Ryan Chittum has an excellent piece on CNBC, which has moved beyond its traditional worship of Wall Street, business executives, and the rich generally to outright fiscal scold advocacy:
So it is with CNBC’s “Rise Above” crusade, which has blanketed its airwaves and adorned its lapels since the day after the election with pleas for a solution to the so-called “fiscal cliff.”
You’ll note that CNBC has not Risen Above for the common good on issues like stimulating a depressed economy, ameliorating the housing catastrophe, or prosecuting its Wall Street sources/dinner partners for the subprime fiasco. But make no mistake: even if it had, it would have been stepping outside the boundaries of traditional American journalism practice into political advocacy. And that’s precisely what it’s doing here, at further cost to its credibility as a mainstream news organization instead of some HD version of Wall Street CCTV.
Fox News is the network all liberals love to hate, but for my money CNBC is worse by far. I actually kind of like Fox sometimes—Chris Wallace does the best interviews of GOP politicians (by default, but still), Megyn Kelly and Bret Baier, though they’re really conservative, seem like they take their job pretty seriously, and when Shep Smith occasionally gets off the chain, it’s awesome.
CNBC, though, is a wholly malignant influence. Their brand of Wall Street boosterism is not just the model of how unstated journalistic bias can be seriously dishonest, it’s running cover for a bloated and parasitic financial sector that is an active threat to the economic health of the nation.
Paul Krugman has more.
