Living & Arts

Cramer vs. Stewart: Comedy Central smackdown!

In print | March 19, 2009

It was billed as a smackdown between two television titans. The weeklong feud of the century. Bigger than Lincoln vs. Douglas, Capulet vs. Montague, possibly even Paris vs. Nicole. It was… Cramer vs. Stewart!

For everyone out there who didn’t spend the entirety of spring break watching Comedy Central while eating a truly mind-boggling quantity of cheese-based food, the previous paragraph was a reference to the weeklong Battle of the Sound Bytes between Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” and Jim Cramer, the crazy bald guy who can be found on CNBC’s “Mad Money” alternately screaming “Buy! Buy! Buy!” and hurling small plastic animals at you through the TV screen. In essence, the feud was a battle between a financial expert (because Cramer is quite knowledgeable, despite all the antics) whose show too often sacrifices real reporting in the name of entertainment and an entertainer whose self-proclaimed “fake” news show often contains better analysis than anything on actual news shows.

The feud started when Stewart, in a piece on how CNBC had ignored all signs of the impending stock market crash, showed a clip of Cramer telling viewers to buy Bear Sterns a mere week before the entire brokerage firm collapsed. Cramer came back swinging, accusing Stewart of using his remarks out of context; Stewart countered by finding more footage of Cramer exhorting his viewers to buy Bear, and by the end of the week the entire nation (or at least that fraction which avidly follows feuds between cable television personalities) had picked a side, and Cramer had agreed to appear on The Daily Show to defend himself. Cramer’s mistake was not realizing that, behind the funny faces and fart noises, Jon Stewart is an intelligent and well-informed man who is not afraid to ask tough questions.

This is not to say that Stewart is usually anything other than a genial interviewer. He rarely presses his guests for anything more difficult than the release date of their latest book. However, when he wants to, Jon can hit just as hard as anyone else in the business, and I mean anyone; when Stewart is at his fiery best, I doubt that even the most seasoned newsman could touch him. (If you need proof of this, just ask Tucker Carlson; that is, if he can even bring himself to speak about the day when Stewart tore him to shreds during an appearance on “Crossfire.”) Cramer, like Carlson, probably came on the show expecting to endure some jokes at his expense and then to return home unscathed. He certainly wasn’t prepared for The Wrath of Jon.

I could summarize the interview for you, but Stewart did it better by saying, at the end of the show, “I hope that was as uncomfortable for you to watch as it was to do.” Don’t worry Jon, it was; I almost felt sorry for Cramer, who was forced to defend not just himself but CNBC as a whole. Jon started early and hit hard, and his guest was hard-pressed to fight back. Whenever Cramer attempted to defend himself, Jon had a clip that contradicted him, including a particularly damning moment in which Cramer defended and even encouraged the controversial practice of short selling. (Short selling, for the record, is when an investor sells stock he doesn’t actually own, betting that the price of the stock will go down, which allows the investor to purchase stock at a lowered price, making him a profit of the difference between the price at which he bought the stock and that at which he sold it. Just so you don’t get an inflated idea of my economic knowledge, I should say that this practice had to be explained to me with the kind of dumbed-down syntax and repetition generally reserved for a 3-year-old learning to use the toilet.)

Stewart was particularly hard on Cramer, and CNBC in general, for taking the words of CEOs at face value. When Cramer attempted to rationalize the way he defended Bear Sterns a mere week before the stock crashed, he said that the CEOs of Sterns lied to his face, a defense he reprised later when defending CNBC’s financial reporting as a whole. It took Stewart, the anchor of a fake news show, to point out that “You don’t just take their words for it at face value […] you actually then go around and try to figure stuff out.”

Some news outlets have criticized Stewart for taking such a serious, prosecutorial role on a show that is normally a lighthearted look at the issues that most of us take so seriously. I, however, agreed with Stewart when he told Cramer that the economy “is not a fucking game,” in response to Cramer’s assertion that his show is there in a large part to entertain people. The economic crisis is not a game to those who, in Stewart’s words, “were capitalizing your adventure by our pension and our hard-earned money,” and the host used that knowledge to tap into the frustration felt by American citizens who lost their savings because of Wall Street greed. The interview with Cramer was, essentially, an articulation of the frustration that most Americans feel, a howl of rage that was, at the least, an act of catharsis. It says something about the state of television journalism that it took a fake newsman to hold the financial press accountable.

Alex is a sophomore who does not endorse shortselling as a way to make a quick profit. You can reach her at aisrael1@swarthmore.edu.