Category: Old Dish

A preliminary Nexis check found no Enron puff-pieces by Bill Kristol, while he was being paid $100,000 for being on an “advisory board” for Enron, apart from a banal, unsigned Weekly Standard defense of Ken Lay last June. There was this Irwin Stelzer piece last November, but it includes a relevant disclosure about serving on the board (no fees mentioned). Make what you will of it. If you dig up anything relevant, please let me know. Stelzer, meanwhile, still hasn’t emailed me back with a list of Enron-paid pundits. I’ll let you know his response as soon as he does. The $50,000 Enron payee, Larry Kudlow, however, wrote two Enron pieces before disclosing his fees. Since the pieces were harshly critical of Enron, there’s no scandal, but he surely should have mentioned it the very first time he ever wrote about Enron.

THE REAL POINT: But the point of this is not some smoking gun proving a nefarious quid pro quo. Washington corruption doesn’t usually get that crude. What this is about is the enmeshment of some of the pundit class in major corporate money. It seems to me that an integral part of a journalist’s vocation is independence – independence from any monetary interests that could even be perceived as clouding his or her judgment. Disclosure is a must – and not just when the subject matter comes up a few years down the line. The reading public has a right to know if their favorite columnist is getting private money from major corporations, especially when it’s to the tune of $100,000. They have a right to know how much and for what. We demand it of politicians. Why should we not demand it of the journalists who police them? To put this in perspective, Paul Krugman got more Enron money for adding his name to their advisory board (and precious little else) than any member of Congress. In fact, he got more than double the ten-year cumulative total of the biggest Enron beneficiary, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. If it’s corrupting for politicians, why is it any less corrupting for pundits, who can exercise as much power as many Congressmen and often have more influence than individual Senators? And what’s really amazing is the sheer contempt this pundit class seems to have for criticism. Check out Paul Krugman’s arrogant preening cited below. Kristol made a bit of a joke of it. I’m sorry, but part of the integrity of journalism, as with finance, is transparency. It seems to me incumbent on every pundit who took money from Enron to disclose it now, in detail.

ON A ROLL: Slate’s Tim Noah takes on Doris Kearns Goodwin. It’s pretty devastating.

MEDIA BIAS WATCH: “Nearly all traces have now vanished from the Web site of the liberal political journal the Nation of a story that appeared there last week on George W. Bush, Enron and baseball. The story first claimed that, “When George W. Bush co-owned the Houston Astros and construction began on a new stadium, Kenneth Lay (Enron’s chairman) agreed to spend $100 million over 30 years for rights to name the park after Enron.” The trouble was, as both the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard noted: Bush never co-owned the Houston Astros. He co-owned the Texas Rangers.” – Brit Hume, Fox News. So the Nation is a liberal magazine but the Weekly Standard is just a magazine? This thing, like Enron, seems to affect both sides.

LETTERS: In defense of Paul Krugman (kinda).

KRUGMAN – “I’M IN THE CIRCLE OF THOSE WHO GET MONEY CALLS”: Here’s Krugman’s take on his big-money corporate fees. No apologies. Just bragging about his own money, accusing critics of being envious of his fat wallet, or part of a right-wing conspiracy. Here’s a beaut: “Academic economists who have established international reputations in policy-relevant fields are constantly called by governments and companies, seeking their services – and yes, offering to pay for them. Think about it: how could it be otherwise? And many respond to those calls.” Er, you know what, Paul? I can think of how it could be otherwise. Economists devoted to their science could actually study governments and markets without being paid by big corporations. They could get those calls subtly corrupting their independence and say, “Thanks, but no thanks. I have tenure and a salary and I’d rather teach my students or devote myself to journalism with no apparent conflicts of interest.” Not Krugman. Then he says this:

“By 1999, 22 years after I got my Ph.D., having published 15 scholarly monographs and around 150 professional papers, I was certainly in the circle of Those Who Get Money Calls (though I didn’t get there until around 1995). So the Enron offer didn’t come as a surprise, and it certainly didn’t corrupt me – as my articles about them surely prove.”

