The Elephant in the Room...

I got up this morning to see what the Sunday talk shows and the Post Dispatch would have on the Enron convictions. Now, I knew that the focus would be on the military since it is Memorial Day. However, I was shocked when just one (ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos) of the Sunday shows even mentioned Enron, Ken Lay, or his connections to the Bushies. Of course, the panel on This Week glossed over the whole scandal by calling an abberation and some law & order mumbo-jumbo that "if you going to steal, you're going to jail".

Pfft. Corporations will lie, cheat and steal until they get caught with their hand in the cookie jar. That's the nature of American capitalism; you're bad only if you GET CAUGHT.

Which leads me to the local angle and the Post-Disgrace. The Lee Enterprises-owned paper has covered the Enron trial (primarily in the Business section) with some consistency, FAILED to use it's higher Sunday circulation to inform the public of the ramifications of the verdict. They failed to position the story on the front page.

That is, except for their on-staff corporate apologist, David Nicklaus. His headline, and a couple of dumb statements in the article:

Convictions in Enron case mark end to shameful era
By David Nicklaus
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
05/28/2006

...Last week's convictions of Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron bosses, marked the symbolic end of that era...

Nicklaus does his usual blah-blah-blah, talking about cosmetic changes and new regulations that don't go far enough, and some so-called "expert" quotes from people in the business. The article ends with this piece of inexplicible pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking:

So we've clearly fixed some of the biggest flaws in American-style capitalism, and we've convicted most of the malefactors who exploited those flaws. For investors, a shameful era has ended on a hopeful note.

What a load of fecal matter. I mean, seriously. Nicklaus needs to get out from under his rock, because the Abramoff scandal is going to make Enron look like a bush league outing.

Pun intended.

This is the problem with mainstream corporate media; they won't talk about corporate malfeasance in any critical manner because they fear the loss of ad revenue. It's funny too, because every time the corporate media has to publish a story about corporate corruption, the corporation in question will often take out full page ads in an effort to repair their sullied reputations. The supermarkets did this during the 2003 strike, Boeing did it when it was revealed that they were engaged in price fixing, and Wal Mart bought sponsorships on National News broadcasts when their criminal acts started coming to light.

So, the question is, if a corporation reacts to bad press by buying ads in the outlet that reports said bad press, then why do we need apologist like Nicklaus? Quite simply, because corporations kiss other corporations' asses. The corporate media has a vested self interest in protecting the corporate culture of corruption. If a news outlet actually investigated corporate wrongdoing instead of just waiting until they can no longer ignore a corporate scandal, they would be labeled "anti business" and advertisers would run from the news outlet as if they had the Plague.
Which is why the parent corporations forced their news operations to "pay for themselves".
The result has been "VNR" reports, paid pundits who don't reveal who conflicts of interest, and outright propaganda published to misinform populations.

Over, David Nicklaus? No, it's only just begun.