Inside Softball

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BusinessWeek's new soon-to-be overlords at Bloomberg have started making their mark on the 80-year-old publication. In November, they hired Josh Tyrangiel as editor in chief, wooing the decidedly nonbusiness editor away from Time, Inc., where he was deputy managing editor of Time and head of the magazine's website.

There were also over 100 layoffs, and the magazine killed the column by Jack and Suzy Welch, who didn't seem to mind very much: "We did it for four years, and it was tougher than we ever thought," Welch, former chairman of General Electric told the New York Post's Keith Kelly. "Every Sunday it was like a guillotine hanging over our heads." They also killed Maria Bartiromo's column.

Last night, the magazine announced it would be hiring Charlie Rose, the PBS talk-show host, to be a new columnist. According to the release (here reprinted by the New York Observer's Reid Pillifant), "His BusinessWeek column will showcase smart conversations with the best thinkers, CEOs, politicians, and other newsmakers. Each week, Rose will offer insights into and takeaways from those who impact and drive the global business and financial markets."

Rose is an interesting choice, to say the least. A recent profile of the host by Fortune's David A. Kaplan called him "nothing if not ambitious," and showed him working nearly around the clock to court and curry favor with the executives and titans he interviews nightly.

One such titan is Mike Bloomberg, who told Fortune, "I always thought Charlie was a good interviewer, and his Southern charm made it easy for guests to tell their stories." Bloomberg likes Rose so much, he gives him free studio space to tape his shows and began rebroadcasting it nightly on Bloomberg Television.

It's probably just a coincidence that as Bloomberg takes over BusinessWeek, they're tapping Rose and his "smart conversations," right?

One thing that makes Rose as a columnist troubling is his reputation as a softball interviewer, someone who values chummy, civil discussion over challenging debate. He even crops up in You're Too Kind: A Brief History of Flattery by Richard Stengel, who notes the semantics of Rose's insistence that what he does isn't interviewing people, but rather hosting conversations with them: "An interview is between people of different status; a conversation is between people of the same status. Interviews are déclassé."

A New York magazine profile of Rose by Jeanie Kasindorf from 1992 unfavorably portrayed Rose as a name-dropper and social climber: "Rose runs the show much as a turn-of-the-century society hostess might run a salon. Within one hour, he can seem to be the best friend of such disparate guests as Jann Wenner, Oliver North, and Susan Faludi. At times he can be silly, giggling with his guests. At times he can be fawning ('a provocative piece,' he intoned to Henry Grunwald about his essay in Time; he called Abe Rosenthal 'a paragon in the world of newspapers')."

There are also ethical questions, as when Rose also found himself at the center of a small scandal in 2002, after appearing at Coca-Cola's annual stockholders meeting and praising the company, which happens to underwrite his PBS show. He did so while also working for CBS on 60 Minutes II, which created the impression of a newsman doing an endorsement deal.

Rose is so helpful to corporate leaders, he reportedly brokers deals for them, even off air, as when Rose used "an off-the-record summit meeting for chief executives sponsored by Microsoft in mid-May" to broker peace between General Electric chairman Jeffrey Immelt and News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, according to the New York Times' Brian Stelter. (That peace didn't last very long.)

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