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You'd think people on TV would have a better idea of how it works.
Yet clearly they don't, to judge from the insane TV parade staged by CNBC Mad Money host Jim Cramer. In his search for justice, attention or both, Cramer inserted himself into a comedy battle between Jon Stewart and CNBC's Rick Santelli, turning what had been a one-day story into week-long, front-page news — and diminishing his reputation and that of his network in the process. Let's just say if Cramer were a stock, the best advice today would be "sell."
For those few who may have missed it, the feud began when Stewart's Comedy Central series, The Daily Show, answered Santelli's rant against the bad judgment shown by homeowners with a video reel mocking CNBC's own bad judgment in covering the economic meltdown. Cramer complained that the reel took some of his comments out of context, which led Stewart to do an even funnier, nastier clip reel aimed solely at him.
At this point, a wise media investor would have simply walked with his losses. As Stewart himself said Tuesday: "I said my piece, somehow he thought my piece was about him, he said his piece, and so then I made it about him. And we move on."
But no. Instead Cramer went on a media tour, starting at the Today show, moving on to MSNBC's Morning Joe and then The Martha Stewart Show and ending, in flames, on The Daily Show itself on Thursday. It's hard to say which was the worst or oddest performance: trading bluster with Joe's Joe Scarborough, seeking comfort from Martha, or the almost embarrassingly contrite groveling he did on The Daily Show by admitting he made mistakes and pledging to do better.
Well, despite what you may have heard from the lazily cynical, all publicity is not good publicity — particularly not when respect is your stock in trade. No one expects Cramer to be an expert in media relations, but when you appear this publicly clueless in one area, it makes people wonder how far that cluelessness extends.
When Cramer dismissed Jon Stewart as a "comedian" running "a variety show" on Today, you could practically hear the death knell ringing. Stewart may be a comic, but he's an incredibly smart and increasingly influential one — a media darling whose comments get amplified by print, TV and the Internet.
Yet in the end, as Cramer himself said, mistakes were made. His main line of defense was that others made mistakes as well. Though that's no doubt true, it's hardly a line you want to fight over, particularly when, considering the different audiences the networks serve, chances are most CNBC viewers would never have heard Stewart's devastating take-down of the network had Cramer not kept the story growing and spreading.
By picking a fight he could not win, Cramer gave Stewart time and ammunition to launch a broader, more damaging attack on CNBC itself. The thrust, as he laid it out Thursday, is that the network gave up its role as watchdog and began to treat the market as a game and CEOs as star quarterbacks, forgetting what was at stake should the market fail. At a time when the market and the media are held in equally low regard, that's an argument that can easily take hold.
And yet that could also be the one upside. If this affair makes the media reconsider their coverage and the rest of us consider how easily distracted we are by, say, stories about feuds between TV personalities, Cramer may have unintentionally done us all a service.
It was a comically absurd drumroll for what, on the surface, was merely a squabble between TV presenters. In one corner, Jim Cramer, the closest thing to a celebrity in American financial journalism. In the opposite corner, Jon Stewart, the satirist and host of the fake news programme The Daily Show on Comedy Central. But unlike many a big fight, this one more than surpassed the hype. Nothing less than financial reporting itself was put on trial – and found severely wanting.
Cramer, who dispenses raucous advice to investors on the Mad Money show on the business channel CNBC, was eviscerated by a serious and genuinely angry Stewart. Meek and contrite, Cramer was pummelled like a rope-a-dope over his profession's failure to be an effective watchdog of Wall Street. There was no cornerman to throw in the towel.
It caught the attention of the White House, prompted a frenzy among bloggers and soul-searching in the media, which failed to spot the biggest story of a lifetime or warn the public until it was too late. Indeed, CNBC and other supposedly objective journalists stood accused of complicity with big business, belonging to a cosy coterie that egged on company chief executives and fanned the flames of excess.
