The Daily Show on Wall Street

[Lucid]

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Comments? I thought it was awesome, hilarious and makes a good (and hilarious) point.

Agree? Disagree? Sharpening your pitchfork and lighting some torches to march on wall street? ;)

[Night Runner]

It would be funny if it weren't so sad... :irked: That's why I like the Daily Show and the Colbert Report - they expose hypocrisy by showing archive footage,revealing lies, inconsistency and, in this case, incompetence.

[Henry]

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Comments? I thought it was awesome, hilarious and makes a good (and hilarious) point.

Agree? Disagree? Sharpening your pitchfork and lighting some torches to march on wall street? ;)

Most of them are ESTP conmen.

Anyone that makes short-term stock market predictions is an idiot. In the short term its a guessing game, in the long-term its a weighing mechanism.

[yondyr]

lol Lucid, 'cheap populism strangely arousing' hilarious!. It might as well be a comedy show were so many not in harm's way.
(btw I miss your B & W icon used previously, I found it awesome, though realise a wish for a change sometimes comes over us.)

[Jinxu]

Most of them are ESTP conmen.

Anyone that makes short-term stock market predictions is an idiot. In the short term its a guessing game, in the long-term its a weighing mechanism.

From experience, making short-term prediction is harder than making long-term ones.

The video speaks a lot of the truth that's been know for a while by traders. The mainstream media is consistently wrong on predicting the stock market. If you dig deeper, you will find that.

[Valiyn]

I would be sharpening my pitchfork....
.....but I can't afford one presently.

[Bobert]

I saw this on TV, and liked it!

But, Jim Cramer has his disclosure that his comments are his own and not that of CNBC.

[Prunesquallor]

This was awesome. Thank you.

It's almost hard to laugh, though, since it's so goddam...horrid...that people get away with all this shit.

[RBM]

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Comments? I thought it was awesome, hilarious and makes a good (and hilarious) point.

Agree? Disagree? Sharpening your pitchfork and lighting some torches to march on wall street? ;)


Yup, it's all those and more - certainly time for pitchforks ! But I don't expect the pitchforks to show up for 3 or 4 years. I think there is a lot of inertia to be diverted to private pockets at the cost of socialized risk.

I had seen it previously and had also come across some links suggesting it was more staged then impulsive.


Edit: To add

Just come across this and due to the 'pitchfork and torches' reference thought it would be appropriate here.

What's Happening in the Background (To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.)

...
And here's the key passage about how long the federal government will be willing to protect 'senior creditors'.
...
The report follows.

Josh Marshall's analysis:

The takeaway is that for now and for the foreseeable future they believe that the government will continue to keep the bondholders whole and insulate them from losses associated with the financial crisis. But things could get so bad that the 'willpower' is no longer there to keep making up for the losses with taxpayer money.

[blueback]

I saw a research report somewhere (I really need to get better at saving those references) which found that the people you see on TV are MORE likely to be wrong. They aren't just guessing wildly, they are actually likely to get it wrong (slightly).

The report concluded that the reason was the way they approached the problem. They are all "Big Idea" thinkers. They have one idea at a time and they apply it to absolutely everything. This means that they always know exactly what's going to happen and they can be very forceful and entertaining when expressing their opinions. . .so they get on TV. The people who are more likely to be right are the people with nuanced ways of thinking, but those people are much less entertaining and therefore much less likely to be on TV.

So, basically, you can figure out whether or not to listen to someone's advice by simply checking to see if they qualify their conclusion. If they are absolutely unequivocal, and they indicate no room for the vaguest hint of any other possibility (especially if they predict something dramatic rather than something ordinary) then they are probably wrong...not just flipping-a-coin wrong, but negatively-correlated-with-reality wrong.

[RBM]

blueback,

For example see Daniel Yergin of CERA (To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.) for one. TV is unhealthy for critical thinking, IMHO.

[Henry]

From experience, making short-term prediction is harder than making long-term ones.

The video speaks a lot of the truth that's been know for a while by traders. The mainstream media is consistently wrong on predicting the stock market. If you dig deeper, you will find that.

Picking short term trends isn't harder, its impossibiler because Mr. Market rules the roost. At the moment he's an ESFP with histrionic personality disorder, and then the media takes what he does and blows it out of proportion to jack their ratings.

[SeaCzar]

Bullshit from the media? Say its not so.

[Krazy P]

It is very tempting to find a bogey-man to blame for our current situation, but the answer, as it is in most things, is starring at you in the mirror.

