Yeah, that one was one of the biggest bitchslappings I’ve seen in a long time. Too bad our alleged “reporters” and “journalists” don’t have the balls to do stuff like that on a regular basis.
I think that’s something a lot of people out there don’t understand. It’s not that Stewart panders to the youth demographic that makes him so influential, it’s that he’s one of the few people getting airtime that tries to hold people to some sort of accountability standard.
I wonder what kind of changes we’ll see at CNBC over the next six months or so.
Bullshit. Cramer isn’t deserving? I’m not too clear on where those clips came from, but that was Cramer telling people how he ran his hedge fund and how people SHOULD run them. It’s easy, just spread false rumors, generate nonexistent capital.
Those clips demonstrated that he was very much part of the problem.
I thought Cramer missed an opportunity there. The short-term market and the long-term market are the same. Go to Vegas and watch a roulette table. Now, maybe every now and then, the house takes a big loss on a spin. But a little advantage, left to play out over a long time, built the entire strip.
(To which the reply is that Vegas has inspectors to make sure that the wheels spin true. And even then, only a fool plays with borrowed money.)
I said completely deserving, Cramer’s a bastard to be sure, he deserves blame for conspiring to gamble peoples life savings on long shots for short term profits for others, but it’s not like Cramer is the head of a Ponzi scheme or anything.
CNBC itself needs to be held accountable for what really seems like collusion.
But he was running a hedge fund, doing what sounds to a layman like me a complete ‘pump and dump’ scheme, AND he was passing those instructions to some newbie-looking-guy. AND he was encouraging the newbie that this is how you SHOULD run a fund.
So he wasn’t running a Ponzi scheme. Madoff may have set a record, but the damage he did is a drop in the bucket to the ‘I Can’t Believe This Shit Is Legal So Lets Ride It As Long And Hard As We Can’ crowd that Cramer was part of - and about which he was apparently educating the next generation.
Stewart did not hit the fact that a few years ago ,the stock pundits on TV were caught giving tips that were to buy the sponsors stocks or ones they had a personal interest in. You note now, that they have a disclaimer while they are on stating their vested interest or lack of. CNBC is a day long advertisement with stock prices thrown in. It also has Erin Burnett.
I agree wtih **Diogenes **- Jon should have given him more time to answer. A lot of the interview was not questions, but lecture-ish statements that Stewart had to know were going to get applause from the audience.
CNBC deserves a lot of criticism, but I think Cramer’s defense that he was being lied to is partly good. If he *knows * he’s being lied to, he should hold the liar accountable. But most liars lie when they know you can’t prove it. In other words, a reporter on CNBC believing a CEO’s lies is no more accountable than a White House journalist believing and reporting lies from the president s/he has no way of verifying.
I guess what TDS does well is predict some of the lies they’ll hear, and they have a great archivist who preemptively calls them (“roll 210!”).
There used to be people who investigated things. Now, as we saw on CNBC, they just lap up whatever they’re given by the CEOs. Why do they do this? So that they can maintain access to these CEOs. Why do they want access to these CEOs? So that they can ask them questions that will be anwered by…lies from these CEOs.
They abrogated their responsibility completely and totally for the sake of “access”. The only person who benefits from that access are the ones who choose to give them access in exchange for slaving and unquestioning repetition of whatever they feel like feeding the market today.
Is there actually a CEO of a company who is going to go on the national news media and say, “This shit is held together with dental floss and prayers. Everyone who has so much as a dollar in this company should get it out as soon as possible before it’s worth less than a penny.”? Of course not.
So, they sold their souls (or at least reason for existing as a “news” organization) for access to people whose best interests would only be served by lying.
What, exactly, was the point of that “access” again?
I thought he had plenty of time. Stewart cut him off a couple times, but Cramer had his say. Did you watch the aired interview or the unedited interview? Apparently that makes a notable difference in perception.
Plus, it wasn’t really so much a typical interview where Cramer had something to plug (except perhaps the remains of his dignity). Stewart was angry with him and CNBC, and Cramer had to know it would be a beating when he accepted the invitation to appear.
