NY Times Admits What Everybody Already Knows

The public editor of the NY Times admits what was clear from the beginning:

The New York Times acknowledged Sunday that a controversial advertisement attacking Gen. David Petraeus, the American commander in Iraq, was sold to a liberal activist group at a discount rate the organization was not entitled to receive, and that the paper violated its own advertising policies when it published the ad.

In a column published Sunday entitled, "Betraying Its Own Best Interests," Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt wrote that after reviewing the Times' policies regarding the sale and content of advertisements and conducting his own investigation of the matter, "I think the ad violated the Times' own written standards, and the paper now says that the advertiser got a price break it was not entitled to."

According to the column, MoveOn.org purchased the ad at a "standby" rate of $64,575 when it should have been charged $142,083. To receive standby rates, advertisers cannot be guaranteed a date when their ads will run, but the sales representative who sold the ad to MoveOn.org told the organization that the ad would run on Monday, Sept. 10—the day that Petraeus was to appear before Congress. ...

Hoyt said the content of the ad—a full-page advertisement that questioned Petraeus' truthfulness with the headline "Gen. Petraeus or Gen. Betray Us?" violated Times advertising policy.

"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,'" Hoyt wrote. He wrote that the Times director of advertising acceptability, Steph Jespersen, told him that while he did think the language of the Petraeus ad 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."

This ad has backfired on everybody that promoted it, from MoveOn to the Times to the Democrats who refused to denounce it. The big winner from this whole debate was probably Rudy Giuliani who was able to place an ad of his own, at the same favorable rate, that both excoriated MoveOn and Hillary Clinton. A well timed 2-for-1.

I'll bet the NY Times walks a little more carefully when it comes to advocate advertising in the future.