Stop Dissing the Washington Times!
Aizenmann, Nurith C.
Stop Dissing The Washington Times! It's not "that Moonie paper" anymore BY NURITH C. AIZENMAN IN 1982, WHEN THE REVEREND SUN Myung Moon launched The Washington Times as a conservative...
...Research assistance provided by Sherri Eisenberg...
...Bill Gertz, who happens to be among the few Unification Church members still on the news staff, is one of the paper’s best weapons...
...Readers who might have been better served by learning that Clinton had just announced a plan to give families a $1500 tax credit for the first two years of college had to flip to page four for that news...
...Larson’s subsequent digging was instrumental in uncovering fatal mismangement at the FAA...
...In its zeal to publish any sensational material on its enemies, the Times often splashes inflammatory gossip across its front page without bothering to check if there is any evidence to support it...
...As a result, although it has only one overseas bureau (in Japan), the paper is an outstanding source of international news...
...That’s not the only time the Times has proved willing to turn the spotlight on conservatives...
...In its haste, the INS failed to do thorough criminal background checks on hundreds of thousands of applicants...
...The paper displayed its sensitivity to religion in 1993, when one of its reporters wrote that evangelicals were “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command...
...Hallow’s story-and the multitude of letters contesting it that followed-made for a highly entertaining read...
...The Times lobby is sculpted out of marble and trimmed in bronze...
...At the beginning, the other papers didn’t know who any of the [newly empowered] Republican members were,” explains congressional bureau chief Nancy Roman...
...When former U.S...
...Take a recent piece by Rowan Scarborough in which he described the oddball views of a sexual harassment consultant employed by the military, but never bothered to find out the opinions of the other six advisers with whom she served, or the likelihood that her recommendations would be taken seriously-let alone implemented...
...And stories that do not aspire to it should be clearly labeled as opinion pieces...
...But it does mean that it’s reporters must strive for balance, even at the risk of producing bland prose...
...Culture page editor Julia Duin was amazed when a crucial fact in a new abortion study that she had reported on was overlooked by the Post...
...Yes,” she replied...
...Naturally the Times ran this story on its front page...
...It’s the journalistic equivalent of Tourette’s Syndrome...
...The consequence of this was highlighted during the last election, when the Times’s repeated assertions that Dole was closing in on Clinton’s lead were dismissed by other media as wishful reporting...
...Where else could you get the anti-feminist take on the Beijing Women’s Conference...
...It turned out that Aldrich‘s source on the trysts was none other than conservative writer David Brock, who was merely passing on a rumor...
...But all of Moon’s millions could not buy the one thing he and his staff wanted most: respect...
...Nor did de Borchgrave’s appearance at a “welcome home party”for Moon upon his release do much to erase the Moonie stigma...
...Such spectacular blunders are hardly surprising when one considers the attitude of the man leading the Tintes, Editor-in-Chief Wesley Pruden...
...A Times reporter had asked Dukakis’s sister-in-law whether he had ever seen a psychiatrist...
...Federal investigations followed...
...Reporters like Nancy Roman, Laurie Kellman, Brian Bloniquist and Michael Myers on the Hill, and Paul Bedard and Warren Strobe1 at the White House generally get high marks from the people they cover for striving to give all sides a fair shake...
...No snide reference is too gratuitous, no insult too far below the belt...
...Many suspected that Moon would try to use the Times as a propaganda tool in his quest to establish a world-wide theocracy...
...The Bad News But if Hallow demonstrates the benefits of the Times’s conservative tilt, he also typifies its drawbacks...
...You might even consider subscribing to his paper...
...Last June the Times struck again with this page one eye-catcher: “CLINTON’S WEE HOURS DASH TO A ROMANTIC TRYST’ The accompanying story reported the allegations made by former FBI agent Gary Aldrich in his book Unlimited Access...
...Several weeks later, “Talking It Over” by Hillary Clinton made its Times debut, a few pages away from the section which runs a column penned by-guess who-the former Tip O’Neil aide, Chris Matthews...
...Pulitzer Prize winners and ace reporters from the recently defunct Washington Star were lured to the Times with can’t-refuse salary offers...
...Over $20 million was spent to convert an old warehouse on the edge of town into a state-of-the-art printing facility and gleaming headquarters...
