If you didn’t watch The Daily Show last night, or if you don’t watch The Daily Show at all, you missed one of the most stunning basic cable comedy show interviews of all time. Throw out the fact that Jon Stewart is the same guy that effectively destroyed CNN’s Crossfire five years ago. That was a crusade against stupid pundits who, while annoying, weren’t causing hundreds of thousands of people to lose money.
All week, Stewart has been railing against CNBC for their complicity in the financial meltdown that we’re facing right now. One way or another, Mr. Mad Money himself, Jim Cramer, became the face of the victim and was paraded through NBC’s family of networks over the last few days for a pity party of epic proportions.
Leading up to his appearance on The Daily Show last night, I have to say that I thought that it would be a humorous, somewhat awkward interview where they would both goof around and everything would return to normal next week.
Boy, was I wrong.
Stewart pulled a Howard Beale on Cramer, lambasting him for his and his network’s failures and playing clips from an interview that Cramer did in 2006 that showed him to be even more involved in propagating this mess than we had all previously thought. I half expected an awkward edit, with Jon sitting alone at his desk, trying to fill the rest of the show after Cramer had bolted from the set. To Jim Cramer’s utmost credit, he remained involved and at least tried to answer the questions and allegations that Jon was leveling at him.
The real sad thing about this whole incident is that MSNBC and CNBC and NBC didn’t do it themselves. All of those inter-connected networks are supposed to be more news-based than Comedy Central. And now, more than ever, I feel like I’m getting more of a straight deal on the events going on in the world around me from A FAKE NEWS SHOW ON A COMEDY NETWORK!
Again, this isn’t about Jim Cramer. He’s a talking head. A very savvy talking head, sure, but a talking head nonetheless. This is about the corporate interests that own “news” networks taking the actual news away from all of us. It’s about not being able to get the truth from people that we’re told to trust to tell us the truth. Instead, we have to get the truth from a former stand-up comic on a network that spends half of it’s time re-airing Mad TV.
And we wonder why we’re so fucked up as a country right now.
At the end of the interview, Cramer shakes on the idea of Stewart going back to being more of a comic and Cramer actually speaking truth to power and being more forward with his audience. I really, honestly, hope that this happens. I don’t watch CNBC or even Mad Money, but just knowing that he would actually be trying to do that would make me feel better. I don’t think that Jim Cramer is a bad guy, I just think that he got just as caught up in the Bull market as everyone else.
Still, I’m not going to hold my breath. Sober, measured analysis doesn’t get ratings. Sprinting around a brightly-colored set, smashing buttons that make noises and screaming like a crazy man gets ratings. And, if the GE-owned family of networks has taught us anything over the past few years, it’s that ratings matter more than substance. Still, it would be nice. A man can dream…a man can dream.
Speaking of dreaming, I’d love to be able to post the videos of the unedited interview here, but WordPress seems to have a beef with The Daily Show’s videos being embedded. So, instead, here’s the link to a page with the entire unedited interview.
