CNBC Smackdown

Jon Stewart has been regularly sticking it to CNBC business coverage this week, in episodes that I've seen only snippets of, but look forward to catching up on this weekend. Stewart's campaign against not merely CNBC but "business TV" generally has actually been picked up by mainstream Canadian media, in the Globe and Mail. I quote from that article,

What's truly strange, however, is that it has taken until now for somebody to notice that, while most television coverage is built around a moral framework, business television has no sense of good or evil. That's what makes it starkly abnormal and, these days, vaguely repulsive. First came the vilification of corporate America. It took a long time for the vilification of corporate America's cheerleaders to begin.

The function of business television is simpleminded and austere. The genre sells the reporting of buying and selling and, to make viewers stay with it, the genre sells the joy of greed. This applies not just to CNBC, but to every all-finance channel and to all the segments about business that appear on every all-news channel.

This sort of visceral take on American business television is probably well-earned from the bits of it that I've seen. Business TV seems to cultivate its viewership in large part by constructing a fantasy world, in which attractive people, in expensive suits are always capable of making more and more money, with no consequences. Sometimes people lose, but that's the thrill of the game - it's high stakes and high rolls - a real man's world. And - of course - consequence free bubble money is a myth just like the world these networks fabricate. I, for one, am enjoying the ribbing Stewart is giving these nonsense pundits.