The Washington Times

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For the newspaper founded in 1893 by William Randolph Hearst, see Washington Times-Herald.
File:The Washington Times front page.jpg
TypeDaily newspaper
FormatBroadsheet
Owner(s)News World Communications
EditorJohn F. Solomon
Founded1982
HeadquartersWashington, D.C.
Circulation102,351[1]
Websitewww.washtimes.com

The Washington Times[2] is a daily broadsheet newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States. As of March 31, 2007, the Times had an average daily circulation of 102,351,[3] about one-seventh that of its chief competitor, The Washington Post.

According to former editor Josette Shiner, it is the world's third-most-quoted newspaper.[4]

The Washington Times is owned and its perennial operating losses have been subsidized by News World Communications, Inc., described by the Columbia Journalism Review as "the media arm of Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church."[4]

History

The Times was founded in 1982 by Sun Myung Moon, leader of the Unification Church and the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, to be a conservative alternative to the larger Washington Post. The Times is widely perceived as maintaining a strongly right-leaning editorial stance. By 2002, the Unification Church had spent about $1.7 billion in subsidies for the Times. The paper has lost money every year that it has been in business.[5]

The Times was founded the year after the Washington Star, the previous "second paper" of D.C., went out of business. Each day on page 2 the Washington Times prints a list of all its front page headlines side by side with those of the Post, to let readers compare what stories each paper is emphasizing and how. Some see the Times' coverage of local politics in particular as stronger than the Post's; Post veteran Ben Bradlee has said "I see them get some local stories that I think the Post doesn’t have and should have had."[6]

When the Times began, it was unusual among American broadsheets in publishing a full color front page, along with full color front pages in all its sections and color elements throughout. USA Today used this approach to an even greater degree. It took several years for the Washington Post, New York Times and others to follow suit. The Times originally published its editorials and opinion columns in a physically separate Commentary section, rather than at the end of its front news section as is common practice in U.S. newspapers. It ran television commercials highlighting this fact. Later, this practice was abandoned (except on Sundays, when many other newspapers, including the Post, also do it). The Washington Times also used ink that it advertised as being less likely to come off on the reader's hands than the Post's.

There is a reference to the paper, in which a front page from the Washington Times is used in the film The American President. The movie shows a copy of the newspaper in which the front page photo of the two main characters is in black and white. This is an error as the front page photo used on the Times is always in color. The Times is also briefly mentioned in the 2007 film Charlie Wilson's War.

Dante Chinni wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review:

In addition to giving voice to stories that, as Pruden says, “others miss,” the Times plays an important role in Washington’s journalistic farm system. The paper has been a springboard for young reporters to jobs at The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, even the Post. Lorraine Woellert, who worked at the Times from 1992 to 1998, says her experience there allowed her to jump directly to her current job at Business Week. “I got a lot of opportunities very quickly. They appreciated and rewarded talent and, frankly, there was a lot of turnover.”[7]

Ads fill an average of 35% of the Times' pages, compared to an industry average of 50-60%.[7]

As of 2007, home delivery of the paper in its local area is made in bright orange plastic bags, with the words, "Brighter. Bolder. The Washington Times" and a slogan which changes. Two of the slogans are "The voice and choice of discerning readers" and "You're not getting it all without us," which may be a response to the current slogan used by the Washington Post, "If you don't get it, you don't get it."

Political leanings

The Times is politically conservative. It was President Ronald Reagan's preferred newspaper. Some have cited it along with the Fox News Channel and talk radio as epitomizing the conservative media.[7][8][9][10] It also prints op-ed and opinion articles that include liberal and Democratic party voices; liberal columnist Clarence Page is a regular contributor.[11] Also featured are libertarian opinion pieces, almost always from scholars at the DC-located Cato Institute.[12][13]

Conservative commentator Paul Weyrich has called the Washington Times an antidote to its liberal competitor:

The Washington Post became very arrogant and they just decided that they would determine what was news and what wasn't news and they wouldn't cover a lot of things that went on. And the Washington Times has forced the Post to cover a lot of things that they wouldn't cover if the Times wasn't in existence.[14]

Investigative journalist Robert Parry wrote about the influence of the Times:

By the 1980s, the likes of South Korean theocrat Rev. Sun Myung Moon and Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch were pouring billions of dollars into a rapidly expanding right-wing media. From these investments came a plethora of well-financed think tanks, year-round attack groups, and a vertically integrated conservative news media – from books, magazines and newspapers to radio, TV and eventually the Internet. Right-wing activists flocked to Washington and New York for good-paying jobs as journalists and pundits.[15]

