Spun by Entertainment

So I'm watching a rerun of Law and Order: Special Victims' Unit and it's about a sex offender who picks up three kids in New Orleans after Katrina and heads to New York in a van which just happens to have a lab researcher who's stolen a stash of weaponized anthrax from a military lab in New Orleans.

The cops put out a cover story to solicit help but a reporter spots that it's not the real story, and keeps showing up at inopportune times. They manage to keep him quiet, but the whole story goes in a different direction when the kidnapper and one of the girls acquires anthrax and the big dark feds move in and take all the evidence and the girls and put a blanket over any statements to the press. But one of New York's finest leaks the story to the reporter and the episode ends with him in prison because he won't reveal his sources.

What's the connection between Dick Wolf and the New York Times? Now, imagine that the cops who are the heroes were working with the feds to track down the dust and don't want to see the city go into a panic. Before they can get a clear enough picture of what to warn the public about some jerk leaks it to the press and from then on everything they do involves stepping over reporters and photographers. Because of the delays and confusion, leads are lost and the anthrax is never fully accounted for. But the public knows that the cops AND DHS are incompetent and that there's a bunch of anthrax missing loose in NYC.

Pulitzer, or no pulitzer?