NEW YORK - March 20 - Join FAIR and leading progressive bloggers and economists in demanding that CNBC practice responsible journalism. Will you please take a few moments to sign this open letter to CNBC?

Add your name at: http://fixcnbc.com/p-fair

*** Dear CNBC -

    "You knew what the banks were doing, and yet were touting it for months and months. The entire network was." - Jon Stewart

These now-legendary words were a wake-up call. We're asking you to wake up.

Americans need CNBC to do strong, watchdog journalism - asking tough questions to Wall Street, debunking lies, and reporting the truth. Instead, CNBC has done PR for Wall Street. You've been so obsessed with getting "access" to failed CEOs that you willfully passed on misinformation to the public for years, helping to get us into the economic crisis we face today.

You screwed up badly. Don't apologize - fix it!

CNBC should publicly declare that its new overriding mission will be responsible journalism that holds Wall Street accountable. As a down payment, we ask you to hire some new economic voices - people who have a track record of being right about the economic crisis and holding Wall Street executives' feet to the fire.

Please show us that you hear our voices loud and clear.

Sincerely,

Dean Baker Co-director of the Center for Economic Policy Research and author of Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy

Lawrence Mishel President, Economic Policy Institute

Doug Henwood Economic journalist and author of Wall Street and After the New Economy

Eric Burns President, Media Matters for America

Peter Hart Activism Director, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)

Linda Jue Director, G.W. Williams Center for Independent Journalism, a project of the Tides Center

Tracy Van Slyke Project Director, The Media Consortium

Don Hazen Executive Director, Independent Media Institute

Robert Borosage & Roger Hickey Co-Directors, Campaign for America's Future

Justin Ruben Executive Director, MoveOn.org

Markos Moulitsas Founder, DailyKos.com

James Rucker Executive Director, ColorOfChange.org

Adam Green & Stephanie Taylor Co-founders, Progressive Change Campaign Committee

Aaron Swartz Co-creator, Reddit and RSS & Co-founder, Progressive Change Campaign Committee

Lawrence Lessig Professor of Law, Stanford University & Co-founder of Change Congress

Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols Authors, It's the Media, Stupid; Our Media, Not Theirs Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy

Todd Gitlin Professor of Journalism and Sociology, Chair, Ph.D. Program in Communications, Columbia University

Christopher Hayes Washington Editor, The Nation

Eric Alterman Professor of Journalism, Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate School of Journalism & Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress

Tom Geoghegan Lawyer and author of Which Side Are You On? and other economic-related books

Heather Boushey Senior Economist, Center for American Progress

Eileen Appelbaum Professor and Director of the Center for Women and Work, Rutgers University

Sylvia Allegretto Economist, Institute for Research on Labor & Employment, University of California, Berkeley

Chris Rabb Founder/Chief Evangelist of Afro-Netizen.com & Demos fellow

Phillip Anderson Founder, TheAlbanyProject.com (New York Blog)

Ian Welsh Economics blogger, former Managing Editor of Firedoglake.com

Rick Perlstein Author of Nixonland and Before the Storm

Garlin Gilchrist II Blogger at TheSuperSpade.com

John Amato Founder, CrooksandLiars.com

Joe Sudbay Deputy Editor, AMERICAblog

Josh Silver Executive Director, Free Press

For more information on CNBC's economic reporting, check out the FAIR blog archives.