Business Channels Fail on Black Friday

The day after thanksgiving, known as 'black friday', in the US is traditionally the start of the Christmas shopping onslaught.  There was nothing different this year, with the exception of the fact that in the business world, Dubai announced its precarious financial position, sending markets around the globe spiralling to their worst losses since the height of the financial crisis.  The business channels in the US seem to have been wrong footed by this, as Inside Cable News reports;

In the morning, if you didn’t want to sit through jokes waiting for more news, you had to switch from FBN to CNBC. FBN kept telling people that for those who wanted more analysis they should tune in to their live webcast. Not good enough. Not everyone wants to tie up their computer bandwidth in the morning like that. But it wasn’t a massively bad day in the offing. People were already speculating that US markets would not get hit as hard. One wonders what FBN would do if it was a really bad day in the making. Would it really stick with Imus and send business viewers packing to either CNBC or the FBN webcast, or would it bump Imus and go wall to wall? We’ll have to wait and see if that day ever comes and what the network ends up doing. But, for whatever shortcomings FBN had in handling the story early, it made up ground later in the day. It stayed live long past the point that markets closed and CNBC went to tape.

So it wasn’t a great day all around for the business nets. FBN kept Imus on while the story was breaking all over the world while CNBC was in full business news coverage mode. But later on in the day CNBC closed up shop while FBN stayed live. Nobody won this day. Both sides need to do some re-thinking.

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