CNBC's Effective Publicity Stunt

Here's a big shout out to my friends at CNBC, for proving yet again that its "multiple heads, talking over each other" format is working wonders in getting free publicity and the all-important "buzz."

I'm referring, of course, to Rick Santelli's yelling at Steven Liesman. Here's the link.

Oh gosh! Sorry. Wrong link. That was another Rick Santelli yelling at Steve Liesman (or vice versa). Here's the link.

Oh my goodness. Wrong again. OK, here is a Huffington Post blog item with the latest Santelli-yelling-at-Liesman-or-vice-versa. And just to show how CNBC has been able to get mileage from the other side of the political spectrum, here's a blog item from NewsBusters on the same yelling.

Bravo! Yelling works.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

CNBC Fracas Unveils Financial Journalism's Dirty Little Secret

An article in the New York Times today describes how CNBC has blurred the lines (such as they are) between business punditry and journalism, and says:

CNBC is now a place for politics, to borrow a phrase from its sister channel MSNBC. The network’s journalists have been encouraged to speak their minds, making the line between reporter and commentator almost indistinguishable at times.

This seems a bit odd coming from the Times, which has deployed some of its best reporters, from Tom Friedman to Joe Nocera, into writing columnists that are deeply opinionated. But I guess the thing about the article that interested me is how it almost, but didn't quite, touch upon financial journalism's dirty little secret.

Which is, of course, that financial journalists tend to be a bit more conservative than journalists in general. You might say that NBC has both flanks covered, with MSNBC on the left and CNBC on the right. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Rick Santelli's Superb Publicity Stunt

Yessir, you can't buy publicity like this

I think that Dan Mitchell has the best take so far on Jon Stewart's hilarious evisceration of Rick Santelli and CNBC.

Mitchell says as follows:

If you watch Stewart's attack carefully, you might notice something: It was completely unfair. Not inaccurate, but unfair. Stewart did a bunch of things that no journalist could, or should, ever get away with. He showed ultra-short clips of anchors and reporters saying things that, by themselves, sounded really stupid but, in context, may not have been quite as dumb as they seemed (though some surely were). And he included clips of interviewees saying dumb things, something for which CNBC bears no blame (unless they went totally unchallenged, which I assume in some cases they did).

This is all fine—for a satirist. The overall vibe of CNBC—with its "money honeys," Jim Cramer's inane frothing, and the lunkheaded fratboys on Fast Money treating economic news like a football game—is stupid. So showing clips that make the network look stupid works just fine—for a satirist.

What's remarkable about this whole episode, aside from tapping into a kind of wellspring of hostility toward CNBC, is how it is a quintessential publicity stunt gone awry. Rick Santelli was engaged in a spur-of-the-moment rant, and CNBC later picked up on it as "Santelli's tea party." He was then attacked by pretty much every non-conservative columnist east of the Mississippi, and then came Stewart's satire to top off an immense P.R. debacle for CNBC.

Here's more from a Philadelphia Inquirer blog and CJR.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

Another Publicity Coup for Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne

Visiting hours at Overstock.com corporate headquarters

I see that some of my friends at CNBC reflected this morning on one of the more embarrassing blatherings of Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne: that there's a "fax machine" at CNBC where reporters take instructions from "hedge funds" (presumably not the hedge fund that his brother operates, or the one through which Byrne owns Overstock shares).

"Did you see that total whack job at Overstock says there's a fax here or something?" asked an amazed Joe Kernan. "We now know he is not above blatant lying."

We now know? Mr. Kernan, with all due respect, where have you been?

Still, I think it's pleasing to see Byrne described accurately for a change, and not with weasel words like "eccentric." The media, I think, has a hard time coming to grips with the possibility that a CEO could be, as one blogger artfully put it the other day, "nucking futs."

True, the "crazy act" could be just that. But I have to admit, it works. Byrne has certainly managed to divert attention from his company's financial woes by behaving like a clown. But is the price that he is paying -- the demolition of his credibility, the damage to his company's reputation, and the humiliation of being an object of fun on national TV -- worth that laudable objective?

© 2008 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

The Fraud was INSANE!

CNBC's "Business Nation" program has a fascinating segment Wednesday night -- a "reunion" of sorts between Eddie Antar, mastermind of the Crazy Eddie stock fraud of the 1980s, and his nemesis and cousin, former Crazy Eddie CFO Sam Antar.

Sam, of course, has gone straight and is now working with regulators and law enforcement and exposing corporate chicanery and fraud. As Sam himself often points out, it takes a crook to know a crook. Recently he has employed his genius at ferreting our corporate wrongdoing by rooting out chicanery and accounting games at the Overstock.com red-ink machine.

In the CNBC segment, Sam confronts Eddie and engages in a heated exchange. Here is a New York Post article on the segment, and an article in Marketwatch by Herb Greenberg, who hosts the segment.

One interesting detail -- fully addressed in Sam's blog -- is the notion promoted by Eddie that, despite the massive nature of the Crazy Eddie fraud, it was a boon for consumers.

Responding to Eddie's contention that "you can't have a company that runs for 22 years that was a fraud," Sam observes that it is, indeed possible -- and happened:

At crucial times to Eddie and Antar and his father Sam M. Antar, Crazy Eddie’s sales were made up and not real. In 1986, we channeled about $2 million from funds previously skimmed as a private company (before we went public) and put the money back into the company to increase sales. A few days later, Eddie Antar and his father cashed out over $30 million in stock.

We sold merchandise to trans-shippers at a little bit above cost and at times even below cost to inflate our store level sales performance. Eddie Antar, his brothers, and brother-in-law laughed all the way to the bank as they continued to sell stock at inflated stock prices.

Crazy Eddie was an empire built on deceit. The company was rotten at its core.

© 2007 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
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