...The real problem is the Times’s tendency to allow its conservative tilt-otherwise a positive attribute-to periodically contaminate its news coverage...
...Attorney Eric Holder finally managed to get a witness intimidator sentenced to life in prison the Times broadcast the story on the front page...
...King said he asked her...
...Instead, the Times was only too happy to trumpet a story charging that a third trooper, who had risen to Clinton’s defense, had a pattern of “reckless disregard for the truth...
...Just the other month Pruden wrote that during Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s visit to China after the death of Deng Xiaoping, Albright “might have been tempted...
...At a party at socialite True Davis’ home,” the Post recounted, “a Times reporter who is a Church member was asked to leave...
...While the Moonies exercised influence in the past, that's no longer the case...
...Most damaging of all, plenty of D.C...
...There’s unique information that they get that you won’t find anywhere else...
...Apart from insulting large segments of American society, this kmd of social liberalism often blinds the Post to significant news-like the rise in teen abstinence programs, on which Times reporter Cheryl Wetzstein has done extensive reporting...
...It was Seper who broke the news that numerous documents, including Whitewater files, were removed from Vincent Foster’s office by White House officials a few hours after his suicide...
...That year, circulation went up by 9 percent...
...that is a story,” says Duin...
...And this philosophy of journalism would be fine if the Times were a magazine, which has the freedom to identify itself with a particular philosophy-as this publication has done-and print articles whose purpose is to argue that point of view...
...Henry Hyde’s legal troubles...
...Every day the Times features a “Regional Briefing” page devoted to a particular area of the world...
...Pruden says he realized the error of his father’s racist views after covering the civil rights movement as a reporter in the early sixties...
...Gertz has broken so many stories based on classified information that investigations into the leaks have been launched at both the Defense and State Departments...
...Are you a Moonie...
...Just a few weeks ago, he revealed that in a heated meeting with 32 conservative activists, Newt Gingrich had been assailed for backmg away from his commitment to tax cuts...
...In contrast to Pruden’s emphasis on national politics, de Borchgrave’s passion was foreign affairs...
...We’re happy to cede that ground to the Post,” says Assistant Managing Editor Francis Coombs...
...Nevertheless, during his tenure from 1985 to 1991, de Borchgrave finally began getting the paper some positive attention...
...refuses even to vote, Pruden parades his political views before readers in a biting column runs on page four of his paper...
...The “Washington Daybook” page lists not just the daily activities of Congress and government agencies, but the time and place of practically every briefing, lecture or conference in the area...
...It’s going to jump up and give us a big bite one day...
...Part of the problem was that he seemed content with the paper’s identity as an active participant in the partisan fray...
...Richardson’s piece completely missed the point: the Forest Service was finally getting rid of old-line bureaucrats who had sold out to the timber industry...
...Clinton and Matthews are hardly a representative sample of Times writers...
...Readers buying the paper on April 4, for instance, would have been treated to a selection of articles analyzing the political situation in Cambodia, and describing how government officials are stealing priceless treasures from the ruins of Angkor Wit...
...However, his upbringing could hardly have been more different...
...He would then step out of his office onto a long balcony overlooking the newsroom, call out to the intended recipients below, and send the clips floating down to them...
...The real problem is the Times's tendency to allow its conservative tilt to periodically contaminate its news coverage...
...DUKAKIS KIN HINTS AT SESSIONS,” screamed the headline...
...Its voluminous commentary and editorial sections are filled with the rantings of nutty right-wingers who claim to represent the silent majority...
...An example was the story by Valerie Richardson which ran under the headline “2 deputy Forest Service chiefs forced to retire: Many on inside say Clinton has politicized agency...
...Another reason for the Times’s success with minority groups may be its self-conscious effort to focus on stories that will resonate with the average Joe...
...Times staffers still cringe over a story the paper ran in 1988 on then-presidential candidate Michael Dukahs...
...Larson was also the first to do extensive reporting on former Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary’s expensive appetite for overseas travels...
...Brian Blomquist is on the case...
...Eight crystal chandeliers illuminate the “Arbor Ballroom” and a private dining room down the hall is furnished in dark shades of burgundy and mauve...
...According to the study, black women were three times more likely than whites to have abortions...
...Over the years, a number of reporters have resigned over such episodes of “Prudenizing...
