On the day in October 2004 that Jon Stewart made up his mind to end CNN’s Crossfire, viewers didn’t have advance warning. By contrast, last night’s epic takedown of CNBC and Mad Money host Jim Cramer that built over an eight-day period, including the advance hype of a Thursday morning front-page, above-the-fold story on America’s most widely-circulated newspaper, USA Today.
It did not disappoint. In addition to an extensive confrontation that included footage of Cramer admitting to the ease of manipulating markets, Stewart indicted CNBC’s “sins of commission” in fueling hype that led to the economic crisis.
I understand you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a (bleeping) game. And when I watch that, I get, I can’t tell you how angry that makes me. Because what it says to me is: you all know. You all know what’s going on. You know, you can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the stuff that was being pulled at Bear, and AIG, and all this derivative market stuff that is this weird Wall Street side bet.
If you haven’t seen the must-see interview in the past seven hours overnight since it aired, here are the full, lengthier-than-televised outtakes, in three parts (note, un-beeped, explicit language):
Part One:
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Part Two:
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Part Three:
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In an unaired segment around the six-minute mark of the third outtake clip, Stewart also passed his awarded mantle of douchebaggery from ex-CNNer Robert Novak (“Douchebag of Liberty”) to MSNBCer Joe Scarborough (“Doucheborough”).
Stewart told Cramer that he could go back to Scarborough’s Morning Joe with a message about Stewart’s role in the debate:
You now have become the face of this, and that is incredibly unfortunate. Because you’re not the face of it, you shouldn’t be the face of it. You were the person that was, uh, I-don’t-know-what enough to stand up and go, “Hey, that wasn’t fair!” Which it’s not, because this show isn’t fair, and you can tell ‘Doucheborough’ it isn’t supposed to be fair.
In Morning Joe‘s first two segments this morning, including one where Scarborough railed against “a sickness on Wall Street,” the Stewart-Cramer interview wasn’t mentioned.
Wise.