INSTAPUNDIT - WHAT WILLIAM SAFIRE SAID ABOUT THE AL QAQAA STORY last night on the Larry King Show:
"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 is to say, the Times deserves credit for specifically rejecting the tactic that CBS going to use. I love the phrase "a combination of ethical and competitive standards." I wrote about the ethics/competition conundrum here two days ago and said I thought the competition between news outlets "might work better than ethics to protect us from outrageous withholding of stories for the purpose of helping a favored candidate." It's an old First Amendment tradition to see the competition among speakers as a way to produce good speech. For a newspaper, adhering to strong journalistic ethics is a good business move, and I'm grateful for that. It would be quite disturbing to have to rely on pure ethics!
posted at 07:34 AM by Ann Althouse |
