1989 – CNBC launches as a cable business news network by NBC.
In the late 1980s, two networks – Financial News Network and NBC’s Consumer News and Business Channel, later shortened to CNBC – debuted with a primary focus on reporting about business, the economy and Wall Street. Financial News Network, which had broadcast seven hours a day, was bought out by CNBC in 1991.
For most of the 1990s, CNBC and CNN, which launched CNNfn in 1995, competed against each other daily to land scoops on business news and CEO interviews. Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz, who wrote about the onslaught of television coverage of business news in the 1990s in The Fortune Tellers, likened the competition between the cable networks and the print media for business coverage as spotlighting “many of the same relentlessly optimistic traders and analysts who have been telling investors to buy, buy, buy stocks.”
The cable networks overwhelmed the local stations as well. In 1999, for example, few Chicago stations were bothering to report on the market and investing. Indeed, the cable television business networks covered the booming stock market of the 1990s as if it were a sporting event, noting the meteoric rise of stock indexes with much fanfare. Celebrities were created, as Dobbs became one of the most-recognized anchors on CNN, and CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo, who often broadcast from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in the 1990s, became known as the “Money Honey.” Others on the show had nicknames as well, such as “The Brain” and “The Kahuna.” CNBC’s slogan was “Profit from it,” the implication being that consumers could get rich by watching its programming. And the mere mention of a CEO of a publicly traded company appearing on the network would send its stock upward – even before the executive appeared on the air.