Jonathans

It was all anybody could talk about today, and it was pretty intense because clearly our big expensive news media can't do their job. CBS felt that Murrow blood running through their veins and ran Jeff Greenfield's excellent piece:


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Time media critic James Poniewozik gets to the core of the modern television journalism problem -- and how Cramer was trapped by it under Stewart's questioning:

"These people were my friends." Cramer said that, or something like it, repeatedly: that longtime friends flat-out lied to him. So problem one: coziness with sources is death for the information business. Now, Cramer is a commentator, not a reporter, and I don't begrudge him friends per se. But it is a problem when reporters either become too close to their subjects to treat them skeptically, or become so obsessed with access that they are leery of being too skeptical: i.e., "If I do that, they'll never talk to me again."

Journalists prize getting people to talk to them, with good reason, but they shouldn't be hostage to it. Part of the problem is a culture in which interviewing is privileged over research: "reporting" is defined as getting a person to talk to you, preferably a famous person. But as the original Daily Show CNBC clip showed, research can be pretty powerful—then it created a situation where Cramer pretty much had to talk.

So what I heard today was that Jon Stewart is doing CNN and MSNBC job for them, that it's only the court jester who can speak truth to the emperor as he reveals him to have no clothes, and that he's essentially our century's Mark Twain.

Or maybe our Jonathan.