Under the provocative headline “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” the ad, purchased by the liberal activist group MoveOn.org, charged that the highly decorated Petraeus was “constantly at war with the facts” in giving upbeat assessments of progress and refusing to acknowledge that Iraq is “mired in an unwinnable religious civil war.”Me, I wrote this guy twice; the combined email:
“Today, before Congress and before the American people, General Petraeus is likely to become General Betray Us,” MoveOn.org declared.
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.”
President George W. Bush called the ad “disgusting.” The Senate, controlled by Democrats, voted overwhelmingly to condemn the ad.
Vice President Dick Cheney said the charges in the ad, “provided at subsidized rates in The New York Times” were “an outrage.” Thomas Davis III, a Republican congressman from Virginia, demanded a House investigation. The American Conservative Union filed a formal complaint with the Federal Election Commission against MoveOn.org and The New York Times Company. FreedomsWatch.org, a group recently formed to support the war, asked me to investigate because it said it wasn’t offered the same terms for a response ad that MoveOn.org got.
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.
By the end of last week the ad appeared to have backfired on both MoveOn.org and fellow opponents of the war in Iraq — and on The Times. It gave the Bush administration and its allies an opportunity to change the subject from questions about an unpopular war to defense of a respected general with nine rows of ribbons on his chest, including a Bronze Star with a V for valor. And it gave fresh ammunition to a cottage industry that loves to bash The Times as a bastion of the “liberal media.”
How did this happen?
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.”
Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The Times and chairman of its parent company, declined to name the salesperson or to say whether disciplinary action would be taken.
Jespersen, director of advertising acceptability, reviewed the ad and approved it. He said the question mark after the headline figured in his decision.
***
For me, two values collided here: the right of free speech — even if it’s abusive speech — and a strong personal revulsion toward the name-calling and personal attacks that now pass for political dialogue, obscuring rather than illuminating important policy issues. For The Times, there is another value: the protection of its brand as a newspaper that sets a high standard for civility. Were I in Jespersen’s shoes, I’d have demanded changes to eliminate “Betray Us,” a particularly low blow when aimed at a soldier.
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.
Bradley A. Blakeman, former deputy assistant to President Bush for appointments and scheduling and the head of FreedomsWatch.org, said his group wanted to run its own reply ad last Monday and was quoted the $64,575 rate on a standby basis. The ad wasn’t placed, he said, because the newspaper wouldn’t guarantee him the day or a position in the first section. Sulzberger said all advocacy ads normally run in the first section.
Mathis said that since the controversy began, the newspaper’s advertising staff has been told it must adhere consistently to its pricing policies.
How does an opinion ad impact the Times' rep unless you all magnify a bogus criticism from a partisan group -- I should say, people with partisan axes to grind, as it were? You must have pretty significant contempt for Times' readers -- as opposed to these political whackos with agendas -- that we cannot separate a paid ad from anything editorial.No, I do not expect any substantive response....
Is Giuliani going to be "upcharged" like MoveOn? Or is the fact that his ad was a radical rightwing response a basis for an entitlement to a discount?
And if MoveOn's ad was so awful (a matter of opinion, of course), how doe you rank the Times' running all those, well, journalistically-challenged articles of Judy Millers leading up to the Iraqi disaster/tragedy/invasion/war? I'd think that's far worse and, whoa, did a lot more damage to the Times' rep than a paid ad. But I must be wrong about that because you have the semi-monthly column, I don't.
Re: The fetuses: The Times regularly runs ads showing disfigured babies and young children. Might I suggest that the frequency and that as small ads it makes it difficult to read that page in the paper in a way that a full page ad that can easily and quickly be turned does not>
As for a "personal" attack on Petraeus: You seem to think that as a decorated soldier, anything ad hominen is wrong. In his current position, he is now essentially a politician less than a military commander. If he wants to be an Administration mouthpiece, which he now is to a great extent, it's only fair he gets treated like a pol. In addition, if editorial is like you, happy to give him a pass even if not warranted journalistically, then an ad hominen attack in the very occasional ad is fully warranted.
And here's a more... well, lucid and informed opinion:
MoveOn.org’s “General Betray Us” ad may have gotten more attention than it deserved, but it also has underscored several important points: the foolishness of MoveOn’s ad-buying strategy, the cringing hypocrisy of the mainstream U.S. news media when attacked by the Right, and the pressing need to build independent news outlets.
Ironically, MoveOn has long resisted using its fund-raising capability on the Internet to support an independent news infrastructure, favoring instead the idea of making expensive ad buys in the New York Times and other Big Media outlets.
So, MoveOn initially spent $64,575 for its Sept. 10 full-page ad questioning Gen. David Petraeus’s honesty. Then, because of MoveOn’s juvenile pun played on Petraeus’s name, the Bush administration and its right-wing allies exploited the ad to divert the debate on the Iraq War into an argument over the propriety of the ad's language.
