Who Spiked The Water At CNBC?

March 5, 2009

The Facts

Someone has put something in the water at CNBC. A couple of days ago, speaking to Mark Haines, Erin Burnett was actually defending the Obama budget, and she wasn’t trying to be facetious. Yesterday while interviewing Peter Orzag, President Obama’s Budget Director, Squawk Box gave Orzag sufficient time to answer questions and respond to comments, which turned out to be a very enlightened segment. For the past few days Dennis Kneale has softened on his idea that tax cuts alone & ungodly bonuses paid to executives is the only answer to economic recovery, and that only bailing out Wall Street is purely acceptable. In fact, Kneale has, for the first time, actually questioned the sanity of some of the money that went to Wall Street. Also this week, Larry Kudlow seems to have a small crack (very small) in his make-believe glass world where his mentality is ‘give me supply-side economics or give me death’. And now that the ‘holy guru’s of knowledge’ have stopped blabbering long enough to find out what’s really in the Obama stimulus package, they are admitting that those people who deliberately over extended themselves on home purchases are not going to be rescued by President Obama. Finally, today Joe Kernen asked the question “do you think there are some untruths floating around out there”.

My View

The first thing that came to me was this post where I quoted Joe Kernen as saying “Wow! We would have to cut this network down from about 17 hours per day to about 1.5 hours per day if we had to get supporting facts before we reported on something”.

We don’t know yet if Rick Santelli has drank the spiked water. But if so, with his triple dose of ignorant arrogance, he’s probably just too busy writing his book entitled “How I Humiliated Obama into Modifying the Stimulus Bill” (you might remember “Santelli’s “pissed-off speech” on February 9^th).

So what does all of this say to us? It says, first, that the end justifies the means; meaning they can get more publicity and more mileage by spouting untruths that supports their ideology. Second, it says that they believe nobody is interested in ‘yesterday’s news’; which is a huge comforter when you knowingly lie about something and know that most likely those lies will be later revealed.

Of course, we can’t overlook the remote possibility that the chiefs at CNBC has told all of them to tone down their personal ideology comments & arguments while they are suppose to be interviewing people and reporting the news.