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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Social Studies: Don't Fear Bin Ladenism's Strength. Fear Its Weakness (January 29, 2002) The West faces not the clash of two cultures but—what may be trickier—the catastrophic collapse of one. By Jonathan Rauch. Legal Affairs: Beware of Cures That Are Worse Than the Disease (January 29, 2002) What Enron did stinks to high heaven. But that doesn't justify passing the badly flawed Shays-Meehan bill. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: 'Daddy Issues' Grab Center Stage (January 29, 2002) Even among women voters, 'mommy issues' are viewed as less important than they were before September 11. By William Schneider. Legal Affairs: It's Time to Junk the Double Standard on Free Speech (January 25, 2002) Campus censorship came mostly from the Left before September 11. And the big media were not interested. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: The Mirror Image of Whitewater (January 25, 2002) The Enron scandal is less likely to implicate a President, but more likely to affect public policy. By William Schneider. On Books: Women at Arms (January 25, 2002) A review of two books that examine the integration of women into the American military. By Katherine McIntire Peters. Media: Late to the Party (January 25, 2002) A question floats over the Enron story like a big, silent blimp: Where were the journalists?. By William Powers. More from National Journal. |
Media 
Sentimental JourneyAs the Enron story emerges, journalists are transported back to glorious White House scandals past by William Powers ..... For media people, Enron Corp. isn't just about greed or corruption, it's about nostalgia. As the story has emerged, countless journalists have been transported back to glorious White House scandals past, while floating the idea that maybe, just maybe—oh please, pleeeeease let it be so—this is another Big One. In a commentary last Sunday, National Public Radio's Daniel Schorr, of Watergate-era fame, shared the many ways that Enron recalls those media salad days of three decades ago: "Executive privilege, stonewalling about the Enron Corporation, was already in progress. The [General] Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, had been talking of suing Vice President Dick Cheney to force disclosure of his contacts with Enron in the White House Energy Task Force last year. Then we heard that masses of electronic and paper files were being deleted and shredded by the Arthur Andersen Company, the accountants for Enron. Immediately, I scented a whiff of Watergate. It took me back to June 1972 and the break-in into Democratic headquarters in the Watergate office building." More Watergate memories followed, then: "Fast forward to 1986 and the explosive revelation that the Reagan Administration was dealing with Iran." After sharing a few juicy memories of Ollie and Fawn, Schorr posed the question of the hour: "Watergate, Irangate, and now Enrongate? As a senior gatekeeper, I say when you hear the shredder at work, it's time to take notice." And pleasure. Enron is to Washington journalists as the madeleine is to Proust, a delicious cake of a scandal that prompts a rush of rich memories and associations. And it's not just NPR lefties who are swooning. Last weekend on The Beltway Boys, a Fox News show, conservative pundit Morton Kondracke took a nibble of Enron and dropped into one of those peculiar scandal reveries that are happening everywhere these days: "Ari Fleischer's statement, you know, 'wasteful fishing expedition,' sort of reminds me of Ron Ziegler, 'third-rate burglary,' or Bill Clinton saying up front, you know, 'I did not have sex with that woman' and all that. I mean, you don't know where this thing is going to lead." Co-host Fred Barnes jocularly scolded Kondracke for indulging in "scandal by association." And indeed, all the Watergate comparisons, and the wishful thinking that lies just beneath their surfaces, are in one sense a little embarrassing for the trade. Right now, there is no hard evidence (a document, a tape) suggesting that the White House did anything criminal or even unethical on Enron. No public official (John Dean) or private individual (Paula Jones) has come forward and credibly alleged abuse of public office by the President or his cronies. Nonetheless, the words "Enron" and "Watergate" have been used together in more than 150 articles and broadcast news shows since mid-October, according to a search of the Lexis-Nexis database. An Associated Press story this week began, "G. Gordon Liddy remembers 'shredding stuff left and right' after the Watergate break-in. Oliver North says he fired up a shredder within earshot of top Justice officials as they pored over Iran-Contra documents. Now comes the image of Enron employees furiously shredding on Christmas Day. Inside government and out, when there's a whiff of trouble, the impulse to shred is powerful." The Chicago Tribune ran a piece this week in which veterans of major White House scandals of the past—Nixon's Leonard Garment, Clinton's Lanny Davis—critiqued the Bush Administration's performance on Enron. The paper chose to use an interesting quote from Garment: "They have done this about as well as one could imagine.... They have been more or less ahead of the game in terms of disclosures. People want more, every contact at every level. But why should they go hunting for land mines with their toes?" Garment was trying to support the Administration, but to any Washington journalist, that last sentence has a lovely resonance. Which land mines are those?!? Sometimes, the parallel is drawn more subtly, as in this sentence from a New York Times story of January 22: "Tales of Enron's largesse—the company spread $6 million across Washington and both parties in the last decade—come just as the drive to overhaul the campaign finance law is at a juncture, promising the possibility of the most wide-ranging change in it since the Watergate era." Strictly speaking, of course, a White House scandal should be declared a scandal, and be compared with previous ones, only when there is credible evidence of wrongdoing. And we should all be blushing at the way the Enron coverage has front-loaded this scandal. But there is also something nice about all this scandal-mongering—a refreshing honesty about what really gets us excited in this business and makes the media world go around. This is, after all, what life is like in the post-Watergate world: Journalists are on a constant watch for wrongdoing in government, and the bigger the wrongdoing, the better. Once upon a time, respectable media people used to hide their love of presidential dirt under a cloak of tweedy, statesmanlike reserve. Most journalists have dropped that old pretense, and many nonjournalists have, too. The scandal phrase that's appeared most frequently in the Enron coverage is that old Watergate favorite, "smoking gun"—more than 125 appearances in Nexis, and counting. Why? Because Enron executive Sherron Watkins, author of the famous "smoking gun" memo, used the expression herself when she worried that a lot of people were "looking for a smoking gun" at the company. Little did she know.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2001 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. |
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