Media spat watch: Jon Stewart vs CNBC

At the risk of making even truer the Tom Tomorrow prophecy of two days previously—that blogs are little more than re-publishers of mainstream media content, adding little to nothing—this really is marvelously funny. Many people in Britain might not be familiar with Jim Cramer. He is a loud, idiosyncratic financial talk show host, on the US cable news network CNBC. Having largely lost out to Fox News in the ratings war, his network decided—quite amazingly, if you think about it—to begin a strategy of trying to out-aggress, and out-hype, their Murdoch backed rival. Cramer was one of the results.

There isn’t really an equivalent in the UK I can think of—its as if he is a cross between Jeremy Clarkson, Martin Wolf and Richard Littlejohn, all with the easy, laid back temperament of Derek Draper. His programme is really actually called “Mad Money;” the joke being that he often acts in a “crazy” way when pushing his (as it turns out generally inaccurate) views on stocks and bonds. Anyway, as it happens, he is in the middle of an on-air spat with John Stewart of the Daily Show. This is rarely a good idea for anyone with half a brain, as this splendidly funny clip from the show makes abundantly clear. Stewart, as ever, mixes jibes and an actual point better than any other contemporary satirist. Click here to see it over at the Talking Points Memo [hat tip to Sean for the link, too.]

Life-imitates-satire update—Stewart's moderately heavy-handed point in the clip about media conglomorates is rather confirmed when MSNBC, a relation of CNBC, is asked not to cover the spat. As POPURLS puts it: "this is why the MSM should be broken up."