Like everyone in the galaxy, I watched Jon Stewart eviscerate Jim Cramer last night. But it was kind of weird. The conventional wisdom is that Stewart ripped Cramer to shreds — and he did — but he only succeeded because Cramer apparently made a preemptive decision not to fight back. He just sat there and took it. Felix Salmon has the right take:
Jim Cramer was craven and highly apologetic on the Daily Show last night […] and almost never attempted to defend himself, preferring to go the mea culpa route.
….In a sense, it’s a shame that Stewart had on his show the most self-loathing of all the CNBC personalities — but then again he, too, had little choice, since Santelli cancelled on him. But the lesson of this interview is that when CNBC is pressed on the way in which it has hurt America, its response is to capitulate and say “well I guess that’s true”. Which means that the bigger lesson is simpler still: don’t watch CNBC. Doing so will do you no good at all, and will quite possibly do you a lot of harm.
There’s a real sense in which CNBC is truly a microcosm of the entire financial meltdown. Sure, they were irresponsible, and they deserve the hits they’re taking. At the same time, they only succeeded because the more irresponsible they got, the more their audience grew. Their audience deserves a share of the blame in the same way that the voracious buyers of preposterously leveraged and tranched CDOs share some of the blame with the financial engineers who put them together. None of this works without a willing buy side, does it?
