The New York Times' Fifth Column

I linked last week to the story about the New York Times accepting an ad at a steeply discounted rate from the far-left anti-war group MoveOn Dot Org attacking the integrity of General David Petraeus. Not only was the ad a huge miscalculation for the left, since it primarily served to embarrass congressional Democrats, but it is turning out to be a huge miscalculation for the New York Times.

It is not just that the Times looks partisan; everybody already knows that the paper leans decidedly to the left. It is the fact that the Times lied about the ad, claiming that they did not really offer MoveOn a discount. Now the Times's own "public editor," a sort of internal watchdog who analyzes the paper's errors, has admitted that the ad violated the newspaper's standards and that it was improperly offered at a discount.

Evoking the left's favorite Watergate slogans, some conservative bloggers have begun to ask what the publisher of the Times knew and when he knew it, and to point out that the cover-up is worse than the crime.

"Betraying Its Own Best Interests," Clark Hoyt, New York Times, September 23 Fpr nearly two weeks, The New York Times has been defending a political advertisement that critics say was an unfair shot at the American commander in Iraq.

But I think the ad violated The Times's own written standards, and the paper now says that the advertiser got a price break it was not entitled to….

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, which might amount to an illegal contribution to a political action committee. In more than 4,000 e-mail messages, people around the country raged at The Times with words like "despicable," "disgrace" and "treason."…

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….

[T]he 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."