Moon over the Potomac
Fossedal, Gregory A. & Hughes, Gerald
Gregory A. Fossedal and Gerald Hughes MOON OVER THE POTOMAC Washington's Other Paper comes into its own. Like the kid who sees himself deftly catching a foul ball as the manager shouts, "Sign...
...And if that's the goal, Moon is succeeding...
...Most of these tend to be concentrated among the up-per classes...
...One could argue the paper would do better during a Democratic regime, or a centrist Republican one...
...Reagan had his clean one...
...Even the paper's friends, though, say it sometimes strays...
...To show just one example of how the Washington Times has put a story on the national agenda, we did a careful study of several dozen clips taken from the two papers on just one story: the controversial odyssey of Miroslav Medvid, the Ukrainian sailor who last fall jumped off a Soviet ship in New THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986 17 Orleans.' The Times was ahead of the Post in almost every relative measure of what became a top news story on the eve of the Reagan-Gorbachev summit...
...intelligence had pinpointed the terrorists in Egypt, and a scheme was being hatched to try and capture them if they fled, they were still out of reach...
...Last summer, Post political reporter Sidney Blumenthal gave one of us a brief tour of the Post newsroom...
...All of these actions are defensible...
...De Borchgrave also signed a front-page editorial defending Moon from tax-evasion charges and suggesting a Reagan pardon...
...his dispatches pooh-pooh or ignore the real arguments for Star Wars, and use advances by one Star Wars scientist to set off fights among others...
...But it might be more fun once it gets a shot at George Bush, Bill Bradley, Gary Hart, or Jack Kemp...
...I think it's an improving paper," says David Broder, political columnist and reporter for the Washington Post...
...Gary Hart, no enthusiast for the paper's Reaganite editorial policy, told a friend...
...The zenith of this effort was the week of November 4, when the Times had front-page stories every day on the various crusades...
...Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the Times's coverage, though, involved not its aggressive digging for evidence that Medvid might have been cynically shuffled back in order to preserve the correct atmospherics for the Geneva summit, but the way McWilliams and others pursued leads that might cast doubt on this version too, that might suggest the State Department had not acted so irresponsibly...
...Many Fortune 500 companies have left New York, stating that they can no longer find housing for transferred or new employees...
...Only in a sentence or two, out of more than forty inches of copy, did Goshko juxtapose these claims with those of critics who said otherwise...
...It's now clear The Connection is here to stay...
...At various times, rumor has it, beer magnate Joseph Coors, Australian newspaperman Rupert Murdoch, and others have made offers to buy the Times for a token sum...
...Hallow did a quick but complete page-one story on Gary Hart when the news broke that Hart enjoys a 100-proof rating from Americans for Democratic Action, a sign that Hart's neoliberalism may be moving off the spectrum...
...and the curse of the Washington Times...
...In 1985, the paper's managers, led by themoonie businessman Bo Hi Pak, decided a change was needed...
...What he wanted, and what he would wait for, Reagan said, was a "clean one," the chance to strike directly at the guilty...
...Pak approached such figures as James Watt, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Lyn Nofziger, and Frank Shakespeare to see if one would become publisher or editor...
...Spurlock staunchly claimed that he and his partner had asked Medvid several times if he wanted asylum, each time being told he did not...
...But it just isn't so...
...The New York Times Magazine, the Daily News Sunday magazine, New York magazine, and Long Island's Newsday have all turned it down...
...The "best deals" in New York are found on the Upper East and West Sides and in Greenwich Village, the centers of "old wealth" and glitTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986 19...
...One way the Times fights back is to be out in front on stories of interest to Democrats...
...Nor does the prospect of having its most influential reader leave his home on Pennsylvania Avenue, come 1989,seem to trouble de Borchgrave's guerrillas...
...It's on foreign and defense news that the Times has particularly shined...
...It was striking to see how many desks included a copy or two of the Times, easily identifiable by its sharp headlines, color photos, and ink that doesn't rub all over your fingers...
...bellicose...
...The point is, for Often, Washington Times scoops are dismissed as simply being fed to the paper by a grateful Reagan Administration...
...My overall impression is that the nucleus good staff they started withmany of the Washington Star people—has been supplemented, and the coverage is improving...
...While private enterprise constructed 100,000 units in 1926 and 40,000 in 1940, no more than 10,000 units per year have been built since 1976...
...Rent control in New York is a "temporary" measure first imposed during World War II and never lifted...
