In the grand spirit of further milking a public controversy to draw traffic to my blog, I was going to make the argument today that all the attention to the throwdown between Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer was misplaced.
I would have said that it’s a classic example of how the media are more comfortable focusing on personalities than on ideas, that it prefers to handle issues like the ones raised about coverage of the economy when it can put famous faces on them. I would have said that the fixation on Jon-vs.-Jim (in which I have participated) makes the issue about a side issue, namely, whether Cramer’s financial advice can be relied on, whether he’s as trustworthy as CNBC says, whether he’s a showboating self-parody. I would have said that what’s more important is the content of CNBC (and business reporting) overall, how its viewing the economy solely from the standpoint of the financial markets—and from a short-term trader/speculator’s view of the markets, at that—has twisted its view of the economy, and increasingly of politics too.
The capper to my argument would have been the irony that this should be about a feud involving Jon Stewart, since a major point of his on-air tirade against Crossfire was that the media’s fixation on feuds and this-guy-vs.-that-guy arguments and dualisms at best obscures more important things, and at worst, in Stewart’s words, “hurt[s] America.”
But then I saw this morning that time.com had put together a list of the 10 Best TV Feuds! So read that instead! Because feuds = awesome!