Feud between CNBC and The Daily Show continues to escalate Economy not small issue in deepening Stewart-CNBC feud With the global crisis deepening, it looks like the last vestiges of civilization are falling into the abyss. ~String
It is interesting how much influence comedians have over inssues involving politics. Now it's economic, wow!
This is one of the wonderful byproducts of not watching television. I get to totally miss out on stupid tempests in teapots like this. Unfortunately, there are people who actually care about this crap.
Not only do they care, but they actually start threads about it in fora and stuff! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! ~String
This guy is your friend? And a journalist??? Dude, you need therapy Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
So I found this. http://www.breitbart.tv/html/296683.html Does Jon Stewart think he is a real journalist or something? That's what scary about this whole thing to me.
I saw the interview with Cramer, and the Daily Show definitely did decide to leave the comedy at the door...and the interview lasted an unusually long 15 minutes. That said, first, many of Stewart's criticisms were plausible. CNBC's pundits did make a series of really bad calls (Cramer especially) and then post-crisis there was a lot of post hoc justification and even outright denial about those calls. Cramer even had a feud with Santelli way back, on air, when Santelli accused him of making bad calls: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGkrNJ19DSU (My favorite part: When Cramer advised, in Oct of '07, "You should be buying things, and accept that they're overvalued. ... I know that sounds irresponsible, but that's how you make money. Right now up is down, left is right, peace is war, all that 1984 stuff.") Second, what Stewart missed (and, to be fair, a *lot* of people miss) is that MSNBC pundits are, to the financial markets, what sports commentators are to professional sports. You can listen to them and get some information, but when it comes to predicting how the season will go, who has a serious shot at the playoffs, whose going to win and lose tomorrow and which players are most likely to be caught cheating, it's all informed guesswork. Both sports and financial comentators have lousy forecasting track records over the long term, though their forecasts are better on average than the typical man on the street's. His complaint was, in a sense, that he wishes that (a) they were more critical of the financial industry and more in the mould of an investigative journalism outfit and (b) that they would not market their punditry as if it were accurate, given that it is decidedly not. What both he and Cramer missed is that CNBC is really more finance-related infotainment than it is journalism. Anyone who takes them more seriously than that is asking for trouble.
Yes, but I have a problem with Stewart taking up the critic mantle. He's not a journalist and he shouldn't pretend like he is one. By doing so, he's doing exactly the same thing he attacked Crammer for, only in reverse. I'm biased, but I generally think Stewart is far more dangerous than Crammer, and by dangerous I mean dangerous in the manner he accuses Crammer of being. Stewart's audience is much larger and much less uninformed than Crammer's, so he is steering more people afoul, in my opinion. As for Crammer and making money, I have no idea how good or bad he is at. I do know that most financial people had no idea this crunch was coming and most of them have generally been wrong pretty badly as of late. I can't remember where I read this, but I saw somewhere that a person took a respected trading house and compared their picks to picks generated randomly and the success/failure rate wasn't that far apart.
I am not sure you have to be in the media for a criticism such as that to be valid. He points out that people on CNBC have taken seemingly inconsistent positions and he told them his view on the service they should provide. Other than the fact that his criticisms were public, I think we all critique the media from time to time. I am not sure what he did qualifies as journalism, just another species of punditry. I think CNBC could have wholly defended the position that they don't want to be harsher critics of the financial sector because members of the financial sector are their core audience (whereas Stewart likely only tunes in when there is a financial crisis). Neither is an obviously foolish position, and whether you prefer a kowtowing CNBC, a harshly critical CNBC or something else is all a matter of aesthetics. The big issue I take with Stewart is that the segment wasn't funny. Whatever CNBC's job is, my view is that his is to be funny. (Comedy Central, however may disagree because that interview generated a lot of, effectively, free advertising for them.)
What I don't think Stewart understood is that the smart guys if finance are not that smart. The way executive pay was structured did create an incentive for the investment banks to gamble but the executives somehow did not know that housing prices might go down soon. Stewart seemed to think the Wall Street executives and the people at CNBC understood what was about to happen and just let it happen. That was wrong. The Wall Street executives and the people at CNBC did not know what was about to happen. There was no conspiracy. There was just stupidity, a lack of regulation and a system that paid Wall Street executives more in the short term if they took excessive risks. Robert J. Shiller and many others predicted what was about to happen but the majority of Wall Street and the majority of economists and the majority of CNBC media personalities chose to ignore the warnings and chose to believe the warnings were not true. We all believe what we want to believe unless there is a compelling reason for us to believe something we would rather not believe. The truth is not a compelling enough reason for us to believe what we don't want to believe. The truth must be overwhelming and inescapable before we will let the truth change our opinions when we don't want to know the truth. This is human nature.
And yet, every day, every evening, those same people come on the news and explain, sometimes in great detail, what's happening and why, and try to charm us into thinking that they actually know what the fuck they're talking about?! They write long editorials analyzing things, explaining things about the economy, yet they know as little as the rest of us?! That's the "conspiracy" of it all ....lying to us as if they know anything!! Baron Max
I agree! If they'd just contend themselves with tell us what happened in the world, I'd be happy. But they try to tell us WHY something happened ....as if they even have a fuckin' clue! That pisses me off. Baron Max
I don't pay much attention to what they say any longer for they are just a bunch of biased, slanted bastards that can't report if it is daytime or nighttime without making it controversial! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
You are right. That sort of is a conspiracy. The media pretends to know more than they really know about finance and and every other subject. Newspapers and TV keep taking shots at the blogosphere because because any idiot can write anything in the blogosphere but at least we all know that about the blogosphere. Too many people were fooled by the media's pretensions of being more knowledgeable and accurate than they really are.
The ratings agency's, Moody's, Standard & Poor's and Fitch also could be considered to be conspiracy. They claim their ratings are just opinions and they should not be held accountable. But they get paid for their opinions and the whole financial system is based upon the premise that their opinions are relatively accurate.
Did you guys ever see Cramer selling state lottery tickets? Something about them being his pick for making money or something. The guy's a total fucking joke. Are you kidding? Making fun of idiots is often a source of humor for comedians, and Cramer is definitely an idiot. I'm not really seeing the liberal conspiracy here. Could you outline it more explicitly?
