Is CNBC Out-Foxing Fox News on Obama?

It must be a confusing time to be Barack Obama's media advisor.

During the long election cycle, Obama could be pretty sure who his best friends in the TV news business were: Roughly speaking, they were at NBC Universal-owned MSNBC. And he could be even more sure where his detractors congregated: at Rupert Murdoch's Fox News.

But these days, many of the fiercest attacks on the Obama presidency aren't coming from that familiar quarter but from MSNBC's sister network. Once a business channel -- remember that? -- CNBC has become, as The New York Times illustrates today, a forum arguably more deserving of the slogan "the place for politics" than MSNBC, which actually uses it.

And those politics tend to fit a certain mold. Jim Cramer calls Obama a "Bolshevik" and offers tips on how to "Obama-proof your portfolio." Larry Kudlow accuses him of "declaring war on investors, small businesses, large corporations and private-equity and venture-capital funds." Rick Santelli leads what amounts to an anti-Obama rally on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade.

Now Robert Gibbs, the press secretary who once specialized in sparring with the likes of Sean Hannity; is doling out slaps to Santelli and Cramer in his press briefings; Media Matters, which exists solely to chronicle the excesses of the right-wing mediasphere, is issuing regular alerts about CNBC; and Jon Stewart, the Fox News critic par excellence, has his researchers assembling slightly misleading clip montages of Mad Money and Squawk Box.

It's a bit disorienting. If nothing else, if gives the lie to the charge by Bill O'Reilly and other conservatives that NBC News is an organ of "far left propaganda."