• Slate, Wednesday, August 5, 2009 10 PM

CNBC's audience plummeted 28% between July 2008 and July 2009, per Nielsen. Daniel Gross seeks to explain this ratings decline at a time when the country was experiencing "the most fundamental failure of capitalism since the Great Depression and important new deals between Washington and Wall Street."

CNBC has embraced a highly politicized view of these developments. "The consensus on CNBC seemed to be that President Obama was half Joseph Stalin, half Jimmy Carter." Assuming it was planned, this oppositional strategy would make sense. Opinion journalists always prosper when the forces in Washington are arrayed against them.

So why have CNBC's viewers clicked the remote? Turns out, most people keep CNBC on to see what stocks and bonds are doing and to see whether there's any bad news. CNBC gets its best ratings when the markets are tanking. As a result, good news in the markets has been bad news for CNBC. There are still plenty of vital economic and corporate developments to cover, but the declining threat of wholesale economic failure has killed much of the buzz. That's probably why ratings for some of CNBC's evening programs were down by more than 40% in July 2009 from July 2008.

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