He’s a commentator meaning he just comments on current events, but those not reveal anything new? He just analyzes the stories that are already out there so he isn’t a reporter?
If that is what you are saying that is a pretty irrelevant distinction. He holds himself up as someone who can offer sound advice on the markets and he clearly does not do that. Call him a report, a commentator, or whatever you want, that still doesn’t mean he isn’t profiting off pretending to be something he is not.
Devil’s Advocate; What exactly Jon Stewart and TDS are labeled as is kind of sketchy as well. Was Stewart selling snake oil last night?
That’s not a bad question, actually, and a wise one to ask.
Much of Jon’s argument boiled down to “You made a lot of bad calls here (clip), when you’re clearly not ignorant or stupid (clip). What the hell happened?” If that was a bullshit line of reasoning, Cramer should absolutely have called him on it. Instead we got what was basically groveling and saying, “You’re right, you’re absolutely right.” Cramer doesn’t seem like the kind of person to roll over for someone he was dismissing as just a comedian a few days ago, unless that comedian had him dead to rights.
Of course, if you want to go into wingnut territory, one could speculate that this entire dustup, beginning with TDS’s attack on CNBC, was completely fabricated and calculated. But to what point and purpose, I don’t really know.
But Stewart’s point is NOT that Cramer made some “bad calls”–it’s that Cramer et al never did the legwork to discover if the CEOs were making hay with Joe Street’s 401k/pension. He said last night that he wanted Cramer to ask hard questions and not accept CEOs words at face value. THAT is his beef.
It was never ABOUT Cramer–Stewart indicted the entire network when he mocked Santelli for being a douche. Cramer was mentioned, but Cramer took umbrage and took his anger to MSNBC etc. That’s how he ended up on TDS. That’s why he’s answering to Stewart (that and his shilling, like most of the rest of CNBC’s shows).
Stewart wants some balanced coverage of financial markets. He wants hard questions posed to those who play the money game. He wants basic education provided for those who don’t know a blue chip from a blue corn chip. He wants these so called financial “journalists” to do their third estate job.
Hell, he wants all of media to do their job. So do I. We are not better off if journalism is a for profit business.
So long as we’ve veered off into wingnut territory…
Cramer’s company TheStreet.com had some interesting news this morning.
Yes, but as Stewart said, his product actually says “snake oil” on it.
Then again, maybe there just shouldn’t be an expectation that you should be taking investment advice from a guy throwing plastic bulls and bears around the studio.
Personally, I think a lot of this goes back to my basic theory that the ordinary Joe shouldn’t be investing in the stock market anyway. Since 1996, thanks to Etrade and online brokerages, people have been buying and selling stocks purely based on hype. Most people have no idea how to do a valuation on a stock to determine if it is a good buy. I actually know how to and I think it’s bullshit because ultimately there are too many unknown future variables anyway.
Now I’ve read some blogger at US News and World Reports saying that a particular quote from the interview (below) shows that Stewart doesn’t believe in the very concept of the stock market and thus the backbone of the American economy. Out of context/misinterpreted?
Or just flat-ass wrong. Jon’s right. This country was built on building stuff. The stock market is supposed to aid that, not replace it.
You’re taking that out of context. He was talking (roughly) about the fact that you can`t really make money by taking a bunch of bad debt, slicing it and calling it different “tranches”, and then insuring it a few hundred times. It’s still just bad debt, but you’ve created enough complicated instruments that when it all collapses you can take the world’s credit markets with it.
I just finished watching the uncut, unedited version. Jon was amazing, and pissed. Cramer looked like a kid being scolded by his daddy after Jon had his crew roll “216”. it was quite painful to watch. Cramer pretty much sat there and took it…he whined a little, but he took it, so I guess you have to give him that.
Like others have asked, I wonder if this will cause a change at CNBC.
I kind of feel badly for Cramer because he’s stepped right into CNBC goat uniform, and that undeserved taint may be with him for a while.
You’re suppose to be able to believe independently audited information. There was at least one investment company that questioned Madoff’s financial claims (can’t remember the name) because they found out the auditing company consisted of a handful of people. That was a red flag unto itself. Even then, large accounting firms such as Arthur Andersen did not catch Enron.
If an auditor goes into the Bailey Savings and Loan and sees $100,000 in cash match up to the ledgers it doesn’t mean the money’s going to be there the next day or that the books are legitimate. You would think that the “system” should work by default as companies increase in size because it requires more people to be involved on the deception from both the investment and auditing company. The problem with this compartmentalization. Large firms will compartmentalize their activities so that one group will not be aware of another’s activities. I had to deal with the auditing company that ended up in the news for Enron like activity but the people I dealt with were quite thorough in their audit. Same company, different group of people.
In this age of information, it should be easier for government agencies to spot fraudulent activity on a billion dollar level of operation. There will always be crooks in every business but computer transactions don’t lie. If a company show’s $5 billion in transactions and Wall Street shows $20 million then bells should go off in a regulatory agency somewhere just as seismographs would warn of a pending tsunami.
