Cramer vs. Stewart: Round One Is No Contest

On a day when Bernie Madoff pled guilty to bilking a lot of people out of a lot of money, another little drama of the Great Recession took place in New York at the taping of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

There Stewart, a self-admitted fake news anchor who has been known to express real opinions from time to time, had as his guest Jim Cramer, the screaming meemee from CNBC who makes stock picks on a show called Mad Money. It was hyped by Comedy Central as this week's version of the Media Showdown at the OK Corral, or something like that.

What brought this on? It began when CNBC's Rick Santelli, who gained notoriety when he attacked President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package on live TV in front of a group of traders, blew off an appearance on The Daily Show. Stewart responded with a tirade of how CNBC, a financial news channel owned by General Electric, had been getting it wrong in its coverage of the economic meltdown.

As I see it, CNBC (and its competitors at Fox, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal) is intended for business junkies who live, eat and breathe the financial markets 24/7. It is not intended for Mr. and Mrs. Average Investor, whose main concerns are that foreclosures are up, their 401(K)s are down, and their employment situation is up in the air.

That said, Stewart was in great form taking down a poorly-prepared Cramer. But that was on Stewart's home turf with a live studio audience. How would he have fared on CNBC, answering tough questions from men and women in business suits with no help from his writers? Would they have left Stewart as exposed as Cramer was?

Jon Stewart has every right to be angry at the financiers who bet their investors' life savings and lost, CEOs who lived high on the hog while their companies take government money and lay off employees, people sweet-talked into buying homes they couldn't afford, etc. But he is a paid entertainer who doesn't have to worry about where his next meal is coming from. The rest of us do.