The TV Zone

Who is Dylan Ratigan and why should care? Because he is one of the fast-rising stars at CNBC, who anchored "Fast Money" and "Closing Bell," and is - by disposition - a tempestuous guy. But he certainly is engaging to watch, and a talented anchor.

Or, I should say, he was. Ratigan's leaving the network for parts unknown, and his last day is today. What happened? I could at this point direct you to "Page 6," which broke the story this morning, but I suspect there's more to this than what the Post has reported. It's a mystery, in fact. Ratigan - lucky guy - largely escaped the flack attack unloaded on CNBC earlier this month, in the wake of Jon Stewart's massive rip. But...Ratigan would have, doubtless, done a better job of deflecting some of that gale force diatribe than Jim Cramer.

Here's a look at a recent Ratigan appearance on "The View." Still no official word from CNBC about this; will post when/if I get it....

Well, sort of.

I do like to have catchily misleading headlines to get people to read this stuff.

In fact, on this morning's "Today Show," Jim Cramer did make what I believe to be his first public comments about last week's encounter with Jon Stewart. Meredith Vieira was de-briefing some members of the CNBC starting line-up about AIG, when she turned to Cramer, "I can't let you go without asking about..."

...that horrific debacle last week. (She didn't really say that - I did. Actually, it wasn't THAT bad for Cramer, though everyone else pretty much declared it to be career-ending; whatever.)

Said he, "it's naive and misleading to blame the media" for the current economic crisis.

"We weren't behind this. CNBC, in particular, has been out front on this," per a transcript from HuffPo. "I think there are people who bear so much more responsibility [than the media] that it's just wrong-headed -- the politicians, the regulators, the SEC, the lenders, the investment banks. ... It's just a naive focus, it really is Meredith."

He added that he didn't fight back because he was "taught to take the high road."

Right, Jim. Like "Mad Money" is the high road. (Sorry....I couldn't resist. That was uncalled for, Gay, entirely uncalled for.)

That was about it. There were no threats or declarations, like, "if I ever meet Jon Stewart in a dark alley," or "that guy Stewart's a dweeb anyway."

A shame: Nothing like having this thing continue on for a few more weeks. When or if I get a transcript/clip, will post.

(AP/Jacquelyn Martin)

OK, I got some reaction to a post earlier this morning about the Jim Cramer/Jon Stewart encounter, and rather than respond to each and every one of the comments, let me address this thoughtful one from "Nick."

It seems to hit clearly on the central complaint -- that I entirely missed the point of the interview, and that my conjecture about the financial news industry also missing the larger story compounded my error.

Here's "Nick," and my reaction follows:

"Verne, you've seriously lost the plot on this one. You have completely misunderstood Jon Stewart. He is not a comedian; he is a satirist. CNBC looked down on Jon Stewart the same way that Tucker Carlson and Crossfire did and look where it got them both: labeled as the embarrassment of journalism.

"I echo Peter's sentiment above when you ask about the lack of comedy in last night's show. I mean, did you seriously think there was going to be anything funny about it after the host looked at the guest and said, full of fury, "this isn't a f****** game."

"You wanted comedy? Your attempt at self-defense comes off as bad taste. The only person you have to blame for your inexplicable inability to take Stewart seriously is yourself.

"Sounds like you need to read up on the comments your post has generated and do what Jim Cramer probably did last night: take a cold shower and figure out how you missed the boat.

"The idea that the entire financial news industry can wash its hands of this debacle because they were lied to as well (and didn't see much point at actually uncovering the truth) is exactly the irresponsibility that Stewart was fuming at. And irresponsible journalism in the face lying hedge fund managers and investment bank executives who deliberately manipulate their books and the market for their own personal gain IS complicity on the part of the journalists.

Good journalism is a tough job and we need now more than ever."

Thanks Nick and everyone else for taking the time to write....

Now here's my reaction:

First of all, I never implied, said, or asserted that last night's show was funny or was meant to be funny. Many millions of people have lost jobs, homes, pensions, and savings -- and perhaps even a future -- because of the actions of a number of people in the financial industry who deserve our condemnation now and forever more. And there should, perhaps even will, come a time when they have to answer for their transgressions before a court of law. Jon Stewart appropriately and accurately reflected the fury of an entire nation that has been screwed by their likes. There was nothing "funny" or "satirical" in that approach, and I can't imagine how anyone construed that I had said as much.