...Not only does the issue get almost daily play in the paper’s editorial pages, but its front page is routinely crammed with stories darkly warning of a feminist conspiracy to undermine our military preparedness, without providing convincing evidence...
...And he clearly does not hold any of those opinions today...
...We said ...people are gonna care about this...
...The Times was left out of more than social events...
...Twice a week Pruden leaps into the partisan muck to throw some verbal mud at his favorite targets: homosexuals, “radical” feminists, and worst of all, the Clintons-or “Bonnie and Clod” as he often refers to them...
...Was the Metro crash last spring an unavoidable accident...
...Finally, several days later, the Post was forced to report on what had by then become the week‘s biggest story...
...Not quite...
...But a growing number of fans, many of them liberals, have stumbled upon a useful little secret: The WashiFzgton Ewes has become a must-read...
...about airplanes falling out of the sky from you guys...
...There's unique information that they get that you won't find anywhere else...
...Because of the paper’s victims’ rights orientation it had immediately appreciated the importance of the story...
...When Congress temporarily halted funding for the Contras, de Borchgrave ran a front page editorial announcing the creation of a Times sponsored “Nicaraguan Freedom Fund” - to which the paper’s then publisher Bo Hi Pak promptly contributed $100,000...
...affairs may be one reason for its suprising popularity among the city’s African American residents...
...On the surface, the Times’s management would seem to support these efforts-after all, they’re the ones doing the hiring...
...But he has not mellowed in other respects...
...A former Belgian count who had p e d notoriety as a swash-buckling war correspondent for Newmeek, de Borchgrave lent a touch of sophistication to the paper...
...But when Rep...
...Pruden’s father, the Reverend Wesley Pruden Sr., was a segregationist Baptist preacher and a founding member of a white supremacist organization called the “Capital Citizens Council...
...Has Washington’s notorious “Loony Moonie Rag” finally (gasp...
...A Good Old Fashioned Value Admittedly, the Times’s concept of mainstream American values is well to the right of what many of us believe them to be...
...To be sure, many Times’ reporters do subscribe to this traditional-some would say naive-journalism school view...
...Like the paper’s pathological fixation with the feminization of the American military...
...Despite his bad habit of ringing false alarms, this little boy is worth listening to...
...its newsroom boasts 18-foot cathedral ceilings and a wall of windows overlooking the forested hills of the National Arboretum...
...And Larson says that federal employees who are normally leery of talking to the press open up when they realize that, until recently, she was one of them...
...De Borchgrave vehemently denied both the specific accusations and the general clain that the Times did not enjoy total editorial independence...
...But, the results of his editing style have provided plenty of ammunition to those who accuse the Times of being a partisan, unreliable news source...
...Then there was the article in which Jerry Seper breathlessly announced the FBI’s confirmation that it had discovered Hillary Clinton’s fingerprints on the long-lost Rose Law Firm billing records which had mysteriously re-appeared in the White House...
...He’d have an article from Der Spiegel clipped to a yellow memo, and it would say ‘why have we missed this fact...
...I don’t want to hear any more...
...The articles in the world section are almost entirely from wire services like the Associated Press, Reuters, Scripps-Howard, Cox, Copley, and Knight-hdder, as well as foreign newspapers, like Britain’s The Guardian and The Fivancial Times...
...Gertz is legendary among national security reporters for the quality of his sources...
...They are like a big old battleship,” explains Shiner, “and we are like a PT boat...
...Cut to Hilton Head, South Carolina, IS years later, where the invitation-only “Renaissance Weekend” for movers and shakers is in full swing...
...And two years later, Cheshire and four of his deputies quit after alleging that, at the behest of the owners, de Borchgrave had pressured them to re-write an editorial that was critical of South Korea’s president...
...But he did not help his cause by personally authoring an editorial calling for a presidential pardon of Moon-who was in prison for tax evasion...
...It was arguably one of the best days of his presidency, and it landed him on the front pages of both The New York Tinzes and The Post, But The Washington Times’s page 15 story didn’t even mention the cheering crowds until the twelfth paragraph...
...Every day, it seems, Seper comes up with some new and scandalous revelation about the Clintons...
...And on certain topics, the Times’s coverage verges on the obsessive...
...to make nice and dab at an imaginary tear between suppressed giggles (as Bill Clinton did at Ron Brown’s funeral...
