Stewart-CNBC feud

Stewart touched on something I have been thinking about. I'm not a financial expert by any stretch of the imagination, and I depend upon good coverage by organizations that purport to aggressively cover financial news. Something struck me during the interview when he talked about the CNBC analysts being in bed with the banks (not an exact quote, but close enough).

Last week on "Real Time with Bill Maher" I listened to business news anchor Erin Burnett and came away decidedly unimpressed. No offense to her as a person -- we're all looking to carve out the best career path for ourselves -- but she struck me as someone who's having a great time being near the top of her industry but woefully disconnected from the average person watching and wanting good information.

I found an online interview with her, on some men's magazine site, and she said buying her expensive gifts was a way to get her attention. During a discussion on "Real Time" about the current economic climate, she talked about the good things that can come out of a depression. The example she cited from the Great Depression: The chocolate chip cookie was born.

Maybe I'm being unfair to her, but she struck me as someone having fun covering the markets and the world of finance without much empathy for people who could never buy her expensive gifts and are hoping for something more to come out of this crisis than a new cookie. That's the way she came across, anyway. She seemed detached from the realities most people are facing. But hey, she was voted the hottest financial news anchor in an online poll by the Wall Street blog Dealbreaker.com.

I think Stewart is on to something that's not true just about financial media: Many get too close to those they cover, and the quest for painful truth -- and the ability to report it -- is therefore compromised. The part about it all being a game isn't too off the mark either, in my opinon. He may have been a little unfair directing it all at Cramer, but someone needs to be saying these things, and the fact that it's falling upon a comedy channel to do so is yet another indictment of the mainstream media.

 

I saw Johnny Dangerously on three continents in three languages. You didn't need to know what Peter Boyle was saying in Africaans to know it was funny.

 

Way too much of big-time media anymore is in bed -- sometimes in a literal sense -- with the people they cover. And in some respects, that can fly when times are good, because all you have to really do is write process stories. So-and-so said this, well the other side says that. There is simply no way in hell a network like NBC, one with some many fingers in so many pies, could ever really give honest analysis about the giant shell game that is Wall Street. Real reporting is fucking hard, and fewer and fewer people are interested in doing it because they'd rather be stars. It's all so incestuous that sometimes it takes someone completely on the outside like Jon Stewart to shake things up, and even in doing it, he's kind of hammering the easiest target possible. At least Cramer was willing to take his licks on the set of TDS.

Untangling the entire thing has really become kind of like untangling the Matrix. It makes our head hurt just to think about it, so we just don't.

 

I couldn't get that video to work earlier.

 

Charlie Brown's link works for me.

 

TVNewser reporting that NBC gave the word to all of its producers on NBC and MSNBC not to mention the Cramer interview. Nice goin' - let Olbermann rain fire on BOR and Fox, CNN and other people in the media, but go turtle when one of your own personalities gets ridiculed. And anyone who thinks this wouldn't be topic one on MSNBC if Cramer and CNBC weren't involved is kidding themselves.

 

Dobbs spent all of 3 minutes on it, much of which was self-serving and self-aggrandizing.
Just curious: This seems like a pretty big deal to me. A cable comedy show KOs an entire news network, and there is very little mention of it the following day. Are we making too much out of this?

 

Of course not. They're just intentionally going out of their way to ignore it.

 

If you check the media blogs, the Cramer-Stewart thing was Topic A by a wide margin. Compare the "firestorm" about Michael Steele on D.L. Hughley's show to how this is being handled on cable today. Hell, Obama Girl, the Palin kid and The Bachelor dumping his fiancee got more play.

 

This would generally by right in the wheelhouse for Hardball. No mention of it on the segment I just watched but I missed much of it. So is the blackout of this topic on NBC/MSNBC in full effect?

 

You're right, and I should've been specific to TV, because HuffPost did a great deal with it.

And then, of course, there's O'Reilly, who came out and said that Stewart went after Cramer as a backlash by anti-Obama sentiment spewed by Cramer.

 

ALL cable news is bullshit. It is infotainment designed to make money for its corporate directors, and you bet even the liberals like Olbermann, who I don't much care for, and Maddow whom I do, will toe the line. There is no news on all-news TV, except, sometimes, on BBC World and Bloomberg.
NBC News' first priority is advancing the profits of General Electric. It has no second priority.