By now, you’d have to live under a rock or be Amish not to have seen or heard about Jon Stewart’s CNBC smackdown and the literal “money punch” he delivered last night to Jim Cramer. Either that or I’m not following you on twitter because that is what everyone seems to be twitterpated about today.
We’ve been paying attention to The Daily Show for a long time here at LR, and we’re not alone. Stewart likes to remind us regularly that he’s a funny man, not a newsman. But, he’s doing a lot of things that funny newsmen have been doing for a long time, and he’s doing them better than they ever did. I’ll venture to say that Stewart represents a new brand of video-powered columnist, speaking truth to power in both politics and news media, and in the instance of his famous Crossfire appearance, sometimes both at the same time. Then again, I also bash my students when they write ledes that look like those from The Onion, but that’s for another post (but if you write like the people who are making fun of you, think twice, ok?)
The question I have is, are the news directors paying attention? Years after Crossfire, CNN still covers politics as theater or, worse, as sports, talking about the reds vs. the blues instead of focusing on the issues. Will CNBC take the hard look in the mirror that Stewart asks and change their ways? Will the industry continue to blame to the Internet for their decline, failing to realize that it is the people – their customers- who sit behind those networked computers and chose to tune them out or take matters into their own hands and publish on their own? Dave Winer, creator of RSS, said it recently: “Dear news people — WE ARE NOT HAPPY WITH THE JOB YOU’RE DOING.”
Will Bunch had a great piece earlier on what battered journalists can learn from all this. Let’s hear what the LR Faithful have to say.