MoveOn.org Gets Discount Rate for ‘Betray Us’ Advocacy Ad | NewsBusters.org

What ever happened to a news organization just reporting the news and selling advertisement as the same rate to everyone?  I guess that simply isn't the case with the New York Times.  They gave moveon.org a more than $100,000 discount on the infamous "General Betray Us" ad.

 

Jake Tapper at ABC News reported that MoveOn.org paid $65,000 for its full page anti-war advocacy sliming of General David Petraeus. This figure raised the suspicions of attentive blogger Confederate Yankee whose intuition appears to be correct. (h/t Michelle Malkin) While looking up the current New York Times rate book he discovered that MoveOn.org received a $102,000 discount on the standard political advocacy rate that is advertised at $167,157.

Of course moveon.org isn't taking the controversy lying down:

In an e-mail to supporters, the group said Petraeus “misled the country” in his testimony before the House on Monday. MoveOn wants its members to write letters to the editors of local and national newspapers and question the findings Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker presented to Congress. The group provides talking points to support its view that Petraeus “used faulty statistics and cherry-picked intelligence to argue that American troops should stay in Iraq for the foreseeable future.”

Now, that would have been fine, but they ran the ad BEFORE he gave testimony and it takes a LONG time to put together an ad of that magnitude.

Simply put, once they knew that Petraeus would deliver at least a bit of positive news out of Iraq, they took it upon themselves to smear General Petraeus' good name without knowing a single thing that he was going to say.

However, the group appears undeterred. It compares the testimony of Petraeus to that of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, who made the case for an invasion of Iraq before the United Nations in 2003. MoveOn said that, had it run a similar ad back then, Republicans “would have done the same thing — but sometimes it’s important to set the facts straight.”

Kind of ironic that they say "it's important to set the facts straight" when they don't even have the facts before they open their mouth.