We’re all for aggressively skeptical interviewing—I’ve often wished we could import Brits to do our presidential interviews, for instance. But it’s a problem when one group of people get interviewed adversarially and another group gets deferential treatment.

That contrast has been clear on CNBC in the last few weeks in a series of interviews with liberal bank critics Neil Barofsky, Paul Krugman, and Eliot Spitzer. The comparison to how the network has recently treated the bankers who actually created the financial crisis is striking.

Barofsky, the former special inspector general of the TARP, is one of a very few prominent government officials to take a sharply skeptical stance toward the big banks. He went on CNBC’s Squawk Box last week to talk his new book Bailout, which makes the case that the TARP bailouts staved off a complete financial collapse but failed to fulfill its mandate to spur lending and help homeowners. In other words, he says Treasury rescued and, importantly, re-empowered Wall Street, while “foaming the runway” for the banks with most everyone else (besides the car companies).

This shouldn’t be controversial or hard to understand, but then you have to actually listen to Barofsky’s argument instead of interrupting him when he tries to answer, as Steve Liesman repeteadly does.

At one point, when Barofsky criticizes “the general attitude, which was this level of deference to the banks. And it’s extended over the past two years to program after program… Again and again it was always from the perspective of Wall Street,” he might as well have been talking about CNBC instead of the Obama Treasury.

Here’s a clip of Becky Quick lecturing Barofsky that “Wall Street made good on its side of the bargain” on TARP because it paid back its megabailouts plus a bit of interest:

Here’s Steve Liesman interrupting Barofsky repeatedly and mischaracterizing his statements, apparently unable to comprehend that Barofsky can criticize TARP while also saying that it averted financial collapse (note that these screen caps are the same, but the clips are different):

Then there’s this snide question from Liesman, which Barofsky bats down with a nod to SIGAUDIT Dean Starkman:

Shortly after his interview, Barofsky wrote on Twitter that he “definitely got Krugmanned.”

He was referring to Paul Krugman’s appearance on Squawk Box a few weeks earlier where the Nobel-winning economist and NYT columnist was bombarded by zombie lies and called a “unicorn” and never asked about his book, which was the ostensible purpose of the interview.












Krugman afterward wrote, “Among other things, people getting their news from sources like that are probably getting terrible advice about any kind of investment that depends on macroeconomics. But it’s amazing just how skewed the policy views are too.”

But if Barofsky got Krugmanned, at least he didn’t get Spitzered. Check out how CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo treated Eliot Spitzer two days after the Krugman interview:

Bartiromo is offended that Spitzer says former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg committed fraud.

At one point, Bartiromo wags her pen at Spitzer and actually says this, “Some people say that the collapse of AIG lays at your feet, because if Hank Greenberg were there he would not have allowed some of that craziness and that risk being taken on,” in a way that makes it clear that she is one of those “some people.” Those “some people” would be The Wall Street Journal editorial page, naturally, and the idea’s insane.

The next minute she’s yelling at Spitzer, saying, “You can’t say ‘fraudulent’ because there is no indictment, you can’t just throw around the word fraud.”

This is just flat wrong. As Spitzer tried to note and which he reported on his own Current show later, Greenberg paid $15 million to settle an SEC fraud complaint against him, which he has miraculously spun as absolving him of fraud. AIG kicked Greenberg out of the company, settled SEC, DOJ and New York state charges for a whopping $1.6 billion shortly thereafter. It makes no sense that this is just a Spitzer thing (Matt Taibbi has more on this).

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