Anytime a post begins, “Conservative blogs are all excited about…” you know you might as well reach for the Maalox.
On Monday, as everyone now knows, MoveOn.org took out a full-page ad in the NYT with a provocative headline: “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” According to one report, the group paid about $65,000 to run the advertisement.
Yesterday, the right decided that the ad rate was too low, and that the New York Times intentionally lowered its rate because the newspaper hates America. Or something. Figuring the right out is tricky sometimes.
John Cole had a great item in which he documented the spread of the charge: one conservative asserted that the NYT gave MoveOn a sweetheart deal on the ad, another linked to the first, and then a third linked to both as proof that the story must be true. Apparently, if three far-right blogs make the same charge in the same day, it should be considered fact.
Today, the rarely-reliable, conservative New York Post got in on the fun, insisting that the NYT gave MoveOn a $116,000 discount.
The New York Times dramatically slashed its normal rates for a full-page advertisement for MoveOn.org’s ad questioning the integrity of Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. […]
Citing the shared liberal bent of the group and the Times, one Republican aide on Capitol Hill speculated that it was the “family discount.”
“I’m surprised they had to pay anything at all for the ad,” the GOP staffer said. “They could have just asked the editorial page to run it and it wouldn’t have cost them a cent.”
Ah, conservative wit. Is there anything more humorous?
Naturally, the right has embraced the New York Post article with great enthusiasm. There are, however, a couple of problems with the charge.
For example, there’s still no proof that Times cut MoveOn a sweetheart deal. Jake Tapper called the NYT (gasp!) to see what’s what.
New York Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis tells me that it’s Times policy to not “disclose the rate that any one advertiser pays for an ad. The rate that is charged for an ad will depend on a variety of factors including how frequently the advertiser advertises with us, the day of the week, is it color, is it black and white, what section it appears, all of those kinds of things.”
Mathis says the newspaper tries “to keep our advertising columns as open as possible” and “there are many instances when we’ve published opinion advertisements that run counter to the stance that we take on our own editorial pages.” As an example of how the Times is open to all points of view in advertisers, Mathis points out that on September 11, 2007, “we published a full-page advertisement from Freedom’sWatch.org, an organization whose view is opposite of MoveOn.org.”
Freedom’s Watch spokesman Matt David, however tells me the group was charged “significantly more” than MoveOn.org for its ad. The organization says it plans to run a response to the MoveOn.org NYT ad in the Times, “and we plan to demand the same ad rate they paid,” David says.
What’s “significantly more”? Freedom’s Watch apparently didn’t want to say. Perhaps it’s because it’s less than the standard rate, and it would look like the NYT offered the conservatives a sweetheart deal?
John Cole summarized the situation nicely today.
There still is ZERO reporting and ZERO evidence that the NY Times did anything out of the ordinary, but the treason of the NY Times is now established “fact” on the right. And no one, and I repeat, NO ONE, will challenge them. And this is how it goes, day in, day out, as they fling things against the wall and hope they stick to their pre-existing opinions, and reify them for their own political purposes.
And so it goes.
Update: And now Rudy Giuliani wants to exploit join his uninformed conservative brothers in fighting against injustice.
At a campaign appearance today, he called on the Times to run an ad from him, at the same discounted rate, an ad praising Petraeus.
“We’re going to call upon the New York Times to give us the same rate, heavily discounted rate that they gave MoveOn.org for that abominable ad that was very very coincidentally published on the day that Gen Petraeus testified,” Rudy said.
C’mon, Rudy. We expect nonsense from the right-wing blogs, but you’re running for president. Show a little class.