Poor Krugman. Imagine having to toil in academe for so long without corporate goodies. What a relief he’s now in the circle of “Those Who Get Money Calls.” Does it in any way worry him that being in those circles might actually give an appearance of conflict of interest for a journalist? Nah, not at all. If a big scandal like Enron blows up, does it in any way concern him that his writing might seem to your average reader a little tainted by his being on the Enron payroll in the past, earning more than double most people’s annual salaries for doing what he brags about as next to nothing? Krugman’s contempt for those for whom $50,000 is a lot of money is simply shocking. Doesn’t he realize that that group includes many Times readers? His own paper regularly accuses politicians who take corporate money as being tainted. Yet Krugman has just gotten more Enron money in one swoop than any member of Congress in ten years. Double-standards, anyone?

ANYONE WANT AN IRON LADY?: Thatcher’s statue is for rent.

Bill Kristol emails to clarify that he was on the Enron advisory board for two years “I believe,” for what would be a total of $100,000. That makes Kristol the biggest Enron pundit beneficiary so far. And the sum wasn’t disclosed until today, so far as I know. The web spreads. Who else was on the board? Did any pundits get more than Kristol? Stay tuned …

Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard emails to say he got $50,000 a year from Enron, implying he was on the same board for more than a year. I’ve asked him to clarify. He adds: “I won’t rat out others on the ‘advisory board,'” and has “donated” the money for his daughter’s college tuition. Hold on a minute. If there’s nothing wrong with this, why does Bill use the word “rat”? Aren’t journalists supposed to be in favor of full disclosure of everything relevant to public matters of debate? I guess it’s one rule for pundits, another rule for everyone else.

I wrote National Review columnist Larry Kudlow this morning asking him for more details about his Enron involvement. He told me his upcoming piece would give details. It does. Good for Kudlow, although it seems to me that he should have disclosed this before now. The upshot is that he too got a total of $50,000 from Enron – for a year’s consulting fee, and two speaking gigs. (That means that he disclosed it later than Krugman but, unlike Krugman, volunteered the amount of money he received.) Kudlow told me that Irwin Stelzer of the Weekly Standard and the Sunday Times of London (the paper I write for) was responsible for organizing the board. I’ve emailed him to ask for more details, including the full list of pundits who were recompensed by Enron. I’ve also asked Bill Kristol to disclose how much money he actually got from Enron. None of the pundits so far involved has said he will return the money to charities for bankrupt Enron employees. I’ll let you know if that changes.

ANOTHER GOLDHAGEN SLAM: Sam Schulman takes on the Cornel West of the Jewish intelligentsia. Has anyone found the Goldhagen piece less than hysterical?

Read this Pentagon press release and you’ll feel so much better. (Thanks to Instapundit for noticing it first).

Today, NPR announced that the National Organization of Women were holding a demonstration in support of Roe vs Wade in front of the Supreme Court. No mention of any other demonstrations whatsoever. But, hey, no decent people oppose Roe, do they? Then here’s the Boston Globe on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s lifting whole passages of another person’s work and passing it off as her own (with some discreet footnotes):

“Goodwin, 59, a Concord resident, was reacting to an article in The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, detailing portions of her book that bore strong similarities to sentences in three previous books: not only McTaggart’s 1983 volume, but also Hank Searls’s 1969 book, ”The Lost Prince: Young Joe, the Forgotten Kennedy,” and Rose Kennedy’s 1974 autobiography, ”Times to Remember.””

So the Standard is conservative (boo-hiss) but Goodwin is just a Concord resident, and not – gasp – a liberal. Keep those double-standards coming.

THE REAL BRITAIN: Don’t buy the elite London hype that the Brits think Guantanamo is a concentration camp. The biggest talk-show host in Britain is an admirably centrist fellow called Jimmy Young. He’s on one of the biggest national radio networks, Radio 2, and was a staple in my household growing up. He held a telephone poll today on whether the camp was illegitimate. I know, it’s not scientific. But he got 32,000 calls. 92 percent backed the U.S. Just remember: the Guardian is the paper the media elites read. It has influence, like NPR or the New York Times. But it’s not indicative of the real mood in the country.

