'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?