When there shall be no more lies and all the words of falsehood put to shame
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What do Tomas de Torquemada, Judge Judy and King Solomon have in common with Jon Stewart? Not a lot. As judges, inquisitors and arbitrators of justice, they are clumsy louts. Forensic surgeon Stewart can have your bowels in a bucket before you can ask for a second opinion and you'll probably grin and shake his hand for it. Not only can Stewart stop a flotilla of excuses and denials, he does it with a smile and so skilfully that the newly disemboweled has to smile at the abject humiliation along with him.
Perhaps, like me, you've been following the feud between the Daily Show host and CNBC's Jim Cramer. Stewart has been serving up the sins and failures, misstatements and disastrous recommendations of Cramer all week like a roast pheasant on a silver platter, prompting Cramer to dissemble, dissimulate, deny and attack like a politician. Last night however was the end of it.
For those who haven't seen it, here it is from Raw Story It's long, too long to post here, but worth your time and we may never see such skill in action again.
Perhaps Stewart should have received an invitation to occupy Russert's chair.
ReplyDeleteIt was brutal. It made me ALMOST feel bad for Cramer as he was the face of CNBC during that interview. Stewart and Colbert are like the Fool's in some of Shakespeares plays: there for comedic effect but the only ones telling the truth.
ReplyDeleteRussert was an amateur in comparison. Humorous or not, it was like watching Manolete in the bull ring or even the Dog Whisperer staring a mad pit bull into submission. Cramer had no out, no refuge, no room to wriggle out of it.
ReplyDeleteHe should be on the Supreme Court.
Stewart was unbelievable. He is the best commentator in the nation. He has set the bar for true journalism very high.
ReplyDeleteI watched the interview earlier tonight and what really gets to me is that Stewart, who is supposedly doing satire, is the only one who is really opening his mouth up to say what needs to be said and to the people who need to hear it. Seriously, "Wall Street" journalists should be fired and go off somewhere with the political yakkers who will say whatever anyone wants to hear so that they can still be paid to wear suits and talk with an earpiece. Shameful.
ReplyDeleteOne of the best questions was when Cramer said that, OH NO, CEOs lied to him. Stewart's retort: You're supposed to check out what they say and not just parrot it. Cramer nods. Seriously, at least stand up for yourself.
The Octopus is taking odds on how long Cramer will last at CNBC.
ReplyDeleteIts funny how much truth you can uncover with a joke and a smile....
ReplyDeleteCramer is probably the most public face of CNBC and so they are parading him around trying to gauge the damage.
Its hard for CNBC to sell themselves as journalists when all they are is pimps for Wall Street
No harder than it is for Fox to call themselves fair and balanced, much less a news network, when all they do is read propaganda and crib things off Republican blogs without investigation.
ReplyDeleteThey all should broadcast disclaimers and warnings revealing that it's all entertainment and bad for the nation.
A suitably Elizabethan topic, I must say, this business of hanging, drawing, and quartering of manifest and confirmed malefactors. Anyhow, yes, I saw Stewart's critiques of that economist fellow – seems to me that the series of clips shown to support the case were devastating and unanswerable. At least until recently, the beauty of being a "commentator" or "expert" seems to have been that no matter what one said—no matter how hopelessly wrong-headed and/or morally compromised one's statements turned out to be, it made no difference in terms of future commentatorship or expertness. The news networks would just keep coming back for more. How wrong did a person have to be about the war in Iraq or the economy (or any number of other things) to lose all credibility? Infinitely wrong, apparently. But perhaps that pattern is susceptible to change. Jon Stewart is doing good work.
ReplyDeleteOn the more general subject of satirical approaches to the news, I have a more limited appreciation—I seldom watch The Daily Show or Colbert, even though when I do I find them effective and entertaining. It's just that I overdose rather easily on edginess: a little of it is fun, but it shouldn't really be necessary to treat events and personages that way to get us to question the most undeservedly accepted or "orthodox" lines of thought: in the back of my mind is that sustained satire reduces too easily to a "pox on both your houses" approach to politics. The truth does not always (or even usually) lie between two supposedly extreme ends of a given political spectrum of ideas, but making nearly everything the object of sustained mockery may encourage us to think that it does. That said, hats off to Stewart for effectively exposing some people who have been making the most inane remarks imaginable and getting away with it for a long time.
The truthiness will be revealed when we learn which one of them gets the bonus.
ReplyDelete"The truth does not always (or even usually) lie between two supposedly extreme ends of a given political spectrum of ideas, but making nearly everything the object of sustained mockery may encourage us to think that it does."
ReplyDeleteSo does the "fair and balanced" approach.
Yes -- I would say the same of both, though there is of course much potential for good in the mockers, whereas the fair-and-balanced-ists seem to incapable of saying anything sane....
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