Alan Sloan (Newsweek): She's (Stewart) a Criminal? Give Me a Break.

[Dudley_DUright]

The Martha Stewart case creeps me out. And I'm not a Martha fan. I don't like Martha Stewart, I am congenitally unstylish, I've spent my career trying to help people without connections understand what's going on so that they have a chance of getting a fair shake from the connected and the powerful: the people like Stewart. Heck, I even criticized greed and overreaching during the '90s, when most of journalism was kissing up to (now busted) dot-com billionaires and (now disgraced) celebrity CEOs and (now humiliated) analysts who never saw a stock they didn't like.

But the Stewart case bothers me, big time. First, I don't consider Stewart's real misdeeds—stupidity and greed and cluelessness—to be criminal offenses. Second, people are treating the Stewart case as seriously as Enron when it's really over trivia. Look. Enron and WorldCom and Global Crossing and Adelphia have done huge damage. Thousands of people lost their jobs and lifetime savings as a result of this corporate misbehavior, stockholders lost vast amounts of money, creditors were cheated, entire communities were so damaged they may never recover. These things aren't as mediagenic as the Stewart trial, and don't offer the same malicious glee people get from watching an icon crumble. But they're a helluva lot more important than Stewart's case, which has used up so much journalistic oxygen.

Stewart's trial wasn't about corporate misbehavior. It was about misleading the government, which was investigating her for a crime—insider trading—that she was never charged with. If Stewart weren't such a big name, who'd care about this stuff? For heaven's sake. When a cop pulls you over for going 70 in a 55-mile-per-hour zone and you say you didn't know how fast you were going although you damn well did, you're lying to an investigating officer. If you take $520 of charitable deductions on your income tax but can document only $500 of them, it can become tax fraud. If the government decides to put your life under a microscope, do you think it won't find something? I suspect there's not an adult in the country who would walk away totally unscathed if every aspect of his or her life were investigated the way Stewart's ImClone trading was.

The conventional wisdom is that by convicting Stewart of lying and obstructing justice, the government has struck a blow for truth, justice and the American way. It has put the fear of God into people, who will now be forthcoming and forthright. That's the rationale for spending all that time and effort and money prosecuting a cover-up when there wasn't any crime.

But the conventional wisdom is wrong. The lesson that any thinking person draws from the Stewart saga is that when the government asks questions, run for your lawyer and don't say a word. Had Stewart kept her mouth shut, she'd be OK. In this litigious world, far too many CEOs already listen to lawyers, whose advice is almost always to say nothing. That argument is now more convincing than ever, thanks to the Stewart case, and the flow of information to the public will suffer because of it.

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4467515/