This article is part of a continuing discussion with Yulin Zhuang about the news media. Read the first part, second part, and third part.

Last Thursday on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show Jon Stewart interviewed CNBC financial host Jim Cramer for the good part of a half-hour. It was a culmination of a week-long series of segments in which the The Daily Show attacked CNBC, a financial news network, for failures to responsibly or accurately report on the economic meltdown or any of its warning signs.

Afterward, the majority of news outlets framed the interview as a personal victory of Stewart over Cramer, the end of a “war of words” or the clash between two media personalities, saying that “Stewart won by knockout” or that “Stewart wrecked Cramer.” The fact that the news media focused on the personalities and less on the substance of the interview only reinforces a point made by Stewart:

Now why, when you talk about the regulators—why not the financial news network? Isn’t that the whole point of this? CNBC could be an incredibly powerful tool of illumination for people that believe that there are two markets: One that has been sold to us as long term. “Put your money in 401ks. Put your money in pensions and just leave it there. Don’t worry about it. It’s all doing fine.”

Then, there’s this other market; this real market that is occurring in the back room. Where giant piles of money are going in and out and people are trading them and it’s transactional and it’s fast. But it’s dangerous, it’s ethically dubious and it hurts that long term market. So what it feels like to us—and I’m talking purely as a layman—it feels like we are capitalizing your adventure by our pension and our hard earned money. And that it is a game that you know… That you know is going on.

But you go on television as a financial network and pretend it isn’t happening.

Stewart’s point is that CNBC as a news channel should have a responsibility to inform the population by performing the kinds of investigative journalism that I’ve mentioned as the core public good that only the press can provide. Instead they’ve served as a vehicle for cheap promotion and entertainment and as a flack for corporations and their CEOs to release sound bytes, which the network passes on to the people uncritically and without judgment.

This indictment of CNBC can be generalized as something systemic in all of television news, and has been a recurring theme for Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. Television news has the highest penetration of any news source, and it is the least investigative in its nature; it’s the medium which is most likely to gloss things over for the neat package or the sensational story, and The Daily Show routinely condemns its failures.

It is bitterly ironic that this kind of introspection comes not from CNN or MSNBC or Fox News, but from Comedy Central. Or, as political commentator Dan Carlin puts it: “If a comedy fake news program is doing the most hard-hitting journalism and TV news in the United States today, that is symbolic that something is wrong… do you think ABC News would do an exposé on how journalism is a shadow of its former self and use current journalists as examples?” And he’s right. Not only do many young people in America turn to The Daily Show as a news source, the show has roughly the same amount of news content as the major networks’ nightly broadcasts.

What’s the source of this problem? Consider this: the most prominent non-profit news organizations in the United States are NPR and PBS. They also happen to be the most trusted by the public. And yet they have far less impact on the national discourse than any network or cable news organization, which are all arms of multinational conglomerates. The core dilemma of the news media is this: when news providers are forced to be profit-generating enterprises, they will tend to adopt practices that increase profit. Investigative journalism is expensive. Regurgitating press releases is cheap. And thankfully for The Daily Show, so is satire.