Big News in the Little Towns

So, if you had the former chief of logistics war plans at Central Command telling a reporter that Donald Rumsfeld had threatened to fire the next person who, in late 2002, talked about the need for a plan for postwar Iraq, wouldn't you think that was significant news? After all, here is the guy who was there when Rumsfeld allegedly insisted on a quick and dirty, in-and-out war plan, possibly setting the stage for the lovely long war we now find ourselves in. Sure, there's plenty of 9/11 remembrance to make room for, and the ABC docu-fuffle to yak about, but--just a tiny little spot in the news hole for a guy who was there and says there was a command from the top to do no postwar planning?

Well, maybe when you start low down on the news pyramid, that's where you stay. So this story, which started in the Hampton Roads Daily Press in Virginia, only gets picked up by small and medium-sized papers--Kansas City and Duluth being the largest markets treated to the news. The big guys had smaller fish to fry.