One of the strangest comments post- Iowa straw poll came from reporter Kelly O'Donnell on NBC Nightly News (8/14/11):

Both Pawlenty's exit and Perry's launch consumed political oxygen that typically would have gone to the straw poll's actual winner, Congresswoman Bachmann, who appeared on all five Sunday morning talk shows, including Meet the Press.

I'm having trouble imagining how someone could put those two thoughts together. Bachmann was merely on five national TV shows Sunday morning. That's being overshadowed?

If that's oxygen deprivation, one has to wonder what you'd call the media treatment of Ron Paul, who finished one percentage point behind Bachmann, despite being treated as a non-candidate by the national media. Politico's Roger Simon  (8/15/11), argued that you can't say the straw poll means almost nothing and that Bachmann's victory makes her a top-tier candidate:

Straw polls are just organized bribery, with the campaigns buying the tickets and distributing them to supporters. (And, in fact, this is what I wrote before Ames.)

What they really show, many argue, is not where the philosophical heart of the party is, but the organizational abilities of the candidates.

Fine, I'll buy that. But why didn’t Paul get the same credit for his organizational abilities as Bachmann did for hers?

He points out that last time around finishing second was treated as a victory:

Four years ago, Mike Huckabee came in a bad second to Romney, losing by 13.4 percentage points. Huckabee managed to spin that into a victory at Ames and became a media darling.

But Paul almost wins the thing and he remains poison.

Simon's conclusion, though, is disappointing.  GOP operatives and officials were responsible for determining the winners/losers storyline:

So don’t blame the media. Here are Republicans, presumably Republican operatives, who said if one candidate wins, the contest is significant, but if another wins the contest is not credible.

That doesn't add up. Reporters don't have to take their marching orders from party operatives.

But if you want the definitive take-down of the corporate media's Paul-blocking top-tierism watch this segment from the Daily Show:

Starting about a minute in, this clip from last night's Daily Show is must-see media criticism.

On the Fox News morning show Fox & Friends, it is revealed that the Kingdom Foundation is a dangerous Saudi organization that, according to guest Dan Senor, funds radical madrassas and has also funded Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam at the heart of the "Ground Zero Mosque"  controversy.

Unmentionned by Fox, but revealed by Jon Stewart, is that the Kingdom Foundation is run by Al-Waleed bin Talal, who also happens to be...one of the NewsCorp's largest shareholders (Fox's parent company).

The clip includes a hilarious debate over whether Fox's coverage of this story makes them evil, or merely stupid. It's a tough call.

Do they still teach the First Amendment in law school?

That's what you have to wonder when you see a lawyer for the Obama administration's Justice Department arguing that statements made by former Vice President Dick Cheney in the Scooter Libby probe ought to be kept secret because a future vice president might refuse to speak to a future investigation out of concern "that it's going to get on the Daily Show" (Washington Post, 6/19/09).

Really?  That's how we're going to ensure that officials cooperate with criminal investigations, by using government secrecy to guarantee that their statements will never be subjected to criticism in the media? Yes, that's the plan, according to "career civil division lawyer" Jeffrey M. Smith.

Here's an alternate plan: How about instead we allow the media to criticize and even satirize the statements of public officials, and make sure that officials cooperate with criminal investigations by subpoenaing them if they refuse to do so? Nope--that would be "unseemly," according to Smith.

It does make you wonder what they're teaching in constitutional law classes--particularly at the University of Chicago.

Jon Stewart (3/17/09) has found Glenn Beck expressing his philosophy in what may be its purest form:

Believe in something!  Even if it's wrong! Believe in it!

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.

Writing on CounterPunch, former Wall Street insider Pam Martens notes (3/16/09) that

the academics and economists (none of whom ever worked a day on Wall Street) have been telling us in op-eds and speeches and testimony before Congress that the crumbling Wall Street structure results from bundled subprime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps and asset-backed securities.

Meanwhile, "in a week’s time, [the Daily Show's Jon Stewart] has zeroed in, like a heat-seeking missile, on the core of Wall Street's malady.... The core of Wall Street's corruption might well be the same core that it has drawn the darkest curtain around: trading." Writes Martens:

None of the toxic instruments would have grown to a problem capable of collapsing the country’s financial system if their trading had been regulated, transparent and fairly reported on by mainstream media. The security instruments were never the problem; how they were traded was the problem. For example, the mortgage and debt securities were, in reality, junk bonds but they were tradedas triple A. They were not traded on an exchange where price discovery would have shown them to be junk bonds, they were traded in an opaque over the counter market. In the case of credit default swaps, they were traded in a market created by the very firms who needed to hide for as long as possible (while executives reaped windfall compensation and bonuses) the dubious pricing of the securities and gargantuan amounts being issued.

Martens sees it as "testimony to how Orwellian life has become under the outrages of Wall Street hubris" that it takes "a comedian, who poses as an anchor on a fake news show, [to] grab the reins of the Wall Street investigation from the actual investigators in Congress."

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.

Prefacing a Daily Show segment (3/4/09) with his version of current big-media reporting: "Recent opinion polls indicate that six weeks into Barack Obama's administration, the American public thinks they approve of his performance--but it turns out they're wrong," Jon Stewart runs clips of celebrity news figures like Fox's Sean Hannity asking, "How did the market react to this latest liberal spending spree? Well, the Dow Jones industrial average dropped almost 400 points," and of Fox Business Network's Neil Cavuto asking, "The Dow is down more than 1,500 points, nearly 3,000 since Election Day, now is this a vote of no confidence in this administration?" Mocking this common media canard, Stewart even calls the Dow

a real-time cause-and-effect precision barometer of how the president is doing. It's been that way for years. For example--little-known fact--Wall Street hated Ronald Reagan: Look at the numbers the day he got inaugurated. And they hated it when Truman announced we'd won World War II. And, to give you an idea of what a finely tuned measure of America's national mood the Dow is, when the Titanic sunk? Through the roof!

Stewart's take-away moral: "So what seems to be being suggested here is that opinion polls don't matter; the stock market is the only rational, objective indicator of a commander in chief's performance." Read the contrary evidence in FAIR's new Media Advisory: "What the Dow Isn't: Stocks Misused As 'Scorecard' of White House Policy" (3/5/09).