NYT = just a little to the right of Pravda
 

After this fiasco, how can anyone argue that the New York Times is simply not a daily Mother Jones. Fox is no more slanted to the right than the NYT is slanted to the left. Liberals just read the NYT to have their preconceived notions reconfirmed.

Sauce for the Times

By George Will

Two days before Christmas in 1967, President Lyndon Johnson, visiting the Vatican, presented Pope Paul VI with a foot-high bust of Lyndon Johnson. Small choices can reveal the character of a person.


Or of an institution. Consider the New York Times' choices concerning MoveOn.org's issue advocacy ad calling Gen. David Petraeus "General Betray Us" and accusing him of "cooking the books for the White House."


In June, the Times was in high dudgeon — it knows no other degree of dudgeon — about the Supreme Court's refusal to affirm a far-reaching government power to suppress political speech. The court ruled that a small group of Wisconsin residents had been improperly refused the right to run an issue advocacy ad urging the state's two senators not to filibuster the president's judicial nominees.


Because one of those senators was seeking reelection, the group's ad was deemed an "electioneering communication" — one that "refers to" a candidate for federal office. McCain-Feingold bans such communications by corporations, including incorporated nonprofit citizens' groups, in the weeks before an election — when the Times' editorial page is in full-throated enjoyment of speech rights it would deny to others.

Concurring with the court's judgment that the Wisconsin group's ad should have been permitted, Justice Antonin Scalia noted that although McCain-Feingold was written to prevent "corrosive and distorting effects" by entities with "immense aggregations of wealth," it actually muzzled — with the Times' strenuous approval — a small group of Wisconsin residents.


Less than three months after the Times excoriated the court for weakening restrictions on issue ads, the paper made a huge and patently illegal contribution to MoveOn.org's issue advocacy ad. The American Conservative Union, under Chairman David Keene, immediately filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, noting that the purchaser of the ad, MoveOn.org Political Action, is a registered multicandidate political committee regulated by the mare's-nest of federal laws and rules the multiplication of which has so gladdened the Times.


The Times, a media corporation that is a fountain of detailed editorial instructions about how the rest of the world should conduct its business, seems confused about how it conducts its own. The Times now says the appropriate rate for MoveOn.org's full-page ad should have been $142,000, a far cry from $65,000, which is what the group paid. So the discount of $77,000 constitutes a large soft-money contribution to a federally regulated political committee. The Times' horror of such contributions was expressed in its enthusiasm for McCain-Feingold.


FEC regulations state: "The provision of any goods or services without charge or at a charge that is less than the usual and normal charge for such goods or services is a contribution." Individuals are limited to contributing $5,000 in a calendar year; corporations such as the Times are forbidden to make any contributions.


MoveOn.org is going to send the Times a check for $77,000. The Times has apologized, which is sweet, but normally the FEC does not accept apologies in lieu of fines. And often FEC fines are levied after intrusive investigations into motives and intentions. Will there be such an investigation of the Times? The FEC is not lenient when dealing with individuals who, less lawyered-up than the New York Times Co., fall afoul of regulations much more recondite than the bright line the Times ignored.


Bob Bauer, a Democratic lawyer specializing in laws regulating political speech, notes — not approvingly — that the Times supposedly has a policy of rejecting ads involving "personal attack" speech. But the Times accepted MoveOn.org's ad accusing a soldier of betraying his country. According to the Times' public editor, a Times official said the ad was "a comment on a public official's management of his office."


Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., defending the decision to run the ad, said: "If we're going to err, it's better to err on the side of more political dialogue. . . . Perhaps we did err in this case. If we did, we erred with the intent of giving greater voice to people." Bauer notes that Sulzberger might have used words from a Supreme Court decision: "In a debatable case, the tie is resolved in favor of protecting speech." And: "Where the First Amendment is implicated, the tie goes to the speaker, not the censor." So spoke Chief Justice John Roberts in the Wisconsin decision that Sulzberger's paper denounced because it would magnify the voices of, among other things, "wealthy corporations." The Times Co.'s 2006 revenue was $3.3 billion.


