Thomas Frank On Jon Stewart Vs Jim Cramer

Mr. Frank actually gets it.

"Listen, you knew what the banks were doing and yet were touting it for months and months," said "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart to CNBC superstar Jim Cramer in their much-discussed confrontation last week. "The entire network was, and so now to pretend that this was some sort of crazy, once-in-a-lifetime tsunami that nobody could have seen coming is disingenuous at best and criminal at worst."

The applause Mr. Stewart has received for his j'accuse is the sound of the old order cracking. We have turned on the financial CEOs, inducting them one by one into the Predator Hall of Fame. We have gone deaf to the seductive rhythms of the culture wars. We have tossed out the politicians whose antigovernment rhetoric seemed invincible for so long.

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But the larger problem won't go away. And it's not just a matter of people missing the biggest economic story of the last 20 years. It's a matter of those who minimized it and those who blew it off because it didn't fit their worldview continuing in their plum positions of authority. Mr. Stewart wasn't rude enough to ask it, but over all his inquiries there hung the obvious question: Why do you still have a job, Mr. Cramer?

If the world of financial infotainment can itself be described as a "market," it is a market where accountability does not seem to exist, where the heaviest of incentives seems to carry no weight, and where consumers, to judge by what they get, seem constantly to choose the lousy over the good. The old order discredits itself, but the old order persists nevertheless.

This needs to be repeated every time someone pleads, "Who could have known?" Plenty of people did see the disaster coming. Most of them were marginalized, however, laboring at out-of-the-way econ departments, blogs and B-list think tanks. They were excluded and even ridiculed because their larger understanding of the economy was not one that fit well with the sort of Wall Street worship preached by the likes of CNBC.

Nor is this a particularly liberal line of inquiry, despite Jon Stewart's well-known fondness for tormenting Republicans. It was a question that interested Milton Friedman, among others, who could be seen musing on the subject in a 1994 TV interview that C-Span chose to rebroadcast on Sunday.

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Friedman may have misread the direction in which the world was moving in 1994, but the question he raised is still a good one. Bad ideas and clueless pundits often do get on top, and they stay there -- sometimes hailing incentives and accountability, even -- despite all manner of rebukes handed down by history itself.

The reasons the financial-entertainment biz failed us are many and complex, but they ultimately come down to this: In the marketplace to describe the marketplace itself, there is precious little competition. There is a single, standard product that comes in packaging that is alternately sultry, energetic or fun -- bitter, brainy or Cramer "crazy" -- but which rarely strays beyond certain ideological boundaries. Adversarial voices are few. Criticism is sacrificed for access. Advice sometimes shades over into simple propaganda. Even the worst prognosticators sometimes go on to jobs with presidential campaigns or prominent think tanks.

I really believe that this is the reason why quite a few journalists tried to down play Jon Stewart's interview and or tried to discredit him as just being partisan. They feel threatened because Jon Stewart pulled back the drapes and exposed how "journalists" who get things totally wrong and totally misinform the people who follow them still get to keep their jobs and never change their modes of operation. The mainstream media keeps lamenting the death of the newspaper without ever taking a hard look at why they are dying. They always just want to blame the internet or the economy without ever examining the product itself. Until they actually do that it won't matter what model the print media tries to transition to. They will still fail because the American people are tired of getting half assed efforts from the people who are supposed to inform us.