Responding to Jon Stewart's massacre of Jim Cramer last night on The Daily Show, Andrew Sullivan writes:
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.
Only that's not what Fallows said. What Fallows said was that "I thought Stewart, without excessive showboating, did the journalistic sensibility proud." The distinction between "journalism" and "the journalistic sensibility" is significant. What Jon Stewart does on the Daily Show, exposing the doubletalk of our media lapdogs and national leaders, is an invaluable public service. But it is not "journalism". It is media criticism. It happens to be what non-reported blogs do best, and it's why so many reporters hate them. But what Jon Stewart did last night didn't involve reporting, it didn't involve learning anything about CNBC that couldn't be found out simply watching the network for a day or two. It's the kind of thing that you expect newspaper ombudsmans and media critics like Howard Kurtz to do instead of merely fluffing the reporters and media figures they're supposed to be reporting on. The most important part of the interview for me was this:
When you talk about the regulators, why not the financial news network? CNBC could be an incredibly powerful tool of illumination for people who believe there are two markets, one that has been sold to us as long term, put your money in 401(k)s, put your money in pensions, and just leave it there, don't worry about it, it's all doing fine. Then there's this other market, this real market, that's occuring in the back room, where giant piles of money are going in and out, it's transactional, it's fast. But it's dangerous, it's ethically dubious, and it hurts that long term market. So what it feels like to us, and I'm speaking as a layman, it feels like we are capitalizing your adventure, by our pension...And that it is a game that you know, that you know is going on, and that you go on television as a financial network and pretend isn't happening.As Glenn Greenwald writes today, this is the relationship that much of the press has with their sources. Rather than serving the public, reporters end up as mere pawns of the powerful. Just as CNBC became the public relations wing of the financial services industry, last year the cable news networks became the public relations wing of the Pentagon. Rather than looking critically in the run up to war with Iraq, the press repaid their access to Bush administration officials by uncritically reporting their claims.
What Jon Stewart has done by exposing CNBC's inversion of its fundamental responsibilities towards the public is significant, and sadly unique. But make no mistake, critics like Stewart cannot replace what networks like CNBC are meant to do. Hopefully, they can help shame them into accepting their responsibilities. But the state of journalism in America would not be so desperate if all we needed were more critics like Jon Stewart. What we need is for reporters do to our job better.
-- A. Serwer
