Make sure you don’t miss my friend Moe Tkacik’s piece on CNBC, hot off the presses in the Columbia Journalism Review and new online here.
Here’s Tkacik on Jim Cramer and Rick Santelli:
If Cramer does share anything with Santelli, though, it’s that both men fall into what could be called the network’s cast of market transcendentalists, people who believe they can sense the interrelated trades of their respective markets on an intuitive level and seek to transmit its moods to viewers with every molecule of their beings. Which is to say, they are fun to watch: Santelli for his eyebrows and almost operatic (if incomprehensible) circumlocutions on monetary policy, commodity prices, and accounting standards; Cramer for his visible and audible torment on a weak trading day.
And this is a nice catch on CNBC’s “I Am CNBC” promos:
Gasparino taped the spot, and submitted to another hour or so of extended self-revelation for the CNBC.com Web site, on September 15, the day Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, causing a run on a major money market fund that had invested in its bonds that cascaded through the financial system and threatened to tie up the majority of the world’s money supply if not for massive federal intervention. Erin Burnett, the luminous mid-morning anchor who has been perhaps the network’s most visible public face during the crisis, taped her spot that day too. All thirty spots were taped between the fifteenth and the eighteenth of September, arguably the most turbulent four days in the history of finance, and thus one of the stranger allocations of newsroom resources in recent media history.
Much more good stuff. Go read it.
