Piling on to Jon Stewart's thorough indictment of CNBC, let's look again at this recent PEW survey of how knowledgeable consumers of various venues of information are.
Respondents were asked (in Fall 2008) 1) Which party was in control of the US House of Representatives, 2) Who the Secretary of State was, and 3) Who the British Prime Minister was. How did CNBC's regular viewers stack up? Here's a selection of the results, ordered by % knowing all three answers:
Outlet
US House Control
Name Sec State
Name UK PM
All Three
New Yorker/The Atlantic
71
71
59
48
NPR
73
72
57
44
Rush Limbaugh
83
71
41
36
Business Magazines
71
64
46
36
Local TV News
55
44
28
16
CNBC
51
45
28
17
TV News Magazines
56
44
28
16
All Resp
53
42
28
18
So there's CNBC, managing (just) to beat out readers of TV Guide for political awareness, but losing out to local news, and below the average.
In PEW's ranked outlets, CNBC places 34th out of 39. It's kind of hard to get worked up about what CNBC thinks Washington should do about this crisis when they're comparable to celebrity magazines in terms of political informational awareness of their viewers.
I realize they're a business network, so I included the readers of Business Magazines who do respectably well for people whose primary focus presumably isn't politics or foreign policy. Also, it's not like foreign events don't ever impact the markets, and considering London's role in the financial world was it really so unfair to ask the obsessive day-trader set at CNBC who the Prime Minister of the UK is?
I hadn't realized how bad CNBC was because I never watch it and kind of assumed it was the sober business channel that made Fox's business channel look silly. Instead it was the reverse, where Fox managed to make CNBC look good just by being so much worse.
Anyway, it seems it deserves every punch it is getting. I guess it figures that the greed-driven and ideologically blinkered business world that created this mess would have a network that suited their tastes. That's how markets work, after all.
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