So the New York Times has been caught giving discounted ad space to MoveOn for it's Petraeus spread. The real crime, of course, is that this is illegal; the New York Times should be able to donate ad space to whatever political causes its owners want it to support. But of course, the New York Times has been one of the foremost advocates of exactly this sort of nannying campaign finance law, so I wouldn't feel too badly if they caught some of the legal flak they've been urging on others.
« Quirky Canada has own government, laws | Main | More guns, less boring kissy stuff » The New York Times gives MoveOn the illegal gift of political speech23 Sep 2007 04:56 pm Comments (32)
Someone who can accuse another of being "without any redeeming qualities as a journalist" while exhibiting no redeeming qualities whatsoever as a commenter and troll is beyond irony. Please go away, FMM. The number one thing wrong with this blog is you. Your envy and spite aren't even entertaining, much less instructive. 
The real crime, of course, is that this is illegal; the New York Times should be able to donate ad space to whatever political causes its owners want it to support. Huh? How is this illegal? It's not related to any regulated campaign or election. Yes, there's a Federal Election Commission, but I was unaware there was a Federal Political Speech Commission regulating "issue" advertising. Can't the New York Times do whatever it will w/ its advertising pages, as long as it's not an ad directly calling for or opposing election of a candidate or passage of a ballot initiative (or law, though I'm not sure about that)? "Whan money is speech, only the wealthy will be able to speak."
They should have paid Move On, like Fox does to their propagandists. This whole situation would then be moot.
Above should have read: "...either have pay Move On like Fox or turn over their entire editorial page to them for two decades like the WSJ..."
Endless slanted reporting wasn't enough? And I agree, contributions to political advertising shouldn't be illegal - for anyone, not just for "news" agencies.
M. Bouffant, MoveOn.org is PAC. Under the current campaign finance regime corporations (like the Times) cannot give money to a PAC. Offering MoveOn.org (or any other PAC, or the Giuliani campaign for that matter) a discount on advertising amounts to an in-kind contribution in the amount of the discount.
Megan, I believe that you will find that M. Bouffant is correct - what they was not illegal. It is certainly awkward, and they are probably going to have to file a notice of an inkind political contribution to moveon.org unless they intend to establish that discounted rate as their issue-advocacy rate going forward. (Most media sources have well-established must-follow guidelines on political advertising, usually drafted by lawyers) Personally, I find it rather laughable that some neophyte in the advertising department handled the rate negotiations, given that a very senior Times employee admits to reviewing the ad content before approving acceptance for publication. And no one but a neophyte would be unaware of the minefield-like complexity of political advertising. The truth is probably along the lines of "We didn't think anyone would notice." When you think about it, those odds were pretty good. We only learned about because someone at moveon. org bragged to one and all about how much was spent on the ad. Had they kept their mouth shut, the amount paid would have been buried deep within pages and pages of moveon.org's next mandated federal filing, long after the furor over the content had died.
Moveon.org has now agreed to resolve this problem for the Times by paying the difference between the rate charged "by mistake" and the correct rate. Their PR release is here.
dickslam unlike the WSJ, who confine opinion to the editorial pages, the NYT has turned over their newspages to moveOn/Hamas and since they can't seem to cram enough leftwing tripe in there they are adding steeply discounted ad pages to moveon as well
It's entirely appropriate that the mistaken rate charge has been brought to light, and appropriate that MoveOn.org is paying the higher rate. And that is the end of this story. Meanwhile, Fox News has now granted two one-hour slots to fawning promotion of General Petraeus. Given that the chief political question in the US currently is whether or not to pull out of Iraq, and that Petraeus has made himself a spokesman for the Republican policy of remaining in Iraq, this is effectively free Republican propaganda. I mean, there is an entire broadcast news network being run by Richard Nixon's former director of communications, with no separation made between news content and editorializing. What's Fox's budget? 500 million dollars a year? More? Yet the perfectly obvious fact that Fox's news narrative is closely coordinated with the GOP's talking points of the week is something that can't be addressed concretely; it just floats around out there -- sure, we all know it's basically a PR organ of the GOP, but... Perhaps Megan is right that there is little point having federal regulations on campaign contributions, because they will be so easily eviscerated when you have a political culture which considers lying and evasion - setting up dummy organizations to broadcast the smears you don't dare voice yourself, etc. - to be merely a normal part of the game.
