Paper: MoveOn Cut Was ‘Mistake’
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The New York Times’ ombudsman says the newspaper violated its standards when it gave the liberal activist group MoveOn.org a $77,508 price break on a full-page advertisement targeting General David Petraeus.
The organization paid $64,575, instead of the standard $142,083 for the ad questioning the war in Iraq, the newspaper’s public editor, Clark Hoyt, wrote in a column published yesterday.
A Times spokeswoman, Catherine Mathis, told Mr. Hoyt that an advertising sales representative shouldn’t have agreed to the discounted price. The ad seemed to disregard internal advertising standards that ban ads involving attacks of a personal nature, Mr. Hoyt wrote.
“We made a mistake,” she told Mr. Hoyt.
A message left with Ms. Mathis was not immediately returned today. An e-mail message seeking comment from MoveOn.org was not immediately returned.
The ad was printed in the Times’ September 10 editions, the day that General Petraeus appeared before Congress to warn against a rapid withdrawal of military forces in Iraq. The ad’s headline — “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” — questioned his honesty and said he was “constantly at war with the facts” in giving positive assessments of the war.
“The ad infuriated conservatives, dismayed many Democrats and ignited charges that the liberal Times aided its friends at MoveOn.org with a steep discount in the price paid to publish its message,” Mr. Hoyt wrote.
Mr. Hoyt said he was asked to investigate the ad rate by FreedomsWatch.org, which advocates a strong national defense and a powerful fight against terrorism, because it said it wasn’t offered a similar rate.
An executive director of MoveOn.org, Eli Pariser, told Mr. Hoyt his group had called three days before the ad ran and asked to place it, and was told the ad would cost $65,000.
“We paid this rate before, so we recognized it,” Mr. Pariser told the Times.
In a statement yesterday, the president of Freedom’s Watch, Bradley Blakeman, praised Mr. Hoyt for criticizing the paper’s ad policy, and said it had paid a similar, reduced rate for an ad blasting President Ahmadinejad’s appearance today at Columbia University.
That full-page ad, headlined “Ahmadinejad is a terrorist,” appeared in today’s editions of the paper. Unlike Moveon.org, Mr. Blakeman said, the group did not receive a guarantee that it would run on the date it had sought.
