Daily Inspiration Quote by Allan Sloan

Calling the Stewart case “as seriously as Enron” is a scalpel move: Allan Sloan isn’t defending Martha Stewart so much as indicting the culture that inflated her scandal into a stand-in for corporate rot. The comparison is deliberately disproportionate. Enron was systemic fraud with mass collateral damage; the Stewart case, in Sloan’s framing, is a celebrity-adjacent infraction that got dressed up as a morality play. “Trivia” lands as a provocation, a way to puncture the self-importance of punditry, prosecutors, and a public hungry for a tidy villain.

The intent is partly journalistic triage. Sloan is arguing that attention is a scarce resource, and America is spending it poorly. The subtext: we prefer narratives with a face, a brand, and a lifestyle empire we can either envy or punish. Enron is abstract - balance sheets, shell companies, regulatory failure. Stewart is legible: domestic perfection, money, a famous name. That makes her case easy to televise, easy to litigate in the court of vibes, and easy to use as proof that “no one is above the law,” even when the underlying harm is minimal compared to white-collar crimes that quietly reshape livelihoods.

Context matters: post-Enron America was supposedly having a reckoning with corporate accountability. Sloan suggests that instead of sustaining that focus, the media latched onto a cleaner, more entertaining target. The line reads like a warning about misdirected outrage - not that accountability is wrong, but that spectacle is being mistaken for seriousness.