If you haven't seen the Daily Show's Jon Stewart giving it good to CNBC "financial commentator" (that's a bit like calling Bernie Madoff a "banker") Jim Cramer, then here is the extended version (unexpurgated). It's full of quotable stuff, but my favorite is Cramer's explanation of why CNBC has so much junk financial talk on tape, providing Daily Show editors with a gold mine: "We've got 17 hours of live TV to do" daily.
To which Stewart replies, "Maybe you should cut down on that..." Which goes to the heart of the problem of TV "news" or, more accurately, infotainment. CNBC has to say something during those 17 hours of live (presumably they are not better informed during the remaining 7 hours of taped material). And that's just one network. Can you imagine the total amount of drivel that America's hundreds of cable channels must churn out daily?
It used to be "the news," as in "did you see the news last night?" There was CBS in pride of place, followed in order of reputation by NBC and ABC. Only later did PBS come along.
Less, in the case of TV news, was more: in the sixties and seventies, Americans getting their information from one of the networks could count on a rich mix of reports from foreign correspondents, in-depth investigative reporting, and the occasional prime-time documentary. Now you have to fork out upwards of $10 to see "Why We Fight" or "SiCKO" at the local multiplex, when the networks used to do stuff almost as good, and all you had to do was watch their commercials from the comfort of your sofa.
And don't get me started on the disappearance of American correspondents from points beyond the continental shelf.
Enter MoJo - Mother Jones, which is making a name for itself for the quality of its investigative reporting - to take on the print media. Actually, MoJo beat the Daily Show by a couple of months in its castigation of the princes of print financial reporting. In "Buying the Bull: How could 9,000 business reporters blow the biggest story of their beat?" former WSJ reporter Dean Starkman's ire is no less heartfelt than Jon Stewart's. But he goes deeper:
but it wasn't just the media abdicating their watchdog role: Just as financial news outlets were weakening, regulators were also abandoning the field, leaving business reporters starved of the investigative leads they rely on. Back in the 1980s, a great deal of tough Wall Street coverage was driven by the aggressive work of prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission (sec). But then came the Clinton-era push toward deregulation that reached its extremes during the Bush administration as the federal government unceremoniously pulled the finance cops off the beat. For a time, Eliot Spitzer filled the void with his aggressive prosecution of Wall Street misdeeds, but for the most part, covering financial corruption without regulators was like trying to clap with one hand.
Starkman then provides some amazing examples of just how lax the Bush Administration had gotten in its fiduciary responsibilities: "Since 2002 the ftc has brought no major consumer lending cases. Zero. The last such case brought by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, against Providian National Bank, came in 2000." That's it. No wonder financial journalists weren't getting the leads. He quotes Jonathan Weil, who helped break the Enron story, who wrote in the waning days of the Bush era:
"Is there anybody left in the government with a pulse? Where's the yellow police tape? How about a cease-and-desist order to prevent document destruction? Can anyone give me a good reason why Lehman offices shouldn't be treated as a crime scene now?"
As Weil, Starkman, and Jon Stewart know, Bernard Madoff isn't the only perp. But the perps were aided and abetted by see-no-evil "regulators" and "financial reporters."