yawn.
brooksfoe: "It's entirely appropriate that the mistaken rate charge has been brought to light, and appropriate that MoveOn.org is paying the higher rate. And that is the end of this story." Becasue they got caught. Nice try, boyo, but people are starting to notice that the NYT's "mistakes" always seem to break in the same direction. It's not the end of the story, much as you wish you could sweep it under the rug.
Please provide some or any reference to law or regulation they supposedly broke. Bonus points if you can demonstrate they did or didn't do same for Giuliani. You may be correct, but I know a bit about this stuff and have no idea what you're referring to.
Mistakes such as Judith Miller, bristlecone?
Okay, bristlecone, off we go into stupid partisan-land: The New York Times's mistakes do always "break in the same direction": they break in the direction of being taken in by President Bush and the GOP and their various lies, distortions, evasions and slanders. When the NYT returns to its core mission of accurate and skeptical reporting, it generally seems to end up supporting Democrats and the left. But that's just the nature of reality. 72% of the US public have gradually realized this over the last few years, though 28% prefer to continue residing in Pretend Ponyland. Now that we've gotten our cannonades off, how about we get back to saying things that are actually interesting.
brooksfoe wrote: Now that we've gotten our cannonades off, how about we get back to saying things that are actually interesting. Hey, that's a good one. Two minutes ago, apparently with cannonades still on, you said this: "Meanwhile, Fox News has now granted two one-hour slots to fawning promotion of General Petraeus. Given that the chief political question in the US currently is whether or not to pull out of Iraq, and that Petraeus has made himself a spokesman for the Republican policy of remaining in Iraq, this is effectively free Republican propaganda." First: I happen to hate all broadcast television news equally, so Fox News registers on my radar somewhere in the same vicinity as the rest -- torpedoes loaded, men at battlestations. I sometimes glean their websites, where I can filter the content at my leisure and not have to spend half of the news hour listenting to The Irrelevantly Salacious Adventures of Britney, Lindsay, Paris, and Friends. So, I don't give a fig newton what Fox News did this week; if you've got the boob tube turned on to a US-market news channel for any purpose beyond local updates, IMO you're already well on your way to being mislead. Second: That set aside, you are not permitted to win arguments by constructing them in the form, "(a) the chief question is this: ____; and (b) one side generally supports ____; so (c) anyone else supporting ____ is a propagandist for that side." I mean, seriously, my credit limit is only at a few thousand bucks, and that means I don't have the purchasing power necessary to buy enough beer for that logic to sound reasonable. Third: If you're basically going to attempt another hatchet job of Petraeus in the vein of that comical MoveOn ad, then I feel obliged to pollute your blather with facts: 1. Petraeus was approved to his present job, without comment, by an overwhelming majority in Congress. 2. Same Congress took strong exception to the MoveOn ad as being inappropriate. 3. Under Petraeus' leadership, the new tactics of the 'Surge' have been much more successful in coordinating information with local Iraqis and quelling major hotspots (e.g. Anbar province) that had been languishing previously. 4. Petraeus is an important public figure, he is likely to be better informed than your magical 72% of US citizenry in regards to the present state of the war, and he is also legitimately outside of campaign finance law when he speaks about the war, unless he attempts electoral coaching. 5. The POTUS is the Commander in Chief of the military, or at least was back when I took civics -- something to do with civilian leadership of the military. OBVIOUSLY Petraeus will be following the adminsitration's lead; he would be the wrong man for the job if he weren't. Anyway...Sorry for interrupting, back to you. Let me help you resume: I believe you were in the middle of saying something funny.
