Rukeyser’s stock up at CNBC

Try as he might, Louis Rukeyser isn’t able to keep the laughter heading entirely up his well-tailored sleeve.

Public television’s ill treatment of one of its few non-puppet superstars -- which had the feel of a debacle in the making last year when Rukeyser was essentially elbowed out of the “Wall Street Week” show he founded -- has turned out, in fact, to be a debacle.

“Wall Street Week With Fortune,” the show Maryland Public Television, with the consent of PBS, devised to replace “Wall Street Week With Louis Rukeyser,” looks more like “Wall Street Week With Misfortune.” It has lost nearly a third of its viewers and, more to the point, all of the literate, punning spark that Rukeyser brought to the dry world of investing.

Maryland Public Television, the host station for the show in both iterations, has endured staff layoffs and salary cuts, in part because Rukeyser’s underwriters left with him.

And the dapper 70-year-old dean of financial television, now ensconced in the commercial world at cable’s CNBC, struggles to keep his satisfaction in check.

“Somebody said to me the other day,” he recounts with admiration for the well-turned phrase, “ ‘The small group that wanted to get you out invented a new crime: suicide by ambush.’ ”

On the one hand, Rukeyser will insist that he doesn’t want to dwell on last year’s very public muddle, which saw Maryland Public TV bringing in Fortune magazine over his head, Rukey-ser going on air to say his show was, in essence, being hijacked, and the two longtime partners in the Friday night venture splitting up faster than a family business after the founder dies.

“I said only one thing at the time: ‘I’m happy to let the market decide,’ ” he says from his home in Connecticut, which is, incidentally, much closer to his new taping site in New Jersey. “I would now, a year later, add only one phrase at the end of that sentence: ‘which it now clearly has.’ ”

The Friday night venture he’s hosting now, CNBC’s “Louis Rukeyser’s Wall Street,” is doing well enough that the news channel just signed him on for two more years. It has become the financial news provider’s most popular show.

On the other hand, ask Rukeyser about what we can take away now -- a year after the Fortune show began -- and he can’t help being less circumspect: “The lesson is that you can be dumb, and you can be dishonorable, but when you put the two together, it’s very bad policy.”

The people he’s talking about, executives at Maryland Public Television, don’t think they were being dumb or dishonorable, of course. In their explanation, they just wanted to make the more than 3-decade-old show more contemporary and Rukeyser wouldn’t play ball.

“I think we’re really hitting our rhythm,” says Larry Moscow, the executive producer of the new “Wall Street Week,” which replaces Rukeyser with the pairing of Fortune staffer Geoff Colvin and business journalist Karen Gibbs. “The show’s coming together. The talent is feeling comfortable with the format.”

And in the ratings, when it comes to total viewers, the “Fortune” show is beating the CNBC one. But depending on how you tally the numbers, it’s close, especially so when you consider “Fortune” is the evolution of a long-established show available over the free airwaves in 97% of U.S. TV households while “Rukeyser’s Wall Street” is a newcomer on a channel that reaches just 76%.

For the seven-month period from October through April, “WSW With Fortune” was averaging about 1.22 million viewers, according to PBS, a number that includes some of the repeat airings of the show each week.

Over on CNBC, the new Rukeyser show grabs “well over a million viewers,” says the channel, citing Nielsen Media Research numbers for the total of the three Friday showings (749,000 viewers) plus the weekend repeats on some 175 PBS stations. (Rukeyser insisted, cunningly, that the cable show be made available to his old faithful.) During the most recent October-April period compared with Rukeyser’s final seven months a year earlier, almost the same number of PBS stations carried the new “Wall Street Week,” according to PBS: 313 for old Coke vs. 307 for New Coke.

But national ratings were down significantly, according to Nielsen numbers provided not by Maryland Public Television, which was hesitant to supply them, but by PBS. The audience dropped from 1.3% of all households watching TV during the last seven months of Rukeyser to 0.9% during the same period a year later, and from 1.78 million viewers to 1.22 million.

It is fair to note, as some close to the show have, that the last year has not been an up period for financial television with the continued lull in the markets.

But it is also fair to note that one of the strongest justifications PBS/MPT used in shunting Rukeyser aside was the declining ratings for his version of “Wall Street Week,” although those declines also took place during a down market.

Up or down, though, the show, founded by the former TV network news reporter in 1970, was still PBS’ only program that was “No. 1 in its category,” as has been Rukeyser’s mantra.

As for Rukeyser, “I’m better off financially. I believe in the free enterprise system, and I practice it.” His shortened commute to tape his new show means “there’s less wear and tear,” and his lucrative side businesses, financial newsletters and cruises, are still going strong.

But he doesn’t -- really -- want to make too much of how it has all played out. “It isn’t that I have vindicated myself against massive odds. It’s just that there were a lot of people from the start who thought [what Maryland Public TV did] was dumb.”

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Steven Johnson is television critic at the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.