Opinion from Frank Cioffi, Apple Investor News:
I’m a big fan of Jon Stewart. I often learn more from “The Daily Show” than from network newscasts. But his artful, well researched skewering of Jim Cramer this week was still a cheap shot, an easy way to blow off populist steam about the financial crisis.
While I agree with Stewart’s premise that most major financial media failed us, making Cramer the poster boy for the crisis, in essence associating him with the liars and thieves, went too far. It’s also ironic to me that Stewart would attack a financial journalist who consistently provides information that attempts to level the playing field between the institutional financial complex and the average investor.
Jim Cramer saw this crisis looming, and called it before almost anyone else in his famous “rant” months before the October 2007 market peak. He also suggested some investors exit the market on “The Today Show” when the Dow was around 10,500. That advice saved a lot of people almost 4,000 points.
Cramer is an easy target because of his visibility, his bombastic style and because he makes many market and stock recommendations, some of them wrong. CNBC is easy game too. You can pull 20/20-hindsight video clips all day and make a good case against the network.
Of course, it’s not hard to see that most of the large financial media are as much a part of the problem as the financial institutions themselves. As Cramer admitted, “we can do a lot better.”
Yet while the highly publicized “Stewart vs. Cramer” episode will ultimately compel better reporting, I fear it may also further cement black-and-white populist thinking on the financial meltdown. This is a highly complex crisis requiring us to make finer shades-of-grey distinctions about what happened, how to fix it, and how to move forward productively.
One of the lessons of this crisis is the need to distinguish between real content and window dressing. This applies to journalism as well as earnings reports. While I see the clowning Jim Cramer does to be entertaining, I also see his knowledge, perspective and willingness to call it as he sees it. To me, he’ll always be the guy who “got it” a year before Ben Bernanke did.
Similarly, I hope more investors will be able to see beyond the reserved, steady and credible demeanor of the many mainstream financial media which let us down. During the height of the crisis those media maintained their demeanor, when maybe what we really needed was a guy screaming at us.
