The national media, which had covered the story with yawning lack of interest up to then, were suddenly tearing each other’s clothes trying to get onto the Tellico site. Half the newspapers in the country seemed to run the story on page one, under some variation of the same headline: “Hundred-Million-Dollar Dam Stopped by Three-Inch Fish.” In most cases, the coverage went little deeper than that. Some editorial writers couldn’t even see humor in the impasse; the Washington Star harrumphed that it was “the sort of thing that could give environmentalists a bad name.”