Human beings, by their nature, are optimistic. This optimism, which can be seen in the simplest cases (like budgeting for a home remodeling) has a pattern in the economy. When the entire world gets too optimistic - the whole world economy gets caught in a speculative bubble. This optimism can best be described as a belief in the positive outcomes of our decisions.

This has happened often in regions of the world (Japan for example, in the late 80s) and happened world-wide this time around.

(Many might not know that the U.S. only had roughly 25% of the world's derivitives market. The other 75% was in the U.K. That means the troubles in the U.K. are that much worse - especially when you consider the relative size of the economies. So, Wall Street avoided some of the crap!)

Blaming "Wall Street" or Barney Frank or George Bush may make you feel better, but the real answer is human nature.

The question is - how to get through this very natural correction in the best way possible?

Here again, human nature takes over. It is in our nature to believe that if we DO something, we CAN make things better. Not doing anything to "fix" what's wrong is worse than doing something - anything - to make things better.

Again, our optimism, our belief in the positive outcome of decisions we make is manifest.

So, let's watch and see.

In the past in developing countries - when something like this happens - the recoveries have been much swifter. Why I wonder? Because the governments did not have the resources to DO anything. Left to its own natural devices, those economies have recovered more swiftly than economies in the developed world.

[LaoTzu]

I'd rather have seen $2T given to the taxpayers in a move for stimulus...

Where would they put it? .... In a bank...
What would they do with it? ...Majority would spend it...


And the end of that clip is priceless...

[Night Runner]

I'd rather have seen $2T given to the taxpayers in a move for stimulus...

That would be over $6,000 per person... Almost makes me wonder what it would look like - with everybody rushing to the stores to buy the latest super-duper-mega-hyper TV. Not unlike giving a beer to a recovering alcoholic. :(

[Henry]

That would be over $6,000 per person... Almost makes me wonder what it would look like - with everybody rushing to the stores to buy the latest super-duper-mega-hyper TV. Not unlike giving a beer to a recovering alcoholic. :(

No worse than giving the money to banks who made terribad loans.

[RBM]

No worse than giving the money to banks who made terribad loans.


Actually it is better. The US is built on consumerism. That's why Bush and now Obama stress to 'keep shopping'.

[LaoTzu]

My buddy was going on about this clip.... apparently it went on for the whole week....with Cramer finally showing up on Stewart and having his ass handed to him.

It was better than when Stewart took on Crossfire back in '04 !! (but same argument...media does not serve public...yadda...yadda..)

Part 1
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If you can find the lead-up vids with the back and forth, they are pretty funny too.

[RBM]

My buddy was going on about this clip.... apparently it went on for the whole week....with Cramer finally showing up on Stewart and having his ass handed to him.

It was better than when Stewart took on Crossfire back in '04 !! (but same argument...media does not serve public...yadda...yadda..)

Part 1
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If you can find the lead-up vids with the back and forth, they are pretty funny too.

I am a US political moderate and where I saw this first was the personal blog of a NC professional journalist. His readership has lots of left/right disagreements and the response to this was consistent.

The right doesn't want to reflect on it at all. Calling attention to the fact that snakeoil is being sold would cause infringement on their right to make a buck. The left says something should be done about the snakeoil salesman to protect the snakeoil buyers.

I thought Jon did a good job holding a really big mirror up to the subculture, for whatever good it'll do.

[Ool]

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If you don’t want the link to go dead thanks to Viacom throwing its weight around, post the link to the original site:

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[qwerty123]

If you don’t want the link to go dead thanks to Viacom throwing its weight around, post the link to the original site:



thank you Ool

no thank you Viacom

[eternaltriangle]

I actually found the entire affair FRIGHTENING.

Cramer, a loud bombastic (probably ENTJ) blowhard didn't defend himself at all on the Daily Show. Why? He knew he couldn't win - not because of Stewart's great argumentative prowess, but rather because he knew nobody in the media would be willing to risk the boos of Stewart's insane (and numerous) fans.

Stewart's main point was that Cramer was beholden to corporate CEO's, and traded his journalistic integrity for access. The implication there is that Cramer knew the market was about to tank but did nothing. YEAH RIGHT! What journalist in their right mind would avoid blowing the lid on the biggest story of the decade save, maybe, 9/11, just to maintain credibility with CEO's (who were about to be utterly discredited and disgraced).

