NBC’s Zucker calls Jon Stewart ‘incredibly unfair’

Jeff Zucker, NBC Universal’s chief executive officer, defended CNBC and called Jon Stewart’s criticism of the business news channel “incredibly unfair.”

CNBC, a part of General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal division, has done “a fantastic job” covering financial markets, Zucker said Wednesday at the McGraw-Hill Cos. Media Summit in New York.

Zucker said CNBC and Jim Cramer’s “Mad Money” advice show haven’t lost viewers since Stewart and “The Daily Show” began criticizing the network for recommending stocks and not being tougher on chief executives who were interviewed leading up to the market’s collapse.

“The criticism of CNBC and the business media in general was completely out of line,” Zucker said. “Just because someone who mocks authority says something doesn’t make it so. The audiences have been there in very strong numbers in the last seven days. So there doesn’t appear to be any effect.”

Cramer’s March 12 appearance attracted the biggest audience to “The Daily Show,” which airs on Viacom Inc.’s Comedy Central network, since the U.S. presidential inauguration, according to Nielsen Co.

“Listen, you knew what the banks were doing and yet were touting it for months and months,” Stewart told Cramer. “The entire network was. And so now to pretend this was some crazy once in a lifetime tsunami is disingenuous at best, criminal at worst.”

“I wish I had done a better job,” Cramer said. “I was late saying that it was bad.”

Comedy Central spokeswoman Renata Luczak declined to comment and said Stewart isn’t giving interviews.

“Mad Money,” a show where Cramer advocates buying or selling shares in companies, averaged 331,000 viewers in the week of his “Daily Show” appearance, a 13 percent increase from the February average, according to Nielsen.

Cramer has averaged 320,000 viewers a day in the TV season that began in September. The audience peaked at 483,000 in the week of Oct. 6, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined more than 18 percent.

“The Daily Show” attracted 2.9 million viewers to Cramer’s interview. The weeknight parody of traditional news shows averaged 2.1 million daily viewers in the week of March 9, Nielsen said.

Cramer is welcome on any show on a Viacom cable channel, Chief Executive Officer Philippe Dauman said Wednesday at the McGraw-Hill conference. Dauman said he supported Stewart and his comments about CNBC.

Stewart “has a connection with the zeitgeist,” Dauman said. “He has that common man connection, and I think the reason it got so much attention is because Jon Stewart was perhaps one of the few people on air who spoke to what people were thinking,” he said.

– www.bloomberg.com