How “liberal” Chris Cuomo made Hedge Funds look good in his February 1, 2021 broadcast on CNN.
Chris Cuomo – A bourgeois liberal through and through
By David Gottfried
In his newscast of February 1, 2021, Chris Cuomo yelled loudly, looked his viewers straight in the eye and said that a lot of people think that bad financial machinations are taking place on Wall Street with regard to GameStock and Robinhood (Robinhood is a trading platform). His invited guest also did a good job of expressing frustration and anger at the seemingly inscrutable manipulations of the hidden and exalted mandarins of Wall Street.
However, Cuomo and his guest did a very bad of explaining just what happened, why it was wrong, who this may help and who this is already hurting. In fact, the news story hardly said a damn thing at all. Somehow, I remember a quaint lesson in elementary school that went like this: A news story should provide the What (as in what happened), why it happened, where it happened and I don’t remember the other W’s in the list, but I think you get the picture.
I believe that Chris Cuomo’s performance (And his broadcasts should be deemed performances as they are contrivances designed to inculcate the views he wants us to share) was intentionally vacuous. At the end of Cuomo’s segment on Wall Street, the viewer may conclude: “Cuomo just said that terrible stuff is taking place on Wall Street. He did not say what was so terrible. I suppose this is just another example of a liberal getting excited.” This is how the supposedly liberal media makes us quiescent, conservative mice.
Let me provide a brief rundown of the salient issues in the Gamestock-Robinhood controversy:
The crisis came to a head when Robinhood halted all purchases of the stock Gamestock. Chris Cuomo said that they had to do this because of liquidity problems. This is what Chris Cuomo omitted, and this is the shady, dirty part of the puzzle:
A) Hedge funds had purchased “put” options on Gamestock. These are bets that the stock will fall in price.
B) By not letting people buy GameStock, Robinhood made the price of Gamestock tank.
C) By inducing the collapse in Gamestock’s price, hedgefund managers were enriched.
D) By making the price of gamestock collapse, Robinhood made independent investors, some of whom were of modest means, lose their shirt.
E) Robinhood is exposed as a fraud: It told the public that it was a mechanism through which the average Joe could face down wall street, but it sold out the average Joe in favor of Wall Street as it let hedge funds prosper on put options and consigned ordinary men and women to a sharp slippage in stock price and the value of their portfolios.
What Chris Cuomo did was part and parcel of something the allegedly left of center media has been doing for decades. This is my basic theory regarding the lying, conniving, pseudo-progressive media:
A) A media outlet, which is perceived as “liberal” (I hate that slippery word which is subject to multiple definitions and which has surreptitiously destroyed so many leftist hopes) produces a film or print story, etc.
B) The story will understate the wrongdoing of the oppressing or culpable party.
C) The story will exaggerate the effectiveness of progressive or left of center remedial programs
D) The conned public concludes that things are not that bad. They will reason that since the liberal NY Times or liberal MSNBC suggests that things are not that bad -- by exaggerating the potency of remedial action and by understating the noxiousness of guilty dominant castes or persons -- things are really not that bad. They reason that the author of the news story is just another passionate liberal. The supposedly excitable liberal author succeeds in making his benighted readership move inexorably to the right.