You should really watch this interview. It's the culmination of a week's worth of brick-throwing on both sides that ends with Jon Stewart utterly demolishing Jim Cramer and CNBC, and Cramer pretty much totally owning up to his network's failures. I gotta say, props to Cramer who treated this interview as less of an entertainment showdown, and more of a chance to get serious and face the music.
At the very end, Stewart tells a story about his mother that alludes to something we really need to address: after all the years of compound interest and all the following market losses, would all of those people who trusted the financial community and conventional wisdom, all those who put their retirement savings in the stock market (or whose conventional retirement plans were phased out in favor of 401(k)'s), would they have been better off had they just left all that money in a plain jane savings account at their local bank? Because if so, then we seriously need to talk about the fact that 401(k)'s have now been shown to entail a huge amount of risk.
2 comments:
i agree that Cramer showed a lot of guts and class to take on that interview and do it in the fashion that he did.
Stewart's research team and prep are proving themselves to be the top of the heap, and Gibbs even took a question about this that was prefaced with the notion that this interview was "serious journalism" - which is pretty astounding when you consider the source is a white-house beatwriter and the subject is a comedy show.
I'm starting to stew a bit on the future of journalsim, and the more I think about it the more I realized that I have more questions than answers.
To the interview: Stewart hit the nail on the head.
to Rene's Comment: I think the fact that all media is now owned by big corporations is starting to show. It poked it's ugly little head a bit with FOX a couple of years ago but now it is undeniable.
the upshot is that blogs exist, the problem is that now blogs need to move into a real investigatory mode and not just a "comment on what's out there mode." Problem two is distinguishing between BS and blogs that really investigate. Newsprint is dying, and the websites attached to them are losing credibility among the educated.
So I guess now we just need to hire some uncorrupted economists, lawyers, and politicians.
That's so hard let's just be content with Stewart bashing what's out there.
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