...McWilliams, for example, man-aged to find the names of the two agents who first returned Medvid to his ship...
...The Times will have more impact, even in helping Nicaraguan freedom fighters, if it sticks to reporting on fund-raising efforts rather than organizing them...
...The moves were bold and flamboyant, and it's hard to op-pose support for the contras...
...If some-one who works in Washington tells you he doesn't read the Times, you might suspect a coverup...
...managing editor of the Dartmouth Review and on involuntary leave from Dartmouth College, is a research assistant to Mr...
...He's created another paper that you have to read to keep up in Washington...
...The Times is thin on both...
...Besides facing a moonie problem, though, the paper has suffered a leadership problem: three editors in its first three years, three editorial-page editors, and similar changeover in such top news positions as managing, executive, and national news editor...
...They had it the first time it was reported...
...People also buy newspapers to read and clip the ads...
...It's no overstatement, though, to say the Washington Times has drawn the attention of the Post's editors—sometimes expressed in vigorous terms...
...Fish or Cut Bait, Mr...
...It's developed a niche," Kondracke says, not just as an alternative political point of view to the Post, but "as an information source...
...Nevertheless, during the Whelan-Hempstone years, the Times established itself as a decently balanced paper, an occasional breaker of news, and an influential editorial voice...
...For example, Tapscott wrote a story detailing a breakdown in communication at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, in which warnings the shuttle might be headed for trouble somehow never reached the ears of top NASA bureaucrats...
...But it isn't the kind of thing you expect from a newspaper...
...All politely turned away the feelers, but eventually Pak went to a more logical choice—a zesty, competitive, muckraking journalist with several decades' experience in foreign reporting and a personal aversion to Communism, atheism, and The Washington Post Company: Arnaud de Borchgrave...
...Nobody will admit it, though...
...In little more than a year, de Borchgrave has taken the paper to new heights...
...Happily for the Washington Times, the things most people read newspapers for have little to do with the religion of some of the editors...
...Bradlee overheard and took umbrage: swearing at Clark ac-cording to some, shouting according to others, and "getting pretty nasty," as one alleged witness put it, according to almost everyone...
...This East European flavor has become so commonplace in the nation's cultural capital that it is difficult to convince the average New Yorkerthat the "housing crisis" is not a national phenomenon...
...Hempstone improved the paper's image as an impartial news organ...
...Ben isn't so negative about the Times," one Post reporter said...
...Yet, if people want to know the Reaganite view on Star Wars or tax reform or monetary policy, they needn't go further than Human Events or National Review...
...Almost everyone else said, and still says, he had pressed outrageous salary and other compensation demands...
...It's difficult for any new paper to escape this vicious circle, but the Times is making workmanlike progress...
...I don't know who their sources are, but they're getting a lot of stories no one else has," says Morton Kondracke, Washington bureau editor of News-week...
...At this writing, however, he is alive and well, and you, dear Spectator readers, are the first to read the story...
...I don't see any conservatives willing to put up that kind of money for a daily newspaper...
...Times reporter Mark Tapscott, according to Peters, "has done some of the best reporting on the space shuttle disaster I've seen...
...The Times generally supported Ronald Reagan, but functioned not as a mouthpiece for the Administration, but as a gadfly, prompting the White House in a bolder, more assertive direction...
...Finding a decent apartment in New York involves the kind of clandestine dealings that most people identify with the Soviet economy...
...Yeah, some people here read it," Blumenthal said...
...The problem, as one friend of Hempstone's put it, was that "if the Star gang couldn't make it without the moonie connection," folding in 1981 despite an attempted bailout by Time-Life Inc., "they certainly can't make it with the moonie connection...
...On April 24, ABC's "World News Tonight" reported that former White House aide Michael Deaver was still receiving a highly sensitive copy of Mr...
...But an editor concerned with demonstrating his independence from a controversial owner probably wouldn't do the things de Borchgrave has done...
...It's quite possible, though, that they simply aren't always aware of it, since the most important effects the Times has—giving government officials an alternative place to leak, stiffening Reagan's resolve, forcing certain stories onto the agenda—might easily be unseen by individual Post reporters and editors...
...It tells them where to look for things, what's important...
...The inter-view, then, offered new if biased evidence that Medvid was not, in fact, railroaded to the gulag...
...The Deaver case would indicate otherwise...
...Elzie Robinson is an 85-year-old former janitor who owns four buildings in Harlem...
...I'm mad at Arnaud de Borchgrave," the paper's flamboyant editor who co-wrote the best-selling novel The Spike after being spiked himself by Newsweek magazine...
