This media's cheerleading began to change in late October, just as opinion polls signaled the public's growing uneasiness with the handling of the domestic, or anthrax, portion of the crisis. (The public's discomfort did not extend at that time to the Bush administration's management of the foreign crisis or to the actions it was taking abroad.) The first media voices raised in criticism focused on Washington's crisis-management skills. For example, John Schwartz wrote in the October 28 New York Times that critics of the administration blamed the lackluster response on 

	·	a lack of communication between agencies;
	·	a lack of preparedness on the part of Tommy G. Thompson, secretary of health and human services (a former governor of Wisconsin, Thompson had little background in medicine or science);
	·	the tendency of officials to respond to the biological threat in the same way they would respond to a political problem.

Schwartz's criticism was quite compelling. He basically told his readers that the administration did not have the crisis in its grasp. With time, the media reported more of this sort of story. I think that the reappearance of critical voices in the mass media was a good sign. Even the most devastating acts of terrorism that the world had ever seen had not managed to silence the American watchdog press for long.