Stewart vs Cramer—click the image to see clips over at Salon
With further apologies to Tom Tomorrow, we are now giving over our entire blog to rolling coverage of the Stewart vs Cramer debacle; an event I’m increasingly thinking could become a bit like the OJ car chase for media in the crunch. Last night, facing the meltdown of his limited credibility, Cramer went on the Daily Show. Salon, who have the clips (click on the picture on the left to see them) pick up the story:
Cramer was constantly deferential and apologetic, at times even catching himself when he tried to offer an excuse for past behavior. And ultimately, he promised to change his ways, which include, as Gawker noted, a history of alleged attempts to manipulate the market using his position as a financial analyst both in print and on television and his connections within the media.
The clips are fascinating. Stewart won, but then, he always does. He is after all on home turf. Salon said that they thought Cramer came off especially badly. I disagree. As they note, his deference plays well. Stewart even hits a few bad notes—like when he accuses a relatively reasonable sounding Cramer of talking to him like he “is a 5 year old.” Equally, Cramer would—in my view—have more than a little right to actually defend the original cause of the spat, and push back just a touch more than he actually did.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a massive Jon Stewart fan: he is, along with Chris Morris, probably his generation’s finest satirist. And, on this issue as in most others, Stewart is more right than wrong. But….. for a show that is normally so morally nuanced, there is more than a little of the Huey Long about the Daily Show’s stalwart defence of “battling” home owners. Many home owners have been hosed by the crisis; that much is obvious, especially in the case of people who were actually mis-sold properties, rather than simply being “mis-sold” the expectation that the market would keep going up. But not all of them were victims—some were greedy, and were unwise to take out mortgages they self-evidently could not afford. (Full disclosure: I very nearly did the same thing, so I’m not saying I’m any smarter. But if I had done it when I thought about it, in 2008, I would at least have realised that the decision to buy was partly a result of my own hubris, and not entirely someone else’s fault.)
Obviously, Cramer is forced to disagree with all this, and happily hangs out to dry his (doubtless vile) CNBC Colleague. But I can’t help feeling that Jonathan Swift—the man whom Stewart, Morris, Iannucci et al venerate—were he alive today, wouldn’t have let them off the hook quite so easily. Anyway, its all riveting stuff—and, once again, a great riposte to smug people in my country who somehow think Americans can’t do comedy quite as well as we clever clogs Brits. There is nothing nearly so funny, so vital or perceptive as this in the British public sphere. And that, sad to say, is a shame.
[Update—oddly, Salon seems to have (a) changed its blog post to tone down the criticism of Kramer and (b) removed the videos. Check them out here, at the Daily Show site, or presumably you can find them somewhere on YouTube.]
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Don’t be silly, James.
I can’t believe anyone fell for Cramer’s faux contrition, hand-wringing and promises to change; this is a man, as Stewart so ably demonstrated, to whom the scams were not just well-known but well practised. And Stewart’s central thesis, and cause for inviting Cramer on to the show, was a tad more sophisticated than a simple defence of the greedy so-and-so who failed to see the danger in his bank offering him a 125% loan when his salary came in loose change.
(You, the deputy ed of Prospect, admit you nearly did the same, so why the dig at those without the benefit of your education?)
Mad Money is a symptom and a cause of the crisis; dispensing with reasoned financial advice, it caricatured the market and the players within. Its host is a self-confessed crook, yet so desperate to continue marketing his own brand despite the litany of bad calls he made on his show he turned up to the Stewart interview with his trademark sleeves-rolled-up. His idea of financial journalism is to conduct an interview with a major banking CEO and fail to question that which he is told.
I’ve watched the full interview and yes – Stewart does look a little petulant at times. Perhaps he did let him off the hook. But, as he said to the guys on Crossfire (whatever happened to them?” he’s a comedian whose programme follows a show involving PUPPETS. Why the ridiculously high expectation?
The points he makes towards the end of the interview are as salient, pointed and pertinent as anything I’ve heard from paxo, randall, peston et al – and he still made me laugh.
Cry a spade a spade, james. There was nothing to cheer in what he said; Cramer is a pricked balloon, screeching and zigzagging round the room in a final flurry of noise and activity before falling, deflated.
One thing I’d agree – I wish we had a Jon Stewart in the UK.
[...] plenty of comment on the encounter on other websites (Prospect’s blog is worth a read, and includes links to the piece), and it was certainly fascinating. A slightly contrite display by [...]
With all the talk about the future of newspapers and where investigative, critical reporting is going to come from in the future, The Daily Show deserves more attention. It is, indeed, disturbing and depressing that there is nothing on British TV to match it in terms of mass market reach: shows like Panorama just do not have the same impact. Perhaps it is all too cozy here, with the ministers, bankers and BBC producers all from the same small pool of schools and Oxbridge colleges.
Anyway, my point is that if anything Stewart was soft on Jim the Fixit. I would have liked to have seen Jim explain his hedge fun activities in more detail than the brief excerpts from thestreet.