...The statistics, however, tell a different story...
...Speaking in favor of landlords in New York, of course, is like speaking on behalf of polio...
...Pincus, meanwhile, has begun to catch up with William Broad at the New York Times, several reporters at the Washington Times, and the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, in reporting advances made in Star Wars research...
...McWilliams, meanwhile, was digging up witnesses in New Orleans, including the owner of a jewelry store and various harbor patrol officers, who disputed Shultz's account...
...Gary Hart told a friend, "I'm mad at Arnaud de Borchgrave...
...Judge Friedman told Robinson, who is black, that it made no difference—as long as people were in his building he was obligated to provide them with services...
...Did not the critics understand . . . that to kill innocent bystanders would cast him as a terrorist...
...Shortly after be-coming editor, de Borchgrave announced the paper would offer $1 million for information leading to the arrest, trial, and conviction of Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele...
...Most Post staffers deny the Times has had any substantial impact on them...
...The editorial still rankled...
...When the Korean preacher made his triumphant return home this year, he was accompanied by de Borchgrave himself, whom Moon referred to as "my editor...
...He is currently writing a book on rent control for the Cato and Manhattan Institutes...
...We have sources, whoever is in," says West...
...I'm addicted...
...Bradlee's exchange with Clark, how-ever, was probably an atavism...
...Reagan brooded about it as he hurried through his morning briefing on the after-math of the hijacking of the Achille Lauro...
...Goshko, for example, twice filed long stories which simply reiterated the line coming from the State Department, and George Shultz himself, maintaining that a) Medvid had said he wanted to return to the ship, and b) in any case, all avenues of appeal, now that Medvid was back in Soviet hands, had been exhausted...
...The difficulty is that while rent control produces losers, it also creates winners...
...Often, Times scoops are dismissed as simply being fed to the paper by a grateful Reagan Administration (as if no one leaking things to the Washington Post has an agenda...
...As a result, Times stories were more critical, more thorough, and more insightful...
...By the usual standards of news-papers," wrote Ellen Hume of the Wall Street Journal last December, "the Times has been a conspicuous failure...
...Our reporter probably didn't mention them because she checked the story out with her own sources," said ABC spokesman Elise Adde...
...the paper relied on copy from Associated Press and United Press International...
...Medvid is just one example of a broader dynamic...
...We're a newspaper...
...In its next phase the Times was piloted by Smith Hempstone, a long-time Washington newspaperman and former editorial editor of the defunct Washington Star...
...That's just what Reagan did, though, a few months after O'Leary's story...
...If Ronald Reagan again fails to avenge the death of a defenseless American, his constituents will want to know why they sent him back for a second term...
...Yes, it is read by Ronald Reagan, a fact that of itself gives the paper significance...
...The editor at the Times called the story too "parochial" and said he thought he remembered hearing New York's 43-year-old rent-control issue had been "settled...
...Several important Soviet assaults in Afghanistan and Angola were first reported in its pages...
...Forced to defend some-thing, they will accomplish the task by turning around and attacking some-thing else...
...Like the kid who sees himself deftly catching a foul ball as the manager shouts, "Sign him up," editorial writers share a secret dream...
...Putting everything aside for a week, I tried to rush the story into print...
...At about the same time, City Council Chairman Dave Clark found himself at the home of Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, mentioning to a friend that the Times had been whipping the Post on city government...
...Standard wisdom, though, has it that the upstart Times (circulation: 83,000 a year ago, according to one audit, and about 100,000 according to the paper's weekly figures for April) isn't read by many people outside the narrow ideological cave of Reaganism...
...Lots of people I know," says Matthews, "read the paper just for the arts and sports...
...All were turned away...
...Naturally, it has produced the nation's worst housing shortage...
...We'll keep writing good copy, covering things the others won't, doing the good analysis and reporting," says executive editor Woody West...
...De Borchgrave seems to relish the competition, yet the paper on the other side of town isn't an obsession...
...In-deed, the improvement of the Washing-ton Post may be one of the Times's most important achievements...
...But I do know the Washington Times had the story...
...ABC didn't cite a source, but the news had just broken that morning in a Times story by George Archibald...
...I was gathering stories for a book I am writing on New York rent control...
...As he dashed to a speech at a Sara Lee plant in Deerfield, Illinois, Mr...
...Whelan said he had refused to knuckle under to the moonies and was purged...
...There have been other factors, of course...
