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You can follow up: here. With a petition to CNBC to start doing their job right!
Previously, I posted here at onthewilderside a link to the video of Jon Stewart lambasting CNBC and other financial news sources. Jon Stewart’s vignette on The Daily Show was brilliant analysis of how the corporate media feeds into government and corporate malfeasance.
After that exciting episode, Cramer, a CNBC financial news celebrity, came on the Jon Stewart show to defend himself. The results were mostly less than funny. Instead, they were profound. Jon Stewart used the occasion to pointedly and brazenly show how CNBC must change. Instead of continuing with their usual childish, consumer, glamorous fodder of fake information and promotion of the stock market, as journalists, the CNBC network could turn itself into the tool for information and public accountability that the media is supposed to be. Jon Stewart was brilliant.
I truly feel that after the simplicity and power of Jon Stewart’s comments, after how Jon Stewart exposed what happened and made Cramer speechless about it, CNBC will have to entirely change its mission. They must become more objective. They must fulfill the mission of journalism to be watchdogs on the government and corporations. They would be foolish not to. A master has given them a new vision.
And, that same master has also exposed them for complying in the crime of the century. After that interview, CNBC could never claim plausible deniability in regards to the recession and the collapse of the big banks. CNBC was exposed, frame-by-frame, to the American people on television, and later with viral video. We are on to them.
Good coverage of the story at The Washington Post:
[Update and irony – late Saturday evening!: As exposed on the Rachel Maddow show, while everyone fretted over this video and the drama, subtley, and without much fanfare, the Washington Post announced they were discontinuing their Business News Section in the weekday paper. (see video below and here.) How ironic that the Washington Post was the coverage I picked for this incident…KW]
(excerpt from) washingtonpost.com
Stewart’s Time to Channel Our Anger
Satirist Accuses CNBC Of Failing Its Audience
by Howard Kurtz / March 14, 2009
Jon Stewart has amassed a passionate following over the years as a sharp-edged satirist, the man who punctures the balloons of the powerful with a caustic candor that reporters cannot muster.
As public furor over the economic meltdown rises, the Comedy Central star has turned not just his humor but also his full-throated outrage against financial journalists who he says aided and abetted the likes of Bear Stearns, AIG and Citigroup — especially those who work for the nation’s top business news channel.
Stewart morphed into a populist avenging angel this week, demanding to know why CNBC and its most manic personality, Jim Cramer [of “Mad Money with Jim Cramer”], failed to warn the public about the risky Wall Street conduct that triggered the financial crisis.
“It’s bigger than CNBC,” said Jeff Jarvis, who teaches journalism at the City University of New York. “As anger rolls across the land about the mess we’re in, it’s also hitting people who cover the financial world. . . “…
…Cramer, a former hedge-fund manager known for his bombastic style, sounded apologetic at times, saying he had made mistakes and wished he and the network had done a better job…
Business journalists generally failed to anticipate the magnitude of the Wall Street collapse, reporting elements of the growing risks but rarely trumpeting the threat on the front pages or network newscasts. And CNBC, a fixture on Wall Street, is hardly the only news organization to fall short in the run-up to the crisis.
Fortune magazine, for instance, reported in 2006 on “How Dick Fuld transformed Lehman from Wall Street also-ran to super-hot machine.” Fuld, the CEO, led Lehman Bros. into bankruptcy. Most news outlets ignored or minimized a decision by the Securities and Exchange Commission to rely on investment banks to police themselves, a move cited by the New York Times last fall as a key element in the debacle that followed…
…”People view him now as a truth-teller, not a joke-teller,” says Jon Friedman, media columnist for Marketwatch.com. “His satire goes beyond anything that Tina Fey did with Sarah Palin.” Stewart, he says, has turned CNBC into “the scapegoat for the recession.”
Steve Friedman, a former top executive at NBC and CBS, called Stewart “a 2009 version of Will Rogers — a social commentator who pokes holes in people who don’t usually get holes poked in them.”…
Video of Rachel Maddow reviewing the Cramer/Stewart incident. And, also noting at the end, that the Washington Post will be ending its weekday Business Section:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Po4GiG6pJXE]
Filed under: media, News, progressive politics, US Politics Tagged: | banks, Business News, CNBC, Comedy, economic hardship, Financial Crisis, Fortune Magazine, Government, Jim Cramer, Jon Stewart, Mad Money, regulatory, satire, Washington Post
While I enjoy watching Cramer every night, one must remember the show is primarily entertainment. The financial networks exist to promote their advertisers financial and investment products. Who would expect them to warn about the credit bubble or coming Washington national debt collapse which will destroy much of the remaining private wealth in America today or what this will do to the dollar, the stock market, bonds, gold or the real estate market?
China is now worried about their dangerous over investment in US Treasury obligations. Washington ’s long-term choice is either repudiation or monetization. For monetization to be effective, the depreciation in the dollar would have to be substantial and this in turn would dramatically raise prices of imports for American consumers which would mean a tremendous drop in foreign imports. Debt monetization would cause more disruption to exporting nations than selective repudiation of Treasury debt.
The Campaign to Cancel the Washington National Debt By 12/22/2013 Constitutional Amendment is starting now in the U.S. See: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=67594690498&ref=ts
Thanks,
Ron with 30 plus years in the investment business and banking industry.