the economy."

Executives at CNBC said numbers were only part of the picture. The network stressed quality, rather than quantity, and offered advertisers affluent, well-educated viewers.

Fans of CNBC said delicate souls who shudder at its bombastic delivery were missing the point. Andrew Leckey, a former CNBC anchorman who chairs Arizona State University's centre for business journalism, says: "CNBC's audience is a very finite group, most of whom are quite well-heeled, mostly quite serious. They know where the presenters are coming from - they know they're provocateurs."

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