Stewart showed a clip of Cramer talking about some of the intricacies of the market in a somewhat honest fashion, and argued you could draw a direct line from that kind of talk to what happened at AIG, etc. Utter bullcrap. Cramer wasn't talking about derivatives trading, he was talking about (if I recall) selling short or something like that. Stewart's prosecutorial tone masked what was essentially a red herring.

I think that episode was emblematic of a larger problem facing the United States - a problem that Cramer is part of, but Stewart is an even bigger part of. Soft news is replacing hard news, as the Stewarts, Limbaughs, O'Reilly's, Olbermanns, and so on replace your Walter Cronkites and Tim Russerts.

Personality-driven infotainment isn't dumbing down America (actually viewers of the Daily Show, Limbaugh, etc. score high on political knowledge tests), but it is vastly diminishing the accountability of the folks we get our news from. Jon Stewart repeatedly disavows any claim that he has journalistic obligations ("I run a fake news show"). Yet clearly with the umpteen times he "cuts to camera three" or overtly plays for partisan cheers rather than laughs, he is not a mere comedian any more than Lou Dobbs is a mere news anchor (Lou Dobbs pays CNN to run his show, but the way, and is a huge douche).

Reliance on soft news has other problems. It means we get the stories that are interesting, before the stories that are important. It means that our news comes from sources that, even if not extremely partisan, generally have extremely partisan audiences that they can't piss off (remember when Stewart made fun of Obama's president elect seal, and the audience responded with awkward silence). It also means that there really isn't the kind of fact-checking that goes on in the mainstream news. Even insofar as some of these personality-driven news outfits "call out" others (eg. Olbermann's "Worst person in the world"), the extremely partisan nature of these shows mean that very few people watch Olbermann AND O'Reilly.

Stewart's attacks on CNBC were ironic because they apply much more to Jon Stewart himself. The only difference is that nobody (except maybe Tucker Carlson) is willing to take on Stewart. Infotainment/soft news is probably here to stay. What we need our better critical listening skills from the public. Without that we will continue to see America grow ever more partisan, as our political leaders get less and less accountable (politicians are only accountable when a large percentage of the public consists of swing voters).

[CaffeineHeretic]

Stewart is a comedian. He is not "soft news", he is comedic commentary on the news. He is "fake news", and he is continuously upfront about that fact. As he so eloquently put it on "Crossfire" : "I follow a show of puppets making crank phone calls!"

It is a sad, sad, state of affairs when a comedian, on a "fake news" program, is the one being noted for asking the tough questions. Don't blame Stewart for asking the questions. If actual "hard news" reporters were doing their job, Stewart wouldn't be the only one asking them!

It is too late to ask Walter Cronkite to come back?

[eternaltriangle]

Stewart is a comedian. He is not "soft news", he is comedic commentary on the news. He is "fake news", and he is continuously upfront about that fact. As he so eloquently put it on "Crossfire" : "I follow a show of puppets making crank phone calls!"


You sir are exactly the kind of person who is being ruined by soft news. The fact that he is preceded by an innocuous show, and that he tells you his show is innocuous does not make it so. In fact, you AGREE in your next sentence when you say:

"It is a sad, sad, state of affairs when a comedian, on a "fake news" program, is the one being noted for asking the tough questions. Don't blame Stewart for asking the questions. If actual "hard news" reporters were doing their job, Stewart wouldn't be the only one asking them!"

To you, it doesn't matter that a lot of people get their news from the Daily Show; it doesn't matter that Jon Stewart clearly believes that he is "keeping the media honest" and has a clear editorial position; it doesn't matter that Jon Stewart rants about issues - without any comedic intent - ALL THE TIME; it doesn't matter that half the time he gets cheers (partisan ones) not laughs. No, he is just a comedian. You can't criticize him and he has no journalistic obligations. We must all just sit down and laugh.

Even if Stewart was "just a comedian" he would need to be deconstructed and criticized. Political comedy is subversive for the very reason that it conveys messages in a medium that people tend not to think critically about. I mean I can't begin to fathom the impact of the Simpsons on America (at least the first 8 seasons of the Simpsons), though the Simpsons was relatively non-partisan (Republicans were generally evil, Democrats generally corrupt/incompetent).