anony-mouse: first of all, there are two broadcast news networks which cannot be accused of being intellectually unserious, or of devoting their time to Britney etc. They are NY1, and PBS. If every news station in the US were run like NY1, we would have the best informed citizenry in the world. Secondly, I am permitted to win arguments by all means necessary. And your argument regarding Fox News's function as a propaganda arm of the GOP is an example of a deliberate refusal to name or accept what is before your eyes. There is a difference between "generally supporting" a position and slavishly parroting the talking points supplied by one political party on all occasions, even when those talking points contradict the ones which were supplied the previous month, or just yesterday. When the opinions expressed on air follow the exact contours of the opinions held by the man who owns the network, and of those held by the man who manages the network - a man who formerly served as communications director for one of the sleaziest and most criminal chief executives of one of the political parties - then the picture becomes quite clear indeed. It is difficult to establish a clear legal distinction between "agreeing with someone" and "serving as someone's hand puppet", but, like pornography, anyone intelligent knows it when she sees it. I don't think you're stupid; I just think that the rules of American political discourse are preventing you from acknowledging the reality of something which you actually know. If you were talking about Russia, for example, you would have no hesitation in saying that all of the major TV networks were controlled by the Kremlin -- even though, just as in the US, there is no way such an allegation can actually be substantiated. In Russia, as with Fox TV, they would say that they simply happen to agree with President Putin's position. Third: General Petraeus has gone far beyond what would have been necessary in cheerleading President Bush's leadership of the war. He has offered overly optimistic scenarios about the war's progress, in articles written for the public news media, at a key point in a political campaign. His optimistic forecasts on that occasion were flatly wrong. He is clearly a more intelligent commander of US forces in Iraq than his predecessors; he understands that Iraq is a counterinsurgency situation, and he understands the implications (minimum necessary use of force, the primacy of political over military aims). It is appropriate for him to argue that, given the situation and the mission, his strategy is the appropriate one to employ. The problem comes when he begins making prognoses about what is likely to happen in Iraq. Any intelligent analyst realizes that the US's chances of success in its current mission are vanishingly small. Petraeus has sharply exaggerated the likelihood of success, and that brings him into the political realm. There are three officers in the US Army who serve as the figureheads of the renaissance of counterinsurgency theory in Iraq: Col. John Nagl, Col. H.R. McMaster, and Gen. Petraeus. Each has written a book or Ph.D. thesis on Vietnam. McMaster's book, "Dereliction of Duty", argued that US military commanders in Vietnam were remiss in their duty to their country and to their troops when they provided overly optimistic scenarios of victory to American political leaders. Gen. Petraeus would do well to reflect on that book, and on whether he is really serving his country by providing exaggeratedly optimistic scenarios for success in Iraq, and by wildly exaggerating the progress his strategy has already achieved.
Secondly, I am permitted to win arguments by all means necessary. Uh, no. You are permitted to think you win arguments that way. I enjoyed seeing the True Scotsman make his appearance in your argument above: The problem comes when [Petraeus] begins making prognoses about what is likely to happen in Iraq. Any intelligent analyst realizes that the US's chances of success in its current mission are vanishingly small. No true scotsman makes optimistic prognoses. Therefore Petraeus isn't a true scotsman. Getting beyond that, let's assume that you are absolutely correct about Fox News. Doesn't that fact, by itself, reveal the sham of campaign finance reform? The law privileges "news" organizations. It does distinguish between news organizations that are wonderfully factual and those that are wildly biased. It does give the government the power to decided who is and is not a news organization and thus who is and is not part of the cartel. It's bad law through and through.
