More on Al Qaqaa

Here's William Safire on Larry King last night:

Let me ... see if I can move the story of this story al Qa Qaa forward a little bit.

We now know from CBS's admission that CBS planned to broadcast this story, which we call in journalism, a keeper, one that's kept for its greatest impact. They planned to broadcast it next Sunday night, 36 hours before the polls opened. That is known as a roar back. That's a last-minute, unanswerable story, and it would have been all over the papers Tuesday morning as people went to the polls. Now, I think that's scandalous.

What happened, because "The New York Times" was working with CBS on the story, and I don't work on the news side of the "Times" at all, so I'm speculating, the "Times," either -- probably from a combination of ethical and competitive standards decided, no, we're not going to hold this story. We're going to go with it now. And they went with it on Monday. And -- but just think for a minute, if the plan had gone ahead, we wouldn't have had this debate this week where it's possible we could shoot some holes in this story or focus on the attack on the integrity of the examination by the troops that were there.

And instead, we would have had a last-minute manipulation of the election.

That's interesting. Maybe I shouldn't be too hard on the Times. While they did run with a bogus story (or at least one that they couldn't verify), they did make the decision not to hold it until right before the election. Somebody over there still has a shred of integrity.