or the most part, it seems like financial "journalists" who appear on television are embedded in this crisis like journalists were embedded in the U.S. military during the Iraq War. There seems to be an understood agreement (or maybe a contractual obligation) to not beat up on Wall Street, to not fan the flames of populism.

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While the dust may have settled from the two and a half segment interview between Jon Stewart and Mad Money’s Jim Cramer from CNBC on Thursday, I doubt that anyone could be satisfied with what has occurred in the aftermath. The press reaction to what was said has proven that financial news as entertainment or infotainment harms society and impacts the level of conversation and discourse severely.

Nearly a week later, has anyone seen signs that CNBC is going to return to the fundamentals of reporting? Is CNBC going to hire a few vibrant muckrakers to boost ratings and break the monotony that financial tickers and incessant talk of financial data creates on the network?

For the most part, it seems like financial "journalists" who appear on television are embedded in this crisis like journalists were embedded in the U.S. military during the Iraq War. There seems to be an understood agreement (or maybe a contractual obligation) to not beat up on Wall Street, to not fan the flames of populism. 

A coalition of outspoken media critics and progressives has formed and continues to form under the name, “Fix CNBC.” In response to Jon Stewart's Edward R. Murrow-esque interview, the coalition calls upon Americans to push “CNBC to do strong, watchdog journalism.”

A petition invites Americans to urge CNBC to ask tough questions to Wall Street, debunk lies, and report the truth instead of conducting “PR for Wall Street” and instead of being “obsessed with getting “access” to failed CEOs,” which has to the willfull passing on of misinformation to the public for years. 

But, can CNBC or any network be reformed? Why should Americans seek to reform CNBC?

First, we need to ask ourselves if we the people need a financial news network to, on a 24 hour basis with 17 hours of live television, report what is happening in the current financial crisis. News outlets traditionally have existed because people want to consume the journalism being put out by those who work at the outlet. 

If CNBC has no value for Americans, maybe we should be advocating that people simply turn off the television and just rely on several Google searches on the Internet to find out what is really happening?

Google searches may be a way to address CNBC's and other financial news network's failings, but if we turn it off, my intuition tells me it will just get worse.

What CNBC does to pervert the public airwaves benefits the Wall Streeters who pollute our nation with their greedy capitalistic free market bureaucratic rhetoric, philosophy, and ideology. 

Watching the network makes it possible to document what is being said, attack the "socialism is America's future" or the "those who took out mortgages and couldn't pay them are responsible" rhetoric that creates fear and insecurity and shifts the blame from Wall Street, and it makes it possible to suggest concrete reform so that America can have a real source of financial journalism.

What follows is a lengthy compilation of reporting on CNBC. As a result of financial pundits' choice to embed themselves in our financial apocalypse and cover it as if it were a hurricane or a basketball game at the Madison Square Gardens arena, citizen muckrakers must do their civic duty and step up and do the job CNBC and other financial news network journalists are failing to do. 

They must create the discussion necessary for society to survive.

This article is lengthy because news networks like CNBC fail the American people on a daily basis. Enjoy.

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Sunday on "Meet the Press"

Sunday, on Meet the Press, David Gregory and an “economic and political roundtable”, which consisted of The Week’s David Frum, BBC’s Katty Kay, CNBC’s Steve Liesman, and PBS’s Tavis Smiley, brought up the interview between Stewart and Cramer on Thursday night.

