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The complete and utter failure of financial journalism. Jon Stewart's takedown of CNBC was so much more than a takedown of Rick Santelli's highly suspicious tantrum. It was a general criticism of the complete and utter failure of financial journalism in the US — the groupthink of "reporters" embedded in the machinery and chicanery they are supposed to be investigating.

CNBC and the Wall Street Journal are both notorious for presenting opinions that are clearly disconnected from any of the quantitative, reality-based information they manage to report. The Journal's opinion page, always a hotbed of right-wing talking points and ludicrous extrapolations, consistently and systematically ignores whatever objective evidence is there to see on the front page.

Today's WSJ provides the cognitive-dissonance-du-jour. Pieces on the opinion page are hysterically headlined, "Obama's radicalism is killing the Dow," and "Obama repeats Bush's worst market mistakes," but the front page shows the real culprit: the job loss that will undermine the potential for any recovery. This job loss started well before Obama was even a front-runner, and yet the opinion page manages to paint him as some sort of über-villain who brought Wall Street to its dirty, dirty knees within six weeks.

If you have ever gone sledding or skiing, you know there's an inflection point on the hill where gravity will pull you down pretty fast. Look at the chart from today's Journal and tell me with a straight face that it's all Obama's fault. [Blue text is mine; everything else WSJ.]

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