The cable and network news has been focused on the oddity of The Daily Show this whole week. Usually, cable news programs might show a clip or two from TDS throughout the week, just for fun. But this week Jon Stewart did something that “real” journalists were loathe to do: criticize their own bad work and information.

It all started on Monday when Jon Stewart showed a classic mash-ups of CNBC anchors, journalists and hosts giving horrible advice to investors, often on the eve of one of the great financial/banking/investment meltdowns over the past year. Concluding the mash-up, Jon Stewart looked into the camera and added his editorial: “F-ck you.”

Most CNBC people in the mash-up kept quiet. But Mad Money host Jim Cramer did not, complaining that his segments in the mash-up were “taken out of context”. The next day, Jon Stewart showed even more clips of Mad Money, this time “in context”, which made it even worse. Cramer again responded, mocking Stewart as “a comedian.” Jon’s response? “You don’t have to make ‘comedian’ sound like a venereal disease.” Then he gave Cramer his own personal two-word salute again: “F-ck you.”

It was all a build-up for last night’s
appearance by Jim Cramer on The Daily Show. CNN has the best run-down of what happened next:

After a week of pointed verbal barbs, host Jon Stewart sat face-to-face with financial analyst Jim Cramer on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” and continued the assault Thursday. Stewart blamed Cramer and cable network CNBC for being irresponsible cheerleaders in the lead-up to the stock market meltdown.

Stewart, whose acerbic brand of satire centers largely on the political news of the day, has held Cramer’s frenetic, nearly cartoonish, stock-advice show, “Mad Money,” and other CNBC programming up as examples of an anything-goes attitude that contributed to the financial collapse.

“I understand you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a [expletive] game,” Stewart said during the recorded interview, segments of which aired on Thursday night. “When I watch that, I can’t tell you how angry that makes me.”

Stewart’s blistering criticism of Cramer this week has included a censored, two-word phrase he spoke into the camera after airing video of Cramer enthusiastically urging viewers to buy stock in Bear Stearns. The global investment bank and brokerage firm collapsed soon after the comments aired and was eventually sold with stock prices less than one-fifth what they were when Cramer pushed them.

Cramer has fired back. In a string of interviews with NBC news outlets affiliated with CNBC. Cramer disputed some of Stewart’s claims and noted times he’s made more cautious comments about the economy.

In one interview, he sarcastically feigned distress at being attacked by a comedian and, on an appearance on Thursday’s “The Martha Stewart Show,” pounded a wad of dough with a rolling pin, pretending it was Stewart’s face.

“Mr. Cramer, don’t you destroy enough dough on your own show … ?” Stewart said early in The Daily Show. After declaring he’s a “big fan of the show,” Cramer appeared contrite during the interview.

“I think that everyone could come in under criticism because we all should have seen it more,” Jim Cramer said. “I don’t think anyone should be spared in this environment.”
Cramer pushed back very little in an interview far more serious than most that Stewart conducts.

He complained when Stewart suggested CNBC’s reporters are “in bed” with Wall Street financiers and said he’s worked with government officials to try to crack down on abuses in the industry.

“Absolutely, there’s shenanigans, and we should call them out,” Cramer said. “Everyone should. I should do a better job at it.”

Stewart did call it “unfortunate” that Cramer has become the prime whipping boy in a larger complaint — “the gap between what CNBC advertises itself as and what it is.”

“We’re both snake-oil salesmen to a certain extent,” Stewart said. “But we do label it ‘snake oil’ here.”

[From CNN]

I want to marry Jon Stewart. I don’t even care that he’s already married, I’d happily be his second, secret wife. I love when he gets righteously angry. Stewart has always seemed like one of the most under-rated interviewers in the media today – his pieces make the other news programs all the time, and even when he hates the person he’s talking to, he’s always respectful and he always listens.

Jon Stewart’s work this week mocking CNBC hasn’t gone unnoticed. He has changed the conversations the news shows were doing on the financial crisis – and he’s made them turn inward and question their own shoddy work.

Yesterday Ron Goldman’s family was finally awarded all of the rights to OJ Simpson’s book “If I did it.” The family first won a $38 million wrongful death lawsuit against Simpson in the late nineties. Simpson has publicly declared that he will never voluntarily pay the Goldmans a penny, even if it means he never works for the rest of his life. When he wrote his “hypothetical” book, he created a shell company in his children’s’ names, so that he could still get the money and the Goldmans couldn’t touch it. Well obviously that didn’t work out to well, as they, and most of the rest of the world, were incredibly offended that Simpson would write such a book and actually get to keep his reported $1 million advance. So they took him to court and have now won the rights to everything regarding the book, which has been auctioned off. They’ve decided to publish it under the True Crime genre. Simpson has again lashed out against the Goldman family, saying that if he can’t make money off the book, neither should they. He did an interview broadcast on business news Web site Market News First on Tuesday.

“I find it sort of hypocritical that they talked everybody in America to boycott the book: it was ‘immoral,’ it was ‘blood money,’” he told interviewer Kate Delaney. “But we now see it wasn’t ‘blood money’ if they got the money.”

Goldman attorney David Cook said his clients were justified in accepting rights to the book as payment for the judgment against Simpson.

“Mr. Simpson himself has placed us in this horrific setting of seeking to liquidate this asset,” he said. “His comments are beyond redemption.”

[From the Associated Press]

In another snippet of his interview, Simpson talked about how hard his life was considering what a great guy he is, and how very, very unfair this world is.

“To me, it hurts me the most. The two things that hurts me the most— well, other than being considered a murderer and all that— is that to some degree, exposing this racial divide, which might be a good thing. I don’t know. It’s being considered a batterer when every girl I’ve ever dated stood by me during the trial. Every girl I’ve ever dated, when Interpol in Europe and the FBI and everybody interviewed them and said, That’s not O.J.

And even Nicole’s closest friends will tell you that after we split up and even while we were going through our divorce, every time she had a problem, her closest friend will tell you she would come to me. If she had problems with guys or how to handle guy, I was the guy she came to for advice, and yet I ended up through one incident on a New Year’s night, which we’ll talk about tomorrow, became the poster boy for abuse. And that hurts me. That still hurts me.”

[Snipped from On the Record with Greta Van Susteren]

The Goldman family was then interviewed by Greta Van Susteren on FOX news, where Fred Goldman responded.

“The killer [Simpson] several months ago filed bankruptcy of his sham company that he used to move the money from HarperCollins to himself. And in an effort to stop us from getting the rights to the book in California, he filed bankruptcy.

The bottom line is that when all was said and done, the court awarded us the rights to the book through bankruptcy, and turns out that’s a good thing as far as we’re concerned. We took away an asset of his that he was protecting, that he was using to make money. We took it away. He will never make money with it again.”

[From On the Record with Greta Van Susteren]

Kim Goldman, Ron’s younger sister, added the following:

“You know, our hope with acquiring the rights, obviously, like my father said, was to take something away from him. But at this point, you know, we have an opportunity to try to turn this around and do something positive with it. You know, my father and I for a long time have wanted to start a foundation, which we did. We launched it. And you know, with a portion of the proceeds of the book going to the foundation, we hope for better situations of other victims of crime. So we’re going to work very hard to make this an easier process as we move forward.”

[From On the Record with Greta Van Susteren]

O.J. Simpson is so delusional it boggles the mind. Not only is he a murderer, but he’s angry that people don’t treat him like the special, wonderful celebrity that he believes he is. Someone who should be able to kill and avoid the law, be it jail or financial judgments. He’s truly mad that these people are still upset that he killed their son. I can’t even say much, I get so mad just knowing that a person like this can exist in the world.