GREGORY: …And, Steve, I want to first pose this question to you.  A nerve was touched this week.  Jon Stewart on the "The Daily Show" raised some really tough questions for CNBC and other financial journalists about who was out there before this crisis came upon us to, to sound the alarm and say what was happening in our financial industry was fundamentally unsound?  And so it goes to a question, I guess, Steve, of who can you point to in financial journalism who, you know, would get the award for sounding the alarm and saying, "Hey, wait a minute, guys, there's something we really ought to be paying attention to here"?
MR. LIESMAN:  Well, first of all, that nerve was right back here, right in the back of my neck.MR. GREGORY:  Yeah.
MR. LIESMAN:  Which is the one that was touched.  Look, I, I can't--see, there's a spokesman for a CNBC.  That's not my job.  I'm not management, I'm a reporter on the staff.
MR. GREGORY:  And this is broader--this is not just about CNBC.
MR. LIESMAN:  And it's...
MR. GREGORY:  It's about financial journalism.
MR. LIESMAN:  I've been reporting on the subprime crisis since 2006.  I was--I did investigative work in 2007 that said the subprime crisis, despite what the Treasury secretary and the Federal Reserve chairman were saying, was going to spread beyond that.  I think there's a lot of reporters at CNBC who've done a lot of work on that.  I was a finalist for the Emmys when it came to that and my reporting in 2006, 2007.  There are reporters at the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times all who have done great work on the subprime crisis.
Could we have screamed louder?  Almost certainly.  Were--did we explain enough what was going on?  Probably not.  But we were out there, we were doing it. The fact that they didn't notice is not my problem.
MR. FRUM:  It was...
MS. KAY:  I think part of the reason this is being--caught such fire in the American public this week is that we saw this in 2003 with the run-up to the war in Iraq.
MR. GREGORY:  Mm-hmm.
MS. KAY:  Where there was a failure of political journalists to ask the tough questions of the administration, as we went into Iraq, about weapons of mass destruction.  President Bush was not hauled over the coals in the way that, for example, Tony Blair was back in Britain.  But in this case it's even more complicated, because we rely on financial journalists.  Most of us, and the American public in general, this is very complicated stuff.  We don't have the jargon, we don't have the technical expertise, so we have to have the financial journalists acting as the people that...(unintelligible)...power.
MR. GREGORY:  …I want to stay on this question of accountability with regard to the financial press generally and what could have been done.  Because what's left out of this conversation is average Americans who were taking the money, who thought, you know, on a salary of $40,000, $50,000...
MR. FRUM:  Yeah.  Right.
MR. GREGORY:  ...they could afford a $400,000 mortgage.  So it was all around.  What should have been done or said, and at what point?
MR. FRUM:  The administration that was in power at the time, Bush administration, which I served, had a problem through those years, which was there was not a lot of good economic news that affected the ordinary person. Incomes were flat, you could see the debt levels rising.  There was one, there was one story, however, that you could tell that was a positive story, and that was the increase in the assets held by the average family because of the housing bubble.  And nobody wanted to get in the way of that.  Not, not the administration, not Congress.  Because if, if they did, what other good news would there be? And it's true that the financial press has tabloidized itself.  And the multiplication of cable channels has meant that we, we talk about the news in a less serious way in all kinds of ways.
MR. GREGORY:  And we have The Washington Post now folding its business section into the front page, so we have less financial journalism.
…MS. KAY:  But the main issues are, are...
MR. GREGORY:  Quickly here, and then I want to get into something else.
MS. KAY:  ...that journalists are there to ask tough questions, whether is it...
MR. SMILEY:  Exactly.
MS. KAY:  ...the president who's in office or whether it's the businesses that they're talking to everyday who are their sources.  And I think that's what happened.  We--what are we here for?  What are we paid for as journalists?  We're paid to ask the tough question and then to ask the follow-up question if we don't feel we got the answer.
MR. GREGORY:  Steve, final question of the--was what was wrong in the financial system, was it knowable, was it discoverable?
MR. LIESMAN:  Yes, it was.  It was way too much excess.  Here's, here's the, here's the easy thing you could have known:  Any time capital chases investments, you know you're in for a hard fall.  It should be investment ideas that are looking for money.  That's the normal way of the world.  This was all backwards, it was the other way around, and that was how you could have known we were headed for a hard fall.

Much can be taken from the roundtable talk about Stewart and the state of financial journalism. A few questions come to my mind.

Why is it that the BBC journalist seems to understand the state of financial journalism better than the other members of the roundtable?

What happens when journalists fail to report what is happening because they do not want to get in the way of the “good news” which is unfolding for average citizens?

Why do members of the press who critique the media (in this case, David Gregory) focus on quantity rather than quality when addressing the state of financial journalism?

And, how come Liesman is allowed to diagnose why the economy is the way it is right now and not be held accountable for being silent at CNBC when the collapse was occurring?

I know, I know. Liesman said he covered the subprime crisis. But, what about the subprime crisis was he covering?

A LexisNexis search for “Steve Liesman” in the News Transcripts category does not yield much truth telling. In fact, what one can gather is that Liesman (as well as others) were like the journalists embedded with U.S. soldiers in Iraq: They were concerned about access and less concerned about the questions & answers in the interviews with officials whom they had gained access to.

This news story on CNBC boasts about the fact that Liesman can get interviews with "Fed officials."

Liesman himself is bringing us an important Fed moment this week. On Friday, Liesman interviews Chicago Fed President Michael Moskow on "Squawk Box." This marks Liesman's 13th exclusive on-camera interview with a Fed official. You may recall the market-moving interview Liesman had last month with Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker, who said he didn't see inflation coming down.

Interestingly, Liesman raised the topic of nationalizing U.S. banks in February. This might have led to some truth digging. Unfortunately, Liesman let the idea of nationalizing U.S. banks rest after Brian Williams passively and nonchalantly reacted to Liesman’s remarks (which can be heard in this video).

Blame the Little Guy Who Mortgage Companies Tried to Make Quick Bucks Off Of

For the most part, the crew over at CNBC (and much of the press) has focused on the subprime mortgage aspect of the current financial apocalypse. The analysis provided points the finger all too often at the citizens who purchased loans or mortgages and were unable to afford them and knew they would not be able to pay for them.