Relationship to the Unification Church

The Times is the flagship publication of News World Communications, Inc. (NWC). NWC was founded by Sun Myung Moon, and some of its officials are members of the Unification Church which he leads, a fact that has drawn some criticism. NWC published Insight Magazine and The World & I. Insight ceased hardcopy publication in 2004, moving to the web; and The World & I became The World & I Online, an educational magazine with four corresponding websites. NWC continues to publish the The Washington Times National Weekly Edition (a tabloid compilation, designed for subscribers outside the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area, of the previous week's published Washington Times stories). NWC also owns United Press International.

NWC is described by the Columbia Journalism Review as "the media arm of Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church".[16] The Unification Church calls Moon the "founder" of the Times. In 1997, on the 15th anniversary of the founding of the paper, Rev. Moon gave an address to staff members that began:

Fifteen years ago, when the world was adrift on the stormy waves of the Cold War, I established The Washington Times to fulfill God's desperate desire to save this world. Since that time, I have devoted myself to raising up The Washington Times, hoping that this blessed land of America would fulfill its world-wide mission to build a Heavenly nation. Meanwhile, I waged a lonely struggle, facing enormous obstacles and scorn as I dedicated my whole heart and energy to enable The Washington Times to grow as a righteous and responsible journalistic institution.[17]

In 2003, The New Yorker reported that a billion dollars had been spent since the paper's inception, as Rev Moon himself had noted in a 1991 speech ("Literally nine hundred million to one billion dollars has been spent to activate and run the Washington Times"[18]). In 2002, Columbia Journalism Review suggested Moon had spent nearly $2 billion on the Times[7] and in 2006 Consortium News said that the figure was more than $3 billion.[19]

Racism scandals

Times editor Robert Stacy McCain was accused of racism in a 2002 New York Press column by Michelangelo Signorile that reported on McCain's criticism of Abraham Lincoln, pro-slavery sympathies toward the Confederacy in the Civil War and McCain's membership in the neo-Confederate organization League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center called "rife with white supremacists and racist ideology."

Columnist Samuel Francis, after speaking at a conference hosted by American Renaissance, a self-described "pro-white" group, was subsequently fired by editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden.

Former Editor in Chief Pruden has been described by former Times writer George Archibald as an "an unreconstructed Confederate" who "still believes the South and slavery were right". Archibald also confirmed and corrobrated a report by The Nation that described former Managing Editor Fran Coombs as a "raging racist who despises blacks, Jews, and Hispanic immigrants, and looks down on women...".[20] Coombs's wife Marion subsequently confirmed charges of racism about her and her husband during an interview by The Nation's Max Blumenthal[21]

Recent changes

In 2006 Max Blumenthal reported in The Nation that Sun Myung Moon's son Hyun Jin Moon (sometimes called Preston Moon) and editor at large Arnaud de Borchgrave wanted to remove control of the Times from Pruden and Coombs, to "shift the paper away from their brand of conservatism, which is characterized by extreme racial animus and connections to nativist and neo-Confederate organizations"[22] In February 2007, former Times reporter George Archibald wrote that long time Unification Church leader Tom McDevitt would soon be taking office as president of the Washington Times Corporation and expressed hope that he would bring about needed changes in the Times organization.[23] In March 2007 McDevitt became the corporation's president.[24] In November 2007, the Washington Post reported that Pruden planned to step down soon and that the Times was looking for a new editor in chief.[25]

On January 14, 2008, it was announced that Executive Editor Wes Pruden would retire, effective January 24th. He was to be replaced by John F. Solomon, formerly head of investigative reporting and mixed media development at the Washington Post. In a surprise move, Times Managing Editor Fran Coombs, who had long been presumed to be Mr. Pruden's heir as top editor at the Times, resigned the same day Pruden's retirement was announced.

