Stewart was of course masterful. But he could have done the same job on the general media, and on every cable and broadcast network, and come to think of it he should. He could showed a montage of talking heads on every network pimping the stock market and pumping up the bubble. He could reasonably ask any network, as he asked Cramer about CNBC, "which side are on?"
The same factors that explain CNBC's pathetic performance in covering the economic tsunami also explain the rest of the media's equally pathetic performance. Stewart rightly suggested that CNBC caters to a Wall Street clientele and viewership, even moreso than the general media, but on a more fundamental level CNBC and the general media have the same vested interest in rising stock prices.
The broadcast and cable networks are all owned by publicly traded corporations. For all of these companies the compensation at the highest executive levels is largely determined by the stock price of the corporation. The price of the corporation's stock is most directly a function of the performance of the individual corporation, but it also obviously a function of general stock price levels. It is a truism that you'd rather own the stock of a mildly profitable firm in a rousing stock market than an extremely profitable firm in the grips of a secular market decline. The short-term general level of stock prices (i.e., two to three year horizon) is an enormous factor in the compensation of the executives that control the media, hire and promote journalists, and influence (if not dictate) coverage.
Does anyone really believe that these corporations will potentially impinge upon the profits of the Fortune 500 by fairly reporting on labor policies that might alleviate the three-decade stagnation in the median wage? Does anyone really believe that these networks will fairly report upon environmental, tax, regulatory or other issues that will could adversely affect near-term corporate profits and stock prices?
There is, of course, the hope and expectation that journalistic standards and respect for the separation of editorial and management will countervail these factors and limit the inevitable bias. But we'd also hoped and expected that care and nurturing of what we'd presumed was any news operation's primary asset - its reputation for objectivity and credibility - would restrain bias in coverage, but in the age of Fox that notion is at best quaint and even ridiculous.
The simple fact is that there is real and significant incentive to provide news content with a Wall Street-centric perspective. It's not even necessary to impugn the journalistic integrity of reporters in order to hold this view, but if journalistic integrity is posited as the bulwark against an inherent bias toward pro-business coverage, what kind of journalistic standard permits Howie Kurtz to hold himself out as a media critic for the Washington Post while collecting a paycheck from a cable network?
Anyone who could doubt this inherent bias need only watch any discussion in the media of the capital gains tax. It is an economic given that the impact of a cut in the capital gains on tax revenues is ephemeral and, in the long run, essentially zero. And yet every discussion of capital gains tax cuts in the mass media will invariably include an assertion by someone, perhaps even the reporter, that a cut in the capital gains tax generates significantly higher tax revenues! It is completely untrue in any meaningful economic sense, but it enjoys universal belief in the media.
CNBC's bias is obvious. Cramer certainly couldn't take issue with that. But it is certainly a bit precious for the general media to pretend to be any different. Perhaps if their own coverage of the gathering economic storm had been any better than CNBC's then one could believe they're different. But look at the early-September 2008 editions of the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and other papers. The collapse that had been building inexorably for years, and was blindingly obvious by the fall of 2007 with the subprime credit collapse, was as much a shock to the general media as the planes hitting the Towers on 9/11.
Let's stop defending against the absurdist argument that the media is liberal. Let's start making the virtually irrebuttable argument that we have a right-wing media in this country.