You know, this is oddly enough why Stewart is so free to call bullshit bullshit. So CNBC might be pissed at him, or a particular politician might get so angry they’ll refuse to ever appear on TDS; so what? He’s still got actors and writers who want to come on his show to shoot the shit and plug their works. His livelihood isn’t dependent on being able to talk to these people.
Which is, I think part of the problem with journalism today. Let’s face it, the CEOs need the financial reporting sector as much as the financial reporting sector needs them. If journalists would occasionally act for the good of their profession, the “I might lose access” argument falls apart.
A scenario:
Reporter A says something bad about GE. GE responds by freezing out Reporter A. Next time GE wants to have a big conference call to tout their latest financials, nobody shows - or even better, they show, but don’t report the call favorably. If that were a real threat, do you think GE’s gonna risk it or will they accept that, from time to time, reporters are going to say bad things about them and move on?
I haven’t had a chance to see the interview yet, but it seems obvious to me that the biggest problem is that the financial shows are trying to drive second-by-second profits, riding every stock up and short-selling down, as if making money were the point. Supporting business is the point, or so I thought: you invest in a business because you want to see that business succeed, and that takes time — plunking down for a gob of stocks and dumping them 48 hours later isn’t an investment in the company, it’s pure greed. CNBC helps drive that perception of stock-market-as-money-faucet, but they’re hardly alone.
Since Comedy Central has never presented itself as a source of serious journalism, he would have absolutely nothing to defend. The only thing he has to defend is whether or not his show is funny. And it is. Stewart wins.
The defense of Cramer and attacks on Stewart here are pathetic - actually, they’re not so much pathetic as remarkably ignorant. Stewart absolutely crucified Cramer - I just watched the interview and Cramer’s performance was, IMHO, even worse than is being reported in this thread - and the fact that it had to happen on The Daily Show, a comedy program, IS EXACTLY THE FUCKING POINT. It is, in fact, the meta-point The Daily Show has been making for years and years; that the news media is utterly, hopelessly failing in its social responsibility to hold the powerbrokers accountable through investigative journalism, and that a comedy program without even a pretension to seriousness can reveal the lies and hypocrisy of the rich, powerful and politically connected almost at will, and better than can CNBC or Fox or CBS can, with no more effort than is required to surf the Web for a few minutes and paste together some videos with a few jokes.
Robot Arm makes the point that the news media are primarily responsible to their advertisers. Well, to an extent, that’s true; it’s oversimplified, but there’s truth to it. Of course, if you only care about the money, I personally am technically not responsible to anyone but my employer and could tell my wife and family and all my friends to go fuck themselves and never associate with them again and be a shitty father to my kid by just providing her with the minimum amount of financial support the law allows. Legally that’s exactly as lawful as my current policy of doing ym job AND being a good husband, father, friend et al. But are those positions ethically equivalent?
And anyway, here’s the PRACTICAL FACT: if you don’t have a media willing to dig and show the ugly side of the politicians, businesspeople and the like - and in a responsible way, not Gary Condit bullshit - you’re going to end up with a worse democracy and a worse country. And we’re seeing it happen right now.
MSNBC owes Cramer for falling on the sword for them. Cramer got hit by a stray bullet from Stewart’s initial volley against MSNBC and returned fire.
The only real problem with the interview is that Stewart did move the goalposts between the personal responsibility of Cramer and the collective responsibility of MSNBC. His point as a whole was still made and Cramer was the unfortunate pundit who was the specific target.
The Daly Show is not a comedy show. It is a news program that presents the news in a comedy format. They cover the news and hit many stories the news stations avoid. They show the hypocrisy of regular news and present deal with serious subjects.
Comedy nowadays has a serious side. They comedians don’t just tell jokes anymore. They are topical.,political and observational. Lewis Black, George Carlin and almost all the others poke fun at politics and politicians.
Many college students go to Comedy Channel to get stories that other so called news stations are too gutless to cover. The fact that they do it with humor does not diminish the seriousness of the stories.
I’m curious to see what impact this will have on CNBC’s coverage in general, and Jim Cramer’s show specifically. Will they attempt to be more critical and less fawning in their interviews? (That interview with Allen Stanford was particularly egregious, although they will argue that no one saw his fraud coming.)