r major competitor, MCI WorldCom, had no wireless ca- pability of its own, one would have thought that we were in a relatively better position. What no one knew until recently was that, in a desper- ate effort to maintain the growth rates on which its stock price de- pended, MCI WorldCom had engaged in the biggest accounting fraud in U.S. history-an $11 billion sleight of hand that allowed it to price below its real costs over a three-and-a-half-year period. AT&T was like a greyhound chasing a mechanical rabbit-it made Tough Calls us run faster and get in better shape, but the race was fundamentally rigged and took billions of dollars of cash flow out of the industry. Falling for the scam like everyone else, the same writers who had declared Armstrong "the new operator with a plan to save AT&T" didn't hesitate to hang up on him and the company. None of that should have come as a surprise. The hallway outside my office at AT&T was hung with two sets of framed magazine covers and stories. Along one wall representative headlines read: "Could AT&T Rule the World" (Fortune) and "I 800-GUTS: AT&T's Bob Allen Has Transformed His Company Into a World-Class Risk Taker" (Busi- ness Week). Along the other wall were "Why AT&T's Latest Plan Won't Work" (Fortune) and "AT&T: When Will the Bad News End?" (Busi- ness Week). I2 The dates of the exhibits on the two sides of the gallery were only a few years apart. The media, it turns out, have the same short-term focus as the markets they cover, and this expresses itself as journalistic avarice- getting scoops, finding new angles to grease rolling bandwagons, and unearthing conflict, preferably between powerful personalities. "Un- named sources" have become the wellspring from which the juiciest stories flow. And, being at the wrong end of a twenty-four-hour news cycle, the print media have turned to interpretation and analysis as their competitive niche. As Felicity Barringer, the New York Times re- porter who used to cover the media, once wrote, "Newspapers get pulled into the gr