[Pen-l] "Media afraid of criticizing Jon Stewart"

[raghu <mraghu01@xxxxxxxxx>]

So says Tucker Carlson, an old victim of Jon Stewart:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-03-11/7-best-cable-tv-feuds/
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-03-18/how-jon-stewart-went-bad/full/
-----------------------------------------------snip
Jon Stewart’s recent attack on CNBC’s Jim Cramer was so brilliantly
performed, so smoothly produced and cruelly compelling, almost nobody
noticed that it didn’t make sense. The climax came as Stewart put up a
number of grainy clips of Cramer describing how to artificially (and
unethically) depress a company’s stock price. The video was damning.
Cramer looked sweaty.

Stewart summed up the significance of what Cramer had said on the
tape: “You can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the
stuff that was being pulled at Bear and at AIG, and all this
derivative-market stuff,” he said sternly.
I can still picture him standing outside the makeup room,
gesticulating as the rest of us tried to figure out what he was
talking about. It was one of the weirdest things I have ever seen.

Except that you can’t draw any such line. In the video, Cramer hadn’t
mentioned derivates or securitized loans or credit-default swaps, or
any of the other exotic financial instruments that caused the fall of
AIG and the current recession. There’s no evidence that Jim Cramer had
anything to do with any of that, and Stewart didn’t offer any.

Before Cramer could defend himself, Stewart moved on to a new charge:
Cramer and his colleagues at CNBC had known that the financial sector
was in imminent danger of collapse, but had pretended otherwise—a ruse
that Stewart described as “disingenuous at best and criminal at
worst.”

This was even more farther-fetched. A ratings-hungry TV network had
the scoop of the decade but decided to sit on it? Why? In order to
curry favor with soon-to-be-disgraced corporate executives? It didn’t
make sense.

No matter. Cramer was almost incoherent by this point, cringing and
apologetic. Stewart was becoming furious. “I understand you want to
make finance interesting,” he said, “but it’s not a fucking game. And
I, I, I—when I watch that, I can’t tell you how angry that makes me.”

Cynics might assume that the fury was a pose. Humor requires ironic
detachment, and nobody as funny and sophisticated as Jon Stewart could
possibly be getting that mad on TV over something so abstract. A fair
assumption, but wrong. Stewart really was enraged. It was all
entirely, strangely real.





-raghu.
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