Facts (and their known liberal bias) got in the way again:
“We are going to ask The New York Times to allow us tomorrow to print an ad that will obviously take the opposite view,” Mr. Giuliani said. He said The Times gave a “discounted” rate to MoveOn.org, which had expressed the “very excessive left-wing side of this dispute.”
The advertisement has become a major talking point for Republicans. Several have demanded that the Democratic presidential candidates condemn the advertisement, which they have not done.
Catherine J. Mathis, a spokeswoman for The New York Times Company, said the advertising department does not base its rates on political content. She also said the department does not disclose the rates it charges for individual advertisements. But she did say that “similar types of ads are priced in the same way.” She said the department charges advocacy groups $64,575 for full-page, black-and-white advertisements that run on a “standby” basis, meaning an advertiser can request a specific day and placement but is not guaranteed them.
Mr. Giuliani’s advertisement attacks MoveOn.org and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, a leading Democratic presidential candidate, while praising General Petraeus.
Freedom’s Watch, a conservative group, ran a full-page, color advertisement in The Times on Sept. 11. In a letter Thursday to its publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the president of Freedom’s Watch, Bradley A. Blakeman, said: “The New York Times representative explained to us that we could run a standby rate ad for $65,000, but we could not pick the date or placement of the ad.” Mr. Blakeman said MoveOn.org must have been able to pick the date of its advertisement, or had been given “preferential treatment” on the timing, because news organizations were discussing the advertisement before it ran.
Ms. Mathis said the content of an advertisement is not reviewed before a price is quoted.
As for advance word of when a standby ad is running, she said: “Someone might say, ‘I’d like the standby rate, I’d like it to run tomorrow,’ and we say, ‘We can’t guarantee that,’ but then if we find out it is running, we let them know. If we have room, we try to accommodate them.”
The question I have for our intrepid truth detectors- why is the NY Times making contributions to Rudy Guiliani’s campaign by running heavily discounted ads? And who will be the brave soul to call for an FEC investigation?
*** Update ***
Actually, I don’t know how I missed this. I know what the next line will be- ‘Of course they gave Giuliani the same rate! They had to after the blogospehre caught them giving MoveOn a discount!’
Who will be the first drooling idiot to say that? My money is on Uncle Jimbo, or a commenter at Ace’s.