Newscasters are renowned for nailing their colors to the fence rather than the mast. An unerring adherence to objectivity and impartiality is often so sacred to them that they are willing to sacrifice individuality and repel free thought. Stuart Varney is happy to be an exception. Once the dispassionate face of CNN, he currently tours the conference circuit, frankly assessing worldwide politics as it relates to economic trends, opportunities and hazards. He describes himself as ‘very opinionated’.
With a career’s worth of journalism and finance experience behind him, he’s probably qualified to discuss such issues. Varney’s route into journalism, though, was more tangential than deliberate. After graduating from the London School of Economics, he worked as a bus conductor before leaving London to quench his thirst for a more exotic brand of travel. His jaunts took him across Europe, Asia and the US, where he briefly worked as a waiter. He resumed his travels and headed for the Far East and it was here that he was first drawn into the joys of journalism: he found a job with Radio Hong Kong.
Golden years
After a year-and-a-half Varney moved to San Francisco where he spotted an advertisement in the Chronicle: ‘Wanted: entry-level television newscaster’. This was his break. He joined Kemo-TV on its early morning business program, a genre which, he says, was still relatively new then but the program was a notable success. Varney looks back on this time with fondness and sees the mid-1970s almost as the golden age of broadcast news. ‘It was expanding, it was credible. People wanted to watch. It was an exciting time to enter broadcast journalism; to watch it grow and be a part of that growth,’ he remembers.
In 1980 he was approached by Ted Turner, who was on the verge of establishing CNN, a new 24-hour news network. ‘He was looking for people who knew business and television. At the time, there weren’t many around,’ Varney recounts. He was hired just before CNN’s launch and was the first correspondent for the New York bureau. ‘It was very experimental. No-one had put on 24-hour news and no-one had put it on nationally.’ CNN, or ‘chicken noodle news’ as it came to be known, was immediately dismissed as the industry joke: ‘We were run on a shoe-string and were very much the new guys on the block.’
Credibility emphatically arrived in 1985 when two TWA planes were hijacked in Beirut. CNN’s 24-hour coverage was naturally far more comprehensive than traditional bulletin-based news and America turned to the new network.
Nonetheless, ‘It was the stock market crash that really put us on the map internationally,’ says Varney. ‘People around the world followed our coverage because at the time we were the only global news operation in the midst of extreme financial uncertainty.’ In fact, the coverage won the team a Peabody Award for excellence in journalism and established CNN as a credible provider of financial news.
IR boom
Varney’s career in broadcasting has coincided with the growth of investor relations. IR, he feels, has impacted immeasurably on financial journalism. ‘Ten or 15 years ago, a journalist’s first port of call when a story broke was the company’s public relations office and you’d scratch around for information there. Now, you go directly to the IR people. They’re more in the thick of things financially, and they know what’s going on in the company. Plus, an investor relations officer is more important when it comes to putting across the company’s side of things. In fact, it’s extraordinary how much influence a company’s IR division has. For me, the development of IR is one of the untold success stories of the past fifteen years.’ Meanwhile, driving IR’s evolution was the stellar growth in institutional investment. That meant legions of new portfolio managers and analysts searching for an information edge and no longer adequately served by once-a-day input. The new retail investors were not far behind.
As a journalist Varney has had a perfect vantage point to observe the boom of visual media. The explosion has generated a clamoring for viewers, and news programs have had to succumb to this struggle. He admits that the packaging and presenting of financial news has always been tricky. Business news, Varney claims, is inherently poor TV: ‘Television demands pictures, real pictures that relate to the story. Real-time drama is the life-blood of television and with business news all you’ve got is talking heads. That’s radio, not television.’ Maintaining interest, then, is a real struggle. ‘This is the age-old problem. You can’t really explore a topic as you can in a print medium.’
Conversely, the advantage of television news is its immediacy: ‘We can report the news as it happens and we’re superb at that. It was a challenge. Interruptions and news and quotes would be coming at you in your ear and you’d have to relay it to the audience at the same time.’
Oversupply worry
The halcyon days of broadcast news are undoubtedly over and Varney is disillusioned with its current state. Oversupply is an obvious area of worry. With the greater prevalence of 24-hour news and the multiplication of news outlets, he believes saturation point has been reached and breached: ‘The quality of the product has gone down in direct proportion to the amount of product being broadcast,’ maintains Varney. ‘Plus, the general prosperity in America and the lack of really hard news stories means that news has dried up to some extent. The oversupply has contributed to a decline in standards. I really think the profession has fallen into disrepute and credibility has been eroded. We’re still more respected than lawyers but only just.’
Varney is optimistic, however, that there will be a reaction against the surfeit of news outlets. ‘I think we’re going to see a cutback in the amount of programming devoted to news. Financial news on television may benefit from a gradual sifting out.’
More worrying is his view that the preservation of objectivity is waning. ‘You’ve got to avoid the constant danger of becoming too involved and ending up as one of the protagonists.’
With the Lewinsky story and the US impeachment row, ‘Broadcast news has become a lot like talk radio,’ according to Varney. ‘Opinion has entered into bulletins,’ he says. ‘The tradition of the newscaster sitting there, saying what happened, has been eroded by newscasters engaging in debate. They’ve injected politics into news.’
Varney doesn’t suggest that disinterest is easy to maintain: ‘What language do you use?’ he asks. ‘If you use a word like collapse, you’re accused of talking the market down. You become part of the news.’ But, however difficult it may be, that disinterest must be observed. At CNN, an impassive exterior was expected, including facial expression and tone of voice. ‘It was difficult, ad-libbing for hours, right in the thick of things, being unable to display any shock or surprise,’ recalls Varney. ‘It can be done, though. It’s a case of supplying a steady drum-beat of facts without emotion.’
Ticking along
Having retired from CNN, Varney is now happy to expound his views on the world economy. He is optimistic about America’s future: ‘The US has never been on such a sound footing. It’s got the fundamentals right. Job creation is high, employment is low, inflation is very low, interest rates are at a near historic low. It’s really ticking along remarkably well.’
He is not so enthusiastic about the global economy definitely not a bull in China’s shop. ‘Look at the Asian model. It’s broken. It shows that crony capitalism doesn’t work,’ he remarks. ‘Look at Europe. Although relatively prosperous, the economy is moronic, stodgy, lethargic. There’s a huge unemployment problem constantly hanging over it. I think the American model of relatively free-market, democratic capitalism is now the role model for the world.’
Varney remains confident the US market would be sufficiently robust to weather a Japanese crisis: ‘Only if Japan’s economy really goes over the edge and by that I mean a full-scale, 1930s-style depression would America be in trouble,’ he avers.
On the other hand, he is blithely critical of European monetary union and the launch of the euro. ‘I don’t understand why Europe has to have a single currency,’ he complains. ‘I don’t understand why Europe has to have a huge bureaucracy dictating all manner of rules and regulations. I’m more of a Thatcherite. I think to construct by government fiat a new kind of bureaucracy is not the way to create a dynamic economy. I don’t oppose the euro; I’m just highly skeptical. I don’t see how you can get over the problem of sovereignty.’
Dispassionate neutrality is not an ideal quality for an eminent speaker on the conference circuit and Varney seems well aware of this. He seems perfectly comfortable, however, sitting on the mast.
