Enron, the Media and the New Economy

No one enthused as romantically over Enron as did the financial media. But there is little soul-searching among financial journalists concerning the Enron scandal. No financial media organization I know of has announced that it will now mend its ways, or at least review the process that led it to be so utterly wrong time and again. There is no public call for an explanation of the media's role in this affair.

Journalists are hiding behind the fact that the Enron debacle is so complex that the company's misdeeds could not be readily understood. As one journalist defensively put it, it was a green-eyeshade scandal. But Enron's profit margins were visibly weak. Its earnings were rising rapidly while the company's cash flow was not. How could this be? The media rarely asked, and rarely bothered to report the simple facts.

Enron was also an active manager of the reporting about itself. When Fortune, which for years had pronounced the company the most innovative in the nation, finally published a piece that was critical of Enron by the admirable Bethany McLean, a young reporter with financial training, management called on the brass at Fortune to complain. Fortune stuck with the story, but few others picked it up. At least one other editor has complained about a similar reaction from Enron management. My guess is that Enron did it frequently. This is an old trick in business journalism: Those uneducated and inexperienced reporters could not possibly understand something so complex, executives tell their counterparts in the publishing suites.

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