In the Jon Stewart-Jim Cramer Bout, It's Stewart By a Knockout

Friday March 13, 2009

Jon Stewart

It was Jim Cramer vs. Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. The winner? Stewart by a knockout.

In a show-long interview Thursday night, Stewart delivered a one-two punch to the host of Mad Money and CNBC for failing to forecast the economic meltdown.

"I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it's not a f---ing game," Stewart told Cramer.

In a sober and virtually joke-free exchange, Stewart charged that instead of being a "powerful tool of illumination" on the side of the average investor, CNBC was essentially a PR mouthpiece for the companies it covered, and failed to report on the Wall Street shenanigans that helped produce the economic implosion.

“No one's asking them to be a regulatory agency,” Stewart said of CNBC, “but whose side are they on?”

Referring to the Wall Street insiders who used shaky loans to reap quick gains, Stewart told Cramer, “These guys were on a Sherman’s march through their companies, financed by our 401ks, and all the incentives were for short-term profit. They burned the f---ing house down with our money and walked away rich as hell. And you guys knew that that was going on.”

A surprisingly subdued Cramer tried to defend himself by claiming that CEOs and Wall Streeters had regularly lied to him about what they were doing.

But Stewart quickly shot back: "I'm under the assumption, and maybe this is purely ridiculous, that you don't just take their word at face value, and that you actually go around and try to figure this stuff out."

Most damagingly, Stewart aired a grainy video from a 2006 interview Cramer gave to TheStreet.com. In it, Cramer appeared to admit he had manipulated the market when he ran his hedge fund and said behaving illegally was okay because the Securities and Exchange Commission didn't understand what was going on.

Cramer disagreed with Stewart here and there, but mostly admitted that he and his network should have done better. "Should we have been constantly pointing out the mistakes that were made? Absolutely. I truly wish we had done more," he said.

The larger point? The failure of Cramer and others at CNBC shows what happens when entertainment trumps journalism. It shows how talking-head cable hosts, whether on Fox News, MSNBC or CNBC, spend far too much time spewing opinions and far too little doing real digging. It shows the danger of journalists cozying up to their sources, to the point where they can no longer be tough and objective.

In short, it shows a network that in many ways has lost sight of its supposed mission - business reporting.