The Times Fesses Up about the Moveon Ad

All the denials, all the defensive explanations, all the lies told by spokesmen for the New York Times have all been shown to be an effort to hide the truth from the American people.

The Times Public Editor (formerly known as "Ombudsman") has revealed that virtually every charge made by defenders of General Petraeus was true:

Did MoveOn.org get favored treatment from The Times? And was the ad outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse? The answer to the first question is that MoveOn.org paid what is known in the newspaper industry as a standby rate of $64,575 that it should not have received under Times policies. The group should have paid $142,083. The Times had maintained for a week that the standby rate was appropriate, but a company spokeswoman told me late Thursday afternoon that an advertising sales representative made a mistake.

The answer to the second question is that the ad appears to fly in the face of an internal advertising acceptability manual that says, “We do not accept opinion advertisements that are attacks of a personal nature.” Steph Jespersen, the executive who approved the ad, said that, while it was “rough,” he regarded it as a comment on a public official’s management of his office and therefore acceptable speech for The Times to print.

And that's it in a nutshell. The Times gave Moveon a break in the ad price, they violated their own editorial standards, and then tried to cover up their transgressions by lying. Their excuse?

Sulzberger, who said he wasn’t aware of MoveOn.org’s latest ad until it appeared in the paper, said: “If we’re going to err, it’s better to err on the side of more political dialogue. ... Perhaps we did err in this case. If we did, we erred with the intent of giving greater voice to people.”

Sure, Mr. Sulzberger. As long s that "voice" is advancing your political agenda, you can make all the "errors" you deem fit.

The Times should suffer ignominy for this outrage but it won't. The left will forget everything they've said in defense of the Times for the last two weeks while the rest of the media will play up their "honest mistakes."

And Sulzberger will continue to push his ideological agenda at the expense of honesty and any accepted standards of journalism.

Hat Tip: Ed Lasky