President Bush properly has dropped his early line that the wave of business and financial scandals were merely the fault of a few bad apples. But the phrase keeps cropping up, among people who have a hard time realizing that something has gone wrong with the system. Systemic is the correct word for the present trouble. And, as Mr. Bush and most members of Congress have come to believe, the system needs fixing.

Those who still cling to the few-bad-apples notion should look at the Fortune 500 list and see how many well-publicized miscreants appear on that roster of the country’s top business firms. They will find Enron, of course, at No. 5. Also among the top 200, they will also find Merck, Dynegy, Merrill Lynch, Kmart, WorldCom, Qwest, Xerox, Rite Aid, Halliburton, Boeing, Edison International and CMS Energy. All of them are in big trouble for things like “aggressive accounting,” phantom sales to inflate earnings, and lawsuits by outraged stockholders.

Most of their stocks have dropped precipitously. Some are already bankrupt. And now, with the Senate’s investigation this week, the list will grow to include some major financial institutions, such as Citigroup and JP Morgan-Chase.

Of course, the wrongdoers and failures are a small minority of American corporations. But what counts with Congress, the media, investors, and a disillusioned public is not the number or the percentage, but how high they rank among the country’s foremost business firms.

Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson, not one to panic or exaggerate, caught Wall Street’s attention when he said in a recent speech, “In my lifetime, American business has never been under such scrutiny, and to be blunt, much of it is deserved.” He added, to Fortune magazine, “You pick up the paper, and you want to cry.”

The Wall Street Journal, in a solid appraisal on July 17 of why the stock market has kept dropping, said investors had lost trust in firms’ numbers: “People don’t believe an analyst when he tells them earnings are going to recover, and they don’t believe the chief executive when he tells them the earnings have recovered, and they don’t believe the accountant when he confirms it.”

So let’s hear no more about a few bad apples.