Time to Move On?

The fact that we're all debating the MoveOn ad two weeks after it ran suggests that the organization more than got its money's worth--even though the price just jumped from $65,000 to $142,000.

That's because, as I noted yesterday, MoveOn agreed to pay the higher rate to the New York Times after the paper acknowledged that it had made a mistake in granting the group what was clearly a big fat discount.

From a PR point of view, the Times has handled this rather badly, allowing the "discount" debate to rage for two weeks before dropping its insistence that MoveOn had paid the usual standby rate, and then because ombudsman Clark Hoyt successfully pressed for answers.

Beyond that, why has this turned into a two-week dust-up? Some thoughts:

-Nearly everyone who defends the war or hates MoveOn welcomed the opportunity to shift the debate from the carnage in Iraq to a controversial liberal group.

-The fact that Democrats were uncomfortable with the headline's frontal assault on a military man -- 'General Betray Us' -- provided bonus points for the Republicans.

-The argument that the NYT aided and abetted an alleged smear provided triple bonus points for the right.

-The Dems, understandably, wondered where the GOP's selective outrage was when ads questioned the patriotism and courage of such veterans as Max Cleland and John Kerry.

-Liberals also fought back because they were disturbed by suggestions that a general running a war should be exempt from criticism, despite a long American tradition to the contrary.

-Things reached the point where liberals felt the conservative noise machine had totally bamboozled the media over a non-issue.

In short, the battle over the ad became a proxy war for the war itself. And the Times inadvertently kept it alive by not straightening out the facts for two weeks, sparking yet another debate about whether the paper is now being honest in saying this was just a mistake by the advertising department.

Robert Stein at Connecting the Dots chides the Times: