40 Years Later, CNN's Myron "Mike" Kandel, Now 90, Looks Back on the Launch of 'Moneyline'

DENVER, May 27, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- This week, ahead of the 40^th anniversary of the founding of Cable News Network, NewsLuminaries.com presents an oral history with Myron "Mike" Kandel, now 90, reflecting on the start of the 24/7 all-news network and its pioneering economic news program "Moneyline."

The oral history is available for free at https://tinyurl.com/BNVA-Kandel.

Moneyline first aired on Monday, June 2, 1980, a day after CNN's official launch. The live weeknight Wall Street and consumer news half-hour quickly became a mainstay, setting the standard for business and financial television programming.

Reese Schonfeld, CNN's founding president, hired Kandel to serve as the new network's financial editor. A well-regarded veteran print journalist and newsletter publisher, Kandel previously had served as financial editor of The New York Herald Tribune, The Washington Star, and the New York Post.

Kandel recruited Lou Dobbs from Seattle's KING-TV to anchor the fledgling Moneyline team, which included columnist Dan Dorfman and correspondent Stuart Varney.

For 25 years, Kandel reported and commented on the major financial and general news stories of the era, including seven presidential elections, the stock market crash of 1987, the dot-com bubble, the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, and an untold number of stories on the economy, mergers and acquisitions, regulations, and business bankruptcies.

In 2000, Kandel was recognized by News Luminaries as one of the ten most influential business journalists of the 20^th century. Similarly, he is the recipient of the New York Financial Writers' Association's Elliot V. Bell Award for outstanding contributions to financial journalism. In 2006, he received the Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award presented by UCLA Anderson School of Management.

"To say that Mike Kandel is beloved and respected by all who know him and have worked alongside him would be an understatement," said Dean Rotbart, chair and editor-in-chief of NewsLuminaries.com and the Business News Visionary Awards.

Rotbart, who is conducting a series of oral histories with prominent active and retired journalists for a commemorative book to be published in 2021, interviewed Kandel – with his wife, Thelma, by his side – shortly after Kandel turned 90 years old on March 14^th. The couple married in 1954 and has two children, Bethany and Andrew, and four young-adult grandchildren.

In addition to his roles at CNN, over the decades Kandel served as a teacher, author, leader of multiple nonprofit journalism organizations, and mentor to many.

More than 200 former colleagues and admirers had registered to attend a celebration of Kandel's milestone birthday this past March. But the reunion and party had to be canceled as the nation embraced social distancing in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

Rotbart, an award-winning former "Heard on the Street" columnist with The Wall Street Journal, inaugurated the News Luminary awards in 2000 and is spearheading the 2020 Business News Visionary Awards.

Recent oral histories available at NewsLuminaries.com include interviews with Neil Cavuto and Maria Bartiromo of FOX Business Network, Stephen J. Adler, editor-in-chief of Reuters, Nina Easton of Fortune Magazine's Most Powerful Women conferences, and Henry Dubroff, founder and editor of the Pacific Coast Business Times.

New journalism oral histories are added weekly to NewsLuminaries.com.

The News Luminary and Business Visionary Awards are made possible, in part, by the support of Monday Morning Radio, a weekly small business podcast produced in cooperation with the nonprofit Wizard Academy and its founders, Roy H. and Pennie Williams; and Robert L. Dilenschneider and Joan Avagliano of The Dilenschneider Group, providing an unsurpassed level of communications counsel to global clients.

Contact:
Dean Rotbart
303-296-1200
[email protected]

SOURCE NewsLuminaries.com