The granddaddy of all financial news shows now copied by the likes of Neil Cavuto and CNBC’s Business Center.
Like all things that Ted Turner touches, the concept of an financial news show was foreign back in 1980. With the launch of Turner's Cable News Network, Teddy wanted to be the CBS of business news.
Reese Schonfeld, Myron Kandel, and Lou Dobbs (the two former being esteemed programming executives and the latter being the news reporter who loved to do business broadcasts) came up with a show about reporting all the events that would effect finance during the day. CNN lacked the resources for the show so they decided to wing it by making the show be half full of interviews with guests (which would costs zero money) and half be like CBS Evening News of business (which would be the actual production costs).
Moneyline was the first business news cast to focus on the political economy, giving people the background from public policy issues to big business. Since a wide range of people, from big time execs to lowly pension holders, would watch the show, Moneyline had to also come off as being informative but poignant and direct.
Moneyline was the first national nightly business newscast and it garnered tremendous attention, almost from the outset. Behind it followed other business news shows on CNN and then in short order an entire network. CNNfn was created about a year and a half after Moneyline started, as a result of CNN's success with business news programming.