By Staff
Testimony ended May 8 in the federal fraud and conspiracy trial of Enron Corp. founder Kenneth Lay and former Chief Executive Jeffrey Skilling absent the breathless attention paid to celebrity proceedings, from O.J. Simpson to Michael Jackson, even though it remains among the biggest corporate scandals in U.S. history.
A dozen hours of closing arguments were scheduled to start today, followed by deliberations May 17.
The government called 22 witnesses in its main case, which rested March 28. The defense presented 29 witnesses.
Prosecutors a week ago grilled three rebuttal witnesses to bolster their contention that Lay and Skilling committed crimes at the energy company before it collapsed into bankruptcy in December 2001.
Oil and gas executive Mike Muckleroy testified he witnessed Lay lie. “Under certain business exigencies, I have known Mr. Lay not to tell the truth,” said Muckleroy, who worked for Lay before and after Enron's 1985 founding.
Lay and Skilling both stuck by their story that no fraud occurred at Enron, they did nothing wrong and they were done in by a fatal convergence of bad press and shaky market confidence after Sept. 11.
The government contends that Lay and Skilling repeatedly lied about Enron's position with full knowledge that accounting tricks kept it afloat.
While awaiting the jury verdict, Lay had another trial scheduled to start May 18. He is charged with bank fraud in a separate bench trial.
Apparently, Americans are so besotted with celebrity and reality television that nothing else matters anymore.
Another report last week by The Associated Press examined the dilemma of foundering newsmagazine ratings and trying to be shocking enough to stand out in the reality TV end of the swamp.
These programs have morphed increasingly toward entertainment at the expense of serious public-service journalism.
ABC's “Primetime” with Diane Sawyer April 21 featured a step-family so vile that even “Supernanny” might have flinched, complete with tape of the dad punching his teen daughter, raising questions of why the network did not feel compelled to alert authorities in upstate New York.
Maybe that's how its ratings buck the newsmagazine trend.
The Darfur crisis is more likely to rely on Angelina Jolie's March interview with Ann Currie on NBC than enterprise reporting.
Our curious complacency and craving for all fluff all the time is taking its toll, from Jay Leno's amazing “Jaywalking” segment, where the clueless wallow in their ignorance in exchange for being on national TV, to a recent National Geographic Society survey.
The survey found almost 60 percent of young Americans cannot find Iraq on a map and a third cannot locate Louisiana - even though they are the sites of widely-seen reality shows, the war on terror and Hurricane Katrina.