Henry, while I don't think Petraeus is a true scotsman, you're claiming that my argument was directed towards saying he wasn't an intelligent analyst. That's not true. I think, in fact, that he is an intelligent analyst, and for that reason I think he's aware of the ways in which he's stretching the truth and manipulating statistics (on sectarian violence, etc.) in order to sell his strategy to Congress. I think he feels that this is simply an inevitable part of the game of military engagement in a civilian-controlled military, and at one level he may be right. I also suspect that he and Nagl (I haven't seen McMaster speak) feel that the Iraq war has been a very good thing for the Army, because it has forced the Army to finally confront the fact that insurgencies and "small wars" are likely to be primary missions for a long time, and it had better learn how to fight them, instead of continuing to prepare for tank battles against the Soviets in the Fulda Gap. Nagl argued that the Army failed as a "learning organization" in Vietnam, that it failed to recognize when its strategies were not working and to accept criticisms and new ideas, or even old ideas from the British, who had already learned these lessons in Malaya. I think Nagl feels that this time around, in Iraq, the Army is doing a much better job of learning and adapting, as Petraeus's appointment shows, and that this may signal a profound reappraisal which will allow the Army finally to stop fighting the last century's wars and move on to a new world of low-intensity warfare. The problem is, while continuing the counterinsurgency war in Iraq may on this view be good for the Army, it's an entirely different question whether it is good for America. The cost of the US military presence in Iraq is roughly the same as Iraq's entire GDP; it is larger than the entire military budget of any other country in the world; 10 more years of this presence would cost half as much as the worst-case shortfall in the Social Security budget for the next 75 years. And not only is there only a very tenuous prospect that such an occupation will ever result in a stable Iraq not hostile to the US; it's completely uncertain whether or not the current occupation is increasing America's vulnerability to catastrophic terrorism, by exacerbating Arab hostility towards the US. It's not really clear that the occupation of Iraq is even worth a penny to the US's security interests; it may have a negative value. And it costs us over $100 billion and 1000 American lives per year. I think it is important to make it clear that General Petraeus, a very intelligent analyst, has interests which may render him a poor source of testimony as to whether continuing to fight a counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq serves America's interests.
"I'm a little worried about upcoming fights over funding for Iraq, inasmuch as they might distract us from discussing the Moveon ad." - Matt Stoller
Using the "costs" of the war in Iraq to substantiate any sort of argument is misleading at best. Those costs include the salaries of the military personnel involved, and would be paid regardless of the war. Same thing for a large percentage of consumable supplies. It's really hard to get a handle on the true "cost" of any war.
Those costs include the salaries of the military personnel involved, and would be paid regardless of the war. That is false. The costs of the Iraq war are requested as a separate supplemental bill rather than folded in as part of the general Defense budget. Estimates (by Stiglitz and others) of the total cost of the war including non-military expenditures similarly do not include things which would not have been bought if not for the war.
Hey, I can play, too! Clearly, brooksfoe, you are an intelligent person and any intelligent person who is reading the news out of Iraq from sources other than the major media outlets (ie from various people who are over there) would see that the surge really is working. Therefore, you are prevented from speaking the truth by your party affiliation or prejudices or some other source of bias. You must know that what you say isn't true, but you can't admit it, probably even to yourself. Your attacks on Patraeus are clearly part of your effort to convince yourself that what you want to believe is true. How was that? Was that good? EI
Rex -- explain to me how the part time reserves activated to serve in Iran and paid a full time salary would have been paid the same if they had continued to serve as a part time reserviest. If your argument were correct why do we need supplemental appropriations for the war? But on the other hand since much of the cost of the war will have to be paid in the future -- like replacing worn out and destroyed equipment and medical care for wounded vets -- you are completely correct that it is hard to estimate the true cost of the war. It will certainly be higher than the current budgets imply.
It is a pity that The New York Times wasn't free to stand up for their rights and give a big "up yours" to election commision. They were constrained by their previous and unwavering support for the laws they violated.
Looks to me like brooksfoe is just making stuff up. The first Google hit for 'Social Security + shortfall + worst case' is this one. They're pro-SSN, so unlikely to exaggerate the problems, and even they give $3.7 trillion for the expected (not worst-case) shortfall over the next 75 years. If we're spending "over $100 billion per year" in Iraq, the total for 10 years can't be "more than half" of 3.7 trillion unless 2 > 3.7 or "over $100 billion" means "around $200 billion" and doesn't count salaries and other costs that would be spent whether our troops were fighting there or training here.
