WSJ Defends NYT In Petraeus Ad Affair

Wall Street Journal:

Two bastions of liberalism are discovering the nasty side of campaign finance reform now that it has landed in their own backyards.

On Sunday, a spokeswoman for the New York Times admitted it had "made a mistake" when it charged the radical group MoveOn.org a special discounted rate for an ad accusing General David Petraeus of betrayal in advance of his Congressional testimony. Meanwhile, DailyKos's Markos Moulitsas Zuniga has faced a Federal Election Commission inquiry into advertising sales at his blog, which has become a force in pushing the Democratic Party to the left on various issues--among them, campaign finance reform.

DailyKos holds forth regularly that "our democracy is in danger" from money in politics and loudly supports McCain-Feingold and other campaign and media restrictions. The New York Times position on campaign finance reform is that it "has not gone far enough," and that more should be done to control donors and prevent changes that would "open the spigots to corporate and special-interest money."

Read the whole story: Wall Street Journal

Comments

[realitytrumpsbull]

Didn't someone just buy the Journal, now they
can pretty much print any damn thing they want
sans editorial oversight etc?

[RanTalbott]

Rupert Murdoch bought the WSJ.

Expect the editorials to get more unabashedly partisan.

[RanTalbott]

So, let's see where this logic takes us...

We now have three Republican candidates for President who say they don't believe in evolution.

That means that every high school biology textbook in the country (well, except for a couple for fundamentalist homeschoolers and religious schools), as well as the entire NASA budget for astrophysics research, is now an "in kind contribution" to all the candidates who are NOT faith-based Luddites.

And I guess we'll have to invade the Galapagos Islands, and take all of Darwin's finches to Gitmo, for violating the laws against foreign agents contributing to US campaigns.

Fortunately, we won't have to invade Iraq, because we're already there, but we _will_ have to arrest all those murdered Iraqis, because their deaths contradict Dumbya's claim that the surge is working, and they failed to file the proper forms with the FEC.

[inexiledeo]

that was a defense of the NYT? did anyone from Huffington Post read the article?

[cindyw]

Well, they did say they defended the Times' right to sign advertising contracts at whatever price they wish, but other than that, the editorial seemed to take a little too much delight in the problems of the NYT and Daily Kos. If that was a defense, it was pretty weak.

[joebaggadonuts]

I think the Huffington Post should spend more time on the headline creation/approval process. Generally they do not reflect the POV of the article under them to the expected extent.

It may be that the authors have a stake in eyeball numbers for their articles. That should be worked on to improve the credibility of the website generally. I think this is a very important issue for the long term growth prospects of Huffpo and for the truth, generally.