Rukeyser Paved Way For Financial News On TV

As Louis Rukeyser tells it, he has never made a career decision solely for financial reasons.

Take 1973, for instance. Basically, he had it made. There he was, working for ABC, a television newsman also doing radio commentary. And yes, he had this weekend gig, running down to Maryland Public Television each Friday to moderate a little show he’d developed, “Wall Street Week With Louis Rukeyser.”

Then, he decided to bag it all - except for the “Wall Street Week” part.

“Everybody thought I was nuts,” he said. There were the security, the prospects and the money. He might get the State Department beat or become the news anchor one day.

“I thought it would take five years to replace the ABC income,” he said. “I was 40 then. I knew that if I didn’t do it then, I wasn’t going to do it.”

Wonderful things happened. The newsman became an entrepreneur. His speeches were in demand and became a mainstay of his income, in fact. The show became a fixture on PBS. From 1976 to ‘93, he wrote a syndicated newspaper column.

He gave that up, he said, after his first financial newsletter was rolling, and he wanted to start a second.

Forbes magazine ruffled his feathers recently with an article suggesting that Rukeyser’s newsletters were less than raging successes. Not so, he said. His publisher is drafting a letter to Forbes suggesting that if their magazine had been doing as well at the same stage as his newsletters, editor Steve Forbes - a GOP presidential hopeful this year - would have run for president four years ago.

Rukeyser writes the newsletter material himself, as he did the newspaper column. That’s also the answer to one of the more often asked questions from regular viewers: Yes, Rukeyser writes his show’s opening monologue himself.

Each Friday evening he begins “Wall Street Week” by offering a wry, pun-jammed commentary on the week’s economic and political events.

He then turns to his rotating corps of panelists to answer viewers’ questions and give the panelists’ assessment of the financial markets. At the end there’s a special guest, usually with ready buy-sell stock recommendations.

The guests also are often quite special. It would be hard to name a prominent private financial wizard or government economic official who has not appeared on the program.

The audience for the program is broad, Rukeyser said, and includes a considerable number of people who do not own stock, but who want to know what to do when their ship comes in.

Over the years, the program has shown the way for other shows, indeed entire television networks, to deal with economic and financial matters. Rukeyser was a man ahead of his time - or at least ahead of everybody else.

He recalled noticing, while overseas for ABC in 1968, how economic affairs were severely under-reported. “I always had the interest and academic background,” he said. The field was not only poorly covered, but “the average journalist knew no economics and almost took pride in that fact.”

So, as he put it, he invented a job.

One of the keys to the show’s success, he feels, is that the program’s vocabulary is kept as jargon-free as possible. He has also found that it helps draw people in if the key word is money, rather than the economy.

Rukeyser, who is married and the father of three daughters, leaves his Greenwich, Conn., home each Thursday for Owings Mills, Md., headquarters for Maryland Public Television. The program comes together Friday night and is as fresh as the stock market’s closing report.

In addition to paving the way for TV financial fare, “Wall Street Week” has also staked at least two other mileposts.

With little fanfare - but with some notice - the program has become a model of diversity. The show’s panelists and guests are sprinkled with black and female analysts.

The program is also a working counterpoint to the PBS programming that conservative congressmen have targeted in recent months.

“Public television,” Rukeyser said, “is the only free market on TV.” Consequently, he said, “The opportunity for diversity is greater in public television.”