Stewart Creams Cramer

During the week La Salle had its Spring Break, the television pundits had no vacation from playing the blame game on the poor state of the economy. The big feud that the media has mainly covered, and to some degree has promoted, was between the host of CNBC’s “Mad Money,” Jim Cramer, and Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” host, Jon Stewart.

The tension started when Jon Stewart did a commentary on CNBC financial editor Rick Santelli’s rant about not bailing out failing mortgage holders. Stewart not only criticized Santelli, but also delved into a six minute presentation on the mistakes that all CNBC shows had made regarding the stock market and the American economy in the recent months. Cramer took offense to this, and yelled that Stewart was just: “a comedian…who runs a variety show!” After verbal assaults on one another, Stewart invited Cramer to his show and devoted the majority of last Thursday’s episode on their debate.

In this showdown, which “The Daily Show” dubbed “Brawl Street,” Stewart turned from being just “a comedian” to a serious analyst on the economic reporting during this recession. This undoubtedly threw Cramer off; at certain points, Stewart looked more like the financial expert rather than Cramer.

Although Cramer did the best he could to defend his network, Stewart ultimately called out CNBC’s miscues on covering the economic problems in the last months. Stewart stated that the job of watching the state of the economy should lie within the financial news reporting and further said that “the financial news industry is not just guilty of a sin of omission but of commission.”

Cramer turned into a bumbling mess after this point in the interview, as he claimed that CEOs had lied to him on his show and that any information provided by them on “Mad Money” was not his fault. Stewart rebuffed that this is where Cramer should have done his share of research to dig deeper behind the quotes and that the information CEOs said to promote their corporations was actually correct – “I’m under the assumption that you don’t just take their words at face value,” Stewart said.

Trying to deflect this point by Stewart, Cramer noted that there are limits to what he can do as an economic commentator. However, Stewart countered with: “As Carly Simon would say, this song ain’t about you.” Stewart was not just answering Cramer’s argument with this statement; he was criticizing the media and their role in this financial collapse. The fact that the media is starting to take the government at its word and not question it is the main issue behind Stewart’s critique, which have seemingly been overlooked in this battle between Stewart and Cramer. Stewart has highlighted the problems behind CNBC and the financial news networks and their failure in not warning the people about the troubles that were going to doom the economy. From now on, these news agencies need to elevate the quality of their reporting, or else they can expect to be the next joke on “The Daily Show.”

This article was published in The Collegian, La Salle University's student newspaper.