Remora

LI can't get enough (although our readers probably have had enough) of the continuing fallout from Enron. The difference between a celebrity scandal -- you know, like O.J. murdering Condit, while Robert Blake takes pictures, or the like -- is that the corp scandal grows richer and stranger the more you look into it. That's a bit of a problem for the fast forward public. We want our National Enquirer, dammit.

But the public, upon which is gradually settling the discovery that the loss of seven trillion dollars in the market wipes out ALL of the value accrued there during the high nineties, just might stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of a number of series.

We'd recommend the Tom Paine article on Rebecca Mark, the Enron exec who lost the company, easily, a billion or two, and was rewarded with stock options to the tune of 80 million dollars -- at least by some reports. We wanted to do a Glassman award piece on her coverage, but Jeff Stein beat us to the punch fair and square. We especially like Mark's end quote:

"I'm very surprised and saddened by [what has happened at Enron]," Rebecca Mark told a reporter recently, "and I wish them all the best."

Surprised, huh?

Media is slowly coming around to criticize its own pump and pump strategy -- LI did our post yesterday, went home, turned on NPR, and listened to a program on Marketplace that actually went through the same lines we'd just typed. One interview was particularly gruesome, with some honcho at CNBC, who claimed that the journalists weren't too blame -- no, it was the greedy culture. The viewers, they were to blame.

This reminds me of something I recently read in an essay by Ricky Jay, the historian of magic. Jay says that there is a reference to loaded dice, one of the first in English, in Roger Ascham's Toxophilus -- the Tudor era treatise on archery. Ascham records a cheater's trick. If the gull is winning, the cheater insinuates loaded dice into the game, getting the gull to use them. Then the cheater claims the dice are loaded. When they prove to be loaded, it shows that the gull has been cheating.

Well, that seems to be CNBC's idea, too. The Greed is good mantra is great, as long as the greedy are people CNBC reporters can toady up to -- but greed isn't for the vulgar, you know. So it is all their fault that the info piped through the biz media in the high nineties was ninety percent garbage.