NY Times subsidizes MoveOn.org (with $77K)

From the AP... Well, there's media bias (according to Media Matters) and then, there's this...

NEW YORK (AP) — The New York Times' ombudsman says the newspaper violated its standards when it gave the liberal activist group MoveOn.org a $77,508 price break on a full-page advertisement targeting Gen. David H. Petraeus.

The organization paid $64,575, instead of the standard $142,083 for the ad questioning the war in Iraq, the newspaper's public editor, Clark Hoyt, wrote in a column published Sunday.

Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis told Hoyt that an advertising sales representative shouldn't have agreed to the discounted price. The ad seemed to disregard internal advertising standards that ban ads involving attacks of a personal nature, Hoyt wrote.

"We made a mistake," she told Hoyt....

Hoyt said he was asked to investigate the ad rate by FreedomsWatch.org, which advocates a strong national defense and a powerful fight against terrorism, because it said it wasn't offered a similar rate.