MAHER: [CNBC] is the channel that Wall Street watched all day. I think it’s much more than just a channel. I think it affects what happens on Wall Street. Why didn’t anyone there predict what was going to happen? [applause] Why didn’t somebody say, “Look, we’re in a bubble and it can’t last”?
BURNETT: I predicted you would ask this question. I think it’s a fair question…Pretty much everybody knew there was a housing bubble. We had done hour long programs on the housing bubble back in 2006. But, everyone knew there was a tech bubble too. It’s easy to say a bubble; you don’t know when it’s going to burst. And, I think that---the question of timing and magnitude---nobody got.
MAHER: We showed the chart of housing prices from 1890 and they go along pretty steady until the late ‘90s and then they just --- Anyone who looked at a chart like that must have known that it couldn’t last. And yet---I don’t know if people like Jim Cramer is helping when he says Obama is Lenin now.
…
BURNETT: It wasn’t just Wall Street. Wall Street was a big part of the problem, but it was everybody. It was an attitude of give me what I want now and I don’t have to pay for it. And it went through all of society. And it’s become now that that’s unacceptable to say that. That we always have to find just a few people to blame…
MAHER: …Yes, the average American person who took this, who couldn’t afford a mortgage and took it---He bears some responsibility. But, he’s not an expert on finance.
The reality is that business newsmen or financial journalists regard their job as one that involves giving a play-by-play analysis of the events as they unfold. Few consider it necessary to ask hard-hitting questions; few contemplate risking their career so that the public can know the information it needs to preserve their collective wealth, their society.
Stewart picked up on this when he said to Jim Cramer that CNBC was “blaming those who do not have the expertise.” He illuminated the idea that “the financial news industry is not just guilty of a sing of omission but a sin of commission” and that networks like CNBC “knew what the banks were doing and yet were touting it for months and months.”
Nobody has proven Stewart’s assertion that the entire network was aware of what was going on and so now they “pretend that this was some sort of crazy once in a lifetime tsunami that nobody could have seen [which] is disingenuous at best and criminal at worst" wrong.
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