MARK STEYN ON A CERTAIN COLUMNIST: “The man who sneers at the malign influence of Enron money on Republican politicians — or, as he calls them “the people Enron put in the White House” — has received more money from Enron than any member of the House of Representatives. If he were in the Senate, where 71 of 100 members have been endowed with Enron moolah, he would rank in that crowded field as the third biggest beneficiary of the company’s generosity. And, whereas the pols’ Enron take was stretched out over several election cycles, Professor Krugman got his nice, clean 50,000 in one year. Yet, while he takes it as read that Enron’s cheques to Dub and Dick and Senator Sleazebag and Congressman Forsale were in return for something, in his case, he assures us, it was a big fat cheque for … nothing. So that’s OK.” – from today’s column in the National Post. Steyn gets it. He’s done more homework and finds Krugman recently lambasting Enron in Businessweek for being “more akin to Goldman Sachs than to Consolidated Edison.” But of course it was Krugman (while on the take from Enron) who actually celebrated that fact in 1999: “It’s sort of like the difference between your father’s bank, which took money from its regular depositors and lent it out to its regular customers, and Goldman Sachs…” Amazing how $50,000 can affect some people’s judgment.

One of the most welcome cultural shifts after September 11 may well be the re-emergence of traditional masculinity as something no-one need apologize for. I wrote last Spring about how Dick Cheney and Dubya were turning back the clock on the Clinton/Gore “new” men. I’ve also written in the past about the idiocy of some extreme feminists in trying to deny basic physiological and psychological differences between men and women. But even though there were signs of a revival of maleness last year, things have really gotten under way since the fall. I was impressed that the Advocate magazine put Mark Bingham on the cover as the gay man of the year. Bingham, you may recall, was a hefty Republican gay rugby player who may well have been part of the sabotaging of the al Qaeda plane headed for DC. Time was, his Republicanism would have barred him automatically from favorable coverage. Now he’s an icon. Then there’s Peggy Noonan’s fireman fetish – and who can blame her? At the same time, fashion seems to be turning. I’m noticing more and more beards around the place (ahead of the curve here!). According to the New York Times today, the phenomenon is deepening. Designer Tom Ford’s

“clothes were no longer intended for a man bent on showing off his feminine side. The suits were roomier than they have been, meant for the kind of man whose eating habits are not modeled after Slim Keith’s. Pants were high-waisted, loose at the bottom and cuffed, referring back to the gentlemanly style of the 1930’s. Mr. Ford showed wonderfully tailored greatcoats, too, and as they came out, one imagined them lending authority to even the most insecure 23-year-old.”

Notice how maleness is also correlated with age in this schema. Masculinity at its best isn’t just brawn; it’s also wisdom and maturity. Call this the age of Rummy. One reason I tend to be an optimistic conservative is that I think certain things will always be true, however hard utopians try to deny or change it. So however daffy the culture can get at times about, say, gender, and although great damage can be done in the meantime, the truth will eventually emerge. One of those truths is gender difference. It’s great to see that it can now be celebrated as much as bemoaned.

WHOEVER IT IS WE’RE FIGHTING AGAINST: David Brooks does his usual wry but perceptive take on the debate about what really motivates Islamic terrorism.

NONE OF THEIR BUSINESS: Some elements of the anti-American British press had a field day over the weekend interpreting some opaque photographs of al Qaeda prisoners with allegations of ‘torture,’ and all manner of abuses. Here’s a great editorial from the Daily Telegraph taking the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, down a notch for joining the clamor.

NO MORE KRUGMAN: I promise. Point made. But keep your eyes peeled for any other Enron-sponsored pundits on their high horses.

Bill Kristol divulged his own Enron-sponsorship on C-SPAN’s Morning Journal on January 13. Good for Bill. Now the hard questions: How much did he get? Will he give the money back to a charity for fleeced Enron retirees? Or is he going to be ethically up-staged by Hillary Clinton?

