TPM Reader DC unleashes his inner rant:
I was watching the segment with Jim Cramer on Morning Joe while getting ready for work this morning and I must say I don’t think I’ve ever yelled at Morning Joe (or any tv show for that matter) as much as I did this morning.
First of all, it was obvious that nobody there had actually watched The Daily Show last night or anytime recently. Joe repeatedly says that Jon Stewart would always rip on Bush but now that Obama is in office he will not make fun of the President so he must go after people “in the arena,” aka Cramer. If any of them had been watching Daily Show last night or any other time recently they would have seen many segments making fun of the new administration and the Democrats in Congress. I am a huge Obama supporter and a lot of these bits on the Obama Administration have really made me cringe with embarrassment but nevertheless it’s still hilarious. What they don’t understand is that the Daily Show makes fun of people being stupid/hypocritical regardless of political or ideological affiliation (it just so happens that the Republicans and Bush have been so stupid and on center stage for so long that they gobbled up all of the attention).
Second, Joe and Jim seem to think that Jon Stewart is just showing clips of CNBC and Cramer being wrong as part of an ideological battle to prove that liberals were right and conservatives/capitalists were wrong. They are simply wrong. The point of the segments is to point out that the folks at CNBC have been extremely reactionary to the daily ups and downs of the Dow they have been extremely critical of the President for not turning the stock market around within his whopping 50 days in office so far. Not only have they failed to offer any coherent alternative solutions, but their panicked reactions and non-stop criticism have contributed to the markets downward spiral.
Finally, the most important thing to take away from the Daily Show segments is that CNBC is very far from Journalism or news. It is a propaganda machine created to get people excited about the stock market and to BUY BUY BUY!! CNBC was a major contributor to our detrimental culture of day trading, expectations of immediate returns, expectations that the market would continue to grow and the bubble would never burst, and a loss of any sense of risk in investing.
So, CNBC was never an independent news/journalism source, nobody there saw the storm clouds gathering until it was too late, and now, nobody has constructive answers for what to do and their increasingly negative coverage of the President and markets only exacerbates the problems. With this track record, what use is CNBC to anyone why should we care what they have to say?
I just hope the Daily Show is cooking up another gem for Joe and Jim tonight!
