With any luck, this will succeed in destroying the tactic of the October surprise. Too bad America had to get so cynical in order to do it.
BTW, back in 1998 we were on the verge of getting a Republican majority on our county commission. Several weeks before the election, a lawyer friend reported that he'd observed the famously leftist editor of the local paper in the document vault of the courthouse, researching a bankruptcy the then-only Republican commissioner had been involved in 15 or 20 years before (a company he partly owned went belly-up for reasons which were no fault of his).
I called the editor and asked him, in several different ways, whether he was considering running such a story (answer: no) and if he was, would he allow my guy time to respond (not running it, but he'd be sure to do so if he ever did anything like that: it was "standard journalistic practice").
Sure enough, in the last edition of the newspaper before the election - this is a weekly - there's the attack piece, front page, above-the-fold, complete with the insinuation that our commissioner had been solely responsible for the bankruptcy. We got a response out in a daily paper which was published in the next county.
Nevertheless, we got our majority by retaining this commissioner and electing one other Republican, and the best part was, of the 3 Dems running (3-seat Commission) the only one elected was the older very conservative Dem who'd voted against a tax increase before either of the 'pubbies got on.
Some time after this, I told the editor that his "standard journalistic practice" hadn't worked. He just shrugged and said "well, in J-school they told us it'd always work".