KRUGMAN, AGAIN: The response to the news that Paul Krugman, public scourge of Enron, was once on their gravy train, is almost as interesting as the original story. First, Krugman himself. Here’s his apologia. Not only does Krugman have no regrets about this – he even boasts about it! Krugman claims his 1999 piece was not about Enron, but a love-letter to markets. Well you decide. It was indeed a weird (for Krugman) piece of ‘irrational exuberance’ about free markets, but its centerpiece was Enron:

“[Enron] is not, and does not try to be, vertically integrated: It buys and sells gas both at the wellhead and the destination, leases pipeline (and electrical-transmission) capacity both to and from other companies, buys and sells electricity, and in general acts more like a broker and market maker than a traditional corporation. It’s sort of like the difference between your father’s bank, which took money from its regular depositors and lent it out to its regular customers, and Goldman Sachs. Sure enough, the company’s pride and joy is a room filled with hundreds of casually dressed men and women staring at computer screens and barking into telephones, where cubic feet and megawatts are traded and packaged as if they were financial derivatives. (Instead of CNBC, though, the television screens on the floor show the Weather Channel.) The whole scene looks as if it had been constructed to illustrate the end of the corporation as we knew it.”

I’m sorry but this gushing paean to Enron is not just a love-letter to free markets. It’s a massive suck-up to a company he was taking $50,000 from at the time. I know, I know. He disclosed the board membership. I never said he didn’t. But the money matters. At least I think it matters to your average New York Times reader who’d be shocked, I think, to find a New York Times columnist who, before he joined the Times, was a $50,000 paid crony for a major corporation that was in the process of fleecing its shareholders – especially since he is now one of that company’s fiercest critics. Then Krugman goes into a swoon about how much he was worth in the international corporate advice industry: “I was a hot property, very much in demand as a speaker to business audiences: I was routinely offered as much as $50,000 to speak to investment banks and consulting firms.” That’s interesting. I wonder how many other companies Paul “Hot Property” Krugman has taken money from in the past that might be relevant for his current disquisitions. I think he owes his readers an account of all the corporate money he has taken in the five years before he went to the Times, if he has ever subsequently mentioned those companies in his Times columns. My further question he ignores. Since many public figures who were once, like Krugman, beneficiaries of Enron’s largess, have now given the money to charity, will Krugman do the same?

THE MEDIA RESPONSE: Another telling issue. Howie Kurtz does a simple, fair, modest story, reporting the relevant facts on both sides. He’s a pro. Romenesko buries the story, never links to my original reporting, hasn’t linked to the New York Times original story about the $50,000, hasn’t linked to the Washington Times story on the controversy, and hasn’t linked to Kurtz’s fair summary. Instead he links to James Taranto’s odd item saying that there’s no scandal, even though I never claimed this was Watergate and even though James seems to agree that it’s all a little dubious if not exactly unethical by the letter of the law. Romenesko also links to Krugman’s defense, while never linking to the charges against him. How’s a reader supposed to get a fair account? (Romenesko spent a good deal of last week, in contrast, trashing a conservative journalist’s privacy in a matter that has no bearing whatsoever on that writer’s journalistic ethics.) In the wagon-circling department, Josh Marshall writes the following amazing sentences: “If there’s an embarrassment here, it’s that Krugman participated in the common business of taking a pretty large sum of money from corporate bigwigs for a pretty small level of exertion. (Note to corporate bigwigs: this is a common business in which Talking Points Memo is eager to become involved — though he’ll keep criticizing until the offers start coming in.)” Am I hallucinating or is Marshall semi-jokingly saying that he is a columnist for hire? And people wonder why the general public is suspicious of the ethics of journalists?

SO AM I CRAZED?: I don’t think so. I have no ax to grind in this. If anything, since the New York Times Magazine regularly publishes me, I’m not exactly being self-interested in asking some hard questions of one of the Times’ op-ed stars. I haven’t claimed Krugman has committed a crime or even something deeply unethical. I don’t think journalists should be barred from sources of outside income if they disclose it when appropriate. I’ve given speeches for money at universities and once at a biotech conference, but I’m always careful to let people know of any specific conflicts when they arise. I’ve banged on about Krugmangate because I feared no one else would. It’s not ideological. My criticisms would apply to anyone of any politics on the take from Enron and not disclosing fully, including the fee. And there are surely double-standards here. I was hounded for declaring in advance that I was hoping to get some pharmaceutical advertising for this site. Krugman gets what many people would think of as a year’s salary by showing up for a weekend and gabbing about Asia – all to burnish the image of a company that is now a byword for corruption. And this year, after the scandal broke, he never mentioned this salient fact in any of his Enron columns. I still think that’s a story. We now need a real investigation, outlining the full roster of pundits, right and left, who have cashed Enron’s checks in the past. We need names and dollars. And we need to demand that they give the money back to the fleeced shareholders. If any of you have good information on pundits on the take from Enron, who haven’t disclosed, please let me know. Is the make-up of that advisory board public? I’d be grateful for any tips.

