On the March 9 edition of CNBC’s Squawk Box, Becky Quick was interviewing Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett when the Oracle of Omaha expressed support for the Obama Administration’s mortgage bailout. “Becky,” co-host Joe Kernen broke in, “tell Warren you’re mad that you’ve done all the right things and all these other people are going to get bailed out.” Buffett replied, “There’s nothing wrong with being mad, Joe. It’s just that there are times when you’re mad about something that you’ve got to overcome the emotion.”
That is why Buffett is not in the cable-news business. For as the economy nose-dives, CNBC — the TV darling of the turn-of-the-century stock boom — is proudly letting the emotion overcome it.
In February, reporter Rick Santelli launched into an on-air rant against helping “losers” with their mortgages, a viral-video hit that made Santelli the poor man’s Rush Limbaugh — or is that the rich man’s Kudlow Report host Larry Kudlow opined that President Obama “is waging war against capital.” Stock picker and professional gasket blower Jim Cramer trained his bulging eyes on Washington, accusing Obama of “the greatest wealth destruction I’ve ever seen by a President.”
To watch CNBC today is to enter an alternative universe, where élites are populists, Wall Street is Main Street and bank executives are the oppressed. It’s not surprising that a voice of opposition to the new Administration would emerge. But who would have thought it would be on a channel not owned by Rupert Murdoch
In a way, CNBC has no choice but to become political, since the economy itself has. And CNBC faces the same dilemma as the rest of the media: If psychology drives the economy, when does reporting bad news become creating bad news How do you walk the line between desperate cheerleading and reckless ranting
CNBC’s answer has been to dive off both sides of the line at once. On the silver-lining-hunt side, its straight-news interviewers now spend uncomfortable days pleading with gloom-saying guests to declare a bottom to the market or find stock picks. “Do you have just one” Steve Liesman asked an investment adviser, almost plaintively.
On the ranting side, it has increasingly pinned the state of the economy on the two-month-old Administration, with Cramer offering recommendations to “Obama-proof your portfolio,” a phrase that now comes up regularly on CNBC’s air.
CNBC’s reaction is colored by its stressed-out day trader’s focus on the short term. When ordinary people think about the economy, they think about jobs, college, retirement. Sure, the stock market affects them in the long run — but so do job security and the threat of getting wiped out by health-care bills. When CNBC considers the economy, it means Wall Street’s numbers that day, that hour, that minute. CNBC may pay lip service to the long term, but it has the time horizon of a fruit fly.
This means that CNBC looks at everything, particularly politics, in terms of how it will affect “the Market.” The commentators on CNBC murmur about the Market as if it were the Island on Lost: a mystic force that must be placated, lest it become angry and punish us. “The Market doesn’t like …” “What the Market wants to see is …”
And, oooh, is the Market cranky at Obama! The Market doesn’t like raising taxes on the wealthy . The Market doesn’t like government health-care reform or cap-and-trade environmental policy or big budgets or limiting bonuses at bailed-out banks. And don’t get the Market started on bank nationalization. That ticks the Market off!
It is as if — between MSNBC and CNBC — NBC News were trying to own the liberal and conservative voices of cable news. But CNBC’s is a much different strain of conservatism from Sarah Palin’s or Bill O’Reilly’s: it is urban, club-room and Mammon-oriented rather than small-town, VFW-hall and God-oriented. It’s an ideology not exclusively beholden to party , but it’s an ideology nonetheless.
It’s also an ideology that you’d think, given the track record of trusted financial institutions, people would be a little wary of crowing in public nowadays. But ratings are up. As the rest of the country stews over the mismanagement of insurers and banks, there’s still a small, demographically appealing niche for talking heads fulminating against the “demonization” of business and being in favor of laissez-faire government.
Hey, somebody’s gotta stick up for the little guy. Even, or especially, when he’s the big guy.
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