I’m still going through all the news I missed last week, and I’ve finally gotten caught up on the recent brouhaha that Jon Stewart caused by calling out CNBC, particularly Mad Money host Jim Cramer, for falling down on the job during the lead-up to the stock market’s current hemorrhaging.
Stewart lit into Cramer for being a “snake oil salesman” passing himself off as something more legitimate. If CNBC had done its job, Stewart railed, maybe people would have been better prepared for this crisis, maybe some of its sharpest edges could have been blunted.
Even if that is overstating the case and this was all unavoidable, Stewart maintains that CNBC should still be ashamed of its financial coverage during the weeks and months before the bottom dropped out of the market. He even characterizes their position as “complicit” with the more general irresponsibility that has dragged our economy to the brink of Depression. Tough words.
I don’t watch Stewart’s The Daily Show as much as many of my friends and colleagues do. Some of them swear by it. During the recent presidential election, I tried to check out a couple of episodes, but it wasn’t quite the right ratio of comedy to news for my tastes. So, I ended up sticking with the cable news channels for most of my coverage.
Plus, I’m an HBO-holic, and Bill Maher’s version of comedy-laced news analysis pulls fewer punches anyway, mostly because HBO doesn’t have to deal with “the censors” the way Comedy Central does, which means that Maher’s critiques feel raw and direct. You won’t always agree with him (especially when he pivots from electoral-political to cultural politics), but he and his guests can be brutally blunt. And that makes for great TV.
But going back through the highlights of Stewart’s recent rants, I was moved by how well he used his bully-pulpit to get a conversation going about the mass media’s role in our meltdown. Some people have even likened it to the media’s “soft” coverage of America’s build up to the Iraq War. Whether that analogy holds or not, the only chance we have to push back against any potentially negative excesses of our ubiquitous mass media is (of course and ironically) only going to come from that selfsame media apparatus.
Watching Stewart go after Cramer, you get a sense that he is also offering up a kind of self-critique. Maybe that’s reading too much into it, but I would definitely watch Stewart a lot more regularly if I thought that his form of reflexive humor consistently possessed that kind of self-critical bent.