...For those who wonder what the other guys are up to, the Tiriies even provides a side-by-side comparison of its own headlines with those of the Post and The New York Times...
...Among her finds: memos detailing problems with the agency such as its extremely haphazard approach to preventing hazardous materials from being placed on aircraft, and the frank assesment of FAA employees before the crash that “we have given [the hazardous materials] program short shaft...
...Waning Moon Pruden maintains that his “Prudenizing” has always been motivated by a desire for clarity, not ideological slant...
...Media critic Don Kowet left in 1992, complaining that his profile of Bob Woodward had been re-written as an unmitigated attack piece...
...Marines had taken part in a neighborhood raid to protect the American embassy in Albania, and that newly released records reveal that Anierican diplomats had grossly misjudged de Gaulle’s staying power in the 1950s...
...Moon was-and still is-widely regarded as a tax-evading cult leader, his Unification Church a brain-washing arm of the Korean CIA...
...From the start, Washington’s elite made its contempt for Moon’s enterprise abundantly clear...
...Ultimately it’s the reader who suffers: You don’t have to agree with these kinds of developments to want to be aware of them...
...The Post buried it on page BS, where, as this magazine’s Charles Peters observed at the time, “there was little danger it would be noticed by the criminals to whom Holder was trying to send a message...
...Just two years after its founding, the paper was rocked by the resignation of its first Editor-in-Chief James Whelan amid charges of improper influence by executives at News World Communications, the Times’s parent company which is the for-profit media arm of the Unification Church‘s business empire...
...Therein lies the second attraction of the Times...
...Hyde, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, had served on the board of directors of a failed S&L, whose bailout cost taxpayers $67 million...
...Larson is a newcomer to journalism...
...Like the man he loves to hate, Pruden also hails from Arkansas...
...The following year Editorial page editor William Cheshire wrote a memo to then Editor-in-Chief Arnaud de Borchgrave complaining that “we consistently doctor wire service copy so as to remove ‘objectionable’ references to the Church and Rev...
...A lot of things turn out not to be true.’’ he says...
...This section of the paper is hardly essential reading-if you’re looking for a good articulation of the conservative view you can just as easily turn to Robert Novak, Charles Krautthammer, James Glassman and George Will in the Post...
...News You Can Use Josette Shiner says her message to her staff is “if you’re in a room with a hundred other reporters, you’re probably in the wrong place...
...The Post has a lot to learn from reporters like Duin...
...Dan Burton-who, to the Times’s delight, is conducting a congressional investigation of White House fundraising-was suddenly hit with improper fund-raising charges of his own, the Times hid the story on the bottom of page four...
...residents still dismiss the Times as “that Moonie paper...
...Though its executives claim they are closing the gap, the paper continues to be a money pit...
...Pruden seems poised to bring the Times into a new era...
...The Post, to be sure, does some very good international reporting...
...Conservative story selection” at the Times also often translates into playing up any hint of dirt on the Clintons, while burying the bad news on anyone who is advancing one of the paper’s favorite causes...
...The Times put the story on page one...
...Hallow has switched back and forth between the paper’s editorial and news pages, and it shows...
...A study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs found that over a IO-month period from 1993 to 1994, the Times printed nearly 70 percent of its Whitewater stories on the front page...
...He has been known to interrupt Republicans he is interviewing with statements like, “Come on, don’t you know if you want to get somewhere with this WE have to...
...Thus freed of what Josette Shiner calls “the burden of having to be all things to all people,” the Times can deploy its limited resources on the gaps in news coverage left by its bigger competitors...
...Although Roman admits that the other papers have closed in on the Times’s advantage since then, the paper remains the best place to read about internal Republican politics because its reporters are so plugged in to party sources...
...As early as 1986, reporter George Archibald was credited with uncovering the revolving-door lobbying activities of Reagan adviser Michael Deaver...
...I don’t talk to Moonies,” retorted His Majesty...
...Yet the major papers routinely ignore them...
...They’re wrong...
...Though Seper is not the only reporter advancing the media’s Whitewater coverage, he is widely recognized as leading the charge...
...But since the Times had been covering them all along, “we not only knew them, but we were familiar with their ideas, the bills they had put forward and the legislation they favored...
...None of them appeared in The Post-even though the Pust presumably had access to many of them...
