PBS, Rukeyser walk a path toward mutual destruction

NEW YORK -- The aftermath of last spring's feud between Louis Rukeyser and Maryland Public Television recalls the famous Cold War acronym MAD -- mutually assured destruction.

It couldn't have happened anywhere but the Public Broadcasting Service, stung in this case by its unique decentralized structure.

Fans of the veteran financial journalist know the basics. Rukeyser's Maryland producers wanted to de-emphasize his role on the Friday night Wall Street wrapup he started 32 years ago. Rukeyser cried foul, was fired, then moved to CNBC.

Rukeyser then took advantage of the way PBS works to come up with an ingenious way to torture his old employers.

He arranged to make the CNBC show available on weekends to any PBS station that wanted it. Currently, 158 of the nation's 349 PBS stations carry "Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street."

There's nothing PBS' management can do about it. The system is set up to give individual stations the power to decide what to put on their air, rendering public broadcasting's central authorities far less powerful than their commercial counterparts.

Imagine, for a minute, CBS firing Dan Rather and the anchor still showing up to deliver the news on about half of the CBS stations. Wouldn't happen.

Long Island's WLIW-TV, which distributes Rukeyser's show to other PBS stations, said it was done to offer a choice. Many stations also wanted to appease corporate contributors who were angry with how the journalist had been treated.

"We certainly didn't do it to aggravate PBS," said Terrell Cass, president of WLIW-TV. "I don't see it as any threat, particularly now that there is so much water under the bridge."

There are plenty of financial journalism shows on the air, Cass said. Besides, PBS stations are forbidden by CNBC from airing Rukeyser's new show on the same night as PBS' revamped "Wall $treet Week with Fortune."

Jeff Hankin, a spokesman for Maryland Public Television, also said he doesn't believe that the distribution of Rukeyser's CNBC show undermines his old one. "Wall $treet Week with Fortune" is being carried on 315 of the 349 stations, with no attrition from the Rukeyser days.

"We're choosing here not to carry rerun cable material, but some others may," Hankin said. "That's their choice."

So far a draw

Who's winning so far? No one.

Since its CNBC debut on April 19, "Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street" is seen by an average of 410,000 viewers on Friday nights. CNBC is thrilled; that's 2 1/2 times more people than were watching the cable channel at that hour.

Yet it's less than a quarter of the 1.7 million viewers that Rukeyser averaged in his PBS time slot before his ouster.

In the four weeks it has been on the air since the makeover, "Wall $treet Week with Fortune" has drawn barely a million viewers.

In other words, the audience for the two shows together is less than it was when Rukeyser was undisturbed.

More disturbing for "Wall $treet Week with Fortune" is the defection of three of its four largest underwriters after Rukeyser left. Hankin said Maryland Public Television is confident the missing underwriters will be replaced by this fall, something that's crucial to its survival.