The jester is a journalist

Jon Stewart took on Jim Cramer of CNBC a news journalist, who (according to Stewart) enabled the housing bubble. Blogs are full of the battle (whole series of videos here) and Mainstream Media is quite silent. It seems Stewart claims to be a comedian and is actually a fine journalist. Cramer claims to be both (at different times) and is shown to be a horrible journalist, someone who isn't in search of truth. While the end of the battle is important and worth watching (19 minutes), I was drawn to a commenter of the situation.

Ted Koppel, while still hosting Nightline, claimed that the job of a journalist is to report the news. Stewart disagreed. (This account makes it difficult to tell if Stewart was on Koppel's show.) According to Stewart, the problem of simply reporting the news was that it

was a license to promote liars then to the equivalence of truth. If we ignore context, meaning and history- we are always going to be subjected to the whims of manipulators and Machiavellian types. These types only thrive so long as we are ignorant. Once we pull back the curtain, we see the wizard.

One of the things that Cramer kept saying was, "They lied to me." Stewart didn't buy that line and eventually responded that the job of a journalist is to listen to the newsmaker and then go out and try to find the truth. Cramer failed that step.