Piling On CNBC

Commentary By Ron Beasley

John Stewart did a great job of pointing out that the business network CNBC is little more than an infomercial for Wall Street.  Well the WSJ has joined the pile on.  (Note: I'm aware that Murdoch's WSJ may have a financial reason to drive a few more nails in the CNBC coffin.)

Financial Journalists Fail Upward

The applause Mr. Stewart has received for his j'accuse is the sound of the old order cracking. We have turned on the financial CEOs, inducting them one by one into the Predator Hall of Fame. We have gone deaf to the seductive rhythms of the culture wars. We have tossed out the politicians whose antigovernment rhetoric seemed invincible for so long.

And now comes the turn of the bubble-blowers of pop culture, the army of fake populists who have prospered for years by depicting the stock market as an expression of the general will, as the trustworthy friend of the little guy buffeted by a globalizing economy.

We know -- or we think we know -- about the roles played by other culprits in the debacle. The government regulators, for example: How could they have ignored the coming disaster? Well, they were incapacitated by decades of deregulation. What about the market's own watchdogs? Well, from appraisers to ratings agencies the whole tough-minded system was apparently undermined by conflicts of interest.

But what about the syndicated columnists and the beloved stock pickers and the authors of personal finance best-sellers, the industry for which CNBC is the perfect symbol? How did they manage to miss the volcano under their feet?

We have seen what happens when an administration only listens to those who tell them what they want to hear.  The same can be said for the financial pundits.

And it's not just a matter of people missing the biggest economic story of the last 20 years. It's a matter of those who minimized it and those who blew it off because it didn't fit their worldview continuing in their plum positions of authority. Mr. Stewart wasn't rude enough to ask it, but over all his inquiries there hung the obvious question: Why do you still have a job, Mr. Cramer?

If the world of financial infotainment can itself be described as a "market," it is a market where accountability does not seem to exist, where the heaviest of incentives seems to carry no weight, and where consumers, to judge by what they get, seem constantly to choose the lousy over the good. The old order discredits itself, but the old order persists nevertheless.

This needs to be repeated every time someone pleads, "Who could have known?" Plenty of people did see the disaster coming. Most of them were marginalized, however, laboring at out-of-the-way econ departments, blogs and B-list think tanks. They were excluded and even ridiculed because their larger understanding of the economy was not one that fit well with the sort of Wall Street worship preached by the likes of CNBC.

On the rare occasions that economists like Nouriel Roubini, who predicted this crisis, appeared on the financial networks they were mocked and marginalized because they were not telling them what they wanted to hear.

Comments

[News Reference]

Ron, that article wasn't the "Wall Street Journal" piling on, it was written by lefty Thomas Franks, a very thoughtful, pointed lefty and the only redeeming value of Murdoch's WSJ.

Sure, it's bizarre to have a thoughtful, unrepentant liberal published in the almost always reliably extreme right wing WSJ.

It would be "tokenism" except that, unlike the NYT's or WaPo's perennially publishing right wing hacks, for some crazy reason, the WSJ actually hired a notable and accomplished writer to be the voice of the opposition.

Maybe the WSJ editorial board didn't read Frank's book, "What's the Matter with Kansas?"

[Ron Beasley]

I should have picked up on that - the name did sound familiar.