NPR did a report on the Homeland Security bill which takes away money from NY & DC and gives it to, for example, Charlotte.
They dropped a tiny truth-bomb early in the story when they said that the super-secret "classified" formula (the invisible hand of fairness? right! i'm sure there wasn't a single lobbyist involved in creating that formula!) worked against NY because the proposal NY submitted spent too much money on (egads) paying people wages to do jobs (which they characterized as a plan that wasn't "effective.") The formula favored (unsurprisingly) Charlotte because their proposal included a lot of spending on computers, software, monitors etc. (ie, things big corporations sell...produced with Chinese labor, probably).
That truth-bomb was buried in the story. You really had to pay close attention to feel its blast. Most of the story was spent talking to the government officials in Charlotte so they could explain their side of the story -- which humanized them tremendously.
If anyone was interviewed telling NY and DC's side of the story, I missed it. And they certainly didn't talk about how absurd it was to suggest that a "formula" isn't capable of satisfying lobbyists's desires, and they didn't explain how there are serious policy implications (which define the differences between democrats and republicans) in favoring labor vs corporations, and they definitely didn't talk about whether a video camera is more capable of protecting people than a detective, or a programmer, or any trained professional.
Here's the link:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5490220(BTW, NPR also gave some air time this morning to the Harvard "don't worry too much about real estate prices" study, which DU'ers yesterday noted was funded by a real estate group with an interest in seeing home prices (and therefore consumer debt) stay high --
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5490226).