Stop dissing the Washington Times! It's not just 'that Moonie paper' anymore - Sun Myung Moon's newspaper is not influenced by the Universal Church very much today - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, May, 1997 by Nurith C. Aizenman

IN I982, 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. 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 result was a monument to Moon's eccentricity as much as to his wealth. The Times lobby is sculpted out of marble and trimmed in bronze; its newsroom boasts 18-foot cathedral ceilings and a wall of windows overlooking the forested hills of the National Arboretum. Eight crystal chandeliers illuminate the "Arbor Ballroom" and a private dining room down the hall is furnished in dark shades of burgundy and mauve. "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.

But all of Moon's millions could not buy the one thing he and his staff wanted most: respect. Moon was--and still is--widely regarded as a tax-evading cult leader, his Unification Church a brain-washing arm of the Korean CIA. Many suspected that Moon would try to use the Times as a propaganda tool in his quest to establish a world-wide theocracy. That nearly a third of the original staff were followers of Moon only heightened this impression. From the start, Washington's elite made its contempt for Moon's enterprise abundantly clean "At a party at socialite True Davis' home," the Post recounted, "a Times reporter who is a Church member was asked to leave." At another party, Larry King boasted to the Post, King was approached by "an attractive young lady" who turned out to be a Times reporter seeking an interview. "Are you a Moonie?" King said he asked her. "Yes," she replied. "I don't talk to Moonies," retorted His Majesty.

The Times was left out of more than social events. 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. Said Matthews, "We work hard enough responding to legitimate press inquires"

Cut to Hilton Head, South Carolina, 15 years later, where the invitation-only "Renaissance Weekend" for movers and shakers is in full swing. 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. At one point in their conversation, as Shiner describes it, "Hillary said to me `Hey--I want you to think about running my column!'" 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.

Has Washington's notorious "Loony Moonie Rag" finally (gasp!) joined The Media Establishment?

Not quite. Clinton and Matthews are hardly a representative sample of Times writers. And the Times's circulation of 100,925 