Partisan blogger Nick (8/6/09) has republished a new email campaign from American Rights at Work that reviews how, "just before Bear Stearns went under, CNBC's Jim Cramer had strong advice for his Mad Money viewers: buy Bear Stearns stock, and fast!"

Of course, "then the company imploded and thousands of ordinary people saw their retirement savings vanish. Oops." Nick continues:

Now Cramer is telling his viewers the Employee Free Choice Act will hurt the U.S. economy.

Cramer was wrong then, he's wrong now! But this time we know exactly what will happen if viewers listen: Millions will lose out financially.

Jim Cramer is claiming that the Employee Free Choice Act will stall the U.S. economy, even though numerous economists (including Nobel Prize winners!) and institutional investors who manage $757 billion in assets recognize that the bill is critical to rebuilding the broken economy.

Discussing on Joe Scarborough's MSNBC show the act he calls "a 'sword of Damocles' hanging over our economy," Cramer "and other guests claimed they couldn't identify a single successful unionized company."

But American Rights at Work happens to know that "GE owns both MSNBC and Jim Cramer's own employer, CNBC. And guess what? GE’s employees are represented by unions"--and General Electric "earned more than $18 billion in profits in 2008!"

Take action by letting CNBC know that "Jim Cramer needs to stop parroting the talking points of the same greedy CEOs who got us into this economic crisis."

Also read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "For Media, 'Card Check' Promise Is One to Break: Corporate Outlets Suddenly Discover 'Workers Rights'" (February 2009) by Janine Jackson.

Jim Cramer, CNBC: "I think Goldman is a great firm....  The good guys are in charge. [Lloyd] Blankfein is a fabulous guy. Do people want him in jail? Does Paul Krugman want him in jail? Where do they want these guys?"

Mike Barnicle, Boston Herald: "Paul Krugman wants anyone who makes over $75,000 a year in jail."

--MSNBC's Morning Joe (4/2/09), cited in Huffington Post (4/2/09)

Editorializing in the Wall Street Journal (3/18/09) on how "Financial Journalists Fail Upward," Wrecking Crew author Thomas Frank sees the "world of financial infotainment" as its own "market where accountability does not seem to exist" and in which "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....

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.

At such outlets, "Adversarial voices are few. Criticism is sacrificed for access. Advice sometimes shades over into simple propaganda." For some analysis of the current flavor of just such propaganda, listen to the new edition of FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Melissa Harris-Lacewell on Earmarks" (3/13/09).

Personally inclined to think that "CNBC may be beyond repair," John Nichols (Nation, 3/17/09) still thinks a new Fix CNBC! campaign's "messaging is smart and instructive with regard to the broader media crisis in America," quoting their open letter to the financial network:

Americans need CNBC to do strong, watchdog journalism--asking tough questions to Wall Street, debunking lies and reporting the truth. Instead, CNBC has done PR for Wall Street. You've been so obsessed with getting "access" to failed CEOs that you willfully passed on misinformation to the public for years, helping to get us into the economic crisis we face today.

You screwed up badly. Don't apologize--fix it!

CNBC should publicly declare that its new overriding mission will be responsible journalism that holds Wall Street accountable. As a down payment, we ask you to hire some new economic voices--people who have a track record of being right about the economic crisis and holding Wall Street executives' feet to the fire.

Apparently lots of folks share Nichols' approval of the effort, since well "more than 10,000 people have signed the open letter" already, such as "Dean Baker... Free Press' Josh Silver, FAIR's Peter Hart and Adam Green and Stephanie Taylor, the co-founders of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which is promoting the initiative."

Many observers praised the Daily Show's Jon Stewart for his hard-hitting interview with CNBC's Jim Cramer. Columnist Richard Cohen (Washington Post, 3/17/09) begs to differ.

Actually, Stewart was "wrong" to go after Cramer, Cohen wrote--it was a "cheap shot at business media." His main argument is that Stewart charged that Cramer "knew all the time what was happening" at game-playing financial companies, but Cohen has a list of CEOs at such firms who lost money on their own company's stock, so even they must not have known what was really going on: "When someone puts his money where his mouth is, you have to pay attention. The big shots believed." It's a variation on the "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" argument: If they're now poor, they must be innocent.

There are several things wrong with this line of reasoning. For one, it's really not so easy to take the money and run--or else Bernie Madoff would have made off with more of the $65 billion he stole. For companies slightly more legitimate than Madoff's, there are disclosure requirements that make a CEOs cashing in their stock the surest way to send the value of that stock hurtling toward zero.

And it's unlikely that any of Cohen's hard-luck moguls are actually now in the poor house. One of them, Citicorp's Sanford Weill, is still on Forbes' list of the 400 richest people in the world, though his net worth has fallen from $1.8 billion to $1.3 billion. That's still more than the GDP of 34 countries.

Cohen provides a helpful link to a story about his exhibit A, AIG's Maurice Greenberg, who lost a billion in stock. That piece ends with this:

Greenberg was forced out of AIG during a controversy in 2005 when the company restated its financial statements for the previous five years, acknowledging accounting improprieties including "improper or inappropriate transactions."

New York regulators later accused AIG, Greenberg and the company's former chief financial officer of orchestrating an accounting scheme that made AIG's financial picture appear brighter than it was, misleading both investors and regulators.

Yeah, in 2005.  Not actually very good evidence for Cohen's "how could anyone have known?" case.

Passing over Cohen's subsidiary argument that even Cohen himself was fooled by AIG, so what chance did Cramer have, what comes through most strongly in Cohen's column is his contempt for journalism:

The role that Cramer and other financial journalists played was incidental. There was not much they could do, anyway. They do not have subpoena power. They cannot barge into AIG and demand to see the books, and even if they could, they would not have known what they were looking at.

