From WNYKR.

From W.NYC in New York, this is NPR's On The Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This weekend marks the anniversary of NASDAQ's record high

when the technology heavy stock index hit 5,048.62 before crashing back to Earth.

Cast your mind back to a time before you knew the term market cap,

before Chris Matthews burrowed under your skin like a telechigger,

before NBC was a suffix.

I referred to the period that should be known as B, CNBC,

before the proliferation of financial news coverage on cable.

CNBC, CNNFN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, each has invested untold millions of dollars and huge chunks of their schedules

to bring you the very latest from that wildly bucking rodeo bull called Wall Street. But then the irrational exuberance

finally gave out. When investors began to have all sorts of demands for the companies they owned

holdings in, pie in the sky expectations such as profitability, it was like the bulls hit a dead

end in Pamplona, first for tech stocks, then for the broader market,

then for the cable shows that followed them.

If you put a graph of what's happened on the stock market and laid a graph of the ratings of these shows on top of it,

they would pretty much track.

Kyle Pope is the TV editor of Inside.com.

Carnage is great, and really dramatic declines or extremely excruciating wipeouts of

companies where you get bankruptcies or huge layoffs or CEOs leaving.

That's good for ratings on television, and people will tune in to watch that.

But when you get this sort of slow drip bleed day after day after day, that's where you get into trouble.

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