One reaction to the Stewart-Cramer Interview from financial pundit James Pethokoukis, an official CNBC contributor who appears frequently on CNBC’s Kudlow & Company, Power Lunch, and The Call is particularly revealing.

There was a lively exchange last night on The Daily Show between Jon Stewart and CNBC's Jim Cramer, in which Stewart hammered Cramer and the network for being subservient to Wall Street and not alerting viewers to the coming meltdown. Cramer and the network can defend themselves, but what became clear to me is that Stewart really doesn't believe in the idea of a stock market where individuals can go to invest their money and build wealth over the long term. This, I think, is a revealing quote:

Isn't that part of the problem, selling this idea that you don't have to do anything? Anytime you sell people the idea that, sit back and you'll get 10 to 20 percent on your money, don't you always know that that's going to be a lie. When are we going to realize in this country that are wealth is work, that we're workers [That should be “our wealth”; typo from Pethokoukis’ transcription.]

Me:  So what is Stewart suggesting, that we "workers" just save insane gobs of money that we squirrel away into low-yielding savings accounts and rely on those savings and Social Security for our retirement? The only reason to do that is if you don't believe in the long-run soundness of the American economy. And if the American economy isn't dynamic over the long run, don't expect Social Security or Medicare to meet their meager promises.

Americans need to be building asset wealth, they need to think of themselves as "investors" and not just workers.  Even plenty of Democrats believe that, which is why many are pushing universal savings accounts. Now, of course, investors tend to be more conservative than folks without investment portfolios. So maybe that is what really bugs the liberal Stewart, as well as those Dems who want to get rid of 401(k) plans.

As I wrote recently:

In short, save the stock market, save the world. Indeed, while Americans should reduce their debt and save more, a good chunk of that savings needs to go into wealth-building assets. And by that I mean stocks and bonds. Obama needs to rekindle America's love affair with investing. Indeed, this could be a once-in-a-generation opportunity to let people invest some of their payroll taxes into the stock market. Buy low, sell high. Indeed, even many of left-of-center analysts contend that unless Rising Asia becomes Disappearing Asia, excess global labor supply will continue to push down hard on wages. Families have to earn income from assets as well as a job. Free-marketeers prefer Social Security privatization, while liberal might be more comfortable with government financed "baby bonds" for kiddies.

Pethokoukis provides an example of the prevailing ideology which overwhelms the news coverage of the unfolding financial apocalypse.

Like CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, who recently said, “Obama is declaring war on investors, entrepreneurs, small businesses, large corporations, and private-equity and venture-capital funds,” the dominating worldview is that you cannot go after the rich because the rich keep America the poor propped up and functioning. They employ the poor so the poor should not be angry at the rich's greed or corruption.

When you hear Jon Stewart talk about this “other market that’s occurring in the back room where giant piles of money are going in and out and people are trading them and it’s transactional and it’s fast and it’s ethically dubious and it hurts that long-term market” which many Americans have their 401Ks in, how can you not ask the question, “Why should I invest in a market that I know has this market operating which will inevitably gamble away and negatively impact my investment in the long term?”

More Blame for the Mortgage Owner

Erin Burnett, anchor on CNBC’s “Street Signs” and co-anchor on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher on March 6^th nearly a week before Stewart confronted Jim Cramer. Here is what was said while Burnett was participating in Maher’s panel.

 

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.

Networks Like CNBC Asked to Report on Wall Street in a Certain Manner

Many newspapers and reporters praised, and in fact, seemed to be lauding Stewart for his take down of Jim Cramer, but like he said in the interview when quoting Carly Simon, that wasn’t about Jim Cramer. It’s about what media reform and media studies organizations have been aware of for some time now.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), which supports the “Fix CNBC” campaign, published an update in Extra! in December 2008, “Remembering Caution After a Crisis”, by Janine Jackson and drew attention to the fact that financial news networks like CNBC were “being very careful in choosing words to describe the ongoing meltdown in financial markets—not because reporters should always choose their words with care, but because financial companies [were] “uniquely vulnerable” to a “loss of confidence” due to rumor, speculation or fear.”

Not only were networks like CNBC taking care to make sure that what could be considered bad news reported could have come from sources “that might have ulterior motives” but networks, specifically CNBC, “were subsequently criticized for filling the air with "Wall Streeters who were extolling stocks that those same analysts were privately calling 'crap’."

FAIR concludes that “much of big media has spent years stumping wildly for one bubble after the next, with nary a murmur to the effect that, as CNBC's on-air editor noted recently (New York Times, 9/22/08) about a federal takeover of bad mortgage loans, their "Wall Street sources . . . all have vested interests in this happening."

