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Jon Stewart interviewed Jim Cramer last night on the Daily Show. I want to thank Stewart for showing what real journalism actually is. Jim Cramer looked bad. I wouldn't be surprised if he's job hunting soon.
Andrew Sullivan has more (including video)...
I watched the Daily Show with growing shock last night. Did you expect that? I expected a jolly and ultimately congenial discussion, after some banter. What Cramer walked into was an ambush of anger. He crumbled from the beginning. From then on, with the almost cruel broadcasting of his earlier glorifying of financial high-jinks, you almost had to look away. This was, in my view, a real cultural moment. It was a storming of the Bastille. It was, as Fallows notes, journalism.
Stewart - that little comic with the Droopy voice for Lieberman - is actually becoming an accidental activist. Why he matters, is why South Park matters. He, like Matt and Trey, do not leave aside their own profession from scrutiny: they have the actual balls to take it on. There is a cloying familiarity among many cable show hosts and television personalities. We all have to get along, even though some of us may believe that others of us are very much part of the problem, rather than the solution. And what Stewart has done is rip off that little band-aid of faux solidarity for a modicum of ethical and moral accountability.
Now, I know Jim Cramer a little. The reason he crumbled last night, I think, is because deep down, he knows Stewart's right. He isn't that television clown all the way down. And deeper down, he knows it's not all a game - not now they've run off with grandpa's retirement money.
It's not enough any more, guys, to make fantastic errors and then to carry on authoritatively as if nothing just happened. You will be called on it. In some ways, the blogosphere is to MSM punditry what Stewart is to Cramer: an insistent and vulgar demand for some responsibility, some moral and ethical accountabilty for previous decisions and pronouncements.
1 comment:
Stewart must have lost a lot of money in this bull market. He is really taking the Kramer thing very personally. Kramer should have just said I make hundreds of stock picks and sometimes they're wrong-like every other broker.
This is what happens when corporate boards and, to a much lesser extent, shareholders ignore their responsibilities and buy into this BS that super execs are so valuable that there compensation must be assured even in the event of corporate failure. Its the same theory that college professors use but on a much larger scale.
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