The New York Times ran a huge (huge!) A1 investigative piece on John McCain and his weird gambling obsession and ties to the Indian Casino industry and Vegas and lobbyists and ten thousand other things yesterday. It was well-reported, historical in focus, and fair. It ran on the front page of the Sunday edition, which reaches almost half a million more readers than the weekday edition. But, you know, no one is talking about it. It didn't really stick! Did anyone read the whole thing? Were there bombshells? Who knows! What happened? The Times sabotaged itself, either intentionally or through ineptitude. Allow us to explain. Times editor Bill Keller complains a lot these days about how no one pays enough attention to the Times and their big stories. He blames the internet and a million competing voices for distracting people from the Important Work of Times journalists. He's sorta right! Gone are the days when the Times set the agenda for the national press. Though the slow death of newspapers across the nation has been beneficial to the Times in one important way: they're the only national paper, effectively. A Times investigation reaches more of the country than a Washington Post investigation. So one would expect a story of this size and seeming heft would make a big splash. But it didn't! Drudge didn't play it up—though as we move closer to the election, he regresses even more to his natural Republican hackdom, so they shouldn't have expected a push from him. And the liberals have no one coherent answer to Drudge, just a million sites trying desperately to push their own often competing agendas. Kos, Talking Points Memo, and the Huffington Post all share an elitist coastal liberal bias and huge audiences, but very different methods of achieving their goals and working the media refs. But on the other hand... the way the Times dropped the story seems self-defeating. Front page of the Sunday edition, sure. But it went online Saturday night. So by the time Monday morning rolls around, it seems ancient, even though no one actually talked about it over the weekend. Furthermore, it came right after a presidential debate, right before a hugely anticipated vice presidential debate, and right in the midst of a gigantic economic crisis and a desperate attempt by Congress to prevent another Great Depression. The Times should've had the story go live online on Thursday night (in time for it to be an issue in the debates!), they should've leaked salient details to Drudge beforehand, or they should've waited until the bailout negotiations collapsed or succeeded. The fact that they did none of those things indicates to us that they didn't actually want this story to blow up. Maybe there's nothing actually to it (though the bit where McCain helped take down Jack Abramoff because he was the competition to McCain's preferred lobbyists seems a bit juicy, right?) or maybe they've actually been cowed by the McCain campaigns attacks on their credibility, or maybe they just don't know what the hell they're doing. Now, for your edification, some interesting bits from the 100-page Times piece on John McCain's gambling addiction:

John McCain used the Abramoff investigation to personally attack Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed, two conservative activists who helped destroy McCain's 2000 campaign. "Inside the investigation, the sense of schadenfreude was palpable, according to several people close to the senator."

McCain helped invent the Indian Casino industry with a 1988 law he drafted with Mo Udall. In 2005 or so, after Abramoff and before his current run for the presidency, McCain declared Indian gambling "out of control" and began declaring the need to restrain the industry.

McCain does lots of favors for lobbyists, all the time, like every other Senator.

"In Connecticut that year, when a tribe was looking to open the state’s third casino, staff members on the Indian Affairs Committee provided guidance to lobbyists representing those fighting the casino, e-mail messages and interviews show. The proposed casino, which would have cut into the Pequots’ market share, was opposed by Mr. McCain’s colleagues in Connecticut."

Update: Two more points we missed! The McCain camp began attacking the Times for no real reason last week. They, uh, probably saw this story coming. Did their preemptive attacks cause the paper to bury this piece or cause people to assume the story was biased and discount it? Well, the McCain campaign's media strategy has been desperate and stupid for a month now, so we don't think they have enough muscle to bury this themselves. But point two, from a reader:

or maybe it was just a lousy lede. Five paragraphs in and facing the decision on whether to continue on to page A4 (or whatever page it was continued on) all the reader knew was that John McCain liked to gamble and did exactly that back in 2001. Not exactly compelling stuff and certainly not compelling enough to follow the story into the bowels of section A1.

Yes. The "McCain gambling at 3 a.m." story was a great atmospheric lede, but it had nothing to do with the news in the story. A wiser editing decision might've been to play up the Abramoff stuff, way more, up top, in easy-to-understand language. "John McCain's lead role in the Abramoff investigations may have been driven by personal animus and the influence of other lobbyists, documents and emails show." You know, like that, but better.