Glenn Greenwald: There Is Nothing Unique About Jim Cramer (Reminiscent Of Pre-Iraq War Coverage)

[Hissyspit]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/13/cramer/index.html

FRIDAY MARCH 13, 2009 08:09 EDT

There's nothing unique about Jim Cramer

Jon Stewart is being widely celebrated today and Jim Cramer/CNBC widely mocked -- both rightfully so -- for Stewart's devastatingly adversarial interview of Cramer (who, just by the way, is a Marty Peretz creation). If you haven't yet seen the interview, you can and should watch it here; if you watch only one segment, watch the middle one and the beginning of the third.

Stewart focuses on the role Cramer and CNBC played in mindlessly disseminating and uncritically amplifying the false claims from the CEOs and banks which spawned the financial crisis with their blatantly untoward and often illegal practices. Here is the crux of Stewart's critique of Cramer/CNBC:

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That's the heart of the (completely justifiable) attack on Cramer and CNBC by Stewart. They 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.

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Perhaps the most egregious instance of this media cowardice is that there are very few occasions when media stars were willing to address criticisms of their behavior in the run-up to the war. With very few exceptions, they have systematically ignored the criticisms that have been voiced from many sources about the CNBC-like role they played in the dissemination of pre-Iraq-War and other key Bush falsehoods. But on those very few occasions when they were forced to address these issues, their responses demonstrate that they said and did exactly what we're all going to spend today mocking and deriding Cramer and CNBC for having done -- and they continue, to this day, to do that.

One of the very few television programs ever to address the media's complicit dissemination of Bush's pre-war falsehoods was Bill Moyers' superb 2007 PBS documentary, Buying the War. While most of the media propagandists whom Moyers wanted to interview cowardly refused to answer questions, Tim Russert, to his credit, did appear. Here are the excuses which Russert offered for the general role the media played in spreading Bush administration lies and the specific role Russert played in uncritically amplifying Dick Cheney's assertions about Saddam's nuclear program. I challenge anyone to identify any differences between what Cramer/CNBC did and the justifying excuses Russert offered:

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Compare Russert's self-defense to how and why he uncritically amplified Government lies ("I wish my phone had rung") to Cramer's pretense of victimization over the fact that CEOs lied to him and so there was nothing he could do but assume they were telling the truth ("I don't have subpoena power"). Stewart's primary criticism of Cramer applies with exactly equal force to the excuse offered by Tim "Wish My Phone Had Rung" Russert, who -- to this day -- is held up as the supposed Beacon of Tough Adversarial Journalism in America:

I'm under the assumption that you don't just take their word at face value. That you actually then go around and try to figure it out.

The point that can't be emphasized enough is that this isn't a matter of past history. Unlike Cramer -- who at least admitted fault last night and said he was "chastized" -- most establishment journalists won't acknowledge that there was anything wrong with the behavior of the press corps during the Bush years. The most they'll acknowledge is that it was confined to a couple of bad apples -- The Judy Miller Defense. But the Cramer-like journalistic behavior during that period that was so widespread and did so much damage is behavior that our press corps, to this day, believes is proper and justified.

The only other occasion when media stars were forced to address these criticisms was when Bush's own Press Secretary, Scott McClellan, wrote a book accusing the American media of being "too deferential" to the administration. In response, Russert's replacement, David Gregory, twice insisted that the criticisms directed at the press for the role they played in the run-up to the war are baseless and misguided -- most recently in an interview with Stephen Colbert (after defending the media's pre-war behavior, Gregory was promoted by NBC to his Meet the Press position). When defending the media's behavior, Gregory echoed exactly the defining mentality of Jim Cramer: pointing out when officials are lying is "not our role," said Gregory.

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It's fine to praise Jon Stewart for the great interview he conducted and to mock and scoff at Jim Cramer and CNBC. That's absolutely warranted. But just as was true for Judy Miller (and her still-celebrated cohort, Michael Gordon), Jim Cramer isn't an aberration. What he did and the excuses he offered are ones that are embraced as gospel to this day by most of our establishment press corps, and to know that this is true, just look at what they do and say about their roles. But at least Cramer wants to appear to be contrite for the complicit role he played in disseminating incredibly destructive and false claims from the politically powerful. That stands in stark contrast to David Gregory, Charlie Gibson, Brian Williams, David Ignatius and most of their friends, who continue to be defiantly and pompously proud of the exact same role they play.

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[screembloodymurder]

1. Complicit or lazy?

Either way, they've lost all credibility with me. I find Glenn is always spot on.