I finally watched the Jon Stewart/Jim Cramer (CNBC “Mad Money”) espisode on The Daily Show (Hulu) and found myself nodding my head several times as Stewart grilled Cramer. Not for the first time, I worried about the fact that most Americans get their “news” from TV. And Cramer admitted to Stewart that there’s pressure to fill up a 24×7 “live” news channel with … well … not the most robustly researched opinion.
I don’t know who reported what (or when) about the current banking crisis. In part, that’s because I’ve been distrustful of the business press since the mid-1990s, when I spent part of my spare time trying to debunk Wall Street-influenced doom-and-gloom stories about Apple. My not-supported-by-research belief is that the business press, by and large, is a cheerleader for — not a critic of — business. And by business press, I mean everything from the WSJ to the FT to the business pages of the NYT or the Seattle Times. Cable “news” — which I think of as nothing more than a stock ticker and print news recycler — is also a cheerleader, I believe.
On the other hand, the NPR “Giant Pool of Money” episode on This American Life was one of the best explanations that I had heard (May 2008) of the mess that should be known as The Bush Bubble That Killed Wall Street. It wasn’t the first, but it was riveting, insightful, educational and scary as all get out.
So what am I being contrarian about? Rescuing newspapers. Read on.
