Max Holland probably wrote the blog post of the week on Wednesday. He revealed that the New York Times' Philip Shenon's forthcoming book had a major scoop: Karl Rove had a line in to the Sept. 11 Commission, and the report's findings may have been dumbed down to favor Republican political tastes.

While some questions have been raised about the accuracy of Shenon's report, there's another matter that we need to address: why didn't Shenon's story run in the New York Times itself? Why was it saved for his book instead of run above the fold in America's paper of record?

The Commission's report came out in the Summer of 2004, and you'd have to think that some of this story about executive director Philip Zelikow's dilution of the report would have been in Shenon's hands sooner. It's hard to imagine that he wouldn't tell his Times' editors about this. White House interference in such an esteemed commission, trying to make sense of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath as it did, would be a story of the year in whatever year it emerged. So why 2008 instead of 2004 or 2005 or 2006? Did it really take so long for any of the disenchanted commission staff to be willing to come forward?

In fact, what's easier to imagine is that Shenon would have gone to his editors, but they would have held up the story for reasons that no one except the Times' editorial staff can understand.

This has happened before. The New York Observer revealed the possibility that James Risen's Pulitzer-winning stories on the US government's illegal wiretapping of US citizens via the NSA's Terrorist Surveillance Program only got into print because Risen planned to feature the news in his book, State of War:

Neither Mr. Risen nor Ms. Abramson has responded to questions about whether Mr. Risen’s material might have been kept from the paper. And surely there are plenty of plausible reasons The Times might not have published any individual story. After all, the standard of reporting in a newspaper can often be higher than that for a book.

But according to multiple newsroom sources close to Mr. Risen, the reporter was vocal in his desire to get the wiretapping piece into print, and he informed Times Washington bureau chief Philip Taubman that the material would be appearing in his book. Mr. Risen left the paper on book leave in January 2005 and resumed his campaign to get The Times to publish the wiretapping piece when he returned to the bureau last June. That set off a renewed push by The Times to get the story into print. Mr. Taubman resumed discussions with senior Bush administration officials over the paper’s interest in publishing the scoop, according to sources with knowledge of the events, culminating in the Dec. 6 Oval Office face-off pitting President George W. Bush against Mr. Keller, Mr. Taubman and Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

And Eric Umansky noted in a Columbia Journalism Review article that the Times buried reports by correspondent Carlotta Gall from Afghanistan of harsh interrogations of suspected enemy combatants by US forces that resulted in a murder. These stories almost certainly presaged Abu Ghraib and the secret prisons:

Gall filed a story, on February 5, 2003, about the deaths of Dilawar and another detainee. It sat for a month, finally appearing two weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “I very rarely have to wait long for a story to run,” says Gall. “If it’s an investigation, occasionally as long as a week.”

Gall’s story, it turns out, had been at the center of an editorial fight. Her piece was “the real deal. It referred to a homicide. Detainees had been killed in custody. I mean, you can’t get much clearer than that,” remembers Roger Cohen, then the Times’s foreign editor. “I pitched it, I don’t know, four times at page-one meetings, with increasing urgency and frustration. I laid awake at night over this story. And I don’t fully understand to this day what happened. It was a really scarring thing. My single greatest frustration as foreign editor was my inability to get that story on page one.”

In each case, it appears that the Times feared getting on the wrong side of the Bush White House and its desire to command public discourse. And a Times decision to print tales of White House interference in the proceedings of the supposedly unassailable Sept. 11 Commission would certainly antagonize President Bush and his surrogates. So is that the reason that Shenon had to take a blockbuster story and publish it in a book years after the crime in question occurred?

Maybe I'm wrong - perhaps the story didn't hold up to scrutiny and Shenon could only run it in a book. But that gives little credit to a seasoned, well-respected Washington correspondent who provided go-to coverage of the Sept. 11 Commission and its proceedings.

Or maybe Shenon wanted to keep the story close to his vest and publish a comprehensive book that would give him a big payday. If that's the case, we should be seeing a preview of Shenon's book, set for publication Tuesday, in Sunday's Times.

But if neither of those alternative explanations shakes out, it might be time to add another asterisk to that phrase, All the News That's Fit to Print.