One Rico wishes he'd seen

The New York Times has an article by Alessandra Stanley about the 'shootout' between Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer (of the Mad Money show) on The Daily Show:

It wasn’t 'Brawl Street' or a 'Thrilla in Vanilla'. It wasn’t a Daily Show-friendly feud, or even much of a discussion. Mostly, the much-hyped Thursday night showdown between the comedian Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer, the mercurial host of Mad Money on CNBC, felt like a Senate subcommittee hearing. Mr. Stewart treated his guest like a CEO subpoenaed to testify before Congress: his point was not to hear Mr. Cramer out, but to act out a cathartic ritual of indignation and castigation.
“Listen, you knew what the banks were doing, yet you were touting it for months and months,” the 'Democratic senator from Comedy Central' said. “The entire network was. For now to pretend that this was some sort of crazy, once-in-a-lifetime tsunami that nobody could have seen coming is disingenuous at best and criminal at worst.”
Congress has— belatedly and showily— gone after the leaders of banks, auto companies, and insurance companies for their complicity in the financial crisis. Mr. Stewart has always had a messianic streak to his political satire, as when he ripped into Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala on Crossfire for “hurting America”. He is now focusing on business news cable networks like CNBC, which not only failed to foresee the credit crisis, but also, in his view, sided with the bankers and helped inflate the bubble.
And while it’s never much fun to watch a comedian lose his sense of humor, in an economic crisis it’s even sadder to see supposed financial clairvoyants acting like clowns. Mr. Stewart made his feelings clear: “I understand you want to make finance entertaining,” he told Mr. Cramer. “But it’s not a fucking game,” he said, using an adjective that was bleeped out. “When I watch that, I can’t tell you how angry that makes me.”
Part of Mr. Stewart’s frustration may stem from the fact that while he clearly won the debate, Mr. Cramer and CNBC stood to profit from the encounter. In today’s television news market, that cable network and its stars are like the financiers they cover: media short-sellers trading shamelessly on publicity, good or bad, so long as it drives up ratings. There isn’t enough regulation on Wall Street, and there’s hardly any accountability on cable news: it’s a 24-hour star system in which opinions— and showmanship— matter more than facts.
Like a Congressional witness who knows better than to contradict senators in public, Mr. Cramer spent much of the interview (and it went long) ruefully conceding that he could have done better, and that he sure will try from now on, but really his heart was in the right place. “There are shenanigans, and we should call them out, I should do a better job at that,” Mr. Cramer said, adding that he was lobbying Washington (“I have people in Congress,” is how he put it) to tighten regulation and enforcement. “I’m trying,” he said.
Mr. Cramer tried to be friendly and looked a little taken aback by Mr. Stewart’s prosecutorial tone— he might have been expecting a more jocular give-and-take. But mostly, he sat back and milked every last drop from a tempest-in-a-cable-box that NBC and its sister channels have been fanning ever since The Daily Show host began hammering CNBC for its complacent Wall Street coverage, singling out embarrassing market calls by Mr. Cramer in particular.
The Daily Show has shown clip after clip from last year that shows Mr. Cramer assuring his Mad Money viewers that Bear Stearns was not in trouble— shortly before that heavily leveraged investment firm imploded. He has apologized to his viewers several times since then. (“I have always thought they were honest,” he said. “That was my mistake.”)
On Tuesday the Today show invited Mr. Cramer to reply to Mr. Stewart’s charges— and watch the Daily Show clips of his show all over again. He also appeared on “Morning Joe,” on MSNBC, and on Thursday morning, he made pie crusts with Martha Stewart, whose syndicated show is distributed by NBC, and jokingly thwacked the table with her rolling pin at the mention of Mr. Stewart’s name. Mr. Stewart used that clip in his introduction, saying with a smirk, “Mr. Cramer, don’t you destroy enough dough on your own show?”
Once he had Mr. Cramer at his desk, Mr. Stewart showed fresh and even more embarrassing clips from a 2006 interview with the website Mr. Cramer founded, TheStreet.com, in which he too candidly explained how hedge fund market manipulation really works.
And Mr. Stewart pointedly questioned the hyped-up theatricality and dubious claims of CNBC shows like Mad Money and Fast Money. When Mr. Cramer explained, “There is a market for it, and you give it to them,” Mr. Stewart stared at him in disbelief, exclaiming, “There’s a market for cocaine and hookers!” Mr. Stewart kept getting the last word, but Mr. Cramer may yet have the last laugh.

Rico says he saw the shortened version on the Today show, but wishes he'd seen the whole thing...