any intelligent person who is reading the news out of Iraq from sources other than the major media outlets (ie from various people who are over there) would see that the surge really is working. EI, the question in this debate was whether or not it was legitimate to attack the trustworthiness of General Petraeus, him being a general, and smart, and all. If someone is so deluded as to actually believe that the surge is significantly improving Iraq's security climate or the likelihood of a political settlement to the Iraqi civil war, then that's a whole separate debate they need to have. But the ginned-up right-wing fury in this case has to do with the very idea that one might impugn the value of the brave guy with the medals on his chest as a source. Without getting into all the cherry-picking, numbers-massaging, and issue-eliding which was necessary in order to claim the surge is "working", the point is simply that one doesn't have to do a "hatchet job" on Petraeus in order to explain why his version of what's going on would be likely to be biased. To paraphrase Gen. Wesley Clark, when the team is down 20-0 in the fourth quarter, the backup QB they've just put in is unlikely to be an unbiased source of information on the team's prospects of winning. When you discount that QB's testimony, you're not accusing him of being stupid or of lying; you're just recognizing who he is and what position he's in. Weevil, estimates of the war's real cost involve many expenditures besides the military ones (things like cost of care for wounded vets), and the figure that is shaping up if we stay there another 10 years is around $2 trillion. But it's true that this figure I think refers to the expected increase in the national debt, and thus includes higher interest payments on the debt due to the fact that we're paying for the war by borrowing. So $2 trillion would be the amount we could save if we just didn't spend it. If we spent it on something else, like Soc Security, presumably there would be interest costs as well -- though since those expenses wouldn't come until much later, the costs would be lower. Also, I think this $2 trillion estimate also includes the money we've already blown in the first 4.5 years, so perhaps at this point we could only save a mere $1 trillion=plus dollars by pulling out. A pittance, really.
You "think" the $2 trillion estimate includes money already spent? Of course it does, even if you don't have the grace to admit it: you were the one who gave the $100 million per year figure, not the $200 million per year you're now trying to claim. And isn't that $100 million based on current costs? If the surge works -- and so far it is working -- we can expect costs per year to drop considerably as Iraqi troops take over and our troops withdraw, not to double as they must for your assertion to be true. As I said, you're just making stuff up, like a common blogweasel.
... Without getting into all the cherry-picking, numbers-massaging, and issue-eliding which was necessary in order to claim the surge is "working", the point is simply that one doesn't have to do a "hatchet job" on Petraeus in order to explain why his version of what's going on would be likely to be biased. To paraphrase Gen. Wesley Clark, when the team is down 20-0 in the fourth quarter, the backup QB they've just put in is unlikely to be an unbiased source of information on the team's prospects of winning. When you discount that QB's testimony, you're not accusing him of being stupid or of lying; you're just recognizing who he is and what position he's in.Forgive me for pointing this out, but without discussing the "cherry-picking, numbers-massaging, and issue-eliding" bits all we really have here is Gen. Petraeus, who's on the spot, a four star general, and an officer & gentleman, telling us that the surge is working, and brooksfoe, who's in Vietnam (isn't that still a communist country?) telling us it's not. Oh deary me, who shall I believe? The man on the spot who's an actual recognized expert on the situation, who testified to Congress, or the guy who pontificates based on moldy books on Vietnam and doesn't want to get into the numbers-crunching? I surely don't know!
Swen, Why should I believe Petraeus has an accurate picture of the likely future of Iraq, and is being honest about it in his public pronouncements. The whole history of this war has been full of people who either got huge things wrong (the occupation was supposed to be pretty cheap and self-supporting, frex) and people who have apparently lied to manipulate US policy (the Iraqi dissidents in the US were apparently feeding us a massive line of BS to get us to get rid of Saddam, frex). So now here's one more guy getting up and making some statements about Iraq, after all the errors and lies. What makes him more trustworthy?
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Copyright © 2008 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
Ever hear that old phrase by Jebus, "let she who is without any redeeming qualities as a journalist cast the first stone"?
Well done.
Maybe if you, say, wrote a post apologizing for urinating on the traditions of the magazine which made the mistake of hiring you, and promising to take the incredibly difficult step of reading about an issue before pontificating on it in the future, you might have status to critique others.
Emphasis on might.
Posted by firemeganmcardle.blogspot.com | September 23, 2007 5:13 PM