BY JAMES TARANTO
Monday, September 24, 2007 4:18 p.m. EDT
We Get Results
On Sept. 13, we raised the possibility that the New York Times had violated campaign finance regulations by giving MoveOn.org a discount on its ad attacking Gen. David Petraeus in classic McCarthyite style. The Times initially denied there was any discount, but now, through the medium of "public editor" Clark Hoyt, it has admitted it. From Hoyt's column yesterday:
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. . . .
Eli Pariser, the executive director of MoveOn.org, told me that his group called The Times on the Friday before Petraeus's appearance on Capitol Hill and asked for a rush ad in Monday's paper. He said The Times called back and "told us there was room Monday, and it would cost $65,000." Pariser said there was no discussion about a standby rate. "We paid this rate before, so we recognized it," he said. Advertisers who get standby rates aren't guaranteed what day their ad will appear, only that it will be in the paper within seven days.
Catherine Mathis, vice president of corporate communications for The Times, said, "We made a mistake." She said the advertising representative failed to make it clear that for that rate The Times could not guarantee the Monday placement but left MoveOn.org with the understanding that the ad would run then. She added, "That was contrary to our policies."
MoveOn.org followed up yesterday with a press release:
Now that the Times has revealed this mistake for the first time, and while we believe that the $142,083 figure is above the market rate paid by most organizations, out of an abundance of caution we have decided to pay that rate for this ad. We will therefore wire the $77,083 difference to the Times tomorrow (Monday, September 24, 2007). . . .
The Public Editor's column makes crystal clear that at no time did MoveOn have any reason to believe that it was receiving from the Times anything other than the normal and usual charge for the advertisement. . . . Of course, MoveOn believed that it was engaged in an arms length negotiation regarding advertising rates with the Times and assumed that it was being quoted advertising prices consistent with the Times' usual and normal charge.
Early in his column, Hoyt notes that the ad "ignited charges" that the "steep discount . . . might amount to an illegal contribution to a political action committee." The Times's position on these charges is unclear; Hoyt does not report any comment from Times executives on this question, nor any indication that he asked them about it.
MoveOn.org, on the other hand, flatly denies knowingly receiving an illegal contribution, a denial that is consistent with the Times's version of events.
Hoyt notes that "in the fallout from the ad, Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor and a Republican presidential candidate, demanded space in the following Friday's Times to answer MoveOn.org. He got it--and at the same $64,575 rate that MoveOn.org paid."
MoveOn.org in turn declares: "We call on Mayor Giuliani, who received exactly the same ad deal for the same price, to pay the corrected fee also."
In fact, the Hoyt column does not say whether Giuliani received the same deal as MoveOn.org. True, he demanded the ad run Friday, it did, and he got the standby rate--but no one has claimed that the Times guaranteed this placement. In fact, in an article that appeared in the Times-owned Boston Globe, Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis seemed to claim the contrary: "The Giuliani campaign asked for the same rate as MoveOn, and we said you'd have to go standby." (Oddly, this quote did not appear in the Times version of the story.)
As we noted Thursday, the American Conservative Union has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging an illegal donation. It wouldn't surprise us if some liberal group decided to do the same over the Giuliani ad.
The Hoyt column contains a quote from Times publisher Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr. that is galling when taken in context:
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."
Yet the laws restricting campaign speech have been championed by the editorialists, and arguably even the reporters, of the New York Times. It would be poetic justice (reminiscent of the Valerie Plame kerfuffle) if the Times got in legal trouble as a result of the success of its own crusade against free speech. But it would be more satisfying if it acknowledged forthrightly that this crusade was a mistake.
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