At the time, Enron's stock was soaring and it had become every stock trader's recommended investment.

The energy company reported increasing profits, quarter after quarter.,”

In March 2001, Bethany McLean asked a simple question: "How does Enron make its money?"

At the time, Enron's stock was soaring and it had become every stock trader's recommended investment on every one of the stock trading apps at the time.

The energy company reported increasing profits, quarter after quarter.

Jeffrey Skilling, chief executive officer of Enron, told McLean, a reporter for Fortune magazine, that her questions were off-base and she should have performed better research on the company. He even accused her of being "unethical."

At Tuesday evening's Burleigh Media Ethics Lecture, McLean spoke to students, faculty and staff about the scandal that followed her investigation into Enron's inner workings.

"Enron's real business was manufacturing earnings," McLean said.

McLean described the top executive officers of Enron as self-made businessmen with a sense of over-entitlement. They had created corrupt off-shore companies that dealt only with Enron in order to fake the appearance of a healthy and profiting business.

Enron took loans from banks to continue to show earnings on their quarterly reports, drawing more people into their web of lies and deceit.

Everyone thought the Enron executives were the "smartest guys in the room," so no one questioned their new ideas, McLean said.

Everyone thought they were brilliant and went along with their plans.

But how could so many people not know that Enron was a bad company?

"Most people really didn't know. They thought they were being creative and changing the way the market worked," McLean said.

Despite Enron executives' attempts to explain to her that Enron was a complicated company and that she simply couldn't understand its business strategies, McLean felt that something wasn't right.

She published an article in Fortune called "Is Enron Overpriced?" which questioned the earnings of everyone's favorite company.

"Enron was not a case of a few bad apples, but a lot of people failing to do the right thing," McLean said.

No one wanted to be accused of being stupid or told that they didn't "get it," she said.

But Enron couldn't fudge their numbers forever, and the company began to crash down around Skilling, former Chairman Kenneth Lay and Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow, its top executives.

"It was not a good business brought down by a bad CFO, it was a bad business propped up by a CFO," McLean said.

In August 2001, Skilling resigned. Soon after, on Dec. 22, Enron declared bankruptcy.

Its investors and employees, all of which had been told to invest heavily in the company throughout its downfall, felt betrayed. Many of them lost their life savings in addition to their jobs.

In 2003, McLean and former Fortune coworker Peter Elkind cowrote a book, "Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room," about the scandal, which was then turned into a film documentary.

Katie Vertovec, a freshman in the College of Communication, attended the lecture.

McLean's talk covered a broad range of topics, including journalistic integrity and moral choices, which appealed to Vertovec.

"I had heard the Enron story before, but I had never truly understood the human side of the story and the ethical challenges the executives faced," Vertovec said. "I was impressed by Bethany McLean's courage and determination to expose the truth."

“