CNBC and the Space and Time of the Market

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Abstract

The CNBC television network is a key site in the cultural transmission of the discourses and representations of finance. The network immerses itself in a culture of financial markets, offering live coverage of price movements from across the globe, including a set on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. At the core of CNBC’s coverage is a televisual representation of the new spaces and times of financialization. Market flashes give up to the second updates on major market news, while live reports and cut-ins from across the globe compress global geography into a financialized televisual space. In this way, the flow of CNBC’s content connects the emerging power of finance to the spatial and temporal horizons of a financially connected world. In such a context, the sweeping lens of CNBC manifests a frenetic search for yield across shortening time spans and widening locales. The “liveness” of CNBC content, a feature oft-promoted by the network, also captures the discursive instantaneity of global finance and positions CNBC as a window to financial markets from the U.S. to Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. The discourses found on CNBC are both reflective and constitutive of new spatial and temporal dimensions of finance and the growing reach of global capital.