CNBC obliges as handy target for Stewart’s satire
Published 10:05 pm Friday, March 13, 2009
WASHINGTON — Jon Stewart has amassed a passionate following over the years as a sharp-edged satirist, the man who punctures the balloons of the powerful with a caustic candor that reporters cannot muster.
As public furor over the economic meltdown rises, the Comedy Central star has turned not just his humor but his full-throated outrage against financial journalists who he says aided and abetted the likes of Bear Stearns, AIG and Citigroup — especially those who work for the nation’s top business news channel.
Stewart morphed into a populist avenging angel this week, demanding to know why CNBC and its most manic personality, Jim Cramer, failed to warn the public about the risky Wall Street conduct that triggered the financial crisis.
“It’s bigger than CNBC,” said Jeff Jarvis, who teaches journalism at the City University of New York. “As anger rolls across the land about the mess we’re in, it’s also hitting people who cover the financial world … CNBC is the easiest target if you’re doing comedy.”
The face-off
In his much-ballyhooed “Daily Show” face-off with Cramer on Thursday, Stewart accused the network of peddling “snake oil.”
“Listen, you knew what the banks were doing,” Stewart said. “And yet were touting it for months and months — the entire network was. So now to pretend that this was some crazy, once-in-a-lifetime tsunami that no one could have seen coming was disingenuous at best and criminal at worst.”
Cramer, a former hedge-fund manager known for his bombastic style, sounded apologetic at times, saying he had made mistakes and wished he and the network had done a better job. “I had a lot of CEOs lie to me on the show. It’s very painful,” the “Mad Money” host said. Video of the interview immediately went viral and was prominently played across the Web, giving it exposure that exceeds Stewart’s television audience, which reached 2.3 million this week.
The showdown with Cramer came eight days after Stewart blistered CNBC for offering bland assurances about the health of investment banks and for soft interviews such as one last year with R. Allen Stanford, who was asked: “Is it fun being a billionaire?” Stanford was charged last month in an alleged $8 billion fraud.
‘Proud of our record’
Cramer has told colleagues he felt blind-sided by Stewart’s hostile approach. But many CNBC staffers were furious with Cramer on Friday for failing to defend the network’s reporting or to criticize Stewart’s video clips as selectively edited or out of context. CNBC declined all interview requests, saying in a statement: “CNBC produces more than 150 hours of live television a week that includes more than 850 interviews in the service of exposing all sides of every critical financial and economic issue. We are proud of our record.”
Stewart’s video montage last week showed CNBC staffers and guests appearing to rule out the notion that Lehman, AIG and Merrill Lynch could face bankruptcy, as happened soon afterward. Cramer was seen repeatedly touting Bear Stearns as a good buy in the weeks before its collapse.
Media critic
Stewart has long used quick-cut editing — a technique that has been copied by some news programs — and liberals cheered when the target was the Bush administration and the war he dubbed “Mess O’Potamia.” But Stewart has periodically erupted about what he views as the media’s shortcomings.
In 2004, he went on CNN’s “Crossfire” to condemn its left-right debating formula as “partisan hackery”; the network later canceled the program. At last year’s Democratic convention, Stewart called cable news a “brutish, slow-witted beast” whose practitioners are too cozy with the officials they cover.
“People view him now as a truth-teller, not a joke-teller,” says Jon Friedman, media columnist for Marketwatch.com. “His satire goes beyond anything that Tina Fey did with Sarah Palin.” Stewart, he says, has turned CNBC into “the scapegoat for the recession.”
Steve Friedman, a former top executive at NBC and CBS, called Stewart “a 2009 version of Will Rogers — a social commentator who pokes holes in people who don’t usually get holes poked in them.” He said CNBC had not been damaged by the ridicule: “They do some very good work, they do some very shoddy work. But if you’re looking at how your stocks are doing, that’s the place to go.”
With such stars as Maria Bartiromo, Erin Burnett and David Faber, CNBC reaches a small but affluent audience who appreciate both the real-time financial data and the banter on “Squawk Box” and other shows. Stewart accused CNBC of catering to its well-heeled viewers, asking: “Which side are they on?”
Online reaction tended to split along partisan lines. National Review’s Mark Hemingway wrote that “Cramer’s appearance on the show … was nothing short of a predictable sandbagging, with Stewart hopped up on faux indignation.” But James Moore said on the Huffington Post that Stewart “has brought back context to journalism by making people in our drive-by culture responsible for their words and even actions.”
