From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Ladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

On Friday, the Secretary of the U.S. Army resigned.

It was the latest shoe to drop in the wake of the Washington Post's expose two weeks ago

about the breakdown in outpatient care at the Walter

Reed Army Medical Center. The article depicted an overloaded system where soldiers with serious

injuries must fend for themselves in a nightmarish bureaucracy with substandard facilities.

The post may have made the biggest splash,

but in recent weeks, the plight of the wounded

also sparked major pieces in Newsweek, the New York Times,

the Boston Globe, and NPR, among others.

This week, ABC's Bob Woodruff hosted a special on vets with traumatic brain injuries,

the signature injury of the roadside

bomb, the injury he sustained last year.

It's clear why ABC latched onto that story, but why the sudden interest across the media?

We put the question to a reporter who's been covering the stories of wounded Iraq war vets, probably longer than anybody else.

That's Mark Benjamin of the online magazine Salon.

He suggests that editors may be more willing to go after these stories, partly because the public is more receptive to bleak news about the war.

To give you an example, I wrote my first story about

this issue in the fall of 2003. It was about Fort Stewart, Georgia, and the headline was something

like sick and injured soldiers held in squalor, and they couldn't get doctors' appointments,

...