Reflections On Documentarys

Ask why-

Why did no one question Enron’s moves earlier?

Why did the banks sign on? –There were definitely hints

Why did Enron qualify for market-market accounting?

Where the hell was the SEC?

You’ve told us many times that one of the major jobs of a journalist is to be a watchdog on power and in this case it seems journalist Bethany McLean was really the first person to look critically at Enron. I would’ve been terrified to go up against a company that big and at the time, that successful. I watched an Nzone Tonight interview with McLean where she was asked if she had any doubts or fears about approaching Enron, she said she had plenty, but as a business journalist she had lots of facts and figures to refer her suspicion to. This isn’t much different from any journalist; rather they smell a rat or not, having some support for their lead is a necessity—otherwise there is no story. In the NZone interview Mclean said as a journalist “you have to say what you think and you have to write the truth as you see it,” these are both points we’ve talked about briefly in class, I think another point to add is you have to be prepared that others might not take you seriously or may completely disagree with your angle. McLean in this interview (and I’m sure she had to do some of this in the Enron story) said as a journalist you have to put yourself out of the picture and not take it personally if people don’t take you seriously, it might even be to your advantage if they don’t because then you are not as big of a threat.

The Enron scam made my stomach turn. For one, it’s terrifying that our government seemed to just let regulations slide because the company was so successful—in the documentary there was a phone call in which an analyst asked Skilling why Enron couldn’t fill out a form that many of its competitors filled out showing some of the company’s financial information—Skilling called the guy an asshole. Not only does it make my stomach turn that the Enron’s figure heads had no problem screwing away the retirement plans of hard working employees and fooling the nation but that the nation’s major bank somewhat knowingly signed on with this. Enron really had people under an illusion, analysts were under the illusion that Enron was doing well, convinced by it’s CEOs , the majority of analysts never really never really did the work to find out how exactly the company was doing it. The way the company was allowed to just mess with California was ridiculous, expensive and completely unethical, hearing that Bush was involved with the whole thing does not at all surprise me. I feel that there were too many hints for government officials to have not asked “why” sooner.

Taxi to the Dark Side, was an intense portrayal of the dysfunction amongst the Bush Administration in understanding the regulations of the Geneva Convention and the rights that come with a human life. The story of Dilawar is another stomach wrenching one in which the innocent is captured and killed under the messy regulations of the US army. It’s scary that of the 83 thousand plus detainees less than 1% of them were actually associated with any of the terrorist acts they had been imprisoned for. The tactics that were revoked by the Supreme Court and then carried out by the Bush Administration are disgusting enough themselves, but more so is the fact the majority of experts believe that torture is ineffective. The case of the detainee that falsely pleaded that the “terrorists” were being trained on chemical and physical war tactics in Iraq is proof of this. It is risky and quite terrifying that the Bush Administration would employ such tactics and then upon receiving any information from detainees would run off and act on that information—is this really what started “The War On Terror”? Equally devastating is how The Bush Administration then dumped the blame for the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo and other cases on the soldiers themselves, not trying any of the figure heads who had given directions and installed pressure without clear method of treatment or plan.

In the case of Delaware, why was it that the journalists were the only ones to tell the family what really happened to him? This was another incident in which the journalists smelled something fishy and did the research to figure out what was going on. The documentary said that the journalists looked at detainee events and analyzed the connections between them. The part in the documentary that showed emails that had been redacted made me realize just how hard it would be to report on issues like this. It was also interesting (but not surprising) that these were New York Times because in the beginning of class we talked about how The Times released a statement apologizing for its treatment of The Bush administration because in a big way they had really missed the facts. Over all, this really makes me not want to be a political journalist.