The Times' performance in this matter confirms an axiom: There can be unseemly exposure of mind as well as of body.

Affirmative action for dim white kids.
 

But they still give out full scholarships to hetero women, right? For diversity and all that?

Affirmative action for dim white kids.
 

You're confusing it with Smith.

With a little push you could almost be a neocon. We should send in the marines and install the democratically elected leader (Aung San Suu Kyi).

NYT = just a little to the right of Pravda
 

In your version of reality, whose campaign was the Times contributing to when it charged MoveOn less than its normal rates?

eta: I've read Will's thing twice now, and I can't figure out why he would call what the Times did "patently illegal." So maybe someone can explain that one.

Hey, now that the WSJ has us welcoming you into the Democratic Party, why not. There's room under the tent here for Sebby, Burger, and Slave too - we're just all throwing darts at the religious right and getting a good chuckle out of creationism. Teddy's tending bar and Greenspan's making toasts.

We're all just one big happy family. Except Hank, of course.

NYT = just a little to the right of Pravda
 

Moreover, it appears that the NYT gave Giuliani the same deal.

health care
 

One has been implemented and found a Byzantine bureaucratic mess, funding the administrative ass-sitting jobs of useless clerks to the detriment of patients.

The other has yet to be implemented and found a Byzantine bureaucratic mess, funding the administrative ass-sitting jobs of useless clerks to the detriment of patients.

Pick your bag of shit. I'll be forking over the cash for a personal retainer plan and supplemental inusrance, which the market will provide. So it'll cost me. What are you going to do? It's your health. You lose it and you haven't much else...

NYT = just a little to the right of Pravda
 

Oh, duuuuuuude. You broke my brain... So if it only subsidizes ALL of the Democrats then it's not subsidizing any single one candidate. Fucking brilliant, man.

But I'm with you on George Will being an idiot. When he ripped Jerry Garcia on the day of the fat man's death he lost me. How in the fuck can you rip Jerry Garcia? It's like hating Santa Claus.

NYT = just a little to the right of Pravda
 

Moveon is not the Democrats, and it's not like there's an election going on. And since the GOP has been trying its damnedest to talk about the Moveon ad instead of, say, Iraq, you might deem the ad a subsidy of Republicans rather than all the Democrats who lined up to vote to condemn it.

Unless I'm missing something, Will is willfully (heh) confusing speech about an issue of current interest with speech aimed to benefit a candidate during an election. I know that those categories are somewhat slippery, but here it's just not that hard.

NYT = just a little to the right of Pravda
 

So I guess this means you concede the fact that the NYT is the daily version of Mother Jones.

NYT = just a little to the right of Pravda
 

The first paragraph is priceless. You remind me of why litigation was fun sometimes. And the final conclusion of it is a wonderful spin on the issue, and, I might add, substantively compelling. It's true. That ad was a gift to the GOP. But any incendiary political ad is these days. All the little connivers in the political game know the "taking umbrage" technique.

I think you answer your own question about Will. It is willful.

NYT = just a little to the right of Pravda
 

When they gave up John Tierney they lost any semblance of balance. David Brooks is a gelded conservative. How he labored under Buckley I can't imagine. I read him and want to slap in the lips, on principle.

Paul Krugman's sad, really. he was once great and is now crazy and rabid and imbecillic. But every now and again he writes about some economic issue and really nails it and you think "Wow! How sad he's Lord Haw Haw of the Idiot Leftists."*


*Actually, no one thinks this but me, in those terms at least. I need a life.

NYT = just a little to the right of Pravda
 

No.

Did you really need me to spell that out? You don't believe yourself.

NYT = just a little to the right of Pravda
 

I don't think Will really thinks the FEC now regulates all political speech. If he does, he needs to hire a new researcher and cut back on the martinis at lunch.