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  • Blaming Jim Cramer for the Economy? Really?

    Kurt Soller | Mar 16, 2009 04:39 PM
    Last week, the business network CNBC was the latest target of the economic meltdown. It all came to a head when the face of network, "Mad Money" Jim Cramer, appeared on the Daily Show to defend himself in front of Jon Stewart. In our Signal or Noise poll, we asked readers whether Stewart's insistence that the biz press failed us was legitimate or a ploy for great ratings. The results of the poll? Readers thought Stewart's smackdown was more than warranted, saying that Cramer's in the tank with Wall Street, not the public.

    "All signal folks," wrote one reader. "We have been waiting to hear this from someone -- anyone -- and for it to come from Stewart? Great." Many others praised the comedian, calling him everything from a God to the greatest and most serious journalist of our generation. "Stewart has exposed Cramer for what he really is: an entertainer in the investment field," wrote commenter sverigeman, while others added that "Cramer looked like he was going to cry," and that this was "the most damning indictment of the financial news networks ever heard." In the end, many thought the debate was warranted, if only because it got to a larger point that supported Stewart's attack: "Stewart's attack was on the media for not doing the jobs the media used to be paid for - not taking things a face value, but investigating to get to the truth of the matter," explained one reader.

    But should Cramer (or Erin Burnett, or any other CNBC host) really be blamed for a systematic meltdown of our financial system? Of course not, said one reader, who argued that "Cramer is a scapegoat being used to divert from other sources that has just as much responsibility to inform the American people." A reader that goes by MT2910 also came to the stock-picker's defense, adding that "Cramer is only one man... the media does not create or write the policies that allowed the banks to over-leverage themselves and write sub-prime mortgages." Just as many thought it was definitely time to find someone to place the blame on, scores of readers think that idea, in itself, signals how we're feeling: "The American people want to blame somebody for their pain," writes one reader. "Since they can never find a real culprit, they were settle for the closest thing they can get. Cramer, with his juvenile antics, and pretensions to know-it-all, makes the perfect target."

    Did you hear that, Ben Affleck? Maybe you can stop blaming Newsweek now.
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  • Wanted: Your Tweets

    Newsweek | Mar 10, 2009 04:35 PM

    Two stories that we here at Newsweek know we’ll be covering for a while are the economic downturn and the continuing rise of social media. Recently, we’ve tried to get a good look at how the recession hits home with stories like Lisa Miller’s piece on worried investors stockpiling gold and our gallery of evictions across the country. We’ve also talked about how Twitter, one of the Web’s fastest-growing social networks, is revolutionizing communication and even, as Andrew Romano found out last week, changing how some entrepreneurs do business. The next step is to see how these stories converge, and to do that, we’d like your help.

    Newsweek’s My Turn column is interested in publishing a few personal essays on Newsweek.com about how the recession is impacting our readers, but we also recognize that we can’t fully capture the effects of the downturn in one or two columns. To solve that problem, we’re calling for all of your personal recession stories, with one catch: we need them in 140 characters or fewer. This week, send your recession stories to us via Twitter. You can reach us @Newsweek (reply to one of our tweets about the contest), and use the tag #rcstory to help us keep track. All of the tweets will be streamed on Newsweek.com, and we’ll contact the authors of our favorites for a chance to write an 850-900 word My Turn column for our Web Site and earn $500. We’re teaming up with our friends at NPR’s Planet Money (@planetmoney) on this project, so some of the best tweets will also be read on their podcast.

    We know it’s hard, but we need to limit this to one tweet per person. So be as witty, funny, and honest as possible, but remember to keep it short and tweet--er, sweet.

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  • Conspiracy Theories: Newsweek's Map Flap

    Kurt Soller | Mar 6, 2009 04:52 PM

    Conspiracy theory is all about finding signs among the innocuous. And when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, every word and image of media coverage is parsed and dissected by both sides in search of any signal of bias or favor.

    So when Newsweek.com made a coding error on a recent map, critics pounced. Our mistake: Our map showed the state of Israel, rather than the West Bank and Gaza, as Palestinian territory--when we meant to only highlight the Palestinian areas. The graph accompanied our recent cover story on radical Islam, and assigned religious freedom scores to Islamic countries, based on data from the Hudson Institute.

    “The fact that you labeled Israel as a ‘Palestinian Territory’ calls to question your whole credibility when it comes to Islam,” wrote one reader. “Either you are too stupid to know basic geography … or you deliberately exposed your true agenda.”

    Newsbusters posted a screenshot of our original map and said, “Perhaps Newsweek hired some nice Jihadis to create its website.” Another commenter on that site added that he “hopes the editor gets a personal visit from someone in the Israeli embassy.”

    NEWSWEEK sincerely regrets the error, which we corrected immediately. For the record, the mistake was simply that--a bad mistake.


  • Lab Notes: The Doctors Respond

    Newsweek | Mar 3, 2009 03:46 PM

    On her Lab Notes blog, Sharon Begley details the response from physicians to her story Why Doctors Hate Science:

    Among the many, many (really many) doctors who have written in to berate me for my column in this week’s magazine claiming that “doctors hate science” (which was shorthand and headline-speak for “why doctors are so reluctant to embrace evidence-based medicine and comparative-effectiveness research”), quite a few made a crucial point. Doctors may be paragons when it comes to using only treatments that have been proved to work. Patients are a whole ‘nother story.

     

    READ THE WHOLE THING HERE