Defense Contractors Gone Wild
By Matt Taibbi
Created Sep 20 2006 - 9:46am
There are small news stories, there are really small news stories, and then
there is "Defense Institute Head Resigns," a little maggot of a news item
that blipped into the "D" section of the Washington Post last Wednesday. 356
words in all, about half the length of an AP NFL game account, and the Post
was the only paper in the country that ran the story. So how important could
it have been?

Actually, the Post item about the resignation of Dennis C. Blair from the
federally-funded Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) spoke volumes about
the utter insanity of the modern American media landscape. In a month when
Katie Couric redefined the "scoop" as an advance glimpse of celebrity
idiot-spawn Suri Cruise, and investigative journalism according to
muckraking icon 60 Minutes meant sappy profiles of Howard Stern and Bill
Romanowski, it made all the sense in the world that the denouement of a
spectacular tale of massive government waste and fraud would go completely
unnoticed by virtually the entire journalism community.