EMERSON, Sandra <br/><br/>
The Public, politics and ethics of public officials :  corporate scandals of 2002 

 - Oxford, UK :  Blackwell,  January 2006 
<br/><br/> This article identifies the tradition of the public interest in the USA, argues for the balancing of interests and is critical of the role of regulators in balancing those interests. The author looks at the extent to which government in the USA was perceived to be protecting the public interest in its role as regulator of corporate America. Opinion polls conducted in 2002 indicated that the American public believed that regulators had failed to act in the public's interest. Today, the public is deeply divided along partisan lines about the role of regulators, a partisan division fuelled, in part, by regulators failing to articulate the ethical issues associated with their agencies' responsibility to promote and protect the public interest