CNBC Under Fire: Sticking Up for the Big Guy?

[one...two...tree 2,762]

By James Poniewozik

On the March 9 edition of CNBC's Squawk Box, Becky Quick was interviewing Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett when the Oracle of Omaha expressed support for the Obama Administration's mortgage bailout. "Becky," co-host Joe Kernen broke in, "tell Warren you're mad that you've done all the right things and all these other people are going to get bailed out." Buffett replied, "There's nothing wrong with being mad, Joe. It's just that there are times when you're mad about something that you've got to overcome the emotion."

That is why Buffett is not in the cable-news business. For as the economy nose-dives, CNBC — the TV darling of the turn-of-the-century stock boom — is proudly letting the emotion overcome it.

In February, reporter Rick Santelli launched into an on-air rant against helping "losers" with their mortgages, a viral-video hit that made Santelli the poor man's Rush Limbaugh — or is that the rich man's? Kudlow Report host Larry Kudlow opined that President Obama "is waging war against capital." Stock picker and professional gasket blower Jim Cramer trained his bulging eyes on Washington, accusing Obama of "the greatest wealth destruction I've ever seen by a President."

To watch CNBC today is to enter an alternative universe, where élites are populists, Wall Street is Main Street and bank executives are the oppressed. It's not surprising that a voice of opposition to the new Administration would emerge. But who would have thought it would be on a channel not owned by Rupert Murdoch?

In a way, CNBC has no choice but to become political, since the economy itself has. And CNBC faces the same dilemma as the rest of the media: If psychology drives the economy, when does reporting bad news become creating bad news? How do you walk the line between desperate cheerleading and reckless ranting?

CNBC's answer has been to dive off both sides of the line at once. On the silver-lining-hunt side, its straight-news interviewers now spend uncomfortable days (even when not talking about parent company GE's woes) pleading with gloom-saying guests to declare a bottom to the market or find stock picks. "Do you have just one?" Steve Liesman asked an investment adviser, almost plaintively.

On the ranting side, it has increasingly pinned the state of the economy on the two-month-old Administration, with Cramer offering recommendations to "Obama-proof your portfolio," a phrase that now comes up regularly on CNBC's air. (In response, The Daily Show aired a clip reel of the network's bad calls during the bubble, suggesting viewers might prefer to CNBC-proof their portfolios.)

CNBC's reaction is colored by its stressed-out day trader's focus on the short term. When ordinary people think about the economy, they think about jobs, college, retirement. Sure, the stock market affects them in the long run — but so do job security and the threat of getting wiped out by health-care bills. When CNBC considers the economy, it means Wall Street's numbers that day, that hour, that minute. CNBC may pay lip service to the long term, but it has the time horizon of a fruit fly.

This means that CNBC looks at everything, particularly politics, in terms of how it will affect "the Market." The commentators on CNBC murmur about the Market as if it were the Island on Lost: a mystic force that must be placated, lest it become angry and punish us. "The Market doesn't like ..." "What the Market wants to see is ..."

And, oooh, is the Market cranky at Obama! The Market doesn't like raising taxes on the wealthy (even if Buffett does). The Market doesn't like government health-care reform or cap-and-trade environmental policy or big budgets or limiting bonuses at bailed-out banks. And don't get the Market started on bank nationalization. That ticks the Market off!

It is as if — between MSNBC and CNBC — NBC News were trying to own the liberal and conservative voices of cable news. But CNBC's is a much different strain of conservatism from Sarah Palin's or Bill O'Reilly's: it is urban, club-room and Mammon-oriented rather than small-town, VFW-hall and God-oriented. It's an ideology not exclusively beholden to party (Cramer voted for Obama), but it's an ideology nonetheless.

It's also an ideology that you'd think, given the track record of trusted financial institutions, people would be a little wary of crowing in public nowadays. But ratings are up. As the rest of the country stews over the mismanagement of insurers and banks, there's still a small, demographically appealing niche for talking heads fulminating against the "demonization" of business and being in favor of laissez-faire government.

Hey, somebody's gotta stick up for the little guy. Even, or especially, when he's the big guy.

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1884328,00.html

[pedroh 21]

don't forget to watch Cramer getting OWNED tonight by Jon Stewart... woot

[one...two...tree 2,762]

don't forget to watch Cramer getting OWNED tonight by Jon Stewart... woot

I don't have Comedy Central on my DishNetwork package. I need to see about getting it.

[I'm Gone 60]

Buffet supported Obama in the election, so I don't think he an unbiased evaluator of Obama's economic policies.

[pedroh 21]

ohh he got owned so baad lol.. can't wait to see what that freak Scarborough has to say tomorrow

[britbird 4]

don't forget to watch Cramer getting OWNED tonight by Jon Stewart... woot

I don't have Comedy Central on my DishNetwork package. I need to see about getting it.

You can watch all the episodes online at www.dailyshow.com or www.hulu.com .... enjoy!

[almaty 19]

stewart ####### slapped him down..and made him look like a chopf##k

[one...two...tree 2,762]

don't forget to watch Cramer getting OWNED tonight by Jon Stewart... woot

I don't have Comedy Central on my DishNetwork package. I need to see about getting it.

