Fox Business's 'Bell' Sounds A New Start For Liz Claman

"I'm not going to sit here and say it's an easy sell," Claman admits. "Apple won't talk to me. I think that's extremely myopic."

Claman's "Countdown to the Closing Bell" is the network's highest-rated show during market hours; it averaged 38,000 viewers last month, a big jump from fewer than 20,000 in September. (The figures, obtained by The Washington Post, are not released by Nielsen because Fox Business is not a full-time client.) CNBC, which recently trimmed its staff amid company-wide cutbacks at NBC Universal, has averaged 453,000 daytime viewers since September. Fox Business reaches 45 million homes, mostly on digital channels, which is less than half the distribution of CNBC. And Sirius XM recently dropped the Fox channel from its satellite radio lineup.

As the financial crisis has intensified, Claman, like other journalists, has tried to strike the right tone. "I'm very mindful about being honest and truthful but not scaring people and not overstating things," she says. "This is a situation that needs no heightened hyperbole."

Claman says she avoids business jargon in an effort to appeal to the average investor, sometimes using what is dubbed the Fox Business Translator. "At CNBC it was a game of who can be the smartest, who can throw around the most alphabet soup -- CDSs, CDOs," she says.

Although she is an anchor, she constantly works the phones. In September, Claman disclosed that the Securities and Exchange Commission was about to crack down on market short-sellers; her report aired 40 minutes before the agency announced the move.

Claman was always "a force of nature," says her oldest sister, Danielle Gelber, a senior vice president at Showtime. When Claman was about 12 and the family got its first video camera, Gelber says her sister "would pretend to be Barbara Walters, and we all had to pretend to be various celebrities and she would interview us. You can't make this stuff up."

Claman bounced around several colleges, from UCLA to the Sorbonne, and climbed the local-news ladder the hard way. After an entry-level job at KCBS in Los Angeles that included delivering newspapers to Paula Zahn, Claman worked at stations in Columbus, Ohio, Cleveland and Boston, picking up an Emmy along the way.

She admits she faced a steep learning curve in 1998 when she joined CNBC, immersing herself in Fortune, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal and trolling Yahoo Finance chat sites. Despite her inexperience, Claman called Buffett one day and he took the call, saying he had just been watching her on the air. Her soft-sell approach worked, and several interviews with the Berkshire Hathaway chairman followed.

"Too many reporters are so inauthentic," Claman says. "They look so greedy. They look so obnoxious: 'I need this to be exclusive!' I don't strong-arm anyone, ever."

When Claman got to Fox, she secured a rare joint interview with Buffett and Bill Gates, a board member of Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, and was able to get Gates's reaction to the news that Microsoft was abandoning its takeover bid for Yahoo. She seems to like corporate hotshots; her special on Buffett's teaching sideline last month was extremely friendly. Claman prides herself on eliciting personal details from CEOs, such as the fact that Jim Kelly, who once ran United Parcel Service, started out as a driver.

After a decade, she is getting some respect. A recent Vanity Fair article called Claman one of the top business anchors, distinguishing her from some other female financial correspondents, with "their short, tight skirts, low-cut blouses, and the way the Fox cameras focused on their legs and chests." Claman called that characterization unfair.

With a 7-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old son, Claman does her share of juggling at her New Jersey home. "We both have nutty schedules, but the kids come first no matter what," says her husband, Jeff Kepnes, a CNN senior producer. Claman recently turned down the chance to be on a panel with Neel Kashkari, the Treasury official in charge of the banking bailout, because she had a private school interview for her son.