Yet, as I've argued, Stewart is clearly not "just a comedian" (incidentally his comedic range seems to extend to making sarcastic faces... no wonder he tanked in the Oscar's twice), he takes on the role of the newsman... very very badly. His interviews of important figures are usually fawning - his toughest question to Musharraf was "if Bush ran against bin Laden in an election in Pakistan who would win?" His toughest question to Obama and Kerry was "so like, being a candidate, is that hard?" In the presidential election (in September) he lobbed 211* jokes at McCain-Palin, versus 29 at Obama-Biden. The main targets of his crusade for a better America have been... a stupid debate show with low ratings, and a business advice show with corny sound-effects. Wow. Way to stick it to the man. Indeed, Stewart only went after such big fish as CNBC after they criticized the president (they've been making shite stock predictions for a looong time, Jon). On a more personal note, while I do not disagree strongly with Stewart on a lot of issues, his opinions are generally facile and ill-founded. X is bad, don't do X (and don't get me started on his simplistic view of economics).

I actually agree with you, CaffeineHeretic, we do need Walter Cronkite back (or you Americans need to start watching Canadian news - look up Peter Mansbridge, that man breathes journalistic integrity). I would add Tim Russert and Peter Jennings to that list too. Charlie Rose and Jim Lehrer are both positive forces for news. But so long as soft news, or fake news or whatever you want to call it, sucks all the oxygen out the room for serious journalism, it ain't going to happen. That is why I suggest we replace the shows of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, and Lisa Maddow and pit each in gladiatorial combat** against the other (Maureen Dowd, William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and Arianna Huffington can go too). With their respective shows/columns I already know what is going to happen: they will conclude that Bush/Obama is stupid/socialist while their guy is great. With gladiatorial combat at least a little suspense.

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**My preferred method would follow the film Battle Royale. They would all be placed on an island and randomly given different weapons or tools.

[JohnDoe]

I actually found the entire affair FRIGHTENING.

Cramer, a loud bombastic (probably ENTJ) blowhard didn't defend himself at all on the Daily Show. Why? He knew he couldn't win - not because of Stewart's great argumentative prowess, but rather because he knew nobody in the media would be willing to risk the boos of Stewart's insane (and numerous) fans.

Stewart's main point was that Cramer was beholden to corporate CEO's, and traded his journalistic integrity for access. The implication there is that Cramer knew the market was about to tank but did nothing. YEAH RIGHT! What journalist in their right mind would avoid blowing the lid on the biggest story of the decade save, maybe, 9/11, just to maintain credibility with CEO's (who were about to be utterly discredited and disgraced).

Stewart showed a clip of Cramer talking about some of the intricacies of the market in a somewhat honest fashion, and argued you could draw a direct line from that kind of talk to what happened at AIG, etc. Utter bullcrap. Cramer wasn't talking about derivatives trading, he was talking about (if I recall) selling short or something like that. Stewart's prosecutorial tone masked what was essentially a red herring.


The problem with Cramer is that on one hand he stands around saying his show is for entertainment, but clearly hes trying to give investment advice. The only problem is theres no way you can have any clue what the number of stocks he tries to handle will do. Hes basically guessing for a bunch of them, and then people make monetary decision based on what he says (WHICH THEY SHOULDN'T, but CNBC advertises the show as quasi investment advice). To put it bluntly, CNBC needs to advertise the show as more entertainment and less investment advice, or Cramer needs to take the show more seriously.

[eternaltriangle]

We can put Jim Cramer in the gladiator ring too. Actually, his tourettes-fired rage would come in handy.

(for those that don't think Cramer showed a lot of restraint on the Daily Show - incidentally this clip also strongly counters the picture Jon Stewart painted of Cramer)
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(and Cramer going nuts)
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[CaffeineHeretic]

You sir are exactly the kind of person who is being ruined by soft news.

And you sir, are exactly the kind of person who likes to paint with large, smug, overbearing strokes, making negative assumptions whilst aspiring to some sort of pseudo-intellectual elitism.

But, then again, I'm just assuming that...

To you, it doesn't matter that a lot of people get their news from the Daily Show; it doesn't matter that Jon Stewart clearly believes that he is "keeping the media honest" and has a clear editorial position;

To be absolutely clear, anyone who takes news commentary (i.e. the horrid demon "soft news"), for actual news, is an idiot. Commentary is commentary, news is news, and despite the attempts of Fox, MSNBC, CNBC, et all, to blend them into some sort of news Frankenstein, it is still easy to tell the difference for those who make a little bit of effort. That so many fail to do so is (again) a sad, sad state of affairs. But I will not blame the court jester for that state of affairs. I will blame the masses for their intellectual laziness.

And, once again, to be absolutely clear, I am not congratulating Stewart for his "asking tough questions." The mere fact that anyone would congratulate him for those "tough questions" is a severe condemnation of the actual news services. If they were doing their job properly, these "tough questions" would have been asked months ago, and Stewart would have had to find other material.