Second, Cramer is irrelevant. He's a showman -- a bells and whistles guy who does shtick to get a number. There are real reporters at CNBC -- Charles Gasparino and David Faber -- to name two, who have done very good work for this network. Cramer should not have been on last night; Rick Santellli who started this whole thing in the first place should've been. Or maybe Gasparino, who could have at least defended himself. Fact is, CNBC mishandled this horribly.

And third, reporters do report what people tell them, and they do report the facts, to the best of their ability, and they do draw conclusions from those. The reporters at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times -- and my paper, too -- do a magnificent job in this difficult endeavor day after day. So, my rhetorical question: How did these dedicated professionals miss the biggest story of their lifetime? They reported the facts correctly, and they understood fully the implications of an ever-expanding market in various securities year after year. The word "bubble" became not merely part of their vocabulary but part of their daily professional lives. So, how did they miss the story? One reason -- the story was astronomically complex, and changed quickly -- and profoundly -- from one day to the next. The outcome was by no means clear. Another reason -- they didn't have all the facts, through no fault of their own. Banks -- for example -- hid vast amounts of junk loans on their balance sheets until they were forced to reveal them. An Edward R. Murrow -- to use one writer's example -- couldn't have uncovered that garbage. Neither could an army of highly trained and responsible financial reporters. Neither, it appears, could the former chairman of the Federal Reserve. Maybe Stewart should have him on the show.

Let's get one thing straight on this subject, may we? Jim Cramer did not come out looking as bad as all the insta-pundits seem to think he did. Honestly, from this insta-pundit's perch, the guy did OK in the face of Jon Stewart's barely contained fury for the most part.

What Cramer didn't come out doing -- to his detriment -- was fight. "I'm a big fan!" Huh? -- you are?! After you got the cr*p kicked out of you on "The Daily Show" all week? What does it take, Jim, to become an enemy of yours? Honestly, that smacked of wussy all the way. If there's a takeaway from this interview, and one that may haunt ol' Mister Mad Money from this day forward, it may simply be that he chickened out.

And yup, Stewart also had him by the short ones when he pulled up an old grainy clip of Cramer talking to someone -- unidentified -- about short-selling on Thestreet.com, with the soundbites suggesting that it was part of the problem and that this former hedge fund guy (turned commentator) named Jim Cramer was part of the problem as well.

Yeah, it looked bad at that moment -- sort 'o like when Randy Orton takes down the Undertaker. Or whatever...

But...was Stewart -- as he certainly seemed to be doing -- suggesting that Cramer was shorting all the stocks he touted on "Mad Money?" And if that was the suggestion, then why didn't Stewart come right out and say so? Cramer had an opportunity to push back on that one, but refused to. Too bad for him. That's what you call "an opening."

But...much of the discussion on short-selling and hedge funds was also financial arcana and I'm fairly certain that there was no one out there last night who sat back and said to him or herself, "by Jeez, Cramer's no better than Madoff....He's the reason for the debacle."

Cramer's defense, and not an entirely unreasonable one throughout the night -- that people lied to him.

Stewart was very good, and below I've posted what I think is the best part of the whole interview -- "When I see that I can't tell you how [frakking] angry I get because it tells me, you all know..." Populist rants play well in this kind of market, but I'd ask Jon: Did you ever read the Wall Street Journal, or the Times? Howabout Fortune? Or the dozen or so big trades like Institutional Investor that covered the Street as well, and are equally -- in fact, more influential than CNBC and poor little Jim Cramer?

Did they call the financial debacle a month, a year, ahead of time?

In fact -- guess what! -- they didn't. So does that mean WSJ is guilty as well, or the Times? Surely they knew about the short-sellers and hedge funds guys as well. So...? That's the logical extension of Stewart's argument, and of course it's an absurd one because they covered the bull market too, and they (often) reported the lies of CEOs too. Not their fault -- reporters report what people tell them.

And one more thing before I bore you, dear reader, into an absolute stupor. Why go after Cramer? He's a tiny target -- why not get the real culprits on? The ones that really truly deserved Stewart's well-founded fury?

Because -- of course -- they'd never come on, so Jim Cramer will have to do.

