Smackdown? Nah, human sacrifice
Like virtually everyone else who kept a scorecard during the much-hyped Jim Cramer vs. Jon Stewart showdown, I called it a knockout for Stewart. Problem is, the fight was rigged. Stewart had the home-court advantage, the audience on his side, and — thanks to his status as the ringleader of a comedy show — no obligation to be as objective or fair as he wants others to be.
It’s good to be Jon Stewart. Helpless saps serve themselves up to him to be pummeled, And when the bullying is over (and what else can his treatment of Cramer be called?), he can expect to be congratulated for his “remarkable public service.”
I won’t argue that Cramer, who was a respected reporter earlier in his career, performed magnificently as a truth-teller. And, yes, there’s all that videotape of Cramer saying stupid things (although if you have a shred of fairness you have to admit that anyone in the public eye can be made to look stupid by somebody who has the time to sit for hours in front of an editing machine, watching tape). The point is that Stewart essentially made the case that rigorous reporting by Cramer and CNBC could have headed off the financial crisis, or at least leavened it. And that’s nuts.
To even hint that Cramer somehow has culpability tells me that Stewart doesn’t have any real grasp of the enormity of what has happened to the global economy over the past few years. To make Cramer answerable for the financial crisis is like holding a lone Polish border guard responsible for not protecting the country from Germany’s invasion in 1939: “Why didn’t you stop them? You were right there.”
Remember, all this started only because another CNBC talking head, Rick Santelli, cancelled a “Daily Show” appearance at the last minute, prompting Stewart to run a six-minute CNBC blooper reel in retaliation. After Cramer then pushed back, Stewart — channeling his inner Mike Wallace — decided a public humiliation was in order. You can see the result here, here and here.
If Stewart wants to pose tough questions to the people responsible for the crisis, Cramer isn’t even in the top five of them. Aw, hell, he’s probably not even in the top 100. But no matter. Stewart felt that he’d been dissed, and Cramer had to pay the price. To celebrate that kind of score-settling as an act of public service only proves that we haven’t evolved much from the time when blood-letting was considered sport.
March 16th, 2009 at 10:26 am
They’re both narcissistic douche bags.
March 16th, 2009 at 11:14 am
I hear you Gearino.
But how could a naive, and freedom-loving world expect a lone conscript, manning a lonely border outpost, to stem the scourge of a Nazi blitzkreig? Man, I haven’t used that line since my ninth grade world history report. It still wears well.
Suppose Jim Cramer had been warning us for the past three years that we were on the verge of an epochal financial crisis? Do you think it would have mattered? Wouldn’t he have been discredited as a loon, or a malcontent with some kind of twisted personal agenda? Nobody likes whistle-blowers. Especially when their tune is as ugly as Cramer’s woulda been.
“Hear me now, or believe me later, my children. Decades of ham-handed social engineering, spend-thrift government, Wall Street shell-games, greedy CEO’s, mortgage-backed securities and impotent regulators are just about finished preparing the giant shit sandwhich from which we all must take a bite.
Look at poor old Al Gore. He was a serviceable VP and a paragon of virture compared to his boss - speaking of which - has anybody seen Clinton’s nose lately? What the hell is up with that? Maybe the Pinnoccio stuff is true. It just takes a decade or so before it comes to fruition.
So anyway, Gore even invented the internet in his spare time.
How do we treat him now? Some of us admire his visionary admonitions about our abuse of the environment. Others treat him like a pompous alarmist with a carbon footprint as wide as his ample ass. I guess that makes him a hypocrite too.
Reasonalbe people not only disagree, we also tend to deny, deny, deny until it’s too damned late to prevent, prevent, prevent.
Or as a great man, Barney Fife, once said, “Nip it. Nip it in the bud!”
And I very much appreciate the link to the gladiator picture, Dan. I love homoerotica in the morning. It smells like…???
March 16th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
John Stewart has never claimed to be anything more than a comedic talk show host, one who gleefully takes any snippet of a person’s actual words and makes fun of them. Jim Cramer, on the other hand, touted himself as a professional economic analyst. He admitted in a recent interview that he manipulated facts and lied about the strength of the companies he told his audience to trust on his show. Anyone can say that one man couldn’t possibly change the outcome of the crisis we are currently suffering, but that doesn’t excuse that person from lying, misrepresenting facts, and manipulating those that trusted his judgement.
March 16th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
The question that keeps coming to mind is why CNBC, of all networks? There are so many others, and they’ve all essentially parroted the same financial “news and analysis” for the past several years. So why pick out CNBC, and ONLY CNBC. Surely John Stewart has a list of other just as culpable financial analysts to go after. Yet it seems that’s not the case.
I would suggest that CNBC has committed the Cardinal Sin of simply getting too far out front of the other networks in condemning President Obama’s financial plans (cue Rick Santelli’s meltdown on the floor of the stock exchange several weeks ago - {sorry I don’t have a link} – directed specifically at Obama).
This serves as yet one more in a long line of examples as to how the media keeps their own in line. Diversity in all things but thought. It well reminds me of the past posts here that discuss the oppression of thought, and the consequences to dissenters, at the N&O.
March 16th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
GD,
It may be true that Cramer was merely a bit player in the meltdown of our economy, but one of the reasons the for the early KO is because Cramer mostly agreed with everything the man said. Stewart said multiple times that the issue had little or nothing to do with Cramer. His overall point was that the whole network merely played cheerleader for more risky behavior by the uber wealthy.
Frankly, I am a little surprised a former business editor doesn’t agree even to a small extent. If they call themselves journalists, do they not have some responsibility to verify the accuracy of what they are reporting? Seems to me that Cramer was admitting they’ve invested little in doing so.
March 16th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
NTI: Two points in response. (1) You’re addressing the journalistic aspects of this. I focused on Stewart’s petulance and vindictiveness. It’s not as if The Daily Show had long pondered CNBC’s performance, and assigned a team of experts to analyze its reporting. As I said, all this unfolded only because Stewart felt dissed. Anything he had to say about CNBC’s reporting was ginned up after the fact to put a noble face on his smackdown of Cramer. (2) I watch CNBC almost every evening, and like anyone else who views it regularly I understand that its main focus is that day’s market performance. It does a very good job of explaining real-time news … like ESPN, its primary function is to provide scores. Remember, it’s TV. Who depends on TV for any kind of in-depth analysis or investigative reporting? That’s what newspapers and magazines are for. Last year, New York magazine ran a very smart, detailed piece about the wider threat posed by the subprime meltdown, the kind of thing you’d never get from TV. The author, by the way, was Jim Cramer.
March 16th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Fair enough. However, I still don’t think he was blaming Cramer and he actually ended by saying emphatically that the whole thing is unfair to Cramer (can’t recall if that was part of the edited version but you can see the unedited version on the web). Actually, the unedited version doesn’t make Cramer look as bad as the aired version. And, while I don’t watch the daily show every night (trouble staying up that late), I do watch frequently enough to know that Stewart has some pent up frustration over the whole meltdown/bailout fiasco. Sure the road to Cramer was only recently paved, but Cramer should have known better than to pick a fight he had little chance of winning.