You know, someone who does more than repeat what officials say and reword press releases.
CSPAN's excellent Brian Lamb spent an hour Sunday with Bethany McLean, the Fortune senior writer who first wondered, in print, back in 2001, how Enron made money. This is the same Q&A show that featured Markos a couple of months ago.
The Houston-based energy company was all-powerful then; a Fortune Top Ten corporation, Enron was the No. 1 corporate contributor to Bush in 2000, including lavish use of corporate jets to assist in the theft of Florida; it was raping California by creating an electricity shortage; Ken Lay was meeting in secret with Dick Cheney to rewrite the nation's energy laws to Enron's liking; and this young reporter had the rest of the story.
BTW, this real reporter looks cute. More substantive stuff below.
Lamb has read McLean's book on Enron, "The Smartest Guys in the Room," and seen the documentary. He found this gem:
LAMB: Right in the middle of your book and in the documentary is Alan Greenspan going to Houston to get the Enron public service award. What in the world -- why would the head of the Federal Reserve bank -- or Federal Reserve Board, go to Houston on behalf of a company to get a public service award?
MCLEAN: Enron was really great at doing things like this and increasing its visibility in Washington through prizes like this. And a guy like Alan Greenspan would have thought, oh, here`s this great company down in Houston, Texas, that`s being celebrated for its inventiveness and that`s changing the world and revolutionizing markets, and they`re going to offer me this prize commemorating me.
And it was just one more example of how Enron was very clever at burnishing its own image, because, of course, the association then between Enron and Alan Greenspan at the time really enhanced Enron`s credibility.
LAMB: Go back to Alan Greenspan, why would he even think about it? I mean, why would you...
MCLEAN: I can`t answer the question for Greenspan.
(LAUGHTER)
LAMB: Was there money involved in it?
MCLEAN: I don`t believe there was. I think the money got donated to a charity. But I`m not sure about that.
Of course, Enron bullies tried to intimidate McLean:
MCLEAN: I called Enron and they put me on the phone with Jeff Skilling who had very little time when I spoke to him and became very irate because he thought I hadn`t taken the time to understand his business, and said that if I had been -- that it was unethical of me to raise questions without having fully taken the time to understand the business.
And that`s actually a scary thing to be told as a reporter because that can be right. You know, no matter how much you`ve spent trying to figure something out, that`s always possible that you haven`t spent enough time and that you are getting it wrong and that you really don`t understand as much as you should. So it was a frightening conversation.
And the bullying has some effect, but McLean did not give up:
LAMB: How do you feel -- what does it feel like? What kind of responsibility is it if you`re writing for "Fortune" magazine and you`re dealing in this town with money and the market and a big company called Enron?"
MCLEAN: I`m not sure I thought about it at the time. I`m sure I did on some level, my friends tell me now that I was terrified as I was writing about this, and completely stressed out. And they remembered me just being in a totally panicked state during this period.
I guess it`s one of those things that you tend to repress the memory somehow because I remember getting interested and thinking, wow, well, this is a really interesting question. This company has this high-flying stock price. It`s a very expensive stock, and yet nobody seems to know how exactly the company makes its money. And how strange is that?
And there`s -- normally companies that are that impenetrable trade at something of a discount because people don`t like that you can`t figure it out. Yet here was Enron trading at a premium.
And it just seemed like an intellectually interesting question. And I guess by the time I was at the point of -- maybe if I had paused at the beginning and said, oh, this might be really scary to actually deal with all of this, maybe I would have stopped. But I`m sure I asked that question of myself until it was too late.
McLean is a real hero -- go watch or read the whole thing.