Sorry for posting all three videos right here.  I could have posted one video which would have been the full episode of the daily show, I chose instead to post the three sections of the unedited videos, care of Comedy Central.

Rarely do any interviews in this modern TV landscape take up the entire length of a show, but in this case the interview was pertinent and timely.  Jim Cramer, the host of CNBC’s entertainment-finance show Mad Money, came on to The Daily Show for an interview about the economy.  Like Stewart’s famous appearance on Crossfire, the dialog of the Cramer interview focused on the role of the media as it disseminates information.  Or rather, the assumption that television news shows are supposed to be reporting facts instead of just entertaining viewers with hacked together press releases and statistics of dubious origin.

Stewart has been able to press this point in the past as The Daily Show keeps receiving critical acclaim.  It is the fake news show that more and more people in mass culture use to get their “actual” news.  The Daily Show has even turned into a meta-news show where you can get the news of the day and your criticism of media at large.  It is a refreshing idea, to pull the camera back far enough to see the spin doctors at work, but the larger questions loom: Why is this the responsibility of a comedy show?  Isn’t critical thinking an important enough idea to support a “serious” media endeavor?  There are attempts to tap into this vein of legitimacy, the no spin zone, etc.  But most of those shows are a shallow effort to profit from a deeper hope.

Some of the concepts touched on in the interview reminded me of a fictional detective novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by the late Stieg Larsson.  The main character Blomkvist is a financial reporter in Sweden.  There were a number of passages where he contemplates the nature of the writing about the financial industry.  The argument was postulated that Investigative Journalism was at best genre specific, that for example, in politics it is accepted that a political figure would be investigated and exposed publicly, but in business, writing “news” comes down to regurgitating a company’s press releases or annual reports.  It seems like only during these times of Ponze schemes and economic meltdown do we see the world of closely guarded business practices smacking up against freedom of information needs.

In both the Stewart interview and Larsson’s book it is asked why business reporting should be treated as different from any other kind of critical thinking investigative reporting.  The interview shows Cramer’s complicit behavior as well as the “I am just passing along the info” pundit strategy.  This wall ultimately falls apart when Stewart asks him to go back to the basics of investigation rather than blindly believing the “facts” as they have been handed over.  Wherever one is on the political perspective, it is hard to argue against basic fact-checking when building an argument.