This is all in marked contrast to 2012, when the big story was what the media didn’t report in October. Recall that the day after the deadly assault on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, President Obama gave an interview to 60 Minutes where he said it was “too early to tell” whether what had occurred was a terror attack or the result of spontaneous protests over a YouTube video. The remark was cut out of the interview when it aired. To promote the politically helpful fiction that it wasn’t a terror attack, Hillary Clinton told some families of those killed in Benghazi that the maker of the offending YouTube video would be arrested—and he was soon thereafter jailed (on grounds other than the political convenience of Hillary Clinton, as it happened, but it certainly looked like a political hit job).

A few weeks after the 60 Minutes interview, ascertaining when Obama admitted Benghazi was a terror attack became a flashpoint at the second presidential debate. Mitt Romney had faulted the president’s reluctance to admit the obvious. CNN moderator Candy Crowley ­famously interrupted Romney to ­erroneously “correct” his version of events. CBS News and 60 Minutes could have cleared this up by releasing the full interview with Obama, and zeroing in on his “too early to tell” line. But this would have ­redounded to Romney’s credit and not been very helpful to the Obama campaign, so they didn’t report it. Just days before the election, CBS quietly released the transcript of the Obama interview to provide a fig leaf of an argument that they hadn’t hidden it from voters. By that time, the controversy had largely petered out.