In the old days, daytime television... programming and advertising took for granted that anybody who was home on the couch at noon was willing to swallow some pretty hokey palaver.

That assumption is still valid. My day. starts with a conversation between Mark Haines and Maria Bartiromo on CNBC.... For hours and hours, as the financial news continues, I zone in and out. Hey, what's that sound? Dum, dum, de-dum, it's Power Lunch. Now that's my show [but] I really despise the fact that I've been listening to all this nonsense on this channel all morning, for the two-hundredth day in a row, instead of listening to a nice, relaxing Chet Baker album. The problem is, I can't stop. Without CNBC, I might miss something important, like the collapse of the bhat, or a surprise Greenspan dirge, or a Joe Kernen one-liner that could ruin my day.

(Anuff and Wolf, 2000: 131-2)