All The Propaganda That's Fit To Print

It’s not often I underestimate the stuck-in-time, fuddy-duddy sixties traditionalism of the New York Times, but in this case I did.

Not in my wildest dreams was the paper capable of deliberately giving a fifty percent advertising discount to the George Soros-supported Moveon.org for a juvenile advertisement calling General Petraeus General Betray-us, of all things.

Despite what many had said, I had just assumed it was a business decision. The Times had ad space left over and, as everyone knows, they have economic problems. I went so far as to tell Pajamas Media’s Jim Hanson that he was over the top in his FEC suit. (I apologize, Jim.)

Quite clearly the Times’ favoritism to Moveon was deliberate.

In many ways this is worse than the Jayson Blair affair that so embarrassed the Times and caused a change in editorial administration. That was the result of inept fact checking. It could partially be excused as accidental, although the “accident” was repeated many times. The Moveon Affair goes much further, showing a functional and deliberate bias pervading the newspaper’s operations.

The question is how systemic is this – how high and deep this bias goes in the paper’s structure?. How long has the Times been showing this kind of favoritism and to whom? More specifically – who knew about the Moveon ad and when did they know it?

Sound familiar? Papers like the Times and the Washington Post make their reputations conducting such investigations. It will be interesting to see if they do one here. We will be waiting. At a moment in history when the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is visiting New York, it is no small matter that the city and the country’s most respected newspaper – or the one that for many years claimed to be – is guilty of unethical behavior that risks jeopardizing our nation’s security.

A few years ago, in a loose-lipped moment that now seems more like projection than anything else, Bill Keller, the editor of the New York Times, accused blogging of being a “one man circle jerk.” What greater “circle jerk” exists today than the New York Times?

UPDATE: Obviously some “A’s” are being “CYed”.

Pajamas Media CEO Roger L. Simon is an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, novelist and blogger.