On January 28, 2008, John F. Solomon began work as executive editor of the Times. He is known for his work as an investigative journalist for AP and the Washington Post.[26][27]

Criticism

Editorial independence

Media watchdogs Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting asserts that the Church has significant influence on the paper and gives the Church significant credit (or blame) for the Times' content and actions.[28][17] In 2002, during the 20th anniversary party for the Times, Rev. Moon declared: "The Washington Times will become the instrument in spreading the truth about God to the world."[29] The paper's first editor-in-chief, James Whelan, said that he resigned rather than accepting what he saw as church interference with his operation of the paper. "I have blood on my hands," he declared.[30]

Commenting about Unification Church ownership of the Times and other news outlets, Reverend Sun Myung Moon has said "That is why Father has been combining and organizing scholars from all over the world, and also newspaper organizations, in order to make propaganda."[5]

The December 2007 edition the journal Presidential Studies Quarterly published Douglas Kellner's paper "Bushspeak and the Politics of Lying". Kellner wrote "Likewise, cult leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who owns the right-wing Washington Times and strongly supports the Bush family, preaches a doctrine "called Heavenly Deception. Religious recruits are told that the ‘non-Moon world’ is evil. It must be lied to..."[6]

Allegations of news and editorial bias

According to the Columbia Journalism Review, "Because of its history of a seemingly ideological approach to the news, the paper has always faced questions about its credibility."[31] Salon.com[32][33] and The Daily Howler[34][35][36][37] have published analyses of what they believe are serious factual errors and examples of bias in the paper's news coverage. Conservative-turned-liberal writer David Brock, who worked for the Times' sister publication Insight, said in his book Blinded by the Right that the news writers at the Times were encouraged and rewarded for giving news stories a conservative slant. In Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy Brock wrote "the Washington Times was governed by a calculatedly unfair political bias and that its journalistic ethics were close to nil."[38]

During the 1988 United States presidential election, the Times printed a false rumor about candidate Michael Dukakis's mental health. [39]

Distortions and the "echo chamber" in "blame America" controversy

On September 5, 2002 Salon.com writer Brendan Nyhan published "The big NEA-Sept. 11 lie; How the Washington Times helped create a myth about the teachers' union and Sept. 11",[40] The controversy was created shortly before the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks by Ellen Sorokin in Page 1 article of the Washington Times. Journalist Nyhan says that Sorokin falsely attributed statements and "lesson plans" to the NEA, and was "intentionally deceptive" in her use of out of context quotes selectively "farmed" from an essay written by Brian Lippincott of the Graduate School of Professional Psychology at the John F. Kennedy University in California.[41] Nyhan's report for Salon documents the speed with which the NEA "lies and distortions" spread internationally to major news outlets, and cites one other example at the Times.

"The story is familiar: A distorted claim is fed into the echo chamber, where it is increasingly twisted as it is repeated over and over until it becomes conventional wisdom."

Nyhan described Sorokin's reporting of Lippincott's statements as "intentionally deceptive", and Janet Bass of the American Federation of Teachers claimed that Sorokin had distorted her statements for the article, charging that the Times left out a sentence making it clear that Bass was referring solely to Lippincott's lesson plan; a wire story published two days before the Times article quoted Bass as saying that the AFT had no problem with any of the other links or materials on the NEA's site.[42]

Nyhan documents how the "echo chamber" picked up the story, and provides several instances of the Times echoing it's own discredited story, as the Times added further distortions in the following days. Nyhan said the Times had "lied" as "refined the myth even further" on Aug. 20, creating another Straw man by "framing direct quotes from Lippincott as NEA creations with false phrases like 'the NEA disgustingly lectures' and 'the NEA urges teachers...'. Nyhan says that the Times repeated the process again on Aug. 22, and that the Times was "feeding off its own spin".

The Boston Globe criticized both the Times distorted portrayal of the Lippencott essay, and it's attributions of that portrayal to the NEA. About the essay, saying "even Lippincott does not suggest that we brought the attacks on ourselves - or that we don't know who the perpetrators are. In context, any group clearly does not mean Al Qaeda or the Taliban, but all Arab-Americans". The Globe pointed out that the NEA's site "offers links to provide an overview on Afghanistan, Osama bin Ladin, the terrorists who killed innocent Americans on Sept. 11, and the Qaeda network.", and that the NEA also featured links to "the CIA and the Department of Defense, a speech by President Bush, and materials on the Constitution of the United States." and said "the charges of anti-Americanism flung at the NEA are wildly exaggerated and sometimes disturbingly akin to a smear."[42]

On August 20, 2002 NEA President Bob Chase responded to the Washington Times, adding further detail to refute Sorokin's story, and saying that the Sorokin article had been written before the NEA's "Remember 9/11" website went live. [43]

In 2008, various internet "Urban Legends" websites and internet blogs are found still echoing the myth and its variations, including Urban Legend chain e-mails featuring attacks on the NEA, teacher unions and public schools in general. As of January 2008, an explicit search query of Google's index of the Internet yielded more than 1,000 websites with information either repeating or refuting the "NEA blames America" story.[44]

