From a historical perspective, I
suspect that what “counts,” or is recognized, as discourse on business has
consecutively narrowed. An enterprising scholar in the field of business and
society, which itself has narrowed to managerial tools and ideological demands
(under the subterfuge of knowledge), might compare the media’s coverage of
business firms beginning to sell electricity, the telephone, and the
auto-carriage (i.e., automobile) in the early decades of the twentieth century
with reports a century later on firms bringing out life-changing products like
smartphones and other applications of computer technology. Not having been
around when electricity was making houses brighter and telephones as well as
cars were fundamentally changing human interaction and mobility, people
following the business news on Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Google, and Microsoft
do not have the historical perspective necessary to assess how broad or narrow
the coverage is.
I contend that what is considered
business news (and discourse) is artificially constrained, in that coverage is biased
toward the companies themselves (most particularly in CEO antics and financial
numbers) at the expense, or opportunity cost, of attention on exciting new
products. Put another way, the public discourse on business need not be so
reductionist. The trajectory is not good for business or society. I contend
that broadening (i.e., rather than
replacing one media obsession with another) the coverage in business news to include,
and, indeed, emphasize, substantive information on, as well as discussion of,
the exciting new uses and wider implications of the companies’ respective
technologically advanced products would render business news as well as
business itself much more interesting, especially to people in the wider
society. In this essay, I sketch how a product-centric approach would look in
the business media; hopefully, the sheer difference between this alternative
and the status quo reporting will provide a sense of how much journalistic discretion is involved in what we watch
and read in business news.
CNBC and Fox Business News provide much
material for analyzing the business media, and can be taken as illustrative of
the default that had taken hold by the 2010s. The devil is in the details, so I
want to concentrate on a particular example and reason inductively to
generalize to the business media overall.
An interview taking place on CNBC. The choice of questions may be more important than the answers. (Image Source: Inside Cable News)
On “Squawk on the Street,” a program on CNBC, the anchors interviewed Harvey Spevak, the CEO of Equinox (a company in the fitness
industry), answered questions on January 17, 2014.
I want to focus on the importance on the questions.
One of the show’s anchors asked Spevak about his company’s plan to offer genome
analysis as a service to customers who would like to know how they respond
generally to exercise. Rather than follow up with a question to illicit what
customers would learn about the way they react to exercise, the journalist
asked if the service was “just a marketing gimmick.” I submit that probing the
service if only to assess its staying power with consumers would have been more
useful to not only investors and stock analysts, but also people who would not
be interested in watching and hearing a cacophony of numbers presumptuously
assuming the high ground as “king of the hill” of business news.
One implication from the interviewer’s
choice of follow-up question is that investor interests, assumed to be
exclusively bottom-line financial, trump consumer and entrepreneur (or even
competitor) interests. Such reductionism is unnecessary, and the numbers
orientation may not actually be in the interests of the investors and financial
analysts, not to mention CNBC’s ratings.
The interview then turned to company’s
foray into wearable fitness technology. Here, the interviewer had little
interest in making the products concrete for prospective customers and the wider public; he was satisfied with the
Spevak’s vague description, which ended with, “It’s science.” The journalist made the choice to follow-up instead by
asking what profits the CEO expected the company would make on the wearables,
and, moreover, whether an IPO might come anytime soon. Potential investors (and
stock analysts) would be better equipped to evaluate a future IPO were the CEO
to have discussed what how the wearables could benefit users (i.e., what the
products can do) as well as how the products might change our daily lives and
society itself. The anchor then turned his guest to the subject of online
advertising, hence inadvertently feeding the obsessive mentality in the
American media generally by treating advertising as an end in itself rather
than a means of making potential and even existing customers aware of products and services.
All too often, information and public
discourse on products a leap ahead technologically (and hence seemingly
unfathomable) are relegated to “print” reports of product announcements, such
as of Google’s
new contact lens that measures glucose levels. People with diabetes would
quite naturally be very interested in
how the new product would likely impact their daily lives. A huge segment of
potential viewers and readers could be drawn in by any media outlet willing to
stay on the announcement rather than run to vague considerations of
profitability and stock charts.
Does not the true value (and
significance, not to mention the excitement) of products coming out of leaps in
technology or hitherto unrealized applications of existing technology lie in
the stuff we can do with the new toys? As a writer, I get excited when I come
up with a novel point or perspective to share with others because I have
experienced what it feels like to have my perspective “opened up” from reading
a unique piece. I am not thrilled in reading about grammar or composition tips,
on the other hand; I do such “mechanical” reading as a means of
improving my ability to communicate to readers.
Public discourse on business too often
obsesses on the means—even taking them to be ends in themselves.
Consequently, interest is typically confined to a narrow segment (i.e., the
financial wonks). Ironically, Wall Street would be better served with the media
giving more attention to the new products and their societal implications, with
the expected financial consequences being secondary rather
than excluded in yet another manifestation of tunnel vision. Reports and
commentary on novel products themselves (as well as innovative ways of
business) do indeed fall within the domain of business discourse. In fact, I
would say the reorientation is more in line with the true
significance of business (i.e., making and providing products that consumers want to use). Tapping into this core of
business, while still attending to the financials, would, I suspect, attract a
broader array of viewers and readers in the wider society beyond the business
world. As an added bonus, business practitioners, investors, and even stock
analysts might find their own interest piqued. A stock analyst excited as much (or
more) about a novel product as charts and figures may do a better job in
assessing a company’s value, and thus likely stock trend.
Of course, in order for more of the
general population to realize that the true significance of business is
actually more interesting, the business journalists would have to wean
themselves and their interviewees off the snazzy jargon, nearly devoid of any
real meaning and yet ubiquitous in the business world. The artificial excitement
over such words or phrases as “champion,” “coach,” “growing leaders,” “driving”
(not as in driving a car), “drivers,” and “leveraging” (beyond its oversold application
to debt) is misguided in that the obsession and related excitement (out of vacuous
boredom?) distract everyone from the true font of excitement in business.
Additionally, the weirdness in both the sheer obsessiveness on particular words—flavors
of the month—and the misuses themselves, and the artificial narrowing of what
counts as business that enables knowing and
enjoying the “language” to function as the passkey keep people outside the
business world from becoming excited about business rather than laughing at its
inhabitants’ discourse. Perhaps the practitioners and journalists who play in
the business world figure, quite unconsciously of course, that business as they understand it is not really very
exciting, and, therefore, that few if any people in the wider society would be
likely to get excited about business anyway.
