I’m sure that the interspheres, blogoverseses and twitternets have been exploding since Jim Cramer’s Daily Show interview aired 10 hours or so ago. I haven’t looked at any of the responses, because I wanted to put up one of my own.
First off, the interview. Really, if you have any thoughts or concerns about the economic crisis this country is in, you ought to watch this. It’s three parts, and below is the first.
First things first – Jon Stewart is absolutely right on a great many things here, not the least of which is that it is unfortunate that Cramer is the one taking the brunt of this assault. It – Stewart’s contention that CNBC essentially failed to inform its viewers of an impending economic collapse, thus exacerbating the problem – is not Jim Cramer’s fault. He shares some blame, because he is a commentator on the network – arguably the highest in profile – but the failure rests with everyone at the network. And not just that network. Bloomberg News, Fox Business Channel, the business and economic departments of every major news outlet – they all can take a chunk of the blame. But Cramer is the one who spoke out and engaged Stewart. On the Today show this past Tuesday, March 10th, in response to Meredith Vieira’s question about Stewart’s criticism of CNBC, Cramer said, “A comedian’s attacking me! Wow! He runs a variety show!”
Belittlement like that doesn’t work to discredit Stewart in this case. It actually elevates Stewart to a much more credible level, because the unspoken response from Stewart really ought to be (and was): “Yeah, I’m a comedian. So why the hell am I the only one calling you out on this?” The exchange had already gotten quite a bit of media coverage, and not all of it was sympathetic to CNBC or Cramer himself. Ridiculing the guy calling your spade a spade is never a good idea when that guy is a master of ridicule himself. And now, Cramer had motivated Jon Stewart. And somehow, they convinced Cramer to come on the show.
Seemingly unbeknownst to Cramer, Stewart had found an interview Cramer did with TheStreet.com in 2006. In it, Cramer talks pretty openly about things he did when he managed a hedge fund that bent ethical and legal limits, including stock short selling, where you bet on certain stocks to fail, and how he would manipulate the market in order to manufacture the results he wanted. All this is alarmingly similar to the practices that got us into the current banking mess, and it all begs a simple question, which Stewart pointedly and repeatedly asks… if Jim Cramer knew full well this stuff happens, and that it bends the law to the point of breaking it, why wouldn’t he tell people? More than that, because Cramer makes the point that he does try to expose short selling (which is true), why does he tell people on Mad Money to invest in stocks that are prime targets for this sort of shorting?
Again, this is a lot against Cramer, and that’s not fair. He became the face of this because he was the one who took offense. The issue is that being offended by an accusation is a really hard position to defend if the accuser is correct. Cramer comes up with all kinds of egg on his face for that one. But the larger issue that Stewart keeps trying to get to, with Cramer as Exhibit A, is the culpability of CNBC and other financial news agencies in the financial crisis. The most pressing question, and one that all of these new outlets really need to ask themselves, is who is the intended audience of these shows? It’s a more difficult question than it was five or ten years ago. When CNBC took on its current financial news format in 1989, or even when Bloomberg TV launched in 1994, I would guess that the viewing audience consisted mostly of economic professionals. Now, I don’t think that’s the case. I have friends who got stock portfolios as graduation gifts. Playing the market is becoming a much more common thing, aided in part by mainstream integration – most high school economics classes play a stock market game. Cramer openly said that the format of his show was designed to appeal to a younger audience. The question is if the content of these networks changed from catering to the professionally connected set to helping the broader audience. Stewart criticizes the ads that CNBC runs for Mad Money, calling into question the tagline “In Cramer We Trust.”
And he’s right. If the financial experts (I’d throw that in sarcastic quotes, but they are certainly more qualified for that title than I am) couldn’t catch the warning signs and predict the economic collapse, should we trust them? Even worse if those guys know full well that the positive market situation prior to the collapse wasn’t going to last, but went on TV and told people to play along with it anyway. If they are telling people to invest money in the types of funds and options that allow investment bankers to make this high risk, high reward bets – and a lot of them are former Wall Street-ers, themselves, so they KNOW this is what is going to happen – doesn’t that make them as guilty as the people making the bad gambles?