“What is implied here is the amazing assumption that society has the right to bargain with the Negro for the freedom which inherently belongs to him. Some of the most vocal liberals believe they have a valid basis for demanding that, in order to gain certain rights, the Negro ought to pay for them out of the funds of patience and passivity which he has stored up for so many years. What these people do not realize is that gradualism and moderation are not the answer to the great moral indictment which, in the revolution of 1963, finally came to stand in the center of our national stage. What they do not realize is that it is no more possible to be half free that it is to be half alive.” – Martin Luther King Jr., “Why We Can’t Wait,” January 1964.

BUSH AND AL QAEDA BEFORE 9/11: A thorough and interesting piece by Bart Gellmann in Sunday’s Washington Post. You can see it as either a more or less continuation of Clinton’s caution – or something much better. You won’t be surprised to see I think the latter. Clearly the Bush administration didn’t do enough in eight months to deter or detect the September 11 outbreak of war. They deserve some of the responsibility for our vulnerability alongside Clinton. But to say the two administrations were interchangeable strikes me as wrong. Here’s an interesting section:

“When the Deputies Committee met April 30, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage declared an important shift in stance by saying the destruction of al Qaeda should be the top American priority in South Asia-higher than slowing the spread of nuclear arms, or preventing another Indo-Pakistan war, or restoring democracy after Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s coup in Pakistan. Only al Qaeda, Armitage said, represented a direct threat to the United States.”

The difference was that the Bushies began to see al Qaeda as a systemic threat requiring a broad strategy for the region. They say Bush himself expressed frustration at inaction. By the summer,

“Tenet dispatched an urgent request on July 3 to 20 foreign intelligence services, asking them to arrest a list of suspected al Qaeda members. Two days later, his Counterterrorism Center called in the FBI, Customs and Coast Guard, as well as immigration and aviation authorities, to say a major attack on U.S. interests appeared to be imminent-likeliest, by now, in Saudi Arabia or Israel, but a target inside the United States could not be excluded.”

The administration ratcheted up its objectives regarding al Qaeda to ‘elimination’ of the organization – far more profound than anything Clinton had done. Further, the Taliban were formally warned that the United States would make no distinction between them and al Qaeda. Options for actual invasion of Afghanistan were on the table by September 4 – if far from being implemented. None of this was enough, of course. But any comparison of this record with Clinton’s eight long years of swatting at flies seems to me to the great advantage of Bush. And I see no reason whatsoever why this record – and his subsequent global success – shouldn’t be a legitimate reason for keeping the guy in office.

SO FAREWELL THEN, TINA BROWN: What is there to learn from the demise of Talk, Tina Brown’s relentlessly bad magazine that was finally put out of its misery last Friday? To begin with, it’s not that Tina B was a bad editor. She’s clearly a superb editor. Yes, the rap on her incessant parties and spin operations and celebrity puff-pieces was all well-deserved. But she also ran some terrific stories at the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, was a line-editor of some skill, a story editor of clear genius, and a buzz-merchant par excellence. She saved the New Yorker as a relevant franchise, although she also effectively destroyed what it was. Her flaw, I think, was that she never grew. What she brought to Vanity Fair in the 1980s was very close to what she brought to the New Yorker in the 1990s and almost indistinguishable from what she did with Talk at the turn of the century. It was the same formula repeated again and again – in different formats. It was a great formula for a while and reached its peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But the mood changed; the zeitgeist altered; the economics of publishing, which she helped skew in the 1980s and 1990s with her pathological profligacy, also shifted. For someone allegedly clued in to the tinniest shifts in the culture, she reacted with numbing obliviousness. September 11 wasn’t therefore just a financial disaster for her; it was a cultural disaster. What seemed merely tired and exhausted in 2001 felt almost offensive and irrelevant in 2002. Like Clinton, Brown will be remembered in the future as an emblem of an era of profound shallowness and great fun. But that era is now over. Here’s a suggestion for Tina: go back to writing, your first love. Publish your diaries. Then get yourself a me-zine. Everyone will read it. And you might even stop losing buckets full of other people’s money.