...But here was a story, I thought, that would finally show people the fruitless savagery of New York City's housing policies...
...Mayor Marion Barry...
...I was wrong...
...According to Time magazine's Hugh Sidey, it actually happened last fall to someone at the Washington Times: The editorial in the Washington Times hit him hard on that Thursday morning...
...George Archibald's discovery that Michael Deaver was receiving a copy of the President's daily schedule is just one example...
...If the Times can match and improve on the standard it set for itself with Medvid, it should have a bright future...
...Even reporters at the Washington bureau of the Wall Street Journal, hardly enthusiasts for the Washington Times, snickered that the story was becoming an embarrassment to the Post...
...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986 good or ill, the wall dividing the Times from the church is lower than it once was...
...During the raid this year on Libya, a front-page Times story said high intelligence officials told the paper Qaddafi had fled the country...
...All great newspapers," Mencken writes, "are ceaselessly querulous and...
...Then too, taking gambles is what you're sup-posed to do when you're an underdog...
...carrier in the Mediterranean...
...Still, Post readers are getting in-formation they didn't get previously...
...In 1983, Jeremiah O'Leary reported on page one that President Reagan had "already decided" not to reappoint Fed Chairman Paul Volcker when his term expired that summer...
...Circulation is rising by several hundred readers a week...
...Almost every day, the Times has something important you don't see elsewhere...
...Hiatt's article, though, came after some equally excellent reporting on the subject appeared in the Washington Times...
...If they want respectability," says editorial-page editor Cheshire, "I say they deserve it...
...But the Times thumped away...
...Early this year, for example, Post Metro editor Larry Kramer held a meeting in the news room to bawl out his staff for being beaten on such stories as the management woes of D.C...
...But no, things don't work that way...
...That purpose, the paper's top editors concede, is to build respectability for the Unification Church...
...Thus, while the moonies seem to have no interest in interfering with day-to-day running of the paper—for example, any news on Moon him-self is generally taken from the wire services—it's equally clear that they have a purpose more ambitious than simply starting up an alternative newspaper...
...One, led by Senators Robert Dole, Gordon Humphrey, and Jesse Helms, sought to subpoena Medvid to testify before the Senate, while demanding action from the Justice Department to investigate 'A more detailed comparison is made in a paper by Mr...
...And the Times's editorial-page editor William Cheshire, along with the staffer who drafted the editorial, had a journalistic home run...
...Last year he launched a fund in the paper's name to raise $14 million in aid for the contras in Nicaragua...
...Yet the Post continued dragging its feet, trying to ignore the story that the Times had claimed as its own...
...Yet it was displayed on page one, just as boldly as McWilliams's other breaks in the Medvid affair...
...A big, robust man, painfully slowed by age, he still spends all day every day tending his eighty-four apartments...
...To the extent the Times has any impact, it makes it easier for him to do some things he wanted to do anyway...
...Such stories have been the blessing Gregory A. Fossedal is media fellow at the Hoover Institution and a contributing editor of Harper's...
...Miss Hume's observation may have been plausible last Christmas—though even the New York Times noted months before that "the paper has created a niche for itself in the capital's crowded journalistic marketplace...
...Competition is an "invisible hand" because it's invisible, but it's still a hand...
...We're not some sort of reactor to the Post," he says...
...You'd think that this spectacular failure of municipal socialism would bring cries of outrage and a revolution for the free market...
...he would have done backflips, as ex-editor Whelan did, to avoid even the appearance that Moon had succeeded in buying sympathy...
...The story seemed to epitomize the brutal warfare that New York City is currently carrying out against private landlords...
...Hughes, "The Medvid Jump: A Comparison of Coverage in the Washington Post and the Washington Times," available from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, Menlo Park, California...
...Times public affairs officer Larry Chandler won't confirm or deny who the bids came from, but says "there have been offers...
...On March 3, 1986, New York City Housing Court Judge Lewis Friedman threw him in jail for twenty days for not providing adequate heat and hot water for people in his buildings...
...With Medvid back on his ship, these efforts became the story itself, and were played prominently on nightly TV news broadcasts...
...There are in fact whispersthat Moon's backers may slash the paper's budget and concentrate on the company's weekly magazine, Insight, which as a national publication wouldn't have to overcome the en-trenched local advertising monopoly faced by the Times...
...I seem to be feeding a lot of mouths over there...
...That's how you build a newspaper...
...Like Broad, Pincus retains his anti-defense bias...
...Forone thing, the New York Times, the Post's real competitor in terms of Washington influence, is becoming a great newspaper again...
