If you missed last week\’s kerfuffle between Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer (or more accurately: CNBC), it culminated with Jim Cramer making an appearance on Stewart\’s The Daily Show.
You can check out the episode (which is almost completely devoted to the interview with Cramer) on The Daily Show\’s website.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/index.jhtml?episodeId=220533
The interview is at times highly entertaining, insightful, and uncomfortable. I agree with many assessments that stated it was as if Stewart was the principal who was scolding the bad child.
And Cramer definitely came off as a child. He is a brilliant Wall Street mind, and the clips that Stewart uses from TheStreet.com are scary and insightful; but Cramer\’s reaction is that of a child.
I wasn\’t the least bit surprised by Cramer\’s response given that I had recently read this article in Esquire. He\’s apparently quite fragile, and you see that during the interview with Stewart.
But beyond all of this, what bothers me the most is that with all of the intricacies of the recession, the place that has given the most concise, accurate, and hardest hitting coverage is Comedy Central (???). In the immortal words of texters everywhere: WTF!!!
Have you ever tried watching CNBC or Bloomberg? If you aren\’t familiar with finance (and let\’s face it, even the people in finance aren\’t apparently very familiar with finance) it\’s damn near impossible to follow. Bloomberg alone is enough to put someone in an epileptic seizure with it\’s multiple windows and multiple scrolling bars all scrolling at different speeds…it\’s a frickin\’ nightmare.
The Daily Show, in their effort to make this all funny, has to break down the complexity into something that the average viewer can understand. And in doing so they not only entertain, but inform. I learned more about the \”real\” market in the 20 minutes I spent watching The Daily Show than I did in the hour of internet research I did on the same topic.
Is it any surprise that in a world where the best \”entertainment\” television can offer is a group of people in a singing competition, the most informative news program is a farce?
I abhor and embrace The Daily Show. It is both destructor and redeemer. But these days, isn\’t that exactly what we need?
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