Does biz journalism no longer care about Jeff Skilling?

Perhaps the most stunning news to come from Jeff Skilling’s resentencing last week was that the fallen Enron executive had grown a salt-and-pepper beard. This wasn’t the shaggy face carpet that Ivan Boesky sported after years behind bars. Skilling — who has spent his time tutoring fellow inmates in Spanish and, rather disturbingly, business — has cultivated a respectable, close-cropped field of chin lettuce.

Skilling’s beard became top news on the Houston Chronicle’s web site, which teased the story with the headline: “See what Jeff Skilling looks like after six years in prison.”

Actually, he looks better than he did six years ago when his brother and wife drove him to the prison door in Waseca, Minn. I was there then, standing in a frozen corn field across a two-lane strip of black top as Skilling rolled up in a rental car. (In a touch of irony, he arrived at prison in a Jeep Liberty.) As a columnist for the Chronicle who had written extensively about Enron and the five-month trial that led to the convictions of Skilling and former Enron Chairman Ken Lay, the prison arrival was big news.

During the trial, the courtroom was packed daily with members of the national press corps. The overflow room where many of us watched the proceedings and blogged about them in real time was a crowed, frantic place in which dozens of reporters from around the world jockeyed to file stories, fought over electrical outlets and complained about the Wifi.

The Enron trial was one of the biggest business stories of the year, dealing with the consequences from the collapse of one of the country’s biggest corporations.

By comparison, Skilling’s resentencing seems a decidedly low key affair. I’m no longer working for the Chronicle, and I didn’t go to the hearing. Many of us who covered the trial are no longer in journalism, and even those who are found the culmination of the Enron story a non-event.

For one thing, Skilling’s endless appeals began to take on a dog-bites-man quality. For another, it was clear that his sentence would be reduced, and that the judge would probably do exactly what he did – shave a decade from Skilling’s prison term so that the former executive could be out in another four years or so.

But it isn’t just the predictability of the case or the slow decay of journalism that led to the disinterest. The world itself has moved on.

As I noted last week in my Forbes blog, Enron is a scandal from a different era, eclipsed by the far more egregious actions of Wall Street during the financial crisis.

Whatever lessons corporate America may have learned from Enron’s demise, they were lost on Wall Street, which used Enron as a test bed for some of the very financial shenanigans it later used to undermine the mortgage market.

Enron, for its legion of sins, was never too big to fail. Ken Lay’s unanswered calls to the Bush administration proved that.

But the mortgage machine – Wall Street, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG and so forth – are far more deeply engrained in the monetary and political system.

In 2001, it seemed impossible that America’s seventh-largest company could implode in a few months. Today — after Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Countrywide and on and on – it seems almost commonplace. What’s more, unlike Skilling, the financial crisis came without legal consequence for the CEOs who orchestrated it.

As a legal story, Enron has become almost quaint. At the time, Skilling’s original 24-year sentence was welcomed by many who had suffered through Enron’s collapse. Now, his crimes pale compared with the unindicted conspiracy that took the world economy to the brink of the abyss.

Even in Houston, Skilling’s sentencing has become a loose end from an earlier time. The city has moved on, its economy soaring past its Enron-era heights, driven by the surge in domestic oil drilling. Enron is remembered the way you remember a particularly bad bout of pneumonia: it was painful at the time, but we’re doing better now, thanks.

It’s no wonder, then, that the media hoard had thinned for Skilling’s resentencing and that facial hair became the focal point of the story. Skilling, once the embodiment of all that was wrong with corporate America is today little more than a curiosity.

The waning interest in Skilling and the dwindling ranks of journalism raises a troubling question: By the time he gets out of prison in 2017, will there be any reporters there at all?