Niall— damn it, i actually agree on most of that. Cramer is obviously an ass of a man. And, even in an interview which i consider to be a triumph for him, he still came off like quizzling, gollumn-like weirdo. The act of keeping-his-y’know-together looked like it took so much effort, you can only imagine the battering the coke machine took in the green room afters.
A mate of mine, elsewhere, said he thought this was the ultimate point of all of this. And i rather agree:
*** I think it was actually a triumphant PR save for CNBC to turn this into a Stewart/Cramer personality feud at all, because Stewart’s initial attacks were on CNBC as a whole. And the one thing you can’t accuse CNBC of is not presenting Cramer’s show as entertainment — it’s the other coverage that’s the problem. Despite all that secret video footage of Cramer advocating market manipulation, the basic problem was that Stewart’s critique was better directed at CNBC’s “serious” stuff, not Cramer’s clowning… ****
The problem is, if every debate about media is reduced to “CNBC isn’t as good as it should be, and, by golly, nowhere near as good as the New York Times / BBC / Economist / or, dare i say it, even Sky news” then this is just a rather tedios reductivism. I mean, who disagrees with this? You can make the case that CNBC uses clownihsness to educate the public about financial news, much as say, Jeremy Clarkson uses soft bigotry to improve our knowledge of the auto trade. But its not /much/ of an argument…..
What say you? Perhaps we should follow D Birch, and just give up on CNBC. After all, if there was no CNBC, or Bill O’Reilly, the Daily show would be a pretty pointless affair. And that, in turn, probably explains why their is no British John Stewart, either.
“if there was no CNBC, or Bill O’Reilly, the Daily show would be a pretty pointless affair.”
No, that’s not right. We (the Brits) need something with a stronger core: shows like “Mock the Week” and “The Now Show” are fabulous, but “The Daily Show” has something beyond the satire because it is trying to bring real stories to the demographic.
I quite often find myself watching The Daily Show with my wife on days when neither of us watch an actual news show (I get my news from Today) and it can’t be just because it’s pretty funny some days (in fact, screamingly funny some days: remember the show where they were trying to come up with a theme tune for Al-Jazeera).
I don’t want to get sidetracked here, but the Now Show is dreadful. Limp, pun-ridden, smug, not challenging, boring, safe….. i could go on. Punt and Dennis are, i’m sure, nice people—but the drop off in quality when the News Quiz run ends is always a moment of great sadness. Indeed, i feel the Now Show is /exactly/ what the Daily Show would be like, if Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Karl Rove had never existed. The Daily Show is parasitic on the idiocy of its targets—just as Swift, at his baby-eating best, was parasitic on the caprice of Britain’s imperial cruelty. The Now Show, in all its dreary mediocrity, is unfit to be put in the same category.
But The Now Show isn’t meant to be like The Daily Show. It’s meant to be by Radio 4, about Radio 4 and for Radio 4 listeners of a certain age. I find it comforting. It does get a bit boring sometimes (eg, when Marcus Brigstocke is on) but I wouldn’t like it to be changed. I used to prefer the News Quiz but now it’s the other way round, because the News Quiz questions and answers are too predictable. A bit like Question Time, in fact.
In response to James… hmmm.
I’m not sure I’d agree that this was a Win for CNBC. Yep, they may well be happy cramer has inadvertently becoming the whipping boy in all of this, rather than the network itself; but what if, shock horror, we take him as emblematic of the culture of financial reporting, and his props, the literal bells and whistles of his trade, simply a pertinent example of the conceit of his ilk – that commenting on the economy needs dressing up if to be of relevance.
What of the revisionist nature of his commentary? The Bear Sterns stuff that Stewart broadcast in the days leading up to the interview could have come from any number of financial reporters… A quick volte face here and there and they move on to the next topic. It shows the utter contempt these guys have for their audience.
If you took the Stewart interview as the totality of the Daily Show coverage then you might have just about been able to argue that JS was guilty of playing the man rather than the ball (although I’d still ultimately disagree). But it wasn’t. And I think we can all agree that a twenty minute interview is still prohibitively short if a fuller examination of the rights and wrongs of the industry in general was to happen.
Cramer was held up as a paragon of virtue (”in Cramer we trust” etc), so why NOT tackle him head on? I disagree with your mate; despite his clowning around Cramer WAS engaging in “serious” journalism. He was providing stock advice and daily commentary on the financial sector!
And “tedious reductivism”?! Come on – who else has been making these points so eloquently and so powerfully?
CNBC may well believe they have come out of this better that they might have. I think they look bloody awful. Most of the show’s viewers will not be as well informed as readers of your blog. For them, the Cramer brand, CNBC through its cheerleading of him, and financial reporting in general have been skewered.
I’ve said it before – Jon Stewart is a comedian with a comedy network show (which is, in general, nowhere near “high brow”). Let’s not be too critical when he has accomplished far more than “proper” journalists.
(PS the Now Show is pretty poor)
(PPS Doesn’t Cramer look a bit like Murray from Flight of the Conchords?)