John Carney at Clusterstock:
On some CNBC show we don’t know much about because it airs when decent people are eating dinner with their families and the rest of us are having a drink with friends, Dennis Kneale decided he’d had enough of bloggers comparing him to Beaker from the Muppets and fat ladies in thongs on the beach. It was time to strike back.
The video is below, so you can watch the train-wreck yourself. He personally names DealBreaker and Zerohedge as the blogs that have been unfair to him.
The CNBC Reports host clearly wanted to push back at the “cowardly” critics, and a CNBC segment about his feud gave him the chance to call his online enemies “dickweeds” and slam one in a live interview (see heavily-edited excerpt above). In the end, though, it’s the bloggers who win: Whatever his ratings, Kneale’s on-air pushback against a lone, anonymous blogger is sure to be a traffic boon to the targets of his ire — and a revelation to viewers who might never have heard them.
Nicholas Graham in HuffPo
First, Dennis is clearly not interested in an honest debate about the economy, otherwise why would he make so many patently false emotional statements about every blogger living in his or her mother’s basement. Surely Dennis has heard that newspapers and television are losing their audiences to the web because there are some incredible bloggers who are willing to do and say what the mainstream media will not. (I shouldn’t make too many assumptions about what Dennis knows because high profile media professionals tend to live in a radically provincial bubble.)
Also, why would Dennis waste valuable network time engaging alleged basement trolls who he claims are nothing more than name-callers? I am not understanding Dennis’s logic (i.e., bloggers are inconsequential name callers, but I [Dennis] am willing to both engage and converse with them on a major media outlet).
In Dennis’s rant, he notes how he has invited several popular bloggers onto his show to “debate” his point of view. Again, I wonder if Dennis realizes his audience is older than 12 and knows no true debate can occur on a heavily edited and controlled media set. If Dennis is truly interested in a real debate, he will submit to a third-party location with a mutually agreed upon moderator. The debate will have a list of questions both parties must answer, and a time limit in which to answer. As a matter of fact, I, Damien Hoffman, would be happy to mediate such a real debate that can be podcasted to the known universe. Further, Dennis will stop whining about how his identity (and ego) is plastered on the overwhelmingly muted flat screens of every financial professional’s office. Instead, he can focus on the exchange of objective ideas absque the abuse of the bully pulpit advantages and spin.
And one of Kneale’s targets, Zero Hedge’s Tyler Durden, posts:
Zero Hedge received an invite from Dennis’ producer Dave at 1:34 pm to appear on the show. Of course, our frequent readers realize this is a non-starter for anyone at Zero Hedge due to the nature of our operation. We countered by offering a telephonic interview at an indeterminate point in the future (and desirous of at least a 24 hour advance notice: again, frequent readers will attest that I tend to post constantly, for about 18 hours a day), and even offered Dennis a forum on Zero Hedge to directly address our readers, whom he, we assume affectionately, had some florid words for. Nowhere did we give the impression we would have a call today, and offered up a date in two weeks for an extended call, which would take place upon my return from a reconnaissance trip to Europe (ironically to check up on some of GECC’s major investments in the region: stay tuned for my observations). Our overture was denied, yet somehow Dennis decided to make a point of misrepresenting the communication that took place. We provide a transcript of the email exchange earlier for our readers’ convenience.
