Max Boot’s post earlier today about the preposterous New York Times story on the relationship between the Pentagon and former-military men-turned-war-pundits was spot on. I think, based on many years of experience working at various newspapers, that there is an explanation for the extreme length — 7800 words — of the story and the fact that it manages to find nothing more than an effort by the Pentagon to get good coverage. The Times thought it was on to something very big, ended up with something very small, and then took what little they had and tried to make a silk purse from the sow’s ear that was reporter David Barstow’s investigation.

I intuit  that this story, which features extensive use of Freedom of Information requests, was originally conceived as an investigation of potentially criminal activity — specifically, whether the Pentagon bribed these men to say things and write things both the Pentagon and the pundits themselves knew to be false. If there were such payments, it would be a requirement in law that the payments would be made on the basis of contracts — like the contracts that Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher, two conservative pundits, received from the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services respectively to promote legislation.

In the end, however, The story reads like a work of investigative journalism that came up entirely dry.  Perhaps  Barstow was tipped off to something seriously rotten and saw a Pulitzer dangling before him if he could only get chapter and verse. Perhaps someone else at the Times was, and threw the assignment to Barstow. Whatever is the case, there proved to be no there there, and Barstow was left with a huge amount of information with no clear act of wrongdoing.

So he did what is called a “notebook dump,” with the approval and even encouragement of his editors, revealing every single bit of information he uncovered. What began as a possible major scoop ended up as a “thumbsucker,” one of those “this is a cautionary tale about the way the Bush administration tried to spin the public.” Barstow’s endless tale reveals nothing more than that the Pentagon treated former military personnel like VIPs, courted them and served them extremely well, in hopes of getting the kind of coverage that would counteract the nastier stuff written about the Defense Department in the media. The fact that they were treated no better, if I have my guess right, than Thomas Friedman is treated any time his assistant places a phone call informing the pooh-bahs of Washington that the Great Man is deigning to give them an audience goes unremarked.

The honest thing to do in these circumstances is to kill the piece because you didn’t get the goods. That’s the problem with investigative journalism — often, the scandal is too confusing to be described in an exciting way, or it isn’t a scandal at all. But newspapers never kill the piece, because they spent too much money, too much time, and had too much hope to say, “You know what? This just didn’t pan out.”