[LaoTzu]

Stewart's point was that CNBC promoted itself as an authority. Yet failed to do any adequate research or actual journalism in the past. He simply stopped short of calling them the propaganda wing of wall-street. (Inferred it, and it's basically true)

Instead of requiring new personalities to give us straight facts and unbiased journalism; we need to break up the media oligopoly that controls all newspaper/television/radio in America. You will still have people with agendas, but you will also have dozens of others out there fact checking the fact checkers.

[JohnDoe]

Stewart's point was that CNBC promoted itself as an authority. Yet failed to do any adequate research or actual journalism in the past. He simply stopped short of calling them the propaganda wing of wall-street. (Inferred it, and it's basically true)\.

This is the problem. Cramer is actually pretty good entertainment. But CNBC does not promote it as entertainment. CNBC promotes Cramer as an authority on the stock market who is going to help people make good decisions.

[eternaltriangle]

This is the problem. Cramer is actually pretty good entertainment. But CNBC does not promote it as entertainment. CNBC promotes Cramer as an authority on the stock market who is going to help people make good decisions.

I would extend that to a lot of stuff coming out of the news-media today - the problem is that it looks like this crap sells - the market prefers happy meals to foie gras (I'm really going for that elitist label). I don't think separating the news from commentary makes a big difference either - there certainly are people that prefer to get their news from commentators because it gives them a ready-made opinion (I am reminded of my own undergrads who always want to be told what they should think, like they are studying for their SAT's).

I am not sure that breaking up media oligopolies helps either. Even if you have fact-checkers, more passive people aren't likely to use them (and more likely you would have partisan fact-checkers that tell you when the other guys are wrong).

Moreover, smaller networks may not have surplus resources necessary to invest in public goods like fact-checking. Indeed, a lot of the reason you have personality-driven news is that with more and more channels, it is easier and easier to target niche audiences. By contrast, in say, 1960, there were only a few channels, which had to target everybody - they couldn't afford to be Fox or MSNBC because they would alienate half their potential audience. The same is still true in Canada, where the number of channels with national news-teams is smaller (there are three, and one of those is publicly funded).

[JohnDoe]

I would extend that to a lot of stuff coming out of the news-media today - the problem is that it looks like this crap sells - the market prefers happy meals to foie gras (I'm really going for that elitist label). I don't think separating the news from commentary makes a big difference either - there certainly are people that prefer to get their news from commentators because it gives them a ready-made opinion (I am reminded of my own undergrads who always want to be told what they should think, like they are studying for their SAT's).
.

Yes but people do not make economic decisions off most news, so there are no real implications besides uninformed voters. People do make decisions off what CNBC says, making it a much bigger deal.

[eternaltriangle]

Yes but people do not make economic decisions off most news, so there are no real implications besides uninformed voters. People do make decisions off what CNBC says, making it a much bigger deal.

People that are actually investing typically have more sources of information than CNBC. I mean in order to buy stocks you generally need a broker, at the very least.

Voting and political behavior is a different story - often people do rely on only one news source. The problem of soft news isn't actually uninformed voters. The Pew found that viewers of such program actually tended to have high amounts of knowledge. The problem has more to do with reinforcing partisanship. Well-informed voters that nonetheless only have one side of the story make politicians unaccountable. Why? Because partisans will back their guy regardless, and members of the other party will oppose the other guy regardless. There is no incentive to be accountable or to govern as a moderate.
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[JohnDoe]

People that are actually investing typically have more sources of information than CNBC. I mean in order to buy stocks you generally need a broker, at the very least.



I think you strongly overestimate the average retail investor.

[eternaltriangle]

That is entirely possible.

Incidentally, Rasmussen ran a pretty relevant poll quite recently.
30% of 18-29 year olds believe that satirical news shows are replacing traditional news.
21% say that shows like the Colbert Report and the Daily Show is at least somewhat influential in forming their opinions (how many more don't realize it is impacting how they form opinions?).

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[RBM]

That is entirely possible.

Incidentally, Rasmussen ran a pretty relevant poll quite recently.
30% of 18-29 year olds believe that satirical news shows are replacing traditional news.
21% say that shows like the Colbert Report and the Daily Show is at least somewhat influential in forming their opinions (how many more don't realize it is impacting how they form opinions?).

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The father of PR Edward Bernays ( nephew to Sigmund Freud ) would be proud. See Century of the Self, by Adam Curtis (To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.) for background.