Notable current and former writers

News

Opinion

Sports

Computers

Metro

Former

Executives, editors and managers, present and past

Editors-in-chief

Managing editors

Others

Notes and references

  1. ^ http://www.accessabc.com/products/top200.htm
  2. ^ The paper should not be confused with a previously existing paper of the same name established in 1893, which later became the Washington Times-Herald, and, still later, in 1954, was purchased by the Washington Post. Nor should it be considered the successor to the Washington Star, an afternoon paper which closed in August 1981. The Washington Post purchased the equipment and plant of the Star. The Times purchased part of the computer system used by the Star, which it replaced soon afterward.
  3. ^ http://www.accessabc.com/products/top200.htm
  4. ^ Josette Shiner said, "There has been very rarely in American history a newspaper that in ten years has the impact that The Washington Times has. We are told by the Associated Press that we are the third most quoted newspaper in the world after The New York Times and the Washington Post." [1]
  5. ^ http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A60061-2002May22
  6. ^ http://www.cjr.org/issues/2002/5/wash-stability.asp
  7. ^ a b c d http://www.cjr.org/issues/2002/5/wash-chinni.asp
  8. ^ http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/connelly/100030_joel16.shtml
  9. ^ http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/freedomline/current/in_our_opinion/gore_fox_times.htm
  10. ^ http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/012805.html
  11. ^ http://washtimes.com/commentary/
  12. ^ http://insider.washingtontimes.com/articles/normal.php?StoryID=20060930-095009-9419r
  13. ^ http://insider.washingtontimes.com/articles/normal.php?StoryID=20060916-112430-7148r
  14. ^ http://www.mediachannel.org/originals/moontranscript.shtml
  15. ^ Were the Republicans the "party of ideas"?
  16. ^ http://www.cjr.org/tools/owners/newsworld.asp
  17. ^ a b http://www.tparents.org/Moon-Talks/sunmyungmoon97/sm970617.htm
  18. ^ http://www.unification.net/1991/911223.html
  19. ^ http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/122706.html
  20. ^ [2]
  21. ^ [3]
  22. ^ http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20061009&s=washington_times
  23. ^ http://georgearchibald.typepad.com/george_archibald/2007/02/unhinged.html
  24. ^ Points Of Light Executives to Lead Washington Times, Child Advocacy Group
  25. ^ The Washington Times, Hunting For a Bionic Editor in Chief
  26. ^ State Native to lead DC newspaper Connecticut Post January 26, 2008
  27. ^ Ex-Washington Post Reporter to Lead a Rival New York Times February 11, 2008
  28. ^ http://www.fair.org/media-outlets/washington-times.html
  29. ^ "Moon Propaganda Machine". Retrieved 2007-12-18. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  30. ^ Wallis, David (2004). Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot to Print. Nation Books. p. 146. ISBN 1560255811. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  31. ^ http://archives.cjr.org/year/95/2/times.asp
  32. ^ http://www.salon.com/politics/col/spinsanity/2002/09/05/nea/index_np.html
  33. ^ http://www.salon.com/politics/col/spinsanity/2002/09/18/nea/print.html
  34. ^ http://www.dailyhowler.com/h120899_2.shtml
  35. ^ http://www.dailyhowler.com/h092500_1.shtml
  36. ^ http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh082702.shtml
  37. ^ http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh022504.shtml
  38. ^ http://www.thinkingpeace.com/Lib/lib099.html
  39. ^ Obama, Clinton, & the GOP Attack Machine Robert Parry 02-02-2008
  40. ^ Nyhan, Brendan (2002-09-05). "The big NEA-Sept. 11 lie; How the Washington Times helped create a myth about the teachers' union and Sept. 11". Salon. Salon. Retrieved 2008-02-01. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  41. ^ Lippincott, Brian (2002-03-22). "Promoting Tolerance and Peace in Children". National Association of School Psychologists. Retrieved 2008-02-03.
  42. ^ a b Young, Cathy (2002-09-02). "An unfair attack on teachers union". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 2008-02-15. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  43. ^ Chase, Bob (2002-8-20). "Letter to the Washington Times from NEA President". NEA Press Center. National Education Association. Retrieved 2008-02-05. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  44. ^ "Google Explicit Internet search". Retrieved 2008-02-06.

External links

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