It should be no wonder that anchors like Burnett deflect the blame from Wall Street and seek to spread it evenly between average American investors, those who cannot pay their mortgage loans, and those on Wall Street who have contributed significantly to the crisis.

Media as "Behaviorists"

Glenn Greenwald, with his article, "There's Nothing Unique About Jim Cramer", got down to the element that the public should be most angry about.

[CNBC] would continuously put scheming CEOs on their shows, conduct completely uncritical "interviews" and allow them to spout wholesale falsehoods.  And now that they're being called upon to explain why they did this, their excuse is:  Well, we were lied to.  What could we have done?  And the obvious answer, which Stewart repeatedly expressed, is that people who claim to be "reporters" are obligated not only to provide a forum for powerful people to make claims, but also to then investigate those claims and then to inform the public if the claims are true.  That's about as basic as it gets.

Today, everyone -- including media stars everywhere -- is going to take Stewart's side and all join in the easy mockery of Cramer and CNBC, as though what Stewart is saying is so self-evidently true and what Cramer/CNBC did is so self-evidently wrong.  But there's absolutely nothing about Cramer that is unique when it comes to our press corps.  The behavior that Jon Stewart so expertly dissected last night is exactly what our press corps in general does -- and, when compelled to do so, they say so and are proud of it.

There's perhaps a better way of considering all that is wrong with financial networks (or news networks in general). 

Just over a month ago, political journalist and Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen, an NYU journalism professor and PressThink blogger, were on Bill Moyers Journal to discuss the state of media in America.  (To watch the video, go here.)

JAY ROSEN: Here's another way to look at it. The press is full of behaviorists. They don't know they're behaviorists, but they are.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

JAY ROSEN: A behaviorist is somebody who thinks that we can figure out what's going on by looking at probabilities and large numbers of people, and what tends to happen with those people. And politics runs on laws like that to a large extent. However, there's another aspect of politics, which is leadership, action, bringing something new into the world, starting something that didn't exist before. Having an idea nobody had before. Pushing it through.

Journalists, deep down, don't believe that action really works. But the real excitement of democratic politics is that something new can come into the world, because we decided it. Because there was an election. Because there's a new crowd in town.

And that's perhaps why Jon Stewart's interview resonates with so many Americans whether they are critical of the media or not, whether they are progressive or not. 

Try watching CNBC. It's a bombardment of facts and data with tons and tons of talk about the probability of this happening and the probability of this not happening and the likelihood that you might win if you invest here and the likelihood that you might lose if American taxpayers do not support giving money to this or that financial institution.

Consider what Jon Friedman at Marketwatch.com says, "To the public's dismay, CNBC often has looked like its mission was to make the news -- however grim it might be -- look like entertainment. The formula draws heavily on its slew of chatty hosts who would seem comfortable on ESPN's SportsCenter shooting the breeze about last night's basketball scores."

Andrew Tyndall hit the nail on the head with his analysis of CNBC:

The raison d'etre of a "financial" news network is to persuade its audience that the best measure of prosperity is the value of financial assets. To that end, the financial markets are assumed to be a rational, efficient and civic-minded method of assigning capital. With finance occupying the commanding heights, the real economy--labor, wages, commerce, business, trade, poverty, infrastructure--is covered by the financial networks as a secondary sideshow.

In that context, CNBC's fulsome cheerleading for a bull market--and its consternation in the face of the bear--has not been an error of judgment. It is a fact of its identity. CNBC is by nature unable to report a bubble in financial assets as bad news, even if it is fueled by lax monetary policy and reckless leverage. It is unable to report the bursting of that bubble as good news, even if that represents a return to sane levels of valuation and a productive allocation of capital.

If CNBC practiced objective journalism, with no rooting interest in the direction of stock prices, it would be an economics news network not a financial news network.

So, perhaps we got it all wrong. The American people should be calling for an economic news network to be established instead of asking for a financial news network to be reformed.

 

An Indiana University study showed in 2006 that The Daily Show has "as much substance as network coverage."

"A second-by-second analysis of the Daily Show's audio and visual content found considerably more humor than substance.... A similar analysis of network coverage found considerably more hype than substance in broadcast newscasts."

There's much to be done, many more questions to be asked, and a need for more interviews like Stewart's. 

Jim Cramer-style infotainment must not prevail. The people must tear it down piece by piece and build something as democratic as Internet news communities on the Internet so that solid investigative reporting can be routinely conducted and so that America's democracy can continue to be preserved and not severely impacted by America's crisis in capitalism.

Authors Bio:
Kevin Gosztola is managing editor of Shadowproof Press. He also produces and co-hosts the weekly podcast, "Unauthorized Disclosure." He was an editor for OpEdNews.com