The Most Trusted Name in Pseudo-News

It made for good comedy on "The Daily Show," but Jon Stewart's awe-inspiring, go-get-'em tirade against CNBC points to a larger, serious issue of integrity in the most important vein of the news media at the moment: the financial press.

Information is the lifeblood of efficient financial markets, and as a primary relayer of market-sensitive information, networks like CNBC have, above all, a journalistic responsibility to provide no-spin, accurate information on the daily intricacies of the world of finance, a world constantly in flux. CNBC's constant forward-looking, speculative, CEO-cheerleading, Wall Street-friendly analyses of economic policies before and since the outset of the crisis send a flagrantly incorrect impression to the American public that government policy can and will be effective only if it passes a Dow Jones Industrials Average litmus test - the up or down movement of the DJIA - and that government policy can only be effective if Wall Street thinks so. In any case, the current financial crisis and resulting government bailouts should be enough evidence that Wall Street does not always have the public's interest at heart).

Because CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, and other specialist business news outlets are now watched and read by more members of the average American public than ever before, the corporations that own these outlets are under pressure to "dumb down" business news. The result has been networks like CNBC moving toward the mainstream cable news model of opinionated talking heads running "news" shows at the expense of the boring, mundane, intricate, black-white-AND-gray, dynamic thing people used to call, "journalism."

This is unethical and too dangerous a risk when the investments of pensioners, workers, parents and others are on the line.