By Brian Carnell

Friday, March 22, 2002

Eric Alterman wrote an article for |The Nation| about Andrew Sullivan's crusade against journalists and pundits who were on Enron's payroll. Of course, since Sullivan is a conservative Alterman blasts Sullivan for picking on liberal economist Paul Krugman who has described the Enron affair as "crony capitalism" but who himself received $50,000 to serve on an Enron board of advisors.

According to Alterman,

Sometimes Sullivan's hysterics are merely amusing. For instance, his TNR colleague Jonathan Chait counted fifty-one attacks on the moderately liberal Paul Krugman in slightly more than five weeks. Sullivan also, in Chait's words, "distort[ed] Krugman's views so wildly as to venture into pure fantasy." (This happens a lot.) The pundit's crime was to accept a $37,500 consulting payment from Enron years before he became a columnist and to disclose it when he first mentioned Enron favorably in Forbes and later negatively for the Times. William Kristol and Irwin Stelzer, by contrast, took their Enron cash and then proceeded, respectively, to edit and to write a highly favorable article about the company without any niceties of financial disclosure. Calculated on the basis of Sullivan attacks, the conservatives' transgressions were approximately one-twentieth as serious.

I have to confess, I never thought I would see the day when The Nation would defend an economist on the payroll of a major corporation -- much less a corporation that was so thoroughly fraudulent as Enron. But more importantly, Alterman is leaving a lot out of his claims about Sullivan.

Alterman claims that Krugman's "crime was to accept a $37,500 consulting payment from Enron years before he became a columnist and to disclose it when he first mentioned Enron." Not true. The problem is that when Krugman disclosed his relationship with Enron, all he wrote was, "I served on an Enron advisory board that turns out to have been a hatchery for future Bush administration officials. (What was I doing there? Beats me.)"

Only in the last few months did it emerge that Enron had paid Krugman $50,000 for sitting on this advisory panel, even though Krugman himself said that, "This was an advisory panel that had no function that I was aware of."

Alterman then proceeds to point out that William Kristol, Irwin Stelzer and other conservative writers also turned out to be on the Enron payroll and did not disclose their involvement either.

Alterman conveniently leaves out the fact that Sullivan slammed Kristol, Stelzer and others as well as soon as those revelations were made. In fact, I saw him on CNN making the point that the problem was not a liberal or conservative issue but rather a journalistic one -- that journalists who accept money from corporations need to disclose not only which corporations (and not just corporations -- special interest groups as well), but also how much they are accepting.

It is difficult to accept the position, apparently held by Alterman, that pundits like Krugman who write about the corrupting influence of corporations on the political process should not be held to those standards themselves.

Finally, Alterman's article is fascinating in its take on independent web sites and web logs. Alterman writes,

Now Sullivan has launched a career in the brave new world of "blogging," or vanity websites. And while his site arouses a certain gruesome car-wreck fascination, it serves primarily as a reminder to writers of why we need editors.

I do not always agree with Sullivan and sometimes he is over the top, but certainly his site does not have the sort of outright conspiracy nonsense that often gets posted to independent left wing sites like IndyMedia. How long do you think we'll have to wait for an article slamming IndyMedia for having a "certain gruesome car-wreck fascination" that "serves primarily as a reminder to writers of why we need editors?"

Don't hold your breath.

Source:

Sullivan's Travails. Eric Alterman, The Nation, April 8, 2002.

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