One more point to add to Mark’s brilliant dissection of the Jon Stewart–Jim Cramer Daily Show showdown . . . Jon Stewart and others are hitting CNBC and, presumably, the rest of the financial press for not “sounding the alarm” on the risks various market entities were taking. This criticism is being taken quite seriously, coming up in the roundtable discussions of Meet the Press, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, and Howard Kurtz’s Reliable Sources.

Now, various institutions did report on the housing bubble, on the risks of the subprime loan market, etc. Perhaps, as CNBC’s Steve Liesman said, they could have “screamed louder.”

But it’s tough to sound the alarm when no one’s listening. The Financial Times’s U.S. circulation is 134,287; for comparison, US Weekly’s circulation is in the neighborhood is 1.85 million. If you want the public to respond to ominous news, first they have to be paying attention to those who are reporting it.