I see both sides - investors love to hear all serious and balanced DD reports from any reliable source, yet when a report is "grandstanded" - i.e., presented in an abbreviated and unbalanced perspective just to get maximum ratings, then CNBCs financial reporters would have had reasonable expectations that this one-sided "report" clearly would have the effect of tanking the stock.
And given that knowledge, that real investors with real money would lose real savings invested in a chunk of LLEN's market cap upon their airing of this soundbite, CNBC should have taken steps to include a balanced persepective of the stock, not merely their standard "disclaimer" at the bottom of the screen. That disclaimer does NOT protect them from liability if they had reasonable expectations that many investors would still panic and sell the instant they saw the clip.
SEC should determine that CNBC knew a while back about LLEN's directors having "old skeletons in the closet" when Cramer recommended the sell on his shown on December 10, and should also investigate who on the show was told about this information BEFORE the show aired. The prime-airtime release of an extremely biased report while giving friends and insiders advanced notice clearly falls along the lines of insider trading, since by purchasing shorts or selling securities, these folks were able to guarantee profits BEFORE the news release.
Furthermore, since these claims are very old news, they have no bearing on accuracy of current financial statements or complaince with SEC standards.
By the way, it's all heresay, but someone on a message board (yahoo I believe) recently claimed they worked or knew someone at CNBC who said "Blame-Her" was short LLEN a couple weeks ago. And shortly after that was posted, a whole bunch of posts on Yahoo LLEN board which mentioned Cramer in various negative viewpoints were suddenly DELETED by the powers that be.....Hmmm... it is VERY RARE to see Yahoo posts deleted, so apparently someone in power had an agenda - it's not hard to connect the dots and speculate the deletion had something to do with the claim in one post about Cramer being short.
Also, this is WOULD NOT BE THE FIRST TIME GREENBERG got in trouble for bashing a company on the air; see the yahoo LLEN post describing the SEC's 2006 investigation of Herb after he bashed another company in an unbalanced/unfair manner:
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