Read This Now - Salon Watches CNBC So You Don't Have To

Salon assigned Gabriel Winant the unenviable task of watching CNBC all day in an effort to see if it's really as bad as Jon Stewart makes it out to be.

The short answer: Yes, it might even be worse.

Got that? It's not our fault none of the models are working. The economy collapsed because the government broke it. Buy Verizon. If it goes up, Cramer and Kudlow and Santelli are geniuses. If it goes down, it's Obama's fault. Either way CNBC wins...

I'm not going to argue that the Dow Jones is irrelevant to the economy, but the fundamental problem of the bubble years was that the Dow Jones was growing and our actual assets were not. We weren't really getting richer. We were just pretending to get richer.

In mistaking themselves for the country at large, and the bouncing of the market for the health of the economy as a whole, Cramer, Kudlow and the whole talking-head crew give the lie to Rick Santelli's assertion about a "silent majority." CNBC feels like bizarro world because, in an important sense, it is.

Along the way Winant links to this video of Art Laffer and Peter Schiff on CNBC back in the fall of 2006 because the guest that CNBC still turns to is Laffer. Watch the video to see just how little sense that makes. Excepting a wierd tangent on whether mothers want to be working or staying at home Schiff absolutely nails the state of the economy and its future downturn. Always interesting to see that once again disater loomed and not everyone missed it but the media didn't want to hear from the folks who said wait, this isn't going to work very well (Iraq ringing any bells?)...



(if you follow the video link through to the YouTube page there are a lot more videos of Schiff accurately diagnosing the economy and predicting its problems)