THURSDAY, JULY 25, 2002 — It was only nine months ago that the biggest story about CEOs — at least some of them — was whom they were boinking. The story that caused the biggest stir involved the dalliance between Suzy Wetlaufer, then the editor of the Harvard Business Review, and Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric.

As usual, the media missed the big picture. While most newspapers and magazines focused on the specifics of the Wetlaufer affair, they managed to lose sight of the real story: that highfalutin business magazines like the Harvard Business Review were treating corporate CEOs like deities when the executives were really acting like scoundrels. Nobody asked, for example, about the ostensible reason Wetlaufer was palling around with these businessmen. She had also interviewed corporate luminaries such as Franco Bernabe of ENI, Jacques Nasser of Ford, and Michael Eisner of Disney; in part, her profiles of these men served to feed both their tremendous egos and the corporate culture’s insatiable need for self-glorification.

I’ll admit, I’m no regular reader of the Harvard Business Review, but its archives appear particularly short on articles like "Fancy Accounting Tricks: How to Make Your Profits Boom" and "Self-Dealing: How to Go from Rags to Riches on Other People’s Money" — even though that’s exactly what companies such as WorldCom, Enron, Tyco, and perhaps even AOL Time Warner did during the 1990s. Somehow, the magazine failed to cover this trend.

The lesson here is that while a fancy institution might be able to dress these corporate champions in some quasi-erudite glory, a scam is still a scam. And it’s a story that the folks over at HBR would have done better to tell us about, rather than papering it over with glitz.