Business Media and Reporting on the British Prime Minister's Resignation

Business journalist Teri Buhl writes about how some business news media such as Bloomberg raced to break the news about the resignation of British prime minister Gordon Brown because of its importance to markets, but CNBC seemed to miss its relevance.

Buhl writes, “On a day when the Dow was soaring 400 points and trading on debt defaults in Euro Countries are shrinking because  of the trillion dollar EuroZone bailout announced last night – Brown’s news was really market effecting.  But not one of the four talking heads on CNBC’s Power Lunch broke in with a news flash and began yelling at their viewers that Brown was stepping down. This would have been important to traders who might not have realized for a few minutes why trading on the British pound was in a tail spin.

“CNBC even had their UK correspondent Simon Hobbs on set, who likely could have done a great job explaining what impact Brown’s news had for the markets.  But we got nothing, ZIPPO, from the crew who thinks they are the world’s leader in delivering unbiased-actionable business news before the Bloomberg speed desk can ever post story to their terminals.

“Boy did they get beat. Because in fact Bloomberg’s print journalist had a whiff of the story posted on a terminal at 12:03 and their anchor Mark Hampton was interpreting trader’s lunches at 12:06 to tell them long time British Prime Minster is giving up the fight to lead his country and will step down.”

Read more here.