The interview has also burnished Stewart's reputation as the last best hope in the media when it comes to, in the earnest phrase of news network CNN, "keeping them honest". It was this comedian who, like a court jester, told uncomfortable truths about the Iraq war when the mainstream media was playing cheerleader. Now, as the financial apocalypse unfolds, it is Stewart again who is scything through the herd mentality and culture of deference.
Jon Stewart has set new standards for both comedy and journalism on television
The interview became an online sensation that reached the White House. Press secretary Robert Gibbs said he has spoken to President Obama about watching the Stewart-Cramer showdown. "Despite, even as Mr Stewart said, that it may have been uncomfortable to conduct and uncomfortable to watch - I thought somebody asked a lot of tough questions," the spokesman said.
Insiders at CNBC have acknowledged the episode was a public relations disaster. A day after his public thrashing, Cramer declared that, "although I was clearly outside of my safety zone, I have the utmost respect for this
person and the work that they do, no matter how uncomfortable it was".
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart earned its second highest total viewer count of the year on Thursday with 2.3 million viewers (the largest viewer audience was on Inauguration Day with 2.6 million). Why the big audience? Stewart's guest was CNBC host Jim Cramer. The interview is also available on TheDailyshow.com site, which is reporting its highest traffic numbers in 2009.
Originally posted by RRconservative
Remember when Jon Stewart used to be funny? Me neither.
Anyone who questions Mr. Obama is a target. Other President had Military Special Forces to go after enemies. Obama has the media.
Originally posted by Fremd
Originally posted by RRconservative
Remember when Jon Stewart used to be funny? Me neither.
Anyone who questions Mr. Obama is a target. Other President had Military Special Forces to go after enemies. Obama has the media.
your name tells me all i really need to know about you.
Why can't conservatives see the humor? Why can't conservatives really see the big picture here?
Seriously.
As i said before, it's not about politics, it's about the middle class finally speaking up and against the big corporations that have milked us dry.
You either see it that way or you don't.
Chances are -- if you don't -- you've been one of the milkers (though that's just a very possible assumption)
Some critics are seizing on comedian Jon Stewart's attacks of CNBC to launch an online petition drive urging the network to be tougher on Wall Street leaders.
The liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America and some economists are behind the effort, launched Monday. They're asking CNBC to hire economic voices with a track record of being right about the current crisis and do more to hold business leaders accountable.
CNBC has been in the firing line since Stewart pointed out network personalities who, in retrospect, offered bad financial advice.
CNBC had no immediate comment. CNBC spokesman Brian Steel said last week that the network was proud of its record of offering diverse opinions on the economy.
A group of leading progressives and economists have penned an open letter to CNBC demanding that the network publicly change its mission to focus more on Wall Street accountability.
Building off of the momentum from last week, in which CNBC personality Jim Cramer was subjected to an embarrassing lecture by the Daily Show's Jon Stewart, the group is launching, alongside its letter, a website:
"Americans need CNBC to do strong, watchdog journalism -- asking tough questions to Wall Street, debunking lies, and reporting the truth," the letter reads. "Instead, CNBC has done PR for Wall Street. You've been so obsessed with getting 'access' to failed CEOs that you willfully passed on misinformation to the public for years, helping to get us into the economic crisis we face today. You screwed up badly. Don't apologize -- fix it!"
The letter is signed by, among others, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research; Doug Henwood, author of Wall Street and After the New Economy; Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute; Linda Jue director of the G.W. Williams Center for Independent Journalism; Robert Borosage of Campaign for America's Future, Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism at Columbia University; Adam Green, Co-founder of Progressive Change Campaign Committee; Rick Perlstein, author of NixonLand; and Chris Hayes of the Nation.
"[CNBC is] bringing on people who are cheerleaders for Wall Street," said Baker. "It wasn't good economic reporting, it was trying to get people to buy stock... [host] Larry Kudlow says we are for free enterprise and free markets, and it is fine that there are shows like that. But there is very little effort to give the other side. And obviously it was a big deal. We had a disaster that should have been foreseeable and for some of us it was foreseeable."
