Enron and its progeny spawned an unprecedented amount of press coverage. To their credit, the media comprehensively covered allegations of widespread accounting fraud as serious and important news. Major newspapers deserve special credit for the breadth and depth of their coverage.

While it was a safe assumption that the sagas of Enron and – to a lesser extent – media icon Martha Stewart would receive sustained media attention, the sheer magnitude of the corporate governance scandals fueled extraordinary coverage of massive frauds at WorldCom, Tyco, HealthSouth, and Adelphia, to name but a few. Before Enron collapsed into bankruptcy and became mired in a complex Web of investigations, few would have predicted that the editors of the Wall Street Journal would devote significant resources – including prominent front-page space – to criminal investigations and prosecutions on a long-term basis. But, to the Journal's credit, it did.

Apart from the value that intensive coverage of virtually every aspect of the corporate meltdown provided the papers' general readership, the press also helped inform public debate about how such massive frauds could have occurred over a prolonged period of time without detection. For elected officials, business executives, legal and accounting professionals, academicians, and corporate governance activists, the burning question was, What went wrong and how can we fix it? The remarkable thing is that, thanks to media saturation, almost everyone knew something about it.