Both times it aired earlier this month, the CNBC documentary “The Age of Wal-Mart” attracted larger audiences than any other business program on the network that week.
That’s not particularly noteworthy until you consider that they were reruns. More than a rerun: The Peabody Award-winning film is two years old and CNBC has shown it 44 times.
Television executives notice those kind of numbers, and the trend explains how Josh Howard got his job 10 months ago, running a newly formed documentary unit at CNBC and preparing the network’s first news magazine for its December debut.
“It just tells you that there’s a real appetite for in-depth documentaries on people and trends (in business),” the CNBC president, Mark Hoffman, said.
