Was Jon Stewart fair to Jim Cramer?

“What Jon Stewart needs is Jon Stewart,” said Richard Cohen in The Washington Post. The Daily Show host needs his own droll watchdog to correct him when he’s wrong, as he was when he skewered CNBC’s “excitable analyst,” Jim Cramer, and the rest of the financial media. “They didn’t cover up the story of financial shenanigans. They didn’t even know it existed.”

Come on, said Canada’s The Ottawa Citizen in an editorial. Audiences lapped up Stewart's assault (watch Stewart's introduction, part 1 of the interview, and Cramer's response) because financial pundits are the only ones still peddling the “greed is good” attitude that got us into this economic mess. Wall Street and the rest of us didn’t bother questioning the morality of that philosophy when times were good—at least Stewart finally asked the tough questions.

Stewart is the first to admit he’s not the one who should be putting people’s feet to the fire, said Tim Walker in Britain’s The Independent. “But if nobody else will?” The rest of us can now rest easy in the knowledge that satire didn’t die when George W. Bush left office.

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