I didn’t get a chance to watch the Jon Stewart-Jim Cramer faceoff until today. And the consensus blogosphere appraisal of the event is spot-on: Stewart reduces Cramer to a simpering husk of a TV personality whose time has come and gone. The whole interview is compelling, but a particularly telling moment comes when Cramer defends himself by saying–and I’m paraphrasing here– that he’s just trying to do an entertainment show on business. The fact that business reporting can even be considered entertainment is symptomatic of the larger problem. When credit was flowing through the streets like wine and McMansions were springing up in every corner of suburbia, we let ourselves think that economic cycles were a thing of the past, like black-and-white TV and polio. And the business networks, just like everyone else, cashed in. They fed us rah-rah pabulum about the unstoppable upward trajectories of stock and housing prices without bothering to critically assess the assumptions underpinning all this optimism.
You know, all this business about the press abandoning its responsibilities and leaving its critical faculties at the door has an awfully familiar ring to it. Like we’ve seen this before. Hmm, it will come to me eventually.
