New York Post questions New York Times...

I think the question being raised as to the difference in the normal price charged for the size ad that Move on ran in the New York Times is a valid one to raise, as this Reuters article, NY Times criticized for ad attacking Petraeus points out:

Moveon.org confirmed it paid $65,000 for the full page ad headlined "General Petraeus or General Betray Us."

The New York Post ran a story on Thursday asking why the basic rate of $181,692 for such an ad was discounted.

Despite the various reasons being touted by the New York Times, questions like this:

Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor who blogs on media at buzzmachine.com, said the key question for the Times was could any other political or advocacy group get the same rate under the same circumstances.

"The quandary the Times gets stuck in is they don't want to admit you can buy an ad for that rate, no matter who you are," Jarvis said, noting that with print advertising revenues in decline newspapers generally did offer big discounts.

Anyone, conservative or liberal is going to look at the math and realize that a $116,692 dollar discount is pretty big, and if that is something that the New York Times does on a regular basis if you were one of the few who did pay full price? You'd be pretty steamed at the way you were ripped off.

This is without even getting into the deeper political issue that the ad most likely did more harm than good since rather than focus on the real issues which are valid concerns regarding the latest reports on Iraq, quite a bit of attention has been on this ad instead. Last I looked the real way to change things was to work on the real issues and not just create a subject change...