Beginning on October 25, 2004, with just over a week left 
    until Election Day, the Times ran 16 articles and opinion 
    pieces about looting at the al Qaqaa munitions facility in 
    Iraq. Some of the stories were implicitly critical of the 
    Bush administration, others were directly so. The Times 
    dismissed suggestions that the attention on the issue was 
    politically motivated. But, as National Review's Byron York
    asked four months later: "Why was the Al Qaqaa story so 
    important in the eight days leading up to the election that
    it merited two stories per day, and so unimportant after 
    the election that it has not merited any stories at all?" 

    Those memories could not have been far from the mind of 
    Scott Stanzel, a White House spokesman, when he rather 
    surprisingly offered a comment on the current Times 
    controversy: "I think a lot of people here in this building
    with experience in a couple campaigns have grown accustomed
    to the fact that during the course of the campaign, 
    seemingly on maybe a monthly basis leading up to the 
    convention, maybe weekly basis after that, the New York 
    Times does try to drop a bombshell on the Republican 
    nominee...Sometimes they make incredible leaps to try to 
    drop those bombshells."