Will the Stewart/Cramer Battle Be the Death of CNBC?

by Thomas R. Eddlem
by Tom R. Eddlem

Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart has struck again, this time perhaps landing a mortal blow on the ratings-troubled NBC financial cable network, CNBC. The Daily Show host has carried on a war against CNBC for the past two weeks. The war began with a devastating and hilarious March 4 segment compiling some terrible prognostications by CNBC talking heads over the past two years.

And CNBC commentators were indeed largely terrible in predicting the crisis and remain useless in shedding any light as to why the current economic crisis was created. Not everyone put on the air by CNBC was wrong. CNBC did have Peter Schiff on as an occasional commentator, and Schiff (an economic adviser to Congressman Ron Paul’s presidential campaign) accurately laid out what was to come throughout the past three years. But he was mocked as a gloom-and-doom prognosticator whenever he was allowed on the air.

Schiff was the exception to the rule.

One of the CNBC commentators whose clips were used in Stewart’s compilation, Jim Cramer, took public exception to Stewart’s commentary, and he therefore became the focus of follow-up segments on March 9 and March 10 on the Daily Show. The follow-up segments made Cramer look even more like a complete buffoon, as Daily Show researchers found and ran clips of him shilling for Bear-Stearns stock just weeks before the firm went belly-up.

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March 18, 2009

Thomas R. Eddlem [send him mail] is a freelance writer and educator who loves the Constitution and contributes to LewRockwell.com, The New American, and AntiWar.com.

Copyright © 2009 The New American

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