The Conspiracy of the Fourth Estate

MANIFESTO

Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
— Mark Twain
Now that the hubbub concerning the Stewart-Cramer confrontation is ebbing, Glenn Greenwald puts his finger on what, exactly, Stewart was so upset about, viz., that CNBC (owned by GE, the twelfth largest corporation in the world) would allow "scheming CEOs" to spout wholesale falsehoods on the network and then fail to investigate those claims. (Daniel Sinker also sees Stewart's point.)

While Greenwald is willing to "give credit to Cramer for facing his critics and addressing (and even acknowledging the validity of) the criticisms," he points out that

By stark contrast, most of our major media stars simply ignore all criticisms of their corrupt behavior and literally suppress it (even if the criticisms appear as major, lengthy front-page exposés in The New York Times).

Perhaps the most egregious instance of this media cowardice is that there are very few occasions when media stars were willing to address criticisms of their behavior in the run-up to the war. With very few exceptions, they have systematically ignored the criticisms that have been voiced from many sources about the CNBC-like role they played in the dissemination of pre-Iraq-War and other key Bush falsehoods. But on those very few occasions when they were forced to address these issues, their responses demonstrate that they said and did exactly what we're all going to spend today mocking and deriding Cramer and CNBC for having done—and they continue, to this day, to do that.

One might say in Cramer's defense that everyone does it. (God knows too many politicos use that excuse.) That, of course, is exactly what's wrong with American reporting: Slipshod journalistic methods have led to financial ruin and, too frequently, to death itself.