Here at dKos, we regularly go after Fox News as the conservative mouthpiece of the Republican Party. Fox News, however, is a sideshow. A distraction. Irrelevant. The true power base of conservatives is the money crowd and CNBC speaks for them and them alone. If the progressive movement wants to attain true power, we need to go after conservative propaganda in all forms. Controlling the media is a vital element. As the economy continues to sink, people are tuning in to CNBC for information and advice. CNBC's advertising is explicitly stating that 2008 viewership was their highest ever. The American people are not getting the information they need to make informed money decisions.
Because I make quite a lot of our household income by trading stocks and options, I watch quite a lot of CNBC for the occasional tip and to get a sense of what the sheep on the Street have on their radar. Believe me, if you're willing to put the time into trading rather than investing, there is money to be made if you buy in and out of Wall Street's flavor-of-the-day. After watching for months, both before and after the election, I can tell you that CNBC is no friend of the working person, the union member, the middle class or the small investor.
Headlined by the odious Larry Kudlow, CNBC is a bastion of groupthink: failed free-market, Chicago school, supply-side, Milton Friedman-esque ideology. (That's almost as fun for me to write as "latte-drinking, Volvo-driving, granola-eating liberal" must be for a conservative). Very rarely, an advocate for Keynesian economics will be a guest during the day but he/she is always "balanced" by at least one supply-sider and a phalanx of talking heads who do nothing but jeer and/or shout over their guest.
To his credit, one daytime host, Dylan Ratigan, has vociferously advocated for accountability when it comes to where the TARP funds are going and the people who got us into this mess. He is just as likely to criticize Alan Greenspan as he is Bob Rubin (supposedly one is right and one is left but truthfully, they're both just crooks). But on the post-market Fast Money show, his guest yesterday was none other than the king of supply-siders, Arthur Laffer. Laffer informs us that he likes the tax cuts more than the infrastructure spending and that the best way to stimulate the economy is to cut all federal income taxes to 0% for the next 6 months (riiiiiight....no federal taxes....who will that benefit most?) He also thinks that at this time, fiscal restraint and a flat tax would be the best bet for putting us on the road to recovery. To balance Laffer's opinions, the guest was....nobody. Of course.
CNBC is adamantly anti-union. Discussion during the auto bailout crisis centered around the "fact" that the unions refused to either give in or negotiate. To listen to CNBC, you would think that the entire global economic meltdown is due to the "reality" that union workers make too much money, have too much healthcare and too much potential retirement security.
From CNBC, I learned that my level of taxation is the only financial variable that will make a difference in my life. Stagnating wages, job insecurity, rising prices, inflationary commodity values...all of this is meaningless compared to the most burning question I must ask myself..."Will Obama raise taxes on the wealthy?" Because if he does so, the world will explode into chaos. Rich people will have to pay more personal income taxes which somehow means that they will not be creating more jobs. Why is it that when Dick Cheney grants himself another tax cut, no one ever asks him how many jobs he's personally created with said cut?
If you go over to Media Matters site, you can click on the Radio/TV shows tab or the Networks/Publications tab and you'll see that they do not cover CNBC. Obviously, Olbermann and Maddow will not be covering/criticizing their own network so CNBC continues to fly under the radar. The only way CNBC will start responding to the new world order is if the new world order stands up and demands to be heard.
We spend a lot of time here posting diaries analyzing Paul Krugman's columns and generally praising the already worthy economists among us. I think we need to go beyond that. I have written to CNBC numerous times, asking for some level of balance in their programming with no response. I think they are doing a disservice to their viewers and to our country as a whole. They do have a feedback page on the main site but each individual show also has a feedback page or e-mail address. If you are a viewer of any of the following shows (or even if you're not) drop them a line and ask why there is no one on their network who has had an original thought in 30 years. I imagine this approach works best if you find some way to ask that question politely. Here are a few of the daytime shows:
Fast Money: fast mail
Mad Money with Jim Cramer: madmoney@cnbc.com
Power Lunch (the bobbleheads on this show are the most egregious): powerlunch@cnbc.com
Kudlow and Company (I can't stomach this guy but maybe you can): kudlow@cnbc.com
It will take many years to undo the damage conservatives have dumped on us for the last 30 years. Taking back the airwaves/media takes many forms. CNBC has gotten away with little attention from progressive's for waaaaay too long. We can do something about that.
Good luck out there...and if you're an investor don't go all in yet in the markets. There's still some downward momentum to be had.