As Cohen later spells out, this is a variation of the don't-blame-the-media argument about the Iraq War.  The fact is, there were exceptional journalists who pointed out the many holes in the WMD case before the invasion, and there were some economists who recognized that a financial system based on a housing bubble was a house of cards. The fact that Cohen didn't pay attention to these people doesn't mean they don't exist.

Cohen should note that Stewart's point about Cramer knowing that the market was manipulated was based on footage he had gathered of Cramer boasting about how easy it was for him, Cramer, to manipulate the market.  And Stewart didn't need subpoena power to get it.

During his well-publicized appearance with Jon Stewart (Daily Show, 3/12/09), CNBC's Jim Cramer tried to present himself as a rational financial journalist, dismissing his on-air wild man persona as entertainment. But if you listened to his calm, sober pronouncements, they really weren't all that rational.

For instance, he said by way of apology, referring to the current financial crisis, "I got a lot of things wrong because I think it was kind of [a] one-in-a-million shot." Well, no--if you build a financial system on the idea that assets are going to keep rapidly increasing in value forever, the system's eventual collapse is not a one-in-a-million shot. That's more like a one-in-one shot.

If you don't get that, even with the benefit of hindsight, then you really are not qualified to be a financial journalist.

Here's a quote from the Daily Show's original CNBC expose (3/4/09), which ought to be carved on Cramer's tombstone:

You should be buying things and accept that they're overvalued and--but accept that they're going to keep going higher. I know that sounds irresponsible, but that's how you make money.

--Jim Cramer (Mad Money, 10/31/07)

Economics writer David Lieberman (USA Today, 3/11/09) previews a Today show interview with CNBC's Mad Money host Jim Cramer by pointing out that Cramer will "have to answer for misguided stock predictions--including some last year urging investors to buy and hold Bear Stearns just before the investment bank collapsed." But the ironic bit comes after Cramer's dismissive quote--"Oh, oh, a comedian is attacking me!"--when business journalism academic Andrew Leckey "says that while CNBC wants to be seen as serious, 'The best ratings go to a wacky guy.' Cramer often bellows and uses sound effects to highlight his stock picks." As for Stewart's comparative journalistic value, Lieberman writes that

some media critics say that Stewart has earned the right to be taken seriously. "Stewart is a comedian who does some press criticism and does it pretty well," says Columbia Journalism Review Executive Editor Mike Hoyt.

Indeed, it's been proven that Stewart's "fake news" has a higher substance-to-hype ratio than "straight" network news and that his average viewer is more educated than are Fox "news" personality Bill O'Reilly's.

Ryan Chittum of CJR.org holds up (2/19/09) Rick Santelli's recent CNBC tantrum as "an example of what's wrong with a certain kind of financial journalism, the kind where people of like backgrounds spend all day staring at tickers and interviewing each other. As such, Chittum says, "the segment couldn't more clearly illustrate the disconnect between the financial-services sector, certain financial journalists and, you know, 'reality'":

What sent Santelli, CNBC's hot-air, oops, "On-Air Editor," over the edge? The homeowner bailout. Of course, he didn't get himself into nearly this much of a lather over the trillions of dollars we’ve given to Wall Street welfare cases and the busted banks. Oh no. He's mad that non-financial-service-professionals, otherwise known as homeowners, or, according to Santelli "losers," are up now for help--to the tune of $275 billion, much of which would go to the banks anyway....

But then, this may be a symptom of a wider disease. We at [CJR's] the Audit have written repeatedly about the blame-the-homeowners meme that's been so popular in misdirecting people away from the real culprits in the crisis: the financial-services boiler rooms that created all those junk mortgages and bundled them into crap securities for sale to all-too-trusting rubes (aka "clients") around the world.

Looking at the "powerful undercurrent of outrage from some people who are paying their mortgages (or renting) who disdain those who aren't or can't," Chittum is compelled to explain exactly "what's going on here": "This homeowner bailout isn't really even aimed at easing people's suffering. It's aimed at the banks, whose downward spiral will not stop until the housing market stabilizes."

Read FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Scapegoating Minorities for Failures of Banking: Blaming CRA Makes Little Sense, but Gets Finance Industry Off the Hook" (1/09) by Mary Kane

The folks at Think Progress recently brought us "a report showing that, in the debate over the House economic recovery bill on the five cable news networks, Republican members of Congress outnumbered their Democratic counterparts by a ratio of 2 to 1." Now that the legislation "passed the House last week with zero Republican votes, shifting the focus to the Senate," a subsequent survey (2/6/09) finds that "though the venue has changed, the debate on cable has not improved much":

In a new analysis, ThinkProgress has found that Republican lawmakers outnumbered Democratic lawmakers 75 to 41 on cable news interviews by members of Congress (from 6am on Monday 2/2 through 11pm on Thursday 2/5)....

Though the imbalance is already stark, the tilt of the coverage would have been even more lopsided if the analysis had been broken down into whether a lawmaker who appeared on TV was a supporter or a critic of the economic recovery plan. Some of the most frequent Democratic guests this week were outspoken critics of the proposed stimulus plans, such as Sens. Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Kent Conrad (D-ND).

Found to be "particularly egregious" this week was CNBC, which "had more than twice as many conservatives, with 14 Republicans and six Democrats. Fox Business was even worse, hosting 20 Republicans for just four Democrats." Listen to FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Dean Baker on Stimulus Package" (1/30/09)