Jim Cramer is an easy target. With his big bald head, poncy disposition and self-assured, obnoxious shouting on his crazy, aptly named show, Mad Money, it's no great mystery why he, of all people, is being pilloried as the goateed, red face of the media's part in the economic meltdown.

Jim Cramer is indeed a shameless snake-oil salesmen who has admitted to – bragged about, even – flouting ethics in order to manipulate the stock market. Nevertheless, he wasn't the only one partaking in these "shenanigans," as Jon Stewart called them. Here, a look at some of the other media wackos involved.

Fox

Of course. Do these people get anything right? Back in 2007, Neil Cavuto, host of the number one business news show on cable, assembled a meeting of the minds that included himself, noted evolution-denier Ben Stein, some lady from the New York Post and the president of Euro Pacific Capital, Peter Schiff. Watch as Schiff says over and over again that subprime lending is horribly dangerous and has the potential to ruin the "entire mortgage market." Then watch as everyone laughs in his face, with Cavuto asking leading questions like, "Don't you think we are using this whole subprime issue as an excuse, and that real market pros know we're using it as an excuse?" Later, game show host Stein stresses, "[Subprime lending] is a tiny, tiny blip."

The next year, in April 2008, FoxNews.com ran a piece by John Lott titled "The 'Recession' Is a Media Myth," in which Lott concludes:

…this last week, Barack Obama proclaimed “As most experts know, our economy is in a recession.” Hillary Clinton made similar staements [sic] last fall. Yet, as any economist knows, a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative growth, and we haven’t even had one single quarter of negative growth reported. The economy slowed down significantly during the end of last year, but that was after a sizzling annual GDP growth rate of 4.9 percent in the third quarter.

"But why?" you might like to ask Mr. Lott. "Why would the media set out to intentionally deceive the country about the stability of the economy if, in fact, the economy was doing just fine?" Because, stupid, it was all an insidious plan hatched to terrify Americans into voting for the Democratic Party in '08! This, again, from Neil Cavuto's program:

NEIL CAVUTO, HOST: Well, is the economy slowing? Well, yeah it is. But call me crazy, is it as bad as this? This week, the Associated Press claiming Americans are being subjected to, and I quote "economic water torture." And then this little ditty item on the GDP, "The economy nearly sputtered out at the end of the year." We were up at the end of the year. Why someone here says this is all part of the media's plan to get a Democrat in the White House. Is it?…First to Ben Stein, and Ben, your reaction to this idea that we're going to hell in a hand-basket.

BEN STEIN: Well, the media has been selling us on fear and recession for months maybe years now. Even before there was and really seriously bad news they were selling, selling, selling fear. They have been shouting "FIRE" in a crowded theatre now for months, quarters, I'd say probably over a year. The actual economic conditions are not that bad. I think if we have a recession, if we have a serious recession, a great deal will lie at the media's feet. And I don't know why they're doing it. They're the ones that are going to lose their jobs.

If only Ben Stein was still giving away all that money, millions of people might not be suffering so much from this non-existent recession.

CNBC

We'd like to go on a screed here about how the whole of CNBC, not just Jim Cramer, is a bumbling mistake of a thing, but Jon Stewart and The Daily Show have already done that better than we ever could. Watch and weep.

Pretty Much All Financial Media

In reality, the silence of the business media about the impending collapse wasn't a specifically left-wing or right-wing mistake, but something endemic to the whole industry. No business journalist was authentically questioning the practices that were making the economy boom, probably because, as Jim Cramer noted during his Comedy Central beatdown, a lot of them were taking CEOs atop these now faltering companies at their word when they assured them everything was fine. It wasn't journalism or reporting, it was lazing around with the kings of the world and shooting the shit for a while.

It's a small consolation, and too little too late, but here, a welcome apology from a Telegraph business reporter:

I don't agree with the hysterical moaning that newspapers are to blame for denting public confidence and sowing the seeds of economic doom. This is rubbish. If people took that much notice of headlines they would have sold their homes en masse three or four years ago when so many of us started warning that property prices were heading for a slump.

But we were guilty of a more fundamental failing – one about which most of the financial press has remained shamefully silent. We should have made more noise about the risks of a crisis before it erupted