Still...great television last night, and kudos to both of 'em. More kudos, though, to Stewart.

And speaking of bleepers that don't go bleep (see below), what exactly did Charles Gasparino say on CNBC yesterday?

Gaspo: One of my favorite TV business news reporters...no, take that back - my favorite TV biz news reporter. The guy's an insane bulldog, in the best sense of both words; he's the Gordo Ramsey of the TV biz news biz. He used to be a little calmer back when he worked for Newsday, about half a century ago...

But TV Newser yesterday caught this exchange, live and unexpurgated, between him and Donny Deutsch:

Gasparino: "We shouldn't be talking about it. It's a stupid [insert word here that typically denotes copulation but in some instances - such as when A-Rod strikes out again, in the bottom of the ninth, for like the fifth game in a row - is a perfectly acceptable and even polite exclamatory word of surprise and regret] debate."

Deutsch: Wow, did he?

Gasparino: I'm sorry.

Sue Herera: You're agreeing. We're leaving it there, you're agreeing. That's it.

Gasparino: I'm sorry, I'm sorry. You can't put me on this show.

[Oh right Donny, you old prude - like YOU'VE never used that word before, like a thousand times a day, every day...]

I do so hope you got the bad pun in my headline: But the fact remains, that special on marijuana last night on CNBC - which usually measures viewers in the thousands as opposed to millions - was by far the most-viewed special on the network's air EVER.

And "ever" is a long time.

The figure: 1.2 million potheads ... er, curious viewers ... tuned into Trish Regan's "Marijuana Inc." last night to learn how to score in ... er, learn how ... the fascinating business of cannabis is conducted.

And none of those viewers inhaled, by the way.

There's something strangely comforting and old school about tonight's new series on CNBC, "The Entrepreneurs" - tucked out of sight on the network at 10 p.m. and hosted by Donny Deutsch. It says, in so many words, that new business launches are still possible and all you have to do is work hard, have an original idea, some common sense, and plenty of luck and you too could wind up with a dream come true - something so wonderful and outrageous that even a looming Great Depression can't derail it. The series is full of hope, and hope is what people need right now. This one leads off with a couple of guys named Jason Osborn and Jason Wright - former models with Wilhelmina - who got the bright idea of packing their own granola called Feed (the second story is about Sara Blakely, who created Spanx.) These guys seem like nice guys - not vipers or boardroom barracudas - with a very good granola. They mixed it themselves, sent it around to stores in Manhattan, and now have (only a handful of years later) a business approaching three million in sales.

The show's fine, but I'd like - maybe you'd like too - a wider angle that never comes: How many other granola makers are there out there? Who are the big players? What are the marketing and distribution challenges? How much does it cost to make this stuff? And how much to market? Who are their consumers? What's their demographic and "psychographic?" How's that changing..? And so on. These are Biz 101 questions, but without answers, the Two Jasons - who apparently have already had a lot of media coverage - get what amounts to another free ride. The wide angle would make their story even more compelling.

Grade: B -

Guess what? That episode of "Big Idea with Donny Deutsch" that you just couldn't wait to see tonight? Wait ... It's been postponed along with whole rest of the prime-time sched on CNBC, which will now go wall-to-wall on the market crisis with " Street Crisis: Is Your Money Safe?" ( 7 p.m. till 11), followed by a real nice glass of warm milk before beddy-bye - a special edition of "Mad Money with Jim Cramer" at 11.

And -- wow! -- speaking of the Big C (CNBC, not Jim, who has some 'splaining to do), did you watch the network this afternoon? I broke out into a cold sweat, then started to hyperventilate, then broke down into uncontrollable sobbing. Finally, I realized - "what are you crying for, pal? You're already broke." Then, I broke into a big smile of schadenfreude.

CNBC at moments like this is a trip - a bracing cup of mushroom tea. It's just wild: I was watching the heart attack until closing bell and I'm fairly certain I began to detect a pattern -- the lower the Dow industrial number goes down, the louder the voices on camera become. Then, when the Dow starts to improve, and go up a bit, the voices start to get a little softer. Dow goes down ... voices go up. Dow goes up ... voices down. It's a fact. Check it out. Charlie Gasparino was on earlier, saying the panic was overblown -- his voice seemed kinda soft -- which appeared to directly contradict a few million traders who had just slit their wrists. But seriously folks ... woo, what a day for CNBC. These guys are juggling their own version of the Iraq invasion, and as a TV event, it's quite mesmerizing -- a gale of words and numbers and all of them verily indecipherable.

