It’s as if the nation’s leading business newspaper doesn’t want to face the ugly reality of what it helped create.

This Wall Street Journal editorial applauds the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion reversing Jeff Skilling’s conviction on honest services wire fraud charges. But when it comes to the WSJ’s role in fanning the flames of public disdain toward business executives that helped to allow this injustice to occur, the WSJ apologizes only to Conrad Black:

The Black and Skilling cases are precisely the kind involving high-profile, unsympathetic defendants in which willful prosecutors like Mr. Fitzgerald are inclined to abuse the honest services law. They know the media won’t write about the legal complexities, and they know juries are often inclined to find a rich CEO guilty of something. We regret that in the case of Mr. Black, that failure of media oversight included us.

But what about an apology to Mr. Skilling? Take it from me WSJ, that lack of media oversight also included you in regard to the Skilling and other Enron-related criminal cases.

Indeed, four years ago the WSJ editorial board was patting the Enron Task Force on the back despite the fact that it was clear at the time that the Task Force had improperly applied the honest services wire fraud statute and engaged in massive prosecutorial misconduct in regard to the Skilling prosecution and numerous other Enron-related criminal prosecutions.

The WSJ’s failure to admit its egregious failures in its coverage of Enron reminds me of a point that John Carney raised several years ago in regard to Eliot Spitzer’s odious tenure as New York Attorney General:

Why didn’t [the mainstream media covering Spitzer’s investigation of Grasso] reveal the slimy tactics of the Spitzer squad?

We suspect part of the problem was the fear of being “cut off” of access. Reporters compete for scoops, and often those scoops depend on sources who will leak information to them. In the NYSE case, reporters assigned to the story were largely at the mercy of the investigators, who could cut-off uncooperative reporters, leaving them without copy to bring to their editors while their competitors filed stories with the newest dirt. They probably felt – not unrealistically – that their very jobs were on the line.

This reveals an unfortunate state of affairs. Playing bugle boy while government officials call the tunes from behind a veil of anonymity is not investigative journalism – it’s hardly journalism at all. It’s closer to propaganda. It would have been far better had the journalists turned their backs on the Spitzer squad, or even revealed these tactics to the public. Sure they may have lost some “good” stories but they could have painted a truer picture of what was going on. But that’s probably too much to hope for.

The same type of mainstream media dissonance went on in regard to the Enron-related prosecutions.

In point of fact, this Ayn Rand Institute press release that was issued in 2006 just a couple of months after the WSJ patted the Enron Task Force on the back is remarkably prescient in regard to the mainstream media’s abysmal coverage of Enron in general and Skilling’s trial, in particular:

The Media’s Mistreatment of Jeff Skilling.

Upon hearing the news that former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling was sentenced to 24 years, most Americans, trusting the newspaper articles and books they have read on Enron, think that justice has been served.

But, said Alex Epstein, a junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, “Jeff Skilling has not gotten justice, and the media bear a major portion of the blame.”Few Americans know that during Skilling’s trial, the prosecution came nowhere near proving its central allegation that Jeff Skilling engineered a conspiracy to defraud investors. Few know that Skilling, upon leaving Enron five months before its collapse, destroyed no documents, nor did anything else resembling a criminal cover-up. Few know that the prosecution, unable to prove a conspiracy, spent huge swaths of the trial taking pot-shots at Skilling with issues not even mentioned in the indictment, such as the failure of Skilling, a multi-millionaire many times over, to disclose a failed $50,000 investment to Enron’s board.”

“The media’s mis-portrayal of the case against Skilling long predates the trial. Ever since the fall of Enron, most of the media have treated as fact every conceivable smear against Skilling made by ax-grinding prosecutors or ex-Enron employees, while treating as absurd Skilling’s claim that he neither engineered a conspiracy nor lied to investors.”

“There can be no doubt that the media’s treatment of Skilling contributed to his conviction for a phantom conspiracy–and to the outrageous 24-year sentence that he has now received. And the mistreatment of Skilling is part of a broader trend: the trend of treating businessmen as guilty until proven innocent. Our journalists and intellectuals, accepting the idea that the pursuit of profit is morally tainted, assume that whenever anything goes wrong in business, it is the result of crooked behavior by greedy, rich CEOs–and slant their coverage accordingly. This practice is putting numerous innocent men in jail, and instilling terror throughout corporate America.”

“During Skilling’s appeal, let us call for the media to start treating Skilling–and all businessmen–fairly.”

The WSJ was right to apologize to Lord Black. But it also owes one to Jeff Skilling, as well as to its readers.