During the roaring 90s, big media missed the big story about corporate America's excesses. "Reporters spent a lot of time covering PR news releases instead of looking behind the curtain," says investigative journalist Lowell Bergman. But corporate CEOs themselves seem to have had a pretty good idea what was lurking there.

WorldCom may be a bad example of how to run a company, but it's doing a good job of reputation management, according to Idil Cakim of the Burson-Marsteller PR firm. "WorldCom is a good example of how crisis could be managed, or at least the public could be answered, via the Internet," Cakim said, praising the web site which WorldCom has created to share information with the public about its bankruptcy.

"Cheap heating bills! Great gardens! Thriving civilizations! In energy-crazed Houston, friends of greenhouse gases abound," writes Dylan Krider as he examines the career of Gerald T. Westbrook and other global warming skeptics.