Fewer smiles, more business please

VIEW FROM THE GROUND FLOOR: CNBC is a channel of boundless optimism, even when things are gloomy and they are talking of economic disasters, writes Sheila O'Flanagan

There have been some irate letters to the editor of this newspaper complaining about NTL's decision to replace their transmission of Eurosport with CNN Europe. I can't say that I ever watched much of Eurosport, since there's only limited excitement to be gained from the delights of competitive cross-country skiing or 10-pin bowling, but they did provide some great coverage of tennis, which I always enjoyed (even though the commentators were clearly holed up in a room in Brighton or somewhere equally far away from the action), and you could occasionally depend on them to reel you in with some impossible sport like truck-lifting, which rapidly became addictive.

CNN, with its breathy, enthusiastic, bright-eyed presenters is certainly exciting to watch - at least until you realise that the presenters and the chief executives are generally spouting unmitigated drivel at around 100 miles an hour.

Speed-talking is essential on CNN, giving the impression that the participants barely have time to toss their nuggets of wisdom at you before rushing back to their corporate nests to engage in some kind of off-balance sheet trade.

It's the kind of channel that you tune into when you're alone and bored in an overseas hotel and you realise that it's the only English-speaking option available.

The station's shout line is "knowledge is power", which is particularly ironic given the amount of knowledge leading members of the wider business community have kept from the world over the past few years.

Did anyone from CNN ever interview Kenneth Lay and ask about off-balance-sheet accounting? Did they ever ask a nascent technology company whether or not they intended to make any money any day soon? Knowledge is power but only when you actually know what questions to ask and only if you get a real answer.

I can watch about 15 minutes of CNN before it begins to irritate the hell out of me - which is about 10 minutes more than Eurosport when it shows the world tiddlywinks championships. But at least Eurosport never pretended it was trying to turn me into a wiser, more knowledgeable member of the community - it just set out to entertain.

Of course sport and news clashed to some extent over the past week when CNN left the Enron sage to report (excitably) on the drama of the Russian/ Canadian gold medal debacle at the Winter Olympics. Since ice-skating is about as interesting to me as the Japanese economy is to a winter sports' enthusiast, I hadn't seen the event itself but it was clearly beaten into last place as a spectacle when put alongside the news story it generated.

It was an unexpected relief to find out that skulduggery and double-dealing goes on in arenas outside the world of commerce - obviously a case of a little off-balance-sheet accounting in the ice-skating world too.

I don't know whether Eurosport's coverage of the event would have been any better than CNN's but I did feel CNN failed miserably when interviewing the two Canadians by not actually showing them to us but by putting up a schedule of forthcoming events instead.

CNN is a channel of boundless optimism, even when things are gloomy. When they talk of economic disaster they do it with smiles on their faces and assurances that it's only temporary. The optimism of Americans is wonderful but it can get wearing after a while.

I suppose the Japanese were feeling kind of optimistic about George W's visit until he actually arrived and managed to mix up deflation and devaluation, which sent the yen reeling. George's error was another slip of the tongue, of course.

With all their business channels to chose from it's surely impossible that anyone in the US doesn't know the difference between deflation and devaluation - even though the emphasis has been on corporate profitability rather than global economics over the past few weeks.

It must be a bit of a nightmare being a chief executive at the moment, never knowing when some horrible little deal that you did five years ago when nobody cared will emerge to slap you in the face. Though my sympathies (unlikely as this may seem) are slightly skewed towards Bill Gates and Microsoft.

The Securities & Exchange Commission is investigating the possibility that Bill & Co understated their profits in the 1990s by holding back earnings as cash reserves. In the midst of all the other companies whose profits were spurious, at least Microsoft was selling a real product and generating real profits.

Nobody ever accused it of bumping up the P&L by fancy accountancy practices (anyway, Microsoft doesn't do a decent accountancy software package). The whole thing came to light because an auditor sued the company saying his contract was wrongfully terminated when he suggested the practice might be in breach of SEC rules. Shooting the messenger has always been an option for people who hear bad news, although it seems that there are a hell of a lot of companies who opted instead to simply change the message.

I'm not sure whether it was as a panacea for his woes that Bill made a guest appearance on the 200th edition of sit-com Frasier last weekend. Bill appeared as himself, answering callers to the station who wanted to ask questions about Microsoft products.

It was disappointing they didn't actually allow more time for Bill to answer the questions - it would have saved loads of people time hanging on the phones to their local "help desk" only to learn that the irritating habit the package has of doing the opposite of what you asked isn't a flaw - it's a design feature!

I'm wondering if this sort of TV appearance will be a new way forward for business executives. Instead of appearing on stations like CNN, where there is always the slightest chance that some presenter might ask a knowledgeable question, maybe they'll insist instead on appearing in popular TV shows. Carly Fiorina on Friends, perhaps. Michael Buckley on The Weakest Link. Denis O'Brien on Home and Away.

Another interesting development might see Michael Smurfit commentating on golf tournaments around the world - whether he'd be doing that under the auspices of Eurosport or CNN is something that maybe his shareholders could decide.