PUNDITGATE?: The Washington Times is the first newspaper to follow up on the Paul Krugman $50,000 Enron payment. I don’t mean to sound crazed about this. It’s not the worst thing in the world for a columnist to take money from a major corporation just to burnish their image. But it is unethical to write about the Enron scandal without divulging that you were once cashing their checks. (Being on an advisory board need not be a source of payment. Krugman owed it to his readers to tell them that he got a very easy $50,000 from the people he’s now accusing of epitomizing corrupt capitalism.) But the Times has also dug up another nugget. Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard was also on the board. I’m not aware of Kristol disclosing this at any point, or how much money (if any) he received; or whether he intends to give it to a charity for the victims of the company’s shenanigans. And Kristol and Krugman surely aren’t the only ones. Here’s a story for any aggressive media reporter. Exactly how many pundits have been on Enron’s payroll? How many of them have disclosed that fact in their relevant publications? How much was each paid? What did they write about Enron at the time? And how many of them are returning the money to the relevant Enron charities? This strikes me as an important piece of investigation if the punditocracy isn’t going to emerge from this scandal as tarnished as many others.

Frank Rich asks many tough, pertinent questions about Enron today. “Then again, who in either party hasn’t cashed an Enron check?” he demands. Good point, Frank. Asked your fellow columnist Paul Krugman about that? “Whom can the country turn to for an honest investigation?” Rich asks. Another excellent point, Frank. Certainly not the economics columnist for the New York Times who never disclosed his own $50,000 Enron lucre in his own column until it was reported by others. Then there’s Rich’s peroration: “Enron has arisen like the ghost of over-the-top Christmases past, as a jolting throwback to the untethered America of the dot-com bubble. The greed of its perpetrators, and of the enabling politicians of both parties who took their cut before the wipeout, looks even uglier against the stark backdrop of those less well-connected Americans who are fighting our war.” Couldn’t have put it better myself. $50,000 is up to two years’ salary for some of our troops. Rich’s fellow columnist pocketed it for what he concedes was doing nothing but burnishing Enron’s image. And now he asks us to take him seriously when he lambastes Enron cronyism?

TICK TOCK: It’s now been three days since Paul Krugman’s $50,000 check from Enron was reported by the New York Times. Not a single media reporter has yet covered it. Romenesko, who has reported in the last two days on an editor’s pencil-tapping in meetings at the Southwest Journal and a flap over a cartoon in a Texas college newspaper, hasn’t reported the New York Times’ chief economics columnist on the take from Enron. Romenesko’s liberal double-standards are legendary. Others are usually better. C’mon, Howie. This is an easy call.

CLARIFYING AN ISSUE: Many of you have made the good point that this email puts succinctly:

“Regardless of what one thinks of Paul Krugman sitting on an advisory board at Enron and collecting $50K for the privilege, it is important to distinguish between the efficiencies that were generated by Enron’s attempts to make energy markets more competitive, which are what Krugman is praising in the Fortune article, and Enron’s accounting shenanigans. It is perfectly consistent to praise the former while condemning the latter. In fact one of the unfortunate outcomes of the Enron case seems be the conflating of these two actions, which could prevent us from benefiting from more efficiently functioning markets in energy and other ‘commodities.'”

Amen. There is a clear distinction between the illegal shenanigans Enron seems to have engaged in and the new economy structure Krugman once praised while on the Enron gravy train. The odd thing about Krugman’s Fortune piece, however, is that it is so out of synch with much of the rest of his writing that has been skeptical of the new economy. Contrast this piece with this one. A little discordant, wouldn’t you think?