...Among the neglected waters probed by the Times is the federal agency beat covered by Ruth Larson...
...This doesn’t mean the paper shouldn’t explore topics that are ignored by other media, or ensure that opinions dismissed elsewhere are given their due in its pages...
...The Post devoted one article to it, then ignored the story for the next three-and-a-half years-even as it became apparent that the other directors were preparing to let Hyde opt out of paying his share of their impending $850,000 settlement with the government...
...The result was a monument to Moon’s eccentricity as much as to his wealth...
...media watcher Jack Shafer observes, the Times “has this weird compulsion to dip itself in manure every couple years...
...A perfect example was his March 19 story, headlined “Rules Committee chief calls for impeachment preparations,” about the fact that two members of the House committee were studying impeachment procedures “in case there is a 'smoking gun’ in the fund-raising inquiries involving Clinton and Gore.’’ Apart from the pseudonews aspect of the piece-no actual impeachment proceedings are underway-the article did not include a single quote from the Democratic perspective, or even a stock denial of wrong-doing by the Administration...
...Deaver was eventually convicted of perjury...
...says Hallow...
...But he is the first to admit to having a clear point of view, and it comes across in his writing...
...And if you’re looking for any positive news about Clinton, don’t even bother checking the Times...
...At another party, Larry King boasted to the Post, Kng was approached by “an attractive young lady” who turned out to be a Times reporter seelung an interview...
...The Tzmes’s “PT boat strategy” has also involved amassing a small, but potent, arsenal of investigative reporters and deploying them in surgical strikes against more traditional targets-like the White House and the Pentagon...
...And though reporters still scratch their heads over the occasional pep talks Moon gives them, there have been no major accusations of Moonie meddling in recent memory...
...But on any given day, the Times carries a wealth of stories you won’t find elsewhere...
...While he hesitates to criticize de Borchgrave, Pruden maintains that he would not engage in such stunts today...
...About 22 percent of Times readers are black- roughly equal to their proportion in the area’s population...
...Not only because it occasionally breaks a really big story, but because the Times now offers a daily menu of straight, ground-breaking, essential news, often on subjects which other outlets give short shrift...
...Hallow maintains that this is just an interviewing technique, one he says he also uses with Democrats...
...s stated goal is for the Tinles “to be a good newspaper, to faithfully report the news...
...But the editors’ oft-repeated assertion that “story selection” is the only place the Times’s bias is reflected is not as innocuous as it sounds...
...Prior to joining the Times, she spent a decade as an engineering officer in the Air Force...
...We used to joke that if [the Times] ever went under, the building would make one hell of a whorehouse,” recalls former Assistant Managing Editor Tom Diaz...
...Gary Ruskin of the Congressional Accountability Project was astonished: ‘‘I mean, here’s the chairman of one of Congress’s most powerful committees being sued by his own government, and then getting a sweetheart deal...
...While the Moonies may occasionally have exercised questionable influence in the past, that’s no longer the case...
...As Managing Editor of the Times, Pruden was notorious for changing reportes’ copy to reflect his conservative view...
...I don’t have any particular apologies to make about putting the Aldrich story on the front...
...Regardless of where you come down on these issues, the fact remains that they are of vital interest to many Americans...
...And it was Larson who broke the news that the INS’S “Citizenship USA” initiative to speed up naturalizations may have been motivated by the administration’s desire to add new Democrats to the voting rolls...
...And he often comes close to achieving it...
...They would have learned that an American sailor had been arrested in Japan on rape charges, that US...
...Thus, unlike richer papers, which scoff at the notion of printing stories by outside reporters, the Times makes liberal use of wire copy...
...As Slate deputy editor, and long-time D.C...
...The Times’s scrappy attitude towards D.C...
...This “lunship with whistleblowers” has paid off...
...Recognizing that it cannot compete with the vast news gathering resources of larger dailies, the Times does not even attempt to be the paper of record...
...You can't not read the Times if you're working in government and politics in Washington," says one White House official...
...Like the little boy who cried wolf, when the Ernes has something to shout about, it’s easy for people to cover their ears...
...And the only place really covering it [other than the Chicago Tribme,] was The Washington Times...
...Like an earnest concierge, the Tinies is also chockfull of practical data...
