TALK ABOUT getting it exactly wrong. Last Friday the Wall Street Journal published an editorial that included this smarmy kiss-off: "We knew the political scandal had gone poof when the Beltway started using Enron as one more prop for ‘campaign finance reform.’ Yawn."

In fact, it is the lack of campaign-finance reform, more than anything else, that made the Enron scandal possible. The millions of dollars that Kenny Boy Lay bestowed on elected officials gave him instant access to every congressional office and regulatory agency in Washington — not to mention the White House. And until it was way too late — until it became obvious that no one in the capital could save him without being irredeemably slimed — Kenny Boy invariably got his way.

"The Enron scandal is a textbook study of money’s influence in Washington," says US Representative Marty Meehan, a Massachusetts Democrat and the co-author — with Connecticut Republican Christopher Shays — of a House bill that would ban unregulated soft-money contributions. (Enron gave $3.9 million in soft money over the past decade.)

"At a minimum," Meehan says, "the huge sums of money that Enron donated to parties and elected officials undermines public confidence in government. Without question, the public will be suspicious of past and future government action on Enron, and it’s compelling evidence for why we need campaign-finance reform."

Even a conservative commentator such as George Will understands that the free market can’t operate in a regulatory vacuum. Writing in his syndicated column last week, he observed that "a mature capitalist economy is a government project. A properly functioning free market system does not spring spontaneously from society’s soil as dandelions spring from suburban lawns. Rather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores that guarantee, among much else, transparency, meaning a sufficient stream — a torrent, really — of reliable information about the condition and conduct of corporations."

Yet Will — a noted opponent of campaign-finance reform — does not spell out how a "mature capitalist economy" can function when government is bought and paid for by the very industries it is supposed to regulate.

Nor does it help when, per usual, the media are asleep at the switch. Here’s a news flash. On March 5 of last year, Fortune published a lengthy story by Bethany McLean on Enron’s then-impressive stock-market valuation, and questioned precisely why that valuation had risen so high — and whether Enron’s business was actually based on anything other than hype.

It was a remarkably prescient piece of reporting. McLean quoted a credit analyst, Standard & Poor’s Todd Shipman, as saying of Enron’s financial reports, "If you figure it out, let me know." She noted that many analysts, even some who were bullish on Enron, didn’t understand Enron’s business model, which was likened to a mysterious "black box." And she quoted Chris Wolfe, an equity-market strategist affiliated with J.P. Morgan, as saying, "Enron is an earnings-at-risk story. If it doesn’t meet earnings, [the stock] could implode." In a follow-up on September 17, McLean reported that Enron CEO Jeff Skilling, who had resigned the previous month amid whispers that things were going bad, once called a money manager an "asshole" for having the temerity to ask for some hard numbers during a conference call.

So there was the whole story, laid out in dramatic fashion, lacking only the gory details that have emerged since Enron declared bankruptcy on December 2.

MediaChannel.org executive editor Danny Schechter, in an apparent reference to the Fortune report (he wouldn’t say, as he was protecting a friend’s identity), wrote in his Weblog last week that "other media outlets didn’t pick it up, follow it up or blow it up into a bigger story. The CNBC’s and CNN Financial News programs of the world and all their clones did not give it the OJ or Lewinsky or Condit scandal treatment. And so the story died."

Until now.

Former Washington Post ombudsman Geneva Overholser, who is now a Washington-based professor of public-affairs reporting for the University of Missouri, puts it this way: "More business stories should make it to the front page before the businesses experience utter collapse." As the Enron story moves forward, Overholser says, the media must exercise "vigilance" and show that they understand "the importance of hard-hitting business reporting in the mainstream press."

Unfortunately, the media are perpetually reactive. They celebrated Lay and other titans of industry back when they were riding high. Now they’re piling on. And, as Gwen Ifill suggests, they’re going to take their lead from elected officials in deciding how to cover this story as it develops. Failing a partisan bloodbath, expect to see it all fade away in remarkably short order.

If scandal coverage is reduced to a lot of eye-glazing, inside-the-business-section articles about 401(k) and auditing reform, then the media will have failed us. At root, this is a story about systemic campaign-finance abuses, political influence, and regulatory failures. It’s a story about a system that will continue to produce such horrors until it is cleaned up, once and for all. It should be on the front page of every major newspaper and on the newscast of every television network and cable news outlet until our elected officials are finally moved — or, rather, forced — to act.

But don’t count on it.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dan@dankennedy.net