Cramer doesn’t really have a good answer for anything in the interview. I’d chalk part of it up to being caught off-guard and unprepared – did he really think he was going to go on the show, after everything Stewart said about him and his network, and laugh it all off with Stewart? Doesn’t he ever run into Tucker Carlson at a NBC Nation party and remember what happened on Crossfire in 2004? – but the real problem is that there really are no answers Cramer can give Stewart, especially after clips from the TheStreet.com interview are aired, and Cramer knows it. The guy looks like he’s on the verge of tears about 6 minutes into a 20 minute interview. He keeps trying to bring it back to being goofy and funny and entertaining, something both he and Stewart usually bank on, but Stewart’s not having it. He really takes Cramer to task, and time will tell how and for how long that will hang over Cramer.
What fascinates me about this stuff is the position Stewart is in that allows him to do stuff like this, be taken seriously, and then go back to telling jokes the next day. After his appearance on Crossfire, Stewart opened the next episode of The Daily Show with, “So… how was your weekend?” He made a couple allusions to what had happened, but then went back to jabs at the Bush Administration. A couple months later, CNN announced that Carlson’s contract wouldn’t be renewed, and six months after that, the show was dead. Stewart’s appearance is pretty commonly accepted as the final nail in the Crossfire coffin. Will that happen to Mad Money? I doubt it… Cramer has become the celebrity face for CNBC, and has been very open with criticism toward both the former and current administrations. He’s a very capable front man, and where the problems at CNBC stretch far beyond him, any attempt to replace him would probably be met by the same scrutiny, if not more. But Cramer hurt himself significantly by underestimating Jon Stewart.
Stewart has worked The Daily Show into a very unique position. He can easily argue both sides of the coin – yes, his is a comedy show. Yes, he is a comedian. His famed response to attacks on his journalistic integrity on Crossfire was that the lead-in to The Daily Show was “puppets making prank phone calls.” It provides him a very easy out in the face of criticism, and an accurate one. On the other hand, The Daily Show is, for all intents and purposes, a legitimate news program. They get press passes to all major political events, including both major party conventions this past year. They have become a required appearance for anyone of political influence who feels a need to garner support among the 18-35 crop. And an uneducated look at the Nielsen ratings shows The Daily Show outpacing all of the network nightly newscasts, though that’s debatable – on March 4th, the only day I could find ratings for Stewart’s show, he pulled in 2.11 million viewers. The same week, NBC Nightly News averaged 1.86 million viewers a night (9.3 million for the week split over 5 days), ABC averaged 1.69 million, and CBS averaged 1.29 million. Coincidentally, Mad Money on March 4th pulled in 294,000 viewers.
So Stewart has the audience. But that sphere of influence only extends so far, and he knows it. There’s no telling how many of his viewers are watching the show for news and how many are watching for entertainment only. But based on the Cramer interview, and my own personal opinion… if anyone has the mandate to speak for the best interests and thoughts of this generation (Y, Millennium, whatever it is), it’s Jon Stewart. And in situations like this, people better shut the hell up and listen. What makes Stewart’s position work is that he’ll fully admit that he’s not an expert, that he’s not really a journalist… he’s a guy. A lucky guy who has been granted access to people and ideas that most guys don’t get. He’s like Joe the Plumber for the 18-35 set, except he doesn’t suck. He will be the first to ridicule you for the criticism you’re taking from a comedian. But just because he’s a self-deprecating comedian doesn’t mean he’s wrong. He really seems to be calling it like he sees it.
And if that common-man view dictates that on some subject he needs to turn the comedy off, you know something hit a nerve. Jim Cramer could sit down and have a thousand tearful interviews with every news anchor from a “legitimate” news outlet on Earth, and I doubt that anything would have the impact of Jon Stewart ‘s interview last night. If you’re a financial commentator, or a banker, or economic insider of any kind, and Jon Stewart brings you on Comedy Central, looks you in the eye without a hint of a smile, sarcastic or otherwise, and feels the need to tell you that the economy of the United States “isn’t a fucking game,” you know something has gone horribly awry. And it’s upsetting and alarming that Stewart seems to be the only guy saying it. Everyone else reporting the news should be ashamed and embarrassed that the best friend from the fine Adam Sandler masterpiece Big Daddy beat them to the punch on this one.
But at the same time, more power to Stewart. He’s really embraced how his role has evolved, and I suspect that he had a strong hand in deliberately crafting that role after taking over the show from Craig Kilborn in 1999. Indecision 2000 was the real launching point for the show as it currently exists, and his coverage of every major political story since then has only strengthened the show and his legitimate claim as the voice and messenger of this generation.
Friday, March 13, 2009
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