The right-wing media – making full use of its extraordinary reach through newspapers, TV, talk radio and the Internet – also spread the word that the Times showed its "liberal bias" by giving MoveOn a favorable “discount” ad rate. More than 4,000 furious e-mails poured in to the Times.
Not only were congressional Democrats soon in full retreat but so were Times’ editors. On Sept. 23, the Times’ public editor, Clark Hoyt, concluded that the Times had violated its policies both on ad rates and on rejecting ads that are “outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse.”
In an article critical of the Times' actions, entitled “Betraying Its Own Best Interests,” Hoyt wrote, “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 also reported that the Times should have charged MoveOn $142,083 for a full-page ad when a client is guaranteed that an ad will run on a specific day. (The discount rate should apply if the ad were treated as a stand-by that could be bumped.)
As it turned out, the Times also had agreed to run an ad from Republican presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani on Sept. 14, attacking both the MoveOn ad and Democratic contender Hillary Clinton. Giuliani was given the $64,575 discount rate, although that also would appear to have violated the Times’ ad-rate policies.
For its part, MoveOn now has volunteered to pay the Times the full ad rate, sending a check for an additional $77,000, a sum that presumably comes from donations that anti-war activists made to MoveOn, partly in defense of its Petraeus ad.
In other words, MoveOn has taken $142,083 from American donors and given it to the New York Times for the privilege of running an ad that served to undermine the goal of reining in President Bush’s Iraq War. Talk about getting a reverse bang for your buck.
(By contrast, for many independent media outlets, the cost of that one ad would cover all their expenses for a year or more. In 2006, the entire budget of our Web site, Consortiumnews.com, was $109,000.)
Double Standard
Another negative lesson that the Times appears to have learned is that it must apply a double standard when accepting ads.
If you are a Bush favorite, such as Gen. Petraeus, public editor Hoyt thinks you should be granted immunity from harsh criticism. However, if you’re a Bush enemy, the Times is still happy to run ads condemning you in the nastiest possible terms.
Just one day after Hoyt objected to “attacks of a personal nature,” the Time ran a full-page ad from a pro-Bush advocacy group, Freedomswatch.org, with the headline “Ahmandinejad Is a Terrorist.” The ad also denounced Columbia University for allowing the Iranian president to give a speech.
“Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens our nation and the freedoms we value,” the ad reads. “He has supported attacks on our soldiers and our allies. He should be treated as the terrorist that he is.” [NYT, Sept. 24, 2007]
Presumably, in green-lighting this ad, the Times editors feared a hostile right-wing reaction if they had said no or demanded softer language.
While few Americans would defend Ahmadinejad or even note that many of these harsh statements have not been proven, it is this double standard – one set of rules for Bush’s enemies and another for Bush’s friends – that guided the U.S. march to war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2002-03.
Yet, the only real hope against a repeat stampede – this time into an attack on Iran – is a principled stand by the American news media for a single standard of fairness. But that isn’t going to happen as long as editors and ad executives see their careers threatened when they allow something like the MoveOn ad.
Mainstream journalists and news executive know they will get pounded if they act in a way offensive to the Right, but they realize that the Left in America lacks anything close to a comparable ability to inflict pain.
To change that dynamic would require America’s Left to build a media infrastructure that can begin to match up with what the Right has created over the past three decades.
MoveOn’s Mistake
MoveOn has been one of the “progressive” organizations that has rejected the need for building a media infrastructure that can restore some balance to the U.S. political process.
In spring 2005, near the start of Bush’s second term, media activist Carolyn Kay presented a comprehensive media reform strategy to MoveOn founder Wes Boyd.
Boyd responded with an e-mail on April 24, 2005, saying, “Just to be direct and frank, we have no immediate plans to pursue funding for media … Our efforts are focused on a few big fights right now, because this is the key legislative season. Later in the year and next year I expect there will [be] more time to look further afield.”
Kay e-mailed Boyd back, saying, “For five years people have been telling me that in just a couple of months, we’ll start addressing the long-term problems. But the day never comes. … Today it’s Social Security and the filibuster. Tomorrow it will be something else. And in a couple of months it will be something else again. There’s never a right time to address the media issue. That’s why the right time is now.”
Boyd’s April 24 e-mail – calling the idea of addressing the nation’s media crisis as wandering “afield” – is typical of the views held by many leaders in the “progressive establishment.” There is no sense of urgency about media. [For more details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The Left’s Media Miscalculation.”]
Instead, MoveOn continues to rely on ad buys in mainstream news outlets to get out its message, a strategy that now has proved both expensive and counter-productive.
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