It is the most eagerly awaited televisual debut for years. Rupert Murdoch's Fox Business Network (FBN) begins broadcasting in America on Tuesday, hoping to do for the arcane world of finance what its sister channel Fox News did for mainstream coverage. Fox TV's abrasive 67-year-old chairman, Roger Ailes, has already hired some established names, including Jenna Lee, Cody Willard and Nicole Petallides, pictured, to front shows, and there is fevered speculation about the editorial tricks he might deploy to make a specialist subject that once had limited appeal palatable to a wider audience.
Murdoch's critics will also be tuning in, ready to lambast the new channel for the slightest editorial indiscretion, and although plans are being kept under wraps, the News Corp chairman's pronouncements have already handed detractors some ammunition.
Speaking at a media conference at the start of the year, he said FBN would be friendlier to corporations than CNBC, the global market leader founded in the mid-1990s and now owned by US conglomerate General Electric. Ailes, meanwhile, has accused its competitor of 'leaping on every scandal' and said CNBC was 'not as friendly to corporations and profits as they should be. We don't get up every morning thinking business is bad.'
Further clues to the likely tone of the coverage can be found on Fox News itself, which carries some business content. This week it excitedly announced that the New York Stock Exchange had reached a new high. The channel's critics claim that market falls do not receive equal coverage, and fear FBN will be a cheerleader for big business in the same way Fox News allegedly favours the Republican party, despite its 'fair and balanced' logo.
Since Fox News was launched 11 years ago, it has infuriated 'liberals' but delighted audiences, who tune in because it offers a more dynamic take on the day's news.
Star anchors like Bill O'Reilly have borrowed some of the plain speaking of radio 'shock-jocks', and Fox is now America's most-watched rolling news channel. The principal victim of Fox News's success is CNN, owned by media giant Time Warner, which lost its pre-eminent position in its home market, and the arrival of FBN could have a similar effect on CNBC. The company says it welcomes the competition, but it has already taken steps to safeguard its predominance ahead of Murdoch's entrance into a sector that has boomed over the past decade as more people invest in stocks and shares.
Mick Buckley, president of CNBC Europe, says: 'We don't know what Fox are going to launch because they've kept their cards close to their chest, but we've got to remain focused on our own audience. We are targeting an investor audience - CEOs and finance professionals, and the top 20 per cent of income earners internationally.'
He adds: 'CNBC has 34 million American viewers and an estimated 58 million globally. Fox will be in just 38 million American homes initially.' Here, too, there are parallels with CNN, which also reaches a far larger worldwide audience and, it claims, a wealthier demographic.
While Fox has long outpaced CNN in terms of viewers, it holds less appeal for more affluent viewers (Ailes disputes this) and industry sources say its advertising rates are lower than CNBC's.
The battle has become personal: Ailes set up CNBC and knows many of its executives, and he has been talking up the battle ahead, telling the Wall Street Journal: 'They have a tremendous advantage. They're in 90 million homes. I put them on track 12 years ago... And we're going to come with our programming in our 30 million little pathetic homes. If they can't kill us in the crib now, it's only going to get worse for them day to day.'
There is another dimension to the tussle. Dow Jones, which owns the Wall Street Journal and was bought by News Corp after a bitter takeover battle this summer, has a content deal with CNBC, supplying much of its programming and making its journalists available to provide comment. The deal has several years left to run and CNBC executives insist it will be honoured. But Murdoch has said publicly that the Journal was an attractive asset partly because it could be used to bolster Fox Business's output, and few expect the deal to remain in place for long.
Financial Times owner Pearson is waiting in the wings, hoping to strike a similar deal with CNBC should it be ripped up. In the meantime, the TV sets at the Journal's New York offices, once tuned to CNBC, have switched to Fox. This week, they will be screening Fox Business instead - and if the rest of the American business community follows suit, CNBC could see its own stock fall.