CNN's "Live From" couldn't play enough footage of Ken Lay's perp walk in handcuffs today. If a little green man fresh off the spaceship happened to pause in front of a television turned to CNN, he'd think--in his garbly, squeaky alien-voice kind of way--that these earthlings had just captured a fearsome mass murderer, or a great conquering general like Alexander the Great, not a white-collar criminal. But the whole trial is SO up CNN's alley: wicked, wicked big business! Bad executive! Bad, bad, bad executive! So naturally CNN business reporter Susan Lisovicz is going to hit Lay on the nose repeatedly with the rolled-up newspaper of the MSM's core contempt for rich middle-aged men...but Lisovicz isn't going to forget for a second that there's contemptible, greedy big business like Enron, and then there's benevolent and good big business, oh, say, like the company that signs her paycheck, Time Warner. So why not pay homage to Time Warner with a twofer while getting in a lick at a guy who's going to spend the rest of his life in prison as a symbol of avarice and greed? Wind her up and watch her go:
KYRA PHILLIPS: Well, were you surprised by the verdict? And what did you think about the defense's strategy?
SUSAN LISOVICZ: I was not surprised by the verdict at all. You know, Kyra, one of the best books on this is written by our colleagues over at "Fortune" magazine. It's called "The Smartest Guys in the Room." And the basic gist is that this was no accident that Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay were running one of the biggest and most successful companies in the world. And I think that jurors found it very hard to believe that these kind of hands-on managers simply did not know what was going on.
As for the defense, it was an interesting defense, as well. They were blaming market forces. Let me read you quickly a quote from Ken Lay himself while he was on the stand where he says, "We thought 'The Wall Street Journal' was on a witch hunt against Andy Fastow and maybe Enron. It was absolutely destroying the confidence of our shareholders and the company and driving down the price of our stock." And, obviously, jurors just didn't accept that. They thought that the principals of the company, the CEO -- and Ken Lay, of course, is the founder of the company.
Let's examine this. What exactly did the mention of the book bring to her reporting? Answer: nothing. And that's fine, if you watch CNN for televised interdepartmental kissyface like this.
