Since the internet’s going to be abuzz this morning praising Jon Stewart for crushing Jim Cramer on “The Daily Show,” I thought now might be a good time to recall the last time Stewart did something similar: “Crossfire,” 2004.
You probably remember the outcome of that debacle: the show was canceled; gutted, ostensibly, by Stewart’s razor-sharp critique of its “partisan hacks.” The affair established muscle behind Stewart’s own punditry: “be careful, or not only will you get mocked, I’ll expose the ridiculousness of your situation to the point where you’ll have no choice but to pull the plug.”
Last night Stewart framed the situation in a way that Cramer accepted: both of them are entertainers, or “snake-oil salesmen,” and the only difference is that Stewart admits it. He made a similar remark to the “Crossfire” hacks, noting that his show is comedy and theirs purported to be a serious examination of the political environment. And just like with “Crossfire,” Stewart used that “honest” position to take Cramer apart, playing clips of the CNBC host’s hedge-fund days and driving home the insanity of ever taking advice from Jim Cramer on anything from whether that dress looks fat on you on up.
Great? Not really. Look at the post-“Crossfire” world of cable news. You have three networks engaged in varyingly-transparent degrees of partisan hackery in manic 24-hour-cycles. The vaunted pundit’s chairs of “Crossfire” are filled instead with boisterous “entertainers” like Chris Matthews or Sean Hannity with their own strong opinions as hosts and a rotating cast that includes Tucker Carlson (MSNBC), Paul Begala (CNN), and James Carville (CNN). The only “Crossfire” anchor that’s not doing exactly what he was doing four years ago in a more demure guise is Robert Novak, and that’s because he’s got brain cancer.
Jon Stewart, as he said both to “Crossfire” and to Cramer, is an entertainer, and while he’s able to use the jester’s position to take populist swings at the people who mislead their audiences, he has his own constraints: he has to be funny, four days a week, forty-some-odd weeks a year. In these fiendishly quick news cycles, being funny means being fresh. Once he’d slammed the “Crossfire” anchors’ heads collectively into their tables, he went on his merry way, gloated a little bit when the show was cancelled, and never again took a serious swing at the news networks that, hydra-like, grew four or five new “Crossfire”-esque shows to fill the void. It’d get tiresome. He doesn’t have the luxury (like, say, Nick Kristof) to devote a column a week or a constant barrage of stories to what he percieves as an injustice.
I feel pretty good after seeing Stewart beat down on Cramer. And to his credit, Stewart’s learned a bit from the mistakes he made in going after “Crossfire,” and hetried to hone his firepower not only on Cramer but CNBC’s broader practices. Yet the network probably knew Cramer was the lowest-hanging fruit, and Stewart took the bait, like any good comedian would, playing personal clips of Cramer’s and taking him apart piece by piece - it’s hard to resist picking on the loudmouth getting his much-deserved comeuppance. After this, CNBC can show a contrite (and maybe even cancelled) Cramer to the world, then quietly grow new shows with thinly-disguised similarities to Jim Cramer’s as Fox Business and Bloomberg step in to fill the void. Heck, Fox Business will probably gloat about how it stood up to “grandstanding socialism” or whatever. Jon Stewart offered pallative care, a good feeling without solving the problem.
What’ll happen next? Well, Jon Stewart’ll probably squeeze a few more quick jokes about it as the public’s interest turns to other affairs. Maybe he’ll gloat a bit if Cramer does get canned. But CNBC’s way of doing business will not change - if anything, they’re probably breathing a sigh of relief right now that Stewart took Cramer onto the show and browbeat him personally rather than succeeding in making the conversation about CNBC’s practices as a whole. If Stewart really wanted to change the situation, he should’ve said no to Cramer and demanded CNBC send over its top broadcast executive, or the joke reels would run every night - maybe even have a clock in the studio with the number of days CNBC had refused to cave to his demand.
But that probably wouldn’t’ve made quite as good television as two entertainers going at it. It’s a shame. I wonder how complacent we’ll be in 2012 when a rotating cast of pundits, like Rick Santelli and Jim Cramer, offer us time-filling platitudes on financial cable’s own “Situation Room,” or “Hardball.” Jon Stewart, at least, will have moved on.
March 13, 2009, 1:00am Comments
