Are you like me in that it does pain you to watch someone else be embarrassed, humiliated and destroyed, even though you thoroughly agree with the person doing the embarrassing, humiliating and destroying? Even though you believe the person being embarrassed, humiliated and destroyed deserves it and more? To be honest, I have not watched the entire video of the Daily Show’s destruction of Jim Cramer’s career for precisely that reason. I suppose it is my conscience telling me I shouldn’t revel in the misfortune of others no matter how deserved.
Regardless, I did enjoy Andrew Sullivan’s take on the matter, and agree, the showdown last night was a cultural and historical moment:
I watched the Daily Show with growing shock last night. Did you expect that? I expected a jolly and ultimately congenial discussion, after some banter. What Cramer walked into was an ambush of anger. He crumbled from the beginning. From then on, with the almost cruel broadcasting of his earlier glorifying of financial high-jinks, you almost had to look away. This was, in my view, a real cultural moment. It was a storming of the Bastille. It was, as Fallows notes, journalism.
…Now, I know Jim Cramer a little. The reason he crumbled last night, I think, is because deep down, he knows Stewart’s right. He isn’t that television clown all the way down. And deeper down, he knows it’s not all a game – not now they’ve run off with grandpa’s retirement money.
It’s not enough any more, guys, to make fantastic errors and then to carry on authoritatively as if nothing just happened. You will be called on it. In some ways, the blogosphere is to MSM punditry what Stewart is to Cramer: an insistent and vulgar demand for some responsibility, some moral and ethical accountabilty for previous decisions and pronouncements.
Braver, please. And louder.