...Dawn Ceol, daughter of conservative guru Paul Weyrich, quit in 1991 after charging Pruden had changed her article on the Clarence Thomas hearings to portray Anita Hd1 as a “fantasizer...
...But the fable contains a lesson for the rest of us as well...
...His supervisor’s response to such concerns...
...Over the course of its short life span, the Times has cost its owners over a billion dollars...
...This is a shame, because Pruden and his fellow editors have succeeded in bringing the Times such a long way from the days when rumors of Moon’s influence still swirled...
...But the Times’s calls itself a newspaper...
...The familiarity and insight into government that she gained during that time has enabled her to scoop more experienced reporters...
...Talk radio and TV news programs also picked it up, and the airwaves soon buzzed with debate over whether sexual discrimination laws had gone too far...
...I felt the heat, and I wasn’t even on the line...
...The Times reveals that the train operator’s repeated requests for permission to switch from computerized to manual controls were rebuffed by his bullying boss...
...Whether or not you agree with abortion...
...And this past February, Seper was the first to report that Webster Hubbell had been paid almost $325,000 in alleged “hush money” by Clinton supporters after he resigned from the Justice Department to face criminal charges-and pledged his full cooperation to independent counsel Kenneth Starr...
...Nevertheless the Times's conservative perspective in one of its most valuable features...
...It's not "that Moonie paper" anymore BY NURITH C. AIZENMAN IN 1982, WHEN THE REVEREND SUN Myung Moon launched The Washington Times as a conservative alternative to The Washington Post, he spared no expense to establish his fledgling paper as a serious contender...
...Times Managing Editor Josette Shiner, a long-time member of the Unification Church-though she’s recently switched to an Episcopal church in Virginia-is rubbing elbows with none other than Hillary Clinton...
...Often the departure point from which its reporters approach stories sets them hunting in the wrong direction...
...Similarly, the Times made no mention of the discovery (reported in other major papers) that two of the troopers who had accused Clinton of sexual improprieties had been involved in an auto insurance scam several years earlier...
...After Hyde and his fellow directors were sued by the government for gross negligence, the Times began ongoing coverage of the case...
...While Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr...
...I hate [writing] ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ because it’s boring and formulaic...
...It’s possible, but I doubt it,” she answered...
...And the Times’s circulation of 100,92S is still a mere one-eighth of the Post‘s...
...A committed cold warrior, his beliefs coincided with those of both Moon and President Reagan-who declared the Times to be his “favorite newspaped’ But whle this fact, and the Times’s increasing knack for breaking big stories, earned it admiration, de Borchgrave never managed to make the Ernes entirely respectable...
...Only afterwards did the other papers marvel at the accuracy of John Zogby, the pollster heavily cited by the Times and ignored by everyone else...
...At the 1995 White House Correspondents’ dinner, President Clinton had the dubious pleasure of presenting Seper with the prestigious Barnet Nover Memorial Award for investigative reporting in front of an alternately shocked and amused crowd of 2,100 journalists and celebrities...
...But by allowing the paper’s conservative editorial stance to spill over into its news gathering, Pruden is undermining the very credibility he and his staff have worked so hard to build...
...Said Matthews, “We work hard enough responding to legitimate press inquires...
...I rather like the idea of trying to get in what I think is really important...
...Seper revealed some of the ‘0 Boys not-so-good racist activities-like barring blacks from the Roundup and selling “nigger hunting licenses...
...Horrified, 55 Times reporters signed a petition in protest...
...A junior-college-educated ex-cop from Los Angeles, Seper is famous around the newsroom for his hostile interviewing technique...
...I would sweat just listening to him talk to people on the phone,” says former Times reporter Major Garrett...
...B lot of us think we’re going to have Pan Am 103 [with hazardous materials],” one divison manager had warned...
...While the paper is resigned to the fact that it cannot cover the waterfront with its own people, it is nevertheless committed to the old-fashioned mission of providing its readers with as much hard news and useful information as possible...
...joined The Media Establishment...
...Although it’s fair to say that Seper is obsessed with anti-Clinton stories, he has not resisted right-wing targetslike the annual “Good o’ Boys Roundup” in Tennessee, attended by hundreds of federal, state, and local law enforcement officials...
...Times editors justify such decisions by arguing that they have no desire to produce a pale imitation of The Washiizgton Post...
...Most recently, the Times has trounced the competition with its coverage of Republican Rep...