Jim Cramer. (Photo by Brad Trent)

What it's about: Those of us who struggle to pay our gas bill always look wistfully to the day when we can pay said bill, but tonight at 10, CNBC takes us into a world where something as picayune as $4.55 per gallon is as momentous as a molecule on a mote of dust on a mite's middle toe.

The world of super duper rich.

This hour begins with a Rolls show, and ends with the stark screen graphic that tells us the average salary is $26,323, but the 400 richest Americans are worth a total $214 billion which is more than the GNP of 149 nations. "Super Rich" is filled with such stats, and after a while they'll drift away from your plain of consciousness, as if they are just more numbers in a sea, nay, universe, of grandiose figures and outsize bank-rolls. Forty-nine thousand households have net worths of between $50 and $500 mill, and 125,000 between $25 and $50 mill. In 1985, there were 13 billionaires from sea to shining sea; now there are more than a thousand.

Millionaires are the mere middle class rich and barely merit inclusion here; this is the rarefied world of wealth, where a billion is a nice pile of peanuts, but you're only really interesting when your pile is up to ten billion. The show - narrated by vet CNBC reporter, David Faber - profiles many of these people and - my suggestion - bring your sunglasses because every one of them seems to have a taste for gold lame.

There's Tim Durham, who confides that it costs 23 grand to change a tire on his Bugatti (he's got 70 cars scattered about, each one worth more than your house, twice over...). There's Glenn Stearns, a poor kid from Maryland now worth - I think I heard the program right - $100 billion. Maybe $100 million. Whatever. There's Anthony Scaramucci, of Manhasset worth only $80 million; he seems like he's almost a pauper in this crowd. These are people who go on vacation to places like Parrot Cay (above) where a lousy room costs two grand a day. Many make their lucre from hedge funds, and in fact, it seems like most do.

Bottom line: David Faber is one of the best financial reporters on TV, maybe the best, as far as I can tell, so you start out with the assumption that this will be a well-told hour that's richly - pun absolutely intended - reported. It is. But like all pornography, wealth pornography starts to wear thin after a while, no matter how skillful or thoughtful the treatment. Faber and his producers, it seems to me, do just about everything right: They offer perspective, talk to the right people (including Ron Chernow, the National Book Award-winning author and biographer of J.P. Morgan), ask the right questions, and provide the requisite beauty shots. But still something is missing, and that is opinion. A subject like this, at a time like this, absolutely demands a moral, or ethical, perspective, which can be summed up in one question: Is such wealth RIGHT? Or does it represent a serious failing on the part of a nation where so very many are struggling each and every minute? Hedge funds? Only the most excoriated financial instrument since Teapot Dome, but most of these people seem to have earned their money this new-fashioned way, by profiting off of others' misfortunes. Is that right? I'm not sure, but I think a question is merited. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, in his Harvard days, used to rail against the paper millionaires who didn't actually make anything. Do THESE people? And if they don't, isn't there a question to be asked, to wit: Is this kind of wealth and iniquity good for the longterm health of the economy and the country?

This hour is fascinating - but I do wish it would have taken another hour to go deeper, and hit harder.

CNBC has had an interesting day thanks to a.) incredible stock run-up; and b.) Spitzer's red-light follies; and c.) Betsy McCaughey Ross and Charlie Gasparino.

First, this morning, Roslyn Height's own Ken Langone - who was one of the backers/founders of Home Depot - got off this poison arrow at New York's own Hot Pillow Luv Guv (and repeated on-air widely throughout the day: "We all have our own private hells. I hope his private hell is hotter than anybody else's.")

But a little less known is this amusing clip featuring CNBC ace correspondent (and former Newsday reporter) Charles Gasparino filleting former Lieut. Guv Betsy McCaughey Ross. It's quite a spectacle, and Betsy ends up in a total "well, I NEVER...!" (I think she said something like, "I have never seen anyone so rude...") All the other CNBC folks had to apologize and tell poor scandalized McCaughey, "that's our Charlie!" (Note to self: Be nice to Charlie, or never do on-air interview with Charlie...)