Slate
Wall Street Journal
New York Times
Is this perhaps one of the most important news stories of the last 10 years?
Here’s how Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker described the two-years of journalistic research that produced the piece(s):
Last week, in a series of three articles totalling some thirteen thousand words, the paper explored the immense national-security industry created since 9/11—a bureaucratic behemoth, substantially privatized but awash in public money, that “has become so large, so unwieldy, and so secretive” that it “amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight.” Mimicking, consciously or not, the work product of its subject, the series begins by summarizing itself with a PowerPoint-like set of bullet points:
* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings—about 17 million square feet of space.
* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year—a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.
Beyond the numbing numbers, the Post describes a vast archipelago of gleaming new office parks, concentrated in the Washington suburbs but also scattered throughout the country, protected by high fences and armed security guards, bland-looking but inaccessible, and filled with command centers, internal television networks, video walls, armored S.U.V.s, and inner sanctums called SCIFs, short for “sensitive compartmented information facilities.”
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/08/02/100802taco_talk_hertzberg#ixzz0v5hkNWB5
In one of the plot lines of the premier of Mad Men’s Season Four, Peggy Olsen and crew are concocting a “news event” in which two women will tear at each other for the last Sugarberry ham in some local supermarket. We had seen the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce ‘ad men’ contemplating another plan to hire a hundred or so women to stand in line for their client’s tasty piggy goodness (the kind, probably, in a placenta of that coagulated brown goop found in those egg-shaped tin-canned hams), and thus make it seem a must-have Thanksgiving dish. Instead, they opt to hire two spirited but old-haggy housewives to yell, scratch, and claw for the last Sugarberry since… it’s cheaper.
The shenanigan is a success. The Daily News covers the fight (btw, didn’t you just love the line when someone asks, “In what section?” and Pete quips, “It’s the Daily News — it’s just one big section”), and the ham gets the great coverage as being a product people will fight over.
In the 30s, PR people and advertisers staged a similar news event during an Easter parade in NYC. (Notice the clever way holiday cheer is coopted to sell products!) Check out: