The Revolution Will Be Televised (on CNBC)

Mark Haines didn't really hit the baby-faced CEO of DigitalThink Inc. with a two-by-four -- that is, not until the third question. Haines, 54, a gruff, jowly fellow with a didactic, inquisitorial style, is approachable but skeptical -- and definitely hard to impress. His mind is as sharp as his physical appearance is, at times, rumpled. Although Haines's first question -- "How would you describe your company?" -- was a gimme, CEO Peter Goettner made the mistake of ending his answer by saying, "I don't think you can compare us to other companies that have come before us." Haines, who interviews a dozen CEOs a week, knows malarkey when he hears it.

Haines looks more like a butcher forced to wear a business suit than he does a TV anchor, but, as host of CNBC's "Squawk Box," he's the man many people across the country wake up to. And he didn't believe for a minute that DigitalThink -- an online learning company that was about to go public that morning -- was unique in the history of U.S. business. "It's a pretty crowded field, isn't it?" asks Haines. "Many companies do this [online training] in-house, and lots of companies hire others to do it for them. There's not much of a barrier to entry."

Goettner stands fast: "When you start talking about the Internet and technologies and outsourcing -- all the things DigitalThink really focuses on -- the barriers to entry actually get very large."

"Really?" responds the anchor, leaning into the word.

Haines is a big man, but he's most intimidating when he's examining a document with his half glasses propped on the end of his nose. With perfect prosecutorial restraint, Haines reads, "Because your S-1 [filing with the SEC] says, 'We ... operate in a highly competitive industry with relatively low barriers to entry.' "

Two hours before $22.4 million of Goettner's stock is to be floated, Haines is asking: Did you lie to the government? Or were you lying to me and my TV audience? Goettner is doomed. Haines's next question also begins with a reading from a DigitalThink document -- and a thwack disguised as an apology: "I'm sorry if I take the words to mean what they're supposed to mean."

CNBC: It's Time for Your Close-up

It's hard to imagine a more fortuitous convergence of moment and medium -- CNBC's rise in popularity during the longest bull market in history and the surge in trading by individual investors. As surely as the 1990s was the decade of the Digital Revolution and of the stock market's skyrocketing performance, the 1990s was also the decade of CNBC. The business-news cable-TV network, which 10 years ago was a little-watched hodgepodge of business, consumer, and health features, ended the 1990s as an authentic cultural phenomenon -- a vivid illustration of the most powerful economy in history. In fact, as a perfect coda to the 20th century, CNBC beat CNN in daytime ratings for the last three months of 1999. Business is the news.

Tuning in to CNBC is no longer just an individual experience: How are my stocks doing? It's also a way of tapping the national zeitgeist. It's like watching an EKG tracing on the nation. All of the vital signs are there on the screen, all the time -- the Dow Jones Industrial Average, NASDAQ, the S&P 500. Everything is color-coded, just as it is on a hospital monitor: Green means good news (up!), and red means bad news (down!). If the vitals are puzzling or contradictory, well, you've got a rotating cast of sometimes-breathless diagnosticians, interpreting data and offering prognoses.

If anything, CNBC has become too much of a cultural phenomenon. The financial markets, of course, are not the economy, let alone the real world; the nonstop media coverage of the market can make it seem more important than it is, even to the companies involved. As this year has shown so clearly, a company can do very well even if its stock isn't doing well at all. A company's stock can go through the roof even if the company has no visible means of making money.

CNBC is broadcast to nursing homes, yuppie gyms, dorm rooms, hotel lobbies, pilot ready rooms, and restaurants, and to trading desks of virtually every Wall Street brokerage. The network has become the real-time color commentary of the new economy. The Dow is 4 times what it was in 1990; the NASDAQ is 10 times what it was that year. More shares of stock change hands on U.S. exchanges in an hour today than they did in a day back in 1990. The number of U.S. households with investments in the market has doubled in the past 10 years. Circulation of the "Wall Street Journal," though, has fallen.

The real-life "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" plays out on CNBC -- where viewership in 2000 is triple that of 1995, according to Nielsen Media Research. And that's just the viewers CNBC knows about. Nielsen measures only what people watch in their homes, and many, if not most, CNBC viewers watch from anywhere but home.

The 1990s witnessed a dramatic democratization of investing. And CNBC has driven that trend by taking some of the mystery out of the stock market and making it more accessible, by giving anyone with a remote control access to the kind of information that used to be only available only to big firms. Indeed, during the past decade, Americans turned a fascinating corner: Today, more Americans invest in the stock market than vote in national elections.