Condé Nast Portfolio
Home > Views > Blogs > Mixed Media > 'Times' and MoveOn: Anatomy of a Bogus Outrage
EMAIL
PRINT
RSS
SHARE
TEXT SIZE:
SHARE
Send a copy to me

Separate multiple email addresses (max 20) with commas.

0/1500

Main
Shuffling for the Sake of Shuffling ...   A Rare Glimpse of Oprah's Ugly Side
Sep 14 2007 10:12AM EDT

'Times' and MoveOn: Anatomy of a Bogus Outrage

Hey, didja hear about how The New York Times gave free ad space to MoveOn.org for an attack on Gen. Petraeus, and then Hillary Clinton endorsed it?

Never mind that it didn't go down anything like that. Thanks to the motivated, coordinated right-wing noise machine and the lazy, reactive mainstream press, that's the storyline out there now, and nothing said at this point will do much to revise the narrative in the public memory. (Just ask Al Gore how much good it does to set the record straight after the fact.)

Watching events unfold over the past two days, I've felt like a man who sits in disbelief as a single, flickering match starts a fire that burns his entire house to ashes. Surely, I thought, this will burn itself out? Surely someone will point out that the Times takes ads from wacky interest groups all the time? Surely that someone will also note that just because the Times publishes an "open rate" of $181,000 for a full-page ad doesn't mean that's its "normal rate," as New York Post columnist Charles Hurt misleadingly calls it? (To pay the open rate for an ad would actually be pretty abnormal.) Surely the reporters at the New York Post and other papers, all of which do their own discounting, wouldn't be so dishonest as to pretend it's anything other than routine to grant price-breaks like the one MoveOn got? And surely, if they were going to make that assertion, they'd at least have to back it up by producing examples of conservative interest groups who've been charged more for a similar ad?

What a wild imagination I have.

In reality, of course, this preposterous non-story has become a major story, and a headache for Hillary Clinton, who, because she said some critical things of her own about Petraeus, is now magically guilty of "defending MoveOn.org."

That last quote, by the way, is from Rudy Giuliani's full-page ad in today's Times. No one's commenting about how much he paid, but as of yesterday he was demanding MoveOn's rate. Does anyone doubt that he got it? And does anything think it'll make any difference to the Times-haters?

See more in

Loading...
Add Your Comment
View
 

Thank you for registering as a Portfolio.com Insider. Your comment has been added.

Create Your Public Profile


Archive

Previous
Jul
2009
Next


Also in Portfolio.com
Most Read
Most Emailed
Recently Commented

Newsletter Sign-Up
Inside Portfolio.com
In This Issue
Subscribe
Newsletter Sign-Up
Inside Portfolio.com
In This Issue
Subscribe