You can watch all the episodes online at www.dailyshow.com or www.hulu.com .... enjoy!

Thank you. I just watched it! John Stewart at his best!

http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/...pisodeId=220533

[pedroh 21]

that was effin journalism... awesome

[EstebanTrabajos 7]

watching it right now,

life sentence, tortoise Pete OMG! funny!

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Who Won the Jon Stewart- Jim Cramer Smackdown?

Posted by James Poniewozik

It was a beatdown, to be sure. (After airing a promo for Cramer's Mad Money which could have itself been a Daily Show parody: "I understand you want to make finance entertaining, but it's not a f__ing game.) But in the long run, it was most fascinating as a discussion about how business journalism in particular and journalism in general are done in America. About CNBC generally, Stewart kept returning to the question not only of why the network didn't report on financial disaster coming, but who CNBC is for at all: "Who are you responsible to? The people in the 401ks and the pensions and the general public, or the Wall Street traders?" Stewart asked (adding that most traders are "bright guys" who are "f__ed in all this too").

The answer seems pretty plain if you watch the channel: it's for the traders. Period. It's not just that CNBC doesn't serve average, buy-and-hold investors. It's that its very existence—at least, as it is presently aimed and structured—goes against their interests. CNBC is by and large about market timing and trading the market in the short term—exactly the sort of thing that average investors should not be doing. (It's not that CNBC should have sounded some "sell" signal so that 401k investors could have bailed out of the market at the top; trying to do that kind of timing is bad advice for average folks generally. The question is how complicit it was in the market getting to unsustainable heights in an unsustainable manner, thus cleaning those average folks out.)

But being aimed at traders doesn't mean being in service of CEOs, who were often seeking to spin at best on the network's air, and at worst were out-and-out lying. The question, as Stewart came at over and over, was: What did CNBC know and when did it know it? Or, rather: if people like Cramer knew there were shenanigans going on on Wall Street—as shown by clips from his excruciating online video cynically describing manipulations that he said he'd never talk about on TV—then why not call them out?

A few of Cramer's responses are especially eye-opening, not just as they relate to business news but to problems that journalism has generally:

* "These people were my friends." Cramer said that, or something like it, repeatedly: that longtime friends flat-out lied to him. So problem one: coziness with sources is death for the information business. Now, Cramer is a commentator, not a reporter, and I don't begrudge him friends per se. But it is a problem when reporters either become too close to their subjects to treat them skeptically, or become so obsessed with access that they are leery of being too skeptical: i.e., "If I do that, they'll never talk to me again."

Journalists prize getting people to talk to them, with good reason, but they shouldn't be hostage to it. Part of the problem is a culture in which interviewing is privileged over research: "reporting" is defined as getting a person to talk to you, preferably a famous person. But as the original Daily Show CNBC clip showed, research can be pretty powerful—then it created a situation where Cramer pretty much had to talk.

* "We have reporters who try really hard who were not always told the truth. But most importantly, the market was going up for a long time, and our real sin I think was to believe that it could continue to go up a lot in the face of what you describe." Again, leave aside the particulars of CNBC here, and there's another lesson about journalism: it's always safer to say the thing the last guy said (the market's going up!) than to be the first one to say the next thing (the market's going to go down!). Whether it's CDS's or WMD's, the process is the same and the result is a huge loss of credibility and trust. In the long run. In the short run, unfortunately, it's what gets rewarded. And if there's one thing the financial crisis has taught us, it's how often people consider the short run first.

* "It's difficult to have a reporter say, 'I just came from an interview with Hank Paulson, and he lied his darn-fool head off.' It's difficult. I think it challenges the boundaries." OK, this is an easy quote to attack—why not just say he's lying, damn you!—but in fairness it's not as simple than that. The real story—and not at all a more flattering story—is that lies like these are not obvious and cut-and-dried: refuting them takes a lot of work and a lot of time and often involves sticking your neck out and going against the crowd (see previous point). Much easier to quote your subject, adding a caveat if necessary, and move on.

Much easier, too, to make this story about a feud between two cable-TV stars, declare a winner, and move on. Because then we don't have to recognize that this song is about us.

http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/2009/03/13/s...his-song-about/

[rclouse 0]

ohh he got owned so baad lol.. can't wait to see what that freak Scarborough has to say tomorrow

You mean Doucheborough?

/CNBC=PWNED

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

ohh he got owned so baad lol.. can't wait to see what that freak Scarborough has to say tomorrow

It was pretty good criticism I thought - You don't usually see that kind of analysis in the "Mainstream Media".

[I'm Gone 60]

I watched the show and Stewart let it slip out what this is all about, he does give a flying f**k about you or I, his mother must have taken a bath in the stock market and now he has to get up off of some of the millions he makes to help out mom.

[pedroh 21]

ohh he got owned so baad lol.. can't wait to see what that freak Scarborough has to say tomorrow

You mean Doucheborough?

/CNBC=PWNED

yup