CHANGE! THEN: NO BLOOD FOR OIL. NOW: NY TIMES COHOSTS ‘OIL AND MONEY’ CONFERENCE; IRANIAN OIL MINISTER TO ATTEND:

A year ago, Tim Graham at NewsBusters noted that the New York Times was “offering 13-day tours of Iran guided by Times journalist Elaine Sciolino” at the bargain rate of $6,995 per person. Among other things, it promised “excellent insights into … (the) life and accomplishments” of Ayatollah Khomeini, the ruthless Islamist leader who posed as a liberator, but then imposed a fundamentalist Islamic state after taking control of that country in the late 1970s. Those tours are still active, and popular.

Given that background, I suppose we really shouldn’t all that surprised that Ira Stoller at SmarterTimes.com reported a related development this morning. With the imminent lifting of Western sanctions against Iran, the ever-opportunistic International division of the Times is cohosting an October 6-7 “Oil and Money” conference in London (I promise, I’m not making this up).

There, among other things, industry decisionmakers can schmooze with “H.E. Seyed Mehdi Hosseini, chairman of the Oil Contract Restructuring Committee at the Iranian Ministry of Petroleum.”

For months, the Times has presented slanted reporting and relentlessly editorialized in favor of what Times staffer Brenda Erdmann Hagerty calls “the historic nuclear deal between Iran and world powers” in an email to potential attendees. Now it is capitalizing on the deal it advocated.

Is it really possible that no one at the Times sees, or at least cares about, how such a blatant conflict of interest seriously and permanently damages any claim they might have objectivity in this matter?

Forget it Jake, it’s Sulzbergertown.

As for the Times’ junkets to Iran, in March, Andrew Stiles of the Washington Free Beacon reported back in March from one on what he saw during his “journey to the birthplace of Valerie Jarrett.” As he noted, “Americans in Iran are generally regarded with a degree of skepticism, but not for the reason you might think. Iranians want to know what you’re doing in Iran, not because they suspect you of plotting a coup, but because they know American passport holders could spend their vacations anywhere else on earth (give or take a few tin-pot communist police states), and feel sorry for you.”