...Then again, as Morton Kondracke observes, "the paper's ideology is one of its strengths...
...When the paper did deign to assign one of its own the beat was handed around like an unwanted foster child, moving on successive days from Charles Fishman to John Goshko to Mary Thornton to Dale Russakoff to Kathy Sawyer to John Mintz to Loretta Tofani...
...tist Church, Adam Clayton Powell's old ministry...
...His nationally syndicated column appears occasionally in the Washington Times...
...Stories on Medvid, from the first days of the crisis, were displayed prominently on page one of the Times, while they were given scanty headlines and buried on pages 8A, 16A, and even the back of the foreign section in the Post...
...Soon I was having nightmares that Robinson would die in jail before Icould tell anyone about it...
...About twenty-five minutes later, his orders were in the hands of F-14 fighter pilots on board a U.S...
...Bradlee doesn't even see the Times, according to some, does ac-cording to others...
...Evidently that's what the triumphalist Reagan Administration thought, but the seasoned de Borchgrave should have played the piece more skeptically...
...days after she named them in a page one article, the Post still didn't seem to know who they were, saying the Justice Department had refused to disclose their names...
...The "tenants" were actually squatters who moved into one of his buildings last December after it was damaged by fire...
...The paper's other problem is less tractable: the moonie connection, which exacerbates the already large problems one faces starting up a major metropolitan newspaper...
...It would be clearly implausible today...
...They buy papers to read about movies, arts, fashion, and the Times has recruited some of the best writers around: culturologists Richard Grenier and John Podhoretz, media critic Don Kowet, arts critic Jane Addams Allen, featurist Diana West, and gag writer S. J. Masty...
...Governmental news summaries, such as the Pentagon's widely read daily briefing, give testimony to the paper's influence, which is also echoed by television news and magazine editors...
...A close friend of mine recently "acquired" an Upper West Side apartment by paying $7,000 in "key money" to the previous tenant...
...Reagan," read the headline...
...In fact, they have little to do with who gets "more scoops," though these build the paper's standing among elites...
...But they need to tone it down a littlein the writing, and to do some reporting on things that might not seem as important to them...
...First published in 1982, the Washington Times was started by several Korean businessmen who belong to the Unification Church run by the controversial Sun Myung Moon...
...While vacancy rates in Dallas and Houston approach 15-20 percent, New York has lost 300,000 units to abandonment over the past ten years—some of them in the most beautiful and durable housing ever built in America...
...Most people buy newspapers to read about things like the mighty Boston Celtics—and the sports section of the Times ranks among AP's Top 10...
...Neither agent would talk with McWilliams at first, but eventually one, Ernest Spurlock, did...
...In 1982, for example, more established publications such as National Review and the Wall Street Journal editorial page wouldn't publish or cover arguments for a strategic defense shield against nuclear weapons...
...At times, it should be noted, the Times's appetite for the scoop back-fires...
...Last summer, Hiatt published one of the first and earliest stories in the major press noting the growth of the Military-Congressional Complex, the spider web of bureaucracies and regulations that was built to minimize Pentagon waste but is now, arguably, a chief cause of it...
...On Park Avenue the price can go as high as $100,000...
...So far, says Chris Matthews of Tip O'Neill's staff, "they've balanced pretty well" the tradeoff between being too bland (the Washington Star) and too ideological (the present Washington Times, on occasion...
...Unfortunately, advertisers, in turn, place ads based on a paper's circulation...
...I'm sure the issue presented itself in his mind as a moonie thing," says National Review publisher William Rusher, a member of the paper's advisory board who remains a friend of Whelan...
...State's bungling...
...Many people with no connection to the Washington Times or the Unification Church felt Moon was treated unfairly...
...Although U.S...
...But the mere fact that people like Broder and Bradlee were willing to discuss the Times suggests it has had some effect on them.' 'Even Mary McCrory, a bete noire of Reaganites in Washington for her sharp at-tacks on the Administration written in a snappy Pat Buchanan prose style, says she sees the Times...
...Reagan approved a plan to intercept some of the Achille Lauro pirates as they fled to Italy...
...Editors at the Times that we talked to exude a quiet confidence...
...Revenues are up by 51 percent in 1986 over 1985 levels, though from such a tiny base it's hard to call this rise significant...
...Early stories in the Post, by contrast, weren't even done by Post reporters...
...The reason lies in the paper's founding...
...The News editor said she had been instructed to concentrate on "movie-star stuff...
