I suppose it’s fair that the Times has Jon Stewart’s showdown with Jim Cramer on its front Web page. The event was not mere entertainment; Stewart was attempting to twist a knife in CNBC’s back, much as he did with Tucker Carlson and Crossfire a few years ago. I always enjoy Alessandra Stanley’s writings on television, and I appreciated her take on the event: “While it’s never much fun to watch a comedian lose his sense of humor, in an economic crisis, it’s even sadder to see supposed financial clairvoyants acting like clowns.” And yet: “[Stewart's] point was not to hear Mr. Cramer out, but to act out a cathartic ritual of indignation and castigation.”
Like many people, I found this interview hard to watch. It was a mismatch; Stewart presented himself not as an entertainer but as a muckraking journalist and moral arbiter, whereas Cramer presented himself as what he is, an entertainer who made some wrong calls. He was a terrible defender of himself — hopeless, really, to the point where you wondered why he and his people had agreed to go on the show — but his stumbling and simpering brought home the point that he’s not really a journalist at all. (At one point he sputtered that he’d never claimed to be Eric Sevareid or Edward R. Murrow.) Was it fair to accuse him of being a bad one? No one accuses Rush Limbaugh of not gathering all the facts before telling people how to vote.
Admittedly I don’t watch Jim Cramer, so maybe I’m giving him a pass. It’s just hard for me to take seriously a man whose shtick includes throwing chairs. “There’s a market for it, and you give it to them,” he told Stewart lamely but accurately. “There’s a market for cocaine and hookers!” Stewart parried in open-mouthed shock — but cocaine and hookers are illegal. There’s no law against crackpot advice. Heck, the show is called Mad Money. Stewart’s peeved attitude, right up to the final handshake, smacked of self-righteousness. Everyone lost their heads in this bubble, and it’s not pretty watching everyone try to blame it on someone else, even if blowhards like Cramer and certainly his bosses should have known better.
In my memory, the last time Stewart attempted to take someone down in this way was when he challenged Tony Blair on the U.K.’s decision to join the U.S. in Iraq. Solid as stone, Blair came across, for better or worse, as someone who had seen a lot more of the world than Stewart ever would. Stewart badly “lost” that interview and seemed determined not to lose this one, hence the mountain of damning TV clips from Cramer’s closet. It was a healthy but sad exercise, like so much of the fallout from this surreal chapter in our economic history.
