Note: Today’s post wasn’t going to be about the Stewart-Cramer interview, but it turned into an even bigger event than seemed possible at the beginning of the week and a final point deserves to be made.
Jon Stewart’s systemic dismantling of Jim Cramer and all that he represents was everywhere on Friday. It was a stunning moment of television and it deserved all the attention it garnered. What made it so remarkable isn’t the fact that two people went on television and disagreed with each other, nor that it was so one sided a confrontation. That happens all the time. Rather, it was a landmark event in the evolution of the way popular media is consumed in this country because of the stark contrast between each man’s approach to television.
Television news channels thrive on immediacy. Getting a story first and then proceeding directly to analysis before even half of the facts are in is, after all, a great way to fill time. During the interview Cramer even admitted as much, pointing out that CNBC has a whopping seventeen hours of live air time to fill each day. (Stewart, quite sensibly, asked if perhaps they might want to cut back.) But in an era of transcripts and YouTube videos, anyone can be held accountable for dumb pronouncements so filling airtime comes at the direct expense of anyone’s long term credibility. And credibility is the only thing worth having in a world of almost infinite information sources.
There wasn’t so much a credibility gap between the opposite sides of that desk as there was a yawning mile wide credibility gulf. Why is that? Why is the comedian who openly admits he has no expertise the more trusted party? It’s because Stewart makes no claims to impartiality or unbiased journalism; Cramer, on the other hand, operates under the guise that what he’s doing is, for all its bells, whistles and stagecraft, fundamentally informative. Which is not to say that Cramer is the only party guilty of that little piece of self deception; Stewart is very clear during the interview that while Cramer has become the poster boy for sloppy, airtime filling fourth rate journalism, he isn’t alone.
Cramer exists in a medium that places a premium on speed and access over substance and research. That used to be easy to get away with, but that’s no longer true. Now there’s a Fifth Estate and it’s composed of easily searchable transcripts, endless publicly available video archives and the ever growing index of information available via Google and other internet services. Once something is typed into a keyboard, or filmed by a camera lens or picked up by a microphone, odds are it’s going to end up on permanent display for any curious party. Opinion and speculation are easily mass produced to fill seventeen daily hours of live television, but they probably aren’t going to hold up to long term scrutiny.
The Daily Show does only two hours of television per week, carefully scripted and rehearsed before taping. It would take them two months, assuming they didn’t take a week off, to generate the same amount of original programming as CNBC puts up in a single day. The reward for the care that goes into their production is the credibility and, yes, trustworthiness that allowed them to expose their cable television brethren as incurious sycophants posing as responsible journalists.
Reputation, trust, credibility, in a world where information is anything but scarce those are the most precious commodities and they can only be built up slowly and with great care, honesty and transparency. Pouring bullshit and noise into a camera for seventeen hours a day is pretty much the opposite of that. On Thursday night the nation saw what happens when the two methods collide.