I don’t think that he’s wrong on this or accusing the stock market of not working. The cue is the “10 to 20 percent on your money.”
The stock market does have a good return, about 8% a year over the long run. The long run here means a century. There have been several decades in which the annual return was 0% or less. The last ten years, for one example.
But the bright boys thought they had found a way to guarantee returns and eliminate risk, even for above average returns year after year. That’s how Bernie Madoff was able to get away with 10% annual returns for so long without investigation. The financial world really thought that the market was now capable of such returns.
But it’s not. You cannot, as Stewart said, promise people guaranteed 10% returns, much less the 20% or 30% returns some were touting, in the real world. You can hit that mark for a couple of years in a bubble but then gravity will return.
It’s a very real issue. What Stewart didn’t say and what Cramer should have is that if everybody around you is promising 10, 20, 30% returns - and actually getting them - saying that five years in the future you’ll all regret it is a losing strategy. Nobody will listen. Even if they believe you, they will also believe that they’ll be smart enough to get out before the end.
That’s why the current crisis hit and the lack of investigative reporting is a red herring.
That’s also why what Stewart said is mostly true but mostly irrelevant. Maybe he thought that Cramer would battle him and some deeper truths would result in the cross-talk. I can’t understand why Cramer didn’t take a golden opportunity to explain badly needed information. He didn’t and now people think that the lack of reporting was the problem. It wasn’t. It may have been one minor aspect, a symptom of the overall problem, but it wasn’t the real problem.
Well, he did repeatedly say, “Hey, it’s your show, do what you want.” I get the impression he just wanted to get through Stewart’s lecture without taking too much damage, and trying to argue too much would just make Stewart jump him even harder. All the talk show hosts have a bad tendency to dominate their guests, and I’m not sure Stewart would have let him bring anything really substantial up, presuming he thought of it in the first place.
He comments on the news better than other commentators. He doesn’t do news at all.
For anyone who’s interested, this is the video they were playing clips from:
He does news sometimes. I wouldn’t get my news from a comedy program but sometimes he’s better than the mainstream media. As an example, one of my favorite clips - The Daily Show with Trevor Noah - TV Series | Comedy Central US
Jon (hilariously) comments on the news about an Inspector General report concluding that Monica Goodling engaged in illegal political hiring at the DoJ. That’s commenting on the news. At about 4:30, he starts mocking a clip of Wolf Blitzer where Blitzer claims the report “suggests” she “may have” been engaged in political hiring, when in fact the report “said” she “did”. That’s commenting on the news… media.
Watching the Daily Show that night would have left you more informed about the report than watching CNN, since for some bizarre reason Blitzer mischaracterized the level of certainty in the report. It’s more an indictment of the actual media than praise for the Daily Show. The point is, they sometimes do report news, albeit inadvertently.
You made some good points, particularly here, and if the head of the SEC, chief financial reporters for the Times, S&P analysts and so forth ever go on The Daily Show I hope they get the same kind of treatment Cramer did. At the end of the day Stewart is a member of the media and a believer in the functions of the press, naive or outmoded as that might be, so that’s why he focused there.
In regard to **Exapno’s **comments cited by **Marley23 **above - it’s chalk and cheese.
Should respected media outlets have “been on top of” the financial situation? Yes. Time and time again over history, there are run-ups - and while some folks ask “okay is there a bad loophole being exploited? When is this going to hit the fan?” most are trying to frame a story of “wow, we are so modern and different - the typical cycle of ups and downs has been broken for good!” Yeah, right.
Cramer is not a reporter, as Exapno and others have said - he’s an entertainer, nothing more.
the problem is that CNBC itself is nothing more than entertainment - period. It tunes it’s programming to increase viewership regardless of content. So while it at times dons the cloak of financial respectibility - and does in fact access some knowledgeable reporters and guests - the sole purpose of doing so is increase viewership. And viewers want to be comforted AND entertained, so a combo of a bit of data, a bit of expertise and a whole lotta hype and silliness seems to work.
THAT is what Stewart is railing about with CNBC: they portray themselves as a real, value-added service of financial reporting and analysis - but only to build their brand and increase viewership. If they suddenly found out that abandoning all pretense of respectibility would increase their viewership, what do you think CNBC would do? Stewart made it clear what his point of view is.
When a rising tide is lifting all boats, the self-serving nature of programming like CNBC’s seems okay - it isn’t, but most folks are doing fine, so we can tolerate the circus of stock hype. Right now, the tide is out - and when folks are floundering, trying to keep doing the same routine like Cramer does just stands out as profoundly silly. And harmful.
My $.02
Trying to paraphrase Terry Pratchett from memory:
Well said. I agree. But the problem is deeper than that in that the perception of most viewers is that CNBC is a media outlet for financial news, not entertainment. Indeed, they bill themselves as that, as you said. Just like Fox News is the farthest thing from Fair and Balanced. News has become a commodity in this country and some people want it to be a profitable one, hence the sensationalistic type of “journalism” we get nowadays. Content or context doesn’t matter. IMO, people thought the staid and stuffy Wall St types were not prone to that mindset. We’ve found out differently.