The San Diego Union-Tribune's editors must have thought they had a major scoop on their hands. On January 12, the paper reported on its front page that the Bush administration had asked Carol Lam, the US attorney for San Diego, to resign. The firing of a single US attorney might not normally make for splashy headlines, but Lam was not your typical US attorney. At the time she was asked to step down, Lam was in the midst of unravelling a congressional scandal of historic proportions. She had already put away California Representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham on bribery charges, with the longest sentence ever given to a member of Congress, and indictments of several other big Washington players appeared to be forthcoming.
If the Union-Tribune's editors did think they had an important exclusive, they must have been disappointed the next day to discover that not one of the major US papers had picked up the story. The New York Times wouldn't get around to mentioning the Union-Tribune piece until a January 15 editorial and didn't report the story on its news pages until January 17 - and then only on page 17. The Wall Street Journal wrote about Lam on the 16th. The Washington Post failed to pick up the story until the 19th.