The goal of the www.FixCNBC.com effort -- officials say the group will follow up the letter with phone calls and a delivery event at the network headquarters -- is to persuade the CNBC brass to prioritize investigative financial journalism over Wall Street "access." The network, in interviews defending its coverage, has noted that they were not alone in missing or underestimating the current economic troubles, that they have aired comprehensive segments on the housing bubble and subprime mortgage crisis, and that they were, essentially, lied to by business leaders who were touting the market's solvency.
Originally posted by siryancelot
God are you all silly. Hooting and hollering about what a great job Jon Stewart did. Lets look at this a little deeper and ask ourselve some ?s.
Why did he get into this spat with Cramer in the first place?
- simple: because Cramer is hammering Obama for how he is "fixing"
the economy.
Soooo, you get Frank Rich and Stewart, people so
obviously beholden to the Democratic Party(and more specifically
their liberal base), attacking Cramer's past misdeeds to MARGINALIZE
him.
It doesn't matter that what Cramer is saying about Obama's
plan to "save" the economy is an outright joke, because Stewart has
exposed Cramer(detect the sarcasm?)
Stewart is as much a partisan hack as Hannity.
They all play to their constituents and attack people to marginalize them.
Sure Cramer's a snake oil salesman, but now that Stewart finally did some tough journalism, you all will be too busy whoopin' it up to see how he shills for Obama and co.
Silly stupid partisan hacks.
Originally posted by scottsquared
reply to post by Swatman
"Liberals" live on the coast. Humm... Another vacuous statement from the bankrupt "conservative right". Hasn't your vision of reality been re-skewed by recent events? If not, why? What will it take before rigid adherence to dogma gets questioned objectively?
Originally posted by TylerKing
Originally posted by scottsquared
reply to post by Swatman
"Liberals" live on the coast. Humm... Another vacuous statement from the bankrupt "conservative right". Hasn't your vision of reality been re-skewed by recent events? If not, why? What will it take before rigid adherence to dogma gets questioned objectively?
Sounds like he's inviting you to attend all the sweet KKK rallies the fly-over states are so famous for. You might need to get some teeth pulled first to fit in.
So what's different about someone doing the reverse here? Jon Stewart is on Comedy Central - the same network that brings you Larry the Cable Guy (incidentally Larry is on the front page of the website) and SouthPark, the show that made "anal probes" famous. Yeah, that's pretty serious.
Originally posted by Fremd
reply to post by sos37
So what's different about someone doing the reverse here? Jon Stewart is on Comedy Central - the same network that brings you Larry the Cable Guy (incidentally Larry is on the front page of the website) and SouthPark, the show that made "anal probes" famous. Yeah, that's pretty serious.
Oh, i see. So we're going to play the "which network is more serious" card?
Okay.
Fox news spreads lies and propagates racist ideology under the guise of "no-spin zones" and "fair and balanced coverage" (never has been, never will be)
oh it also belongs to the same network as
- The Simpson
- Family Guy
- American Dad
- The Critic
All one really has to do to see the validity (or extreme lack there-of) of Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, etc.. is visit mediamatters.com
So the over-all point here is
Just because you CALL yourself a credible and newsworthy source doesnt make it true. Only people like yourself that believe it will find places like Fox News a worthwhile gatherer of non-propaganda.
Most people in this country look to Jon Stewart and his show as a filter of the all the BS.
they call it like they see it, and they throw in some dirty fart jokes along the way to keep people interested.
If calling it how it is makes you a less credible person, then, yes, SoS37, you and people like you have a point.
Unfortunately for you -t he only people you're going to find to agree with you are the same types of folks you're going to find at Fox News.
Sean Hannity - Ties to white supremacy that he won't condemn and tries to hide?
jon stewart is a die hard liberal and has even said it. the only thing he is filtering out of the news is the correct story and inserts his liberal BS into it.
Originally posted by Swatmanjon stewart is a die hard liberal and has even said it. the only thing he is filtering out of the news is the correct story and inserts his liberal BS into it.
liberals are the ones living in the gated communities with the guards and town watch protecting them from themselves