Without Clark Hoyt, the New York Times would still be claiming denial was a river in Egypt.

For the past two weeks, the Times has pretended that it didn’t do anything wrong by running an ad from MoveOn.org at a discounted rate. The September 10th “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” ad has been fodder for Republicans since it ran.

Yesterday, the Public Editor agreed with Republicans and said that the ad violated two Times house rules. MoveOn was given the standard discounted rate for a floating date advertisement, even though the Times promised the ad would run on the tenth. The Times ad policy also states, “We do not accept opinion advertisements that are attacks of a personal nature,” which the MoveOn ad was.

MoveOn wired the $77,000 price difference between the two ad rates to the Times today. Of course, the interest rate on the discount will be attacks on the liberal media for the next five months.