...The Times has become a fun paper under Ronald Reagan...
...Perhaps the rockiest bump came in 1984, when editor and publisher James Whelan 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986 was fired by the paper's management...
...The Deaver case would indicate otherwise...
...The Times also devoted resources and energy to the story, sending a reporter, Rita McWilliams, down to New Orleans on the first day of Medvid's jump and letting her pursue the story for weeks, with help from more senior reporters such as Jeremiah O'Leary in Washington...
...Nor is the paper's importance limited to political news junkies, people who, as an aide to Congressman Steve Solarz told a Republican counterpart recently, "have to read the Times," because "we have to keep track of what you guys are up to...
...And who ever said the larger, more established Post doesn't make mistakes...
...For example, the paper has given superior coverage to various rising-star Democratic governors around the country...
...The two chatted affably, for example,at this spring's White House correspondents' dinner...
...Bradlee told us he didn't swear, but when asked if the rest of the story was true, he grumbled and hung up the phone...
...Reporting like this has forced the Post to compete, at least grudgingly...
...The paper was fair, and accurate, but had no focus, nothing you had to know and couldn't get from one of a dozen other dailies...
...They've been way ahead on Afghanistan," Kondracke says...
...The paper, Washington Monthly editor Charles Peters observes, "has been beating the Post consistently" at some important stories...
...While cities like Philadelphia and Chicago deal with normal housing vacancy rates of 6-9 percent, New York's stands at 2 percent and is estimated at minus 2 percent in mid-Manhattan (meaning that 2 per-cent is living in illegal housing...
...William Tucker MOSCOW ON THE HUDSON What would Mia Farrow do without rent control...
...He's created another paper that you have to read to keep up in Washington...
...Reagan's daily schedule...
...But contrary to many reports, the paper is not "owned" or "run" by the church, or by Moon...
...If the paper merely provided some ideological balance to Washington, it would be a good thing...
...A few days later McCrory called us back with this addition: "You know, I forgot to say that I read John McKelway there regularly...
...He strode onto his waiting helicopter...
...The paper still re-quires an annual subsidy of more than $30 million...
...Archibald also broke the news, this spring, that the White House had attempted to stymie a report by the General Accounting Office on the acid rain controversy, another smoking gun with Deaver's fingerprints...
...It's been hard to miss, for example, the general improvement on defense issues coming from such Post reporters as Fred Hiatt and Walter Pincus...
...Former National Security Adviser Richard Allen says the paper's steady advocacy of a strategic defense helped convince the President, in 1983, to act on his long-held instincts and launch research on a "star wars" shield...
...For another, Reagan has transformed the national agenda, compelling at least some changes in influential journals...
...I look to see if they're saying anything about me," she says wryly, adding, accurately, that usually the Times is saying something about Mary McCrory...
...And actually, despite the talk, we just don't get that many leaks from the Administration...
...Private developers no longer even think of building rentals in New York...
...I stumbled onto Elzie Robinson's story last March while attending a meeting of the Harlem Taxpayers and Property Owners' Association in the recreation room of the Abyssinia BapWilliam Tucker is The American Spectator's New York correspondent...
...And such political reporters as Tapscott and Ralph Hallow have tracked more carefully than their Post counterparts the positioning of various 1988 candidates...
...The other magazines said it "wasn't quite right for them...
...Hempstone had been Whelan's right hand, and chief recruiter of such former fixtures in the Star's firmament as Anne Crutcher, editorial-page editor at the Times until her death in 1983, and Diana McClellan, the "Ear" on Washington society at the Star, then the Post, and then the Times...
...Even if Medvid's case was indeed "closed," as a Goshko story clearly suggested midway through the crisis, only readers of the Times were kept up to date on the efforts of various Medvid sympathizers to offer him a final chance at freedom...
...As editor, Hempstone sought to cast the Times along the lines of the old Star, covering essentially the same news as the Post but with more vigor, less bias...
...The best muckraking is generally done by the opposition, from the Post's coverage of Watergate to William Safire's chronicling of the confusions of Jimmy Carter...
...The Times only pretends to live in New York...
...Post reporters say that, if anything, Bradlee has mellowed to the prospect of competing with his old rival de Borchgrave...
...The other took the form of lawsuits, filed on Medvid's behalf, by Ukrainian-American groups...
...Not until the crisis was more than a week old did one of these bylines appear twice...
...But at least both stories were carefully qualified...
Vol. 19 • July 1986 • No. 7
