Keeping up the financial-news wars, Fox Business Network is airing ads on much-larger rival CNBC, bashing Jim Cramer, one of the cable channel’s biggest stars.
The TV spots, which have been running in heavy rotation during CNBC’s most-watched daytime hours, criticize the “Mad Money” host for his investment tips.
“The last thing you need is bad advice,” the voiceover says. “The last thing you need is CNBC’s Jim Cramer.” The ad goes on to highlight a specific call Cramer made with regard to Wachovia, a failing bank that was forced to sell to Citigroup before Wells Fargo jumped in with a higher bid.
“On CNBC, Cramer said buy Wachovia and it tanked,” the ad says.
Fox Business skirted CNBC’s ad sales department by buying spots in local markets, including New York and Los Angeles, from cable operators such as Time Warner Cable and Comcast. (Fox Business is part of News Corp., which also owns The Post. )
“It is a predictably desperate attempt by a completely irrelevant network with ratings so pathetically small they refuse to make them public,” said a CNBC spokesman. “As recent market events attest, Jim Cramer has proven once again to be one of the most insightful and knowledgeable commentators in business news today.”
Fox Business, which just hit its one-year anniversary, has been taking shots at its much bigger rival since the start, but the Cramer ad is a more personal attack.
Yesterday, a Fox spokeswoman defended the ad, saying, “CNBC has become an industry joke thanks to Cramer’s irresponsible, sloppy commentary and wildly inaccurate predictions – how many more times is he going to apologize for tanking CNBC’s credibility?”
During the financial crisis, CNBC has posted some of its best ratings, averaging 662,000 viewers during the day when the markets are open.
Fox Business has also experienced some ratings success, although it is harder to judge. Nielsen does not regularly release ratings for the one-year-old network, whose audience isn’t large enough most days to be reliably measured.