From company profits to consumer prices, money was the name of the game. CBS even did a story that scolded a multibillionaire for spending his money! Maybe those reporters didn’t learn in Economics 101 that spending money creates jobs for countless people. Instead, CBS got huffy about one businessman’s buying habits.

Everybody’s always making too much money to suit journalists … never mind that some of those network anchors are pulling in tens of millions themselves. According to TV Guide, CBS’s Katie Couric makes $15 million a year, while NBC’s Brian Williams makes $8 million.

No, the nightly newsers didn’t focus on the positive. Despite more than $51 billion pledged from the most generous Americans in 2006, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, journalists portrayed businessmen as criminals one-and-a-half times more often than they were portrayed as philanthropists.

I know businessmen who give generously, and they wouldn’t want to be featured on the evening news. They prefer to give without widespread fame. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t good stories about businessmen out there – stories that enterprising reporters could dig up – about those who build companies and communities.

Other nations would love to have a chance at this system of free enterprise that our media take for granted and even attack. Bill George, a Harvard Business School professor and businessman himself, wrote about that system on BusinessWeek.com August 5.

“Every government leader and business executive I have met in developing countries –from the mayor of Beijing to the ruler of the United Arab Emirates – is eager for one thing: U.S.-style capitalism to build their economies, create jobs and wealth for their people, and bring their countries fully into the global trading network,” George wrote. “From Kazakhstan to Vietnam, people are hungry for capitalism.”

People from around the world come here to work. That coveted capitalism that creates jobs and wealth is maintained by hard-working businessmen and women – most of whom stay out of the spotlight. They’re not scandal-ridden. They’re inventors, innovators and entrepreneurs. They provide jobs to more than 100 million Americans. And they give back to their communities.

Unfortunately, they’re just not making headlines.