Shock jocks' poor taste.(BROKERAGE)

It's no news to insurance producers that their reputation, and that of the industry they represent, historically occupies the dark, dank basement of American business. Like it or not, you're down there with used car salesmen and hawkers of spurious kitchenware devices on late-night television. We have decades of public-opinion polls to prove it.

As if that wasn't enough, along came Eliot Spitzer, who bared a longstanding breach of trust by a handful of the nation's top brokers and further decimated the reputations of the vast majority of lesser and honest brokers. Some