Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Who watched Jon Stewart v. Jim Cramer Uncensored?

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I don’t have time for more than a drive-by post, but I’m surprised there’s been no BMG conversation on the meme du jour, the extended and uncut Daily Show throwdown with CNBC’s manic money mullah, Jim Cramer:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.c… (caution: clips contain f-bombs)

The Boston Herald gave the interview a positive endorsement:

It was an astounding half-hour, featuring more trenchant talk of the financial crisis and the responsibility of the networks than you’d find on any news channel, all the more surprising in that it aired on Comedy Central. It demonstrated once again why so many rely on Stewart for their news. Cramer deserves credit simply for showing up.

I’m curious as to what BMG has to say about this.  

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Comments

  1. Stewart has a razor sharp mind.  Not only was the interview funny, but it was instructive at the same time because Stewart admirably showed how useless MNBC has been as a “business” station.  I stopped watching Cramer long ago; he is a clown.  I also lost several thousand investing in Wachovia because of his enthusiastic endorsement of same in the fall of 2008.

  2. I think Jon Stewart is amazing.  This feels to me like the Beal moment when Stewart took on Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala a couple years ago–only bigger.  Stewart showed tremendous aplomb last night, I thought, and successfully balanced asking the tough questions without appearing the bully.  Cramer tried hard to charm his way out of some of it, and Stewart was clearly having none of it–to his credit.  

    <

    p>Cramer, I thought, handled himself well.  He tried, understandably enough, to defend himself but never got defensive.  I think it took a lot of courage to sit there and take Stewart’s withering commentary and questioning as we well as he did.  There’s a part of me that’s hopeful this experience has been epiphanic for Cramer, who should be one of the good guys, and that he can recover and do something meaningful with his brains and his experience.  

    • People who pick stocks are sometimes wrong.  People who pick horses are sometimes wrong.  Both may have done research up the yin-yang.  Both may have “inside information.”

      <

      p>The difference is that you don’t see horseracing pickers advertising “In Ralphie We Trust”.  At least, not much.  

      <

      p>And if CNBC didn’t make a pretense of being “objective”, of being “business news” rather than admitting they are wearing knee-pads for the financial industry, it wouldn’t be so bad…or funny when Stewart skewers them.  The WORST was the clip of the CNBC sycophant asking the Ponzi Perpetrator if it was “good to be a billionaire”.

      <

      p>As Iris points out, the audience for CNBC may be predominantly the very industry CNBC sucks up to, which would mean that the worst deception, self-deception, is the core of CNBC.  

  3. Jim Cramer is supposed to be giving some sort of response to his appearance on Stewart’s show last night on CNBC at 6 PM.  

  4. this comment from Josh Marshall appeared this afternoon on TPM that provides a bit of insight into the niche that CNBC fits into vis a vis NBC News:

    <

    p>

    As the economy has moved front and center, probably all of us are reading and watching a lot more financial news. It now runs regularly on our bank of TVs here at TPM HQ, whereas we used to be more focused on the regular cable news nets and the CSPANs. But there are somewhat unique advantages CNBC operates under. To the best of my knowledge CNBC is not part of the news division at NBC. It’s part of the division that runs cable broadcasting. MSNBC is also one of their cable channels; but they report up through the news division. As you can see here, CNBC President Mark Hoffman reports to NBC Universal’s Jeff Zucker, not Steve Capus, the president of NBC News. So they’re in with Bravo and the rest. And they’re under no pressure from the News division to provide editorial objectivity or balance or any editorial standards at all (*). And I mean, half of it is Jim Cramer and Larry Kudlow. So that’s pretty obvious.

    The other point, which is both obvious and worth stating, is that CNBC’s business model is not reporting news for average folks or even average investors. While the channel makes good money, it ratings are actually pretty low. The whole model is based on who the audience is — brokers, financial professionals and folks with big money on Wall Street. So of course it’s heavily biased toward that viewership.

    Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Big dollar investors deserve their own cable channel too. But as more of the ‘news’ moves into CNBC’s ‘space’, it’s worth considering how deeply skewed their reporting is.

    (ed.note: * — Obviously, this does not mean that they don’t apply their own editorial standards. Just that they’re on their own in that regard and not on any kind of leash from the news division which might provide some push back to their right-wing tilt or singular focus on Wall Street as the determiner of what’s good or not for the economy.)

    <

    p>Stay tuned–or not.  

    • While watching a fellow hop around and scream may be entertainment to a lot of people, it doesn’t beat research.  If you trust your purse to others, don’t blame them if your money is lost.  You made the unsound choice.  Would you trust an investment proposal you heard on the Jerry Springer Show?  Maybe not.  

      <

      p>A few years ago my son, then an economics major, told me why he believed the economy was headed for disaster.  We discussed this for some time and I concluded he was right.  I started pulling out of the market and into fixed income devices.  I was lucky, I didn’t believe the businessmen, politicians and government officials.  I didn’t put my trust in them then and don’t now.  I certainly don’t trust entertainers.  

      <

      p>My son (I like to think is very smart) is not privy to any secret information and is probably no smarter than thousands of other people.  People with vast resources and knowledge.  Why did he know?  Probably no more than the businessmen, politicians and government officials that not only let this economic disaster happen, but also now exacerbate the problem now with give-aways of credit to incompetent institutions.  (So you think that easy credit will solve the problem created by easy credit?  What is said about one’s sanity when one does the same actions over and over again and expects different results?)

      <

      p>A license to steal.  Little wonder the the perps’ show their best sneer at Congress during committee meetings.  The government is not on the side of the citizens.  With the leaders talking about using the economic disaster as an opportunity I expect this situation to last at least ten years.  (I didn’t predict that, my son did.)

      <

      p>“You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.
      Rahm Emanuel

      • I dumped  all of my realestate holdings in 2005. The handwriting was on the wall. I had zero training as an economist or in financial matters—but an idiot could see that this was unsustainable.  The fact that people were getting mortgages, simply on a signature was the handwriting on the wall that disaster was on the horizon. But the genius’s in Congress and Wall St would hear nothing of the cautions to put the brakes on. And of course—it was all done in the name of good intention. Now the quintessential excuse  to justify failure..

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