Glenn Greenwald: There's Nothing Unique About Jim Cramer

[marmar]

via CommonDreams:



Published on Friday, March 13, 2009 by Salon.com
There's Nothing Unique About Jim Cramer

by Glenn Greenwald


Jon Stewart is being widely celebrated today and Jim Cramer/CNBC widely mocked -- both rightfully so -- for Stewart's devastatingly adversarial interview of Cramer (who, just by the way, is a Marty Peretz creation). If you haven't yet seen the interview, you can and should watch it here; if you watch only one segment, watch the middle one and the beginning of the third.

Stewart focuses on the role Cramer and CNBC played in mindlessly disseminating and uncritically amplifying the false claims from the CEOs and banks which spawned the financial crisis with their blatantly untoward and often illegal practices. Here is the crux of Stewart's critique of Cramer/CNBC:

STEWART: This thing was 10 years in the making . . . . The idea that you could have on the guys from Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch and guys that had leveraged 35-1 and then blame mortgage holders, that's insane. . . .

CRAMER: I always wish that people would come in and swear themselves in before they come on the show. I had a lot of CEOs lie to me on the show. It's very painful. I don't have subpoena power. . . .

STEWART: You knew what the banks were doing and were touting it for months and months. The entire network was.

CRAMER: But Dick Fuld, who ran Lehman Brothers, called me in - he called me in when the stock was at 40 -- because I was saying: "look, I thought the stock was wrong, thought it was in the wrong place" - he brings me in and lies to me, lies to me, lies to me.

STEWART : The CEO of a company lied to you?

CRAMER: Shocking.

STEWART: But isn't that financial reporting? What do you think is the role of CNBC? . . . .

CRAMER: I didn't think that Bear Stearns would evaporate overnight. I knew the people who ran it. I thought they were honest. That was my mistake. I really did. I thought they were honest. Did I get taken in because I knew them before? Maybe, to some degree. . . .

It's difficult to have a reporter say: "I just came from an interview with Hank Paulson and he lied his darn-fool head off." It's difficult. I think it challenges the boundaries.

STEWART: But what is the responsibility of the people who cover Wall Street? . . . . I'm under the assumption, and maybe this is purely ridiculous, but I'm under the assumption that you don't just take their word at face value. That you actually then go around and try to figure it out (applause).

That's the heart of the (completely justifiable) attack on Cramer and CNBC by Stewart. They would continuously put scheming CEOs on their shows, conduct completely uncritical "interviews" and allow them to spout wholesale falsehoods. And now that they're being called upon to explain why they did this, their excuse is: Well, we were lied to. What could we have done? And the obvious answer, which Stewart repeatedly expressed, is that people who claim to be "reporters" are obligated not only to provide a forum for powerful people to make claims, but also to then investigate those claims and then to inform the public if the claims are true. That's about as basic as it gets. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/13-8

[90-percent]

1. Interesting Connection

There's a connection between newspapers collapsing and the "quality" of today's "journalism".

I much prefer payapalling Larissa Alexandronova or Josh Marshall or Greg Palest or even contributing to DU than supported MSM newspapers.

Why should I buy any newspaper if all it offers is stenography?

Internet news is steamrolling over the dinosaur newspapers. Those that cannot adapt to change will die.

-90% Jimmy

Glenn Greenwald is one journalist that is doing great work. Work so desperately needed in these times.

And I hope Cramer isn't made the poster boy over this. He seems to have much more basic decency than a David Gregory or especially the despicable Judith Miller!

[jkshaw]

2. The video of Jon's interview of Cramer that I just saw on

Crooks & Liars was the most painful thing I've ever experienced. Cramer's voice was shaking, I expected real tears. The guy -- whatever else he is -- was brave to face Jon Stewart, knowing that he was going to be vaporized. And he was vaporized.

And now that Jon Stewart has explained so cogently what the financial "experts" were doing behind the scenes and blaming the disaster they created on mortgage holders, will we see anything happen on Wall Street? Will they just continue to try to spin the mess they made with their PR companies that the taxpayers are paying for? Will we see programs like the fraudulent CNBC change into a real financial news reporting channel? Ha.

Remember the dressing-down Jon gave to the pundits on Crossfire? Sure, they disappeared, but the other channels just took their place. They continued to be a crowd of shills.

[TahitiNut]

3. Cramer has at least the vestigial conscience to allow himself to be the Whipping Boy for CNBC.

While that metaphor over-reaches (since Cramer *IS* complicit), he did step forward in the absence of anyone else at CNBC even coming close to accepting accountability for being nothing more than paid shills for the Greater Fool casino of the 'market.' The cult-like liturgy spewed 24x5 on CNBC is akin to a bizarre RPG ... a virtual reality of spin and arcane jargon.

[Karenina]

8. How much damage do you think this will do to CNBC?

[TahitiNut]

9. None. Cramer might be looking for a job, though. He essentially admitted it was all a carnival hoax.

The rest of the grifters won't like that. (They like shilling.) The Greater Fools won't like that. (They like being fools.)

[Johonny]

4. the important part of the first part of the interview

Is Jon shows that Cramer does understand how the market is manipulated. It makes it harder to believe the I was lied to part. Cramer understood the market place of the last 10 years.

[Radical Activist]

5. Same thing happened with the Iraq War.

Bush lied. The press didn't investigate or challenge those lies.

[slipslidingaway]

6. Greenwald is correct, nothing unique about Cramer....

"...Today, everyone -- including media stars everywhere -- is going to take Stewart's side and all join in the easy mockery of Cramer and CNBC, as though what Stewart is saying is so self-evidently true and what Cramer/CNBC did is so self-evidently wrong. But there's absolutely nothing about Cramer that is unique when it comes to our press corps. The behavior that Jon Stewart so expertly dissected last night is exactly what our press corps in general does -- and, when compelled to do so, they say so and are proud of it...

...Perhaps the most egregious instance of this media cowardice is that there are very few occasions when media stars were willing to address criticisms of their behavior in the run-up to the war. With very few exceptions, they have systematically ignored the criticisms that have been voiced from many sources about the CNBC-like role they played in the dissemination of pre-Iraq-War and other key Bush falsehoods. But on those very few occasions when they were forced to address these issues, their responses demonstrate that they said and did exactly what we're all going to spend today mocking and deriding Cramer and CNBC for having done -- and they continue, to this day, to do that...

...It's fine to praise Jon Stewart for the great interview he conducted and to mock and scoff at Jim Carmer and CNBC. That's absolutely warranted. But just as was true for Judy Miller (and her still-celebrated cohort, Michael Gordon), Jim Cramer isn't an aberration. What he did and the excuses he offered are ones that are embraced as gospel to this day by most of our establishment press corps, and to know that this is true, just look at what they do and say about their roles. But at least Cramer wants to appear to be contrite for the complicit role he played in disseminating incredibly destructive and false claims from the politically powerful. That stands in stark contrast to David Gregory, Charlie Gibson, Brian Williams, David Ignatius and most of their friends, who continue to be defiantly and pompously proud of the exact same role they play.


....I was on The Hugh Hewitt Show last night discussing the Charles Freeman controversy. That show can be heard here, and the transcript is here."

[slipslidingaway]

7. ...n/t