CNBC's Jim Cramer should be verrrrrry afraid. The last time Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" went after a pair of cable television pundits, both Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala lost their jobs and their show was canceled. That first foray against cable television excesses taken by Jon Stewart (no relation to Martha) was prior to the advent of the mature Internet. With this second virtual stoning of Jim Cramer, the video is viral and has a life of its own. The footage of Jim Cramer giving sleazy counsel to a young stock-trader trainee is death to Cramer's credibility. CNBC — along with the entire NBC "family" of TV outlets — has adopted a stonewalling strategy. However, the video footage is everywhere and NBC can't prevent the e-mail deluge. Perhaps Jim Cramer can land a fulltime gig as a stooge-sidekick on Martha Stewart's cooking show. They would make a dream pair for the Decade of Greed: sleazy stock market hustlers. There is a market for cocaine, hookers, and sleazeballs. The NY Fishwrap's chief TV critic thinks that Cramer will have the last laugh. We shall see if there is a Jim Cramer on CNBC in 2010. If this is (fair & balanced) contemptuous disbelief, so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap]
High Noon On The Set: Cramer vs. Stewart
By Alessandra Stanley
Tag Cloud of the following article
It wasn’t “Brawl Street” or a thrilla in vanilla. It wasn’t a “Daily Show” friendly feud or even much of a discussion. Mostly, the much-hyped Thursday night showdown between the comedian Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer, the mercurial host of “Mad Money” on CNBC, felt like a Senate subcommittee hearing.
Mr. Stewart treated his guest like a C.E.O. subpoenaed to testify before Congress: his point was not to hear Mr. Cramer out, but to act out a cathartic ritual of indignation and castigation.
“Listen, you knew what the banks were doing, yet were touting it for months and months,” the Democratic senator from Comedy Central said. “The entire network was. For now to pretend that this was some sort of crazy, once-in-a-lifetime tsunami that nobody could have seen coming is disingenuous at best and criminal at worst.”
Congress has — belatedly and showily — gone after the leaders of banks, auto companies and insurance companies for their complicity in the financial crisis. Mr. Stewart has always had a messianic streak to his political satire, as when he ripped into Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala on “Crossfire” for “hurting America.” He is now focusing on business news cable networks like CNBC, which not only failed to foresee the credit crisis, but also, in his view, sided with the bankers and helped inflate the bubble.
And while it’s never much fun to watch a comedian lose his sense of humor, in an economic crisis it’s even sadder to see supposed financial clairvoyants acting like clowns.
Mr. Stewart made his feelings clear. “I understand you want to make finance entertaining,” he told Mr. Cramer. “But it’s not a game,” he said, using an additional adjective that was bleeped out. “When I watch that, I can’t tell you how angry that makes me.”
Part of Mr. Stewart’s frustration may stem from the fact that while he clearly won the debate, Mr. Cramer and CNBC stood to profit from the encounter. In today’s television news market, that cable network and its stars are like the financiers they cover: media short-sellers trading shamelessly on publicity, good or bad, so long as it drives up ratings. There isn’t enough regulation on Wall Street, and there’s hardly any accountability on cable news: it’s a 24-hour star system in which opinions — and showmanship — matter more than facts.
Like a Congressional witness who knows better than to contradict senators in public, Mr. Cramer spent much of the interview (and it went long) ruefully conceding that he could have done better, and that he sure will try from now on, but really his heart was in the right place. “There are shenanigans, and we should call them out, I should do a better job at that,” Mr. Cramer said, adding that he was lobbying Washington (“I have people in Congress,” is how he put it ) to tighten regulation and enforcement. “I’m trying,” he said.
Mr. Cramer tried to be friendly and looked a little taken aback by Mr. Stewart’s prosecutorial tone — he might have been expecting a more jocular give-and-take. But mostly, he sat back and milked every last drop from a tempest-in-a-cable-box that NBC and its sister channels have been fanning ever since the “Daily Show” host began hammering CNBC for its complacent Wall Street coverage, singling out embarrassing market calls by Mr. Cramer in particular.
“The Daily Show” has shown clip after clip from last year that shows Mr. Cramer assuring his “Mad Money” viewers that Bear Stearns was not in trouble — shortly before that heavily leveraged investment firm imploded. He has apologized to his viewers several times since then. (“I have always thought they were honest,” he said on Thursday. “That was my mistake.”)
On Tuesday the “Today” show invited Mr. Cramer to reply to Mr. Stewart’s charges — and watch the “Daily Show” clips of his show all over again. He also appeared on “Morning Joe,” on MSNBC, and on Thursday morning, he made pie crusts with Martha Stewart, whose syndicated show is distributed by NBC, and jokingly thwacked the table with her rolling pin at the mention of Mr. Stewart’s name. Mr. Stewart used that clip in his introduction, saying with a smirk, “Mr. Cramer, don’t you destroy enough dough on your own show?”
Once he had Mr. Cramer at his desk, Mr. Stewart showed fresh and even more embarrassing clips from a 2006 interview with the Web site Mr. Cramer founded, TheStreet.com, in which he too candidly explained how hedge fund market manipulation really works.
And Mr. Stewart pointedly questioned the hyped-up theatricality and dubious claims of CNBC shows like “Mad Money” and “Fast Money.” When Mr. Cramer explained, “There is a market for it, and you give it to them,” Mr. Stewart stared at him in disbelief, exclaiming, “There’s a market for cocaine and hookers!”
Mr. Stewart kept getting the last word, but Mr. Cramer may yet have the last laugh. ♥
[Alessandra Stanley was named chief television critic for The New York Times in 2003. Before that, she was a foreign correspondent for the newspaper, serving as Rome bureau chief (1998-2001) and co-chief of the Moscow bureau (1994-1998). She has also covered national politics and metropolitan news for the Times. Stanley has served as a writer and correspondent for Time, working in Paris, Los Angeles, New York, and finally, Washington, D.C., covering The White House and presidential campaigns. While at Time, she reported from Central America, Afghanistan, Asia and Africa. She has also written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, GQ, and Vogue. Alessandra Stanley studied literature at Harvard University.]
Copyright © 2009 The New York Times Company
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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
