Shot Down In Flames

Jon Stewart's almost forensic dissection of Jim Cramer's tips & "shenanigans", to use Cramer's own term, made for compelling viewing on the Daily Show, shown on More4 in the UK a short while ago (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/12/jim-cramer-on-daily-show-_n_174503.html ). Stewart was at pains to point out throughout the edited version of the interview that his beef lay not with Cramer himself, despite the crass & inaccurate reporting of the US MSM, nor, indeed, with Rick Santelli, whose "loser" rant in front of wealthy Chicago traders prompted the Daily Show's interest, & whose decision to bail out of an interview with Stewart led to his critique last week. Instead, the problem lay with channels like CNBC, which seem to think that having "access" to business leaders is all that counts. As for the journalism side of things, forget it. The end result of this approach is that CNBC's role is little more than that akin to a fluffer on a porn set.
Cramer squirmed visibly as Stewart warmed to his theme. Indeed, passages of the interrogation were almost Paxmanesque. As some of the posters on the Huffington Post site have pointed out, it could well be that CNBC extricate themselves from this awkward & embarrassing PR debacle by throwing Cramer to the wolves while the necks of all the others, including Santelli's, are saved.