Is Personal Responsibility Well Defined in a Media-Driven Society?

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Hmm... methinks that this forum is in sore need of some new threads.

In any case, I just finished watching the (unedited) interview between Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer, the financial analyst working for CNBC, and I think the interview raises some interesting issues that require discussion. Namely, to what extent are we liable for our own actions? With respect to this particular segment, the main critique that Stewart put out was that financial news analysts were perfectly knowledgeable about the impending economic crisis, yet chose to misrepresent information that lulled the public into a false sense of security, an act that Stewart deemed "disingenuous at best and criminal at worst." Yet, on the other hand, is there not some measure of personal responsibility that we must take for our own mistakes, even if those mistakes were invariably influenced by others? More specifically, to what extent is it justifiable to look at the victims of the current economic situation and say "tough cookies, you should have thought a bit more before you did the stupid things you did"?

More concisely, it is obviously egregiously unfair to place all the blame on the media, but to what extent can we justifiably hold them responsible for the current economic pit we find ourselves in? On the other side of the same coin, to what extent can we blame the laypeople who made unwise investments, lured by the promise of false riches given to them by a bubbling market?

This question obviously generalizes past the current fiscal crisis. The pervasiveness of marketing in today's society allows the media to have a paramount impact on many of the decisions we choose to make. So in that context, to what extent should the media be responsible for the well-being of their audience?