If a Cable Gaming talking head who works for one network praises a rival network, thus damning, in effect, his own network, that should be news, right? I mean how often does that happen? So if Michael Eisner, the onetime uber-mogul at Disney, who now does a small-bore gig on CNBC, goes out of his way to praise Fox Business News, that should be of some note, right? Well, yes, says Jeffrey Bercovici of Conde Nast's Portfolio magazine, and no, says Caroline McCarthy of C/NET.
C/NET?
You remember C/NET? Don't you? Dimly? Yeah, yeah, it's still around, even if you haven't heard of it for awhile. Back in the mid 90s, C/NET was one of those cool San Francisco-based Internet startups, complete with cool Clintonista politics. In fact, C/NET was so cool, back then, that it snagged the url www.news.com out from under all the existing news organizations. For awhile, C/NET even had a gig with CNBC--an early attempt to converge TV and the Net.
But then, unfortunately for Halsey Minor and all that crowd of Internet 1.0-ers, the bubble burst, and C/NET never really recovered. Now in its second decade, C/NET has not developed into an enduring news brand--today, there are zillion blogs that do exactly what C/NET was supposed to have once done. Oh well.
So these days, C/NET is not so much a news site as, seemingly, it is a compendium of ads and what might be called "newsfomercials"--ads and product-placements half-heartedly disguised as "news" stories. Once again, free country: caveat C/NET-or.
But occasionally, C/NET struggles to be journalistic. That's nice, but of course then two more of C/NET's basic weaknesses show through: First, its basic Bay Area bias--total blue-itude, politically. Second, perhaps, the legacy of the link to CNBC, combined with, possibly, the hope for a renewed relationship--that further biases its idea of "news."
So when Eisner said at a recent Nielsen conference that the Writer's Guild strike was "stupid," that was a newsworthy comment, and deserved to get plenty of attention. And both Bercovici and McCarthy wrote about Eisner's blunt comments.
McCarthy stopped there in her reportage. But the more enterprising and thorough Bercovici kept going, adding more valuable detail, incuding a terrific gem of man-bites-dog counter-intutive blurting out from Eisner.
Eisner, the man with the CNBC show, praising Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, the creators of FBN--that's news, huh? Here's the way Jeff put it:
Eisner, who hosts a show for CNBC, on arch-rival Fox Business Network's chances: "It's not crazy if you have [Rupert] Murdoch and [Roger] Ailes. it's probably crazy if you have two other people, but those guys are pretty good. So you can't bet against them."
I wonder what CNBC prexy Mark Hoffman thinks about Eisner's words. No doubt Bercovici is still on that trail, while McCarthy is doing--well, who knows what she's doing.