...This progression of events was no accident, argues Editor-in-Chief Wesley Pruden: “We want to be a mirror to reflect mainstream American views back to Washington...
...But the paper is in greater danger of resembling The Natioiial Enquirer...
...Every morning he would clip out articles from a dozen or so newspapers and attach his commentary on over-sized yellow index cards...
...These tend to be the ones who were drawn to the paper not for its conservative angle, but because of the incredible opportunity it offers young, talented journalists...
...Mayor Marion Barry really fulfilling his promise to fill every pothole within 72 hours of its being reported...
...Elusive though it may be, objectivity is still the goal...
...The Times became an invaluable tool for anyone who wanted to know what the Republican leadership was thinking...
...The reporters called it “yellow rain...
...People are gonna talk about this,” recalls Josette Shiner...
...Soon after the crash of ValuJet Flight 592 one of Larson’s sources in the Federal Aviation Administration mentioned to her that the accident, which had been caused by the mishandling of dangerous oxygen-generating cannisters in the plane’s cargo hold, had been “bound to happen” and that, somewhere, there were documents to prove it...
...All of these stories were interesting...
...An extensive list of the expected guests on all the major talk shows is also provided...
...That nearly a third of the original staff were followers of Moon only heightened this impression...
...Seper waited until the seventeenth paragraph of his story to mention the crucial fact that none of the other fingerprints found on the document belonged to any of the people Republicans had accused of removing files from Vince Foster’s office...
...Who but the Times would run excerpts from a different local sermon every Monday...
...Back in September, Times editors noticed a short wire story about Johnathan Prevette, the six-year-old boy who had kissed a classmate in school and gotten suspended for “sexual harassment...
...We’ll use the wires to cover [that story...
...Chris Matthews, an aide to then-Speaker of the House Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, announced that Times reporters would be ignored by the Speaker’s office...
...And the fact would be in paragraph seventeen-in German...
...At one point in their conversation, as Shiner describes it, “Hillary said to me ‘Hey-I want you to think about running my column...
...As such, its primary obligation is to report the news in as fair and unbiased a fashion as possible...
...The Times emphasis on stories that appeal to conservatives also makes it an excellent place to pick up news of what White House spokesman Mike McCurry calls “the entrails of the conservative movement...
...During his trip to Northern Ireland in December 1995, Clinton’s message of peace and reconciliation was greeted with thunderous cheers by a joyous crowd of over 100,000 Catholics and Protestants...
...This, almost populist, sensibility often leads the Times to highlight stories which fly under the radar of more highbrow publications...
...You can’t not read the Times if you’re workmg in government and politics in Washington,” says one White House official...
...While there’s nothing wrong with striving to do original work, the Post could clexly learn from the Times’s wilhgness to run stories not written by its own people in order to ensure that its readers get the news they need...
...We had a competitive edge...
...The Post put it on page one above the fold...
...Having been in the belly of the beast for 10 years helps,’’ says Larson...
...They just have to soil themselves every so often...
...In practice, plenty of reporters for “mainstream” papers take the same approach-though not as many would be as forthright as Hallow in admitting to it...
...If it’s Tuesday, the news is on the Americas, if it’s Wednesday, it’s on the Middle East...
...One former reporter remembers his astonishment when, at his job interview, de Borchgrave asked point-blank: “SO who did you vote for in the last election...
...Although, McCurry does not recommend the Times for those seeking “factual reporting on the news of the day,” he concedes that the Times “chronicles the ups and downs and sideways and byways of the movement better than any other newspaper I knod Public appreciation of the Times shot up significantly after the Republicans took over the House in 1994...
...You Sank My Battleship To begin with, the Times has capitalized on the advantages of its underdog status...
...What other paper would devote its entire second page to the cultural wars over sex, religion, and governmentevery day...
...But the Tzmes most celebrated hitter is probably Jerry Seper...
...We get to zip around and go where the opportunities are...
...Although the administration complains that his pieces often lack context, he is the envy of his competitors...
...The other major papers, in contrast, ran less than a third of their Whitewater copy on page one...
...Ralph Hallow is among the bestconnected...
...recalls Josette Shiner...
...The paper’s news-you-can-use attitude also informs its metro coverage: Is D.C...
Vol. 29 • May 1997 • No. 5
