Stewart was of course masterful. But he could have done the same job on the general media, and on every cable and broadcast network, and come to think of it he should. He could showed a montage of talking heads on every network pimping the stock market and pumping up the bubble. He could reasonably ask any network, as he asked Cramer about CNBC, "which side are on?"
The same factors that explain CNBC's pathetic performance in covering the economic tsunami also explain the rest of the media's equally pathetic performance. Stewart rightly suggested that CNBC caters to a Wall Street clientele and viewership, even moreso than the general media, but on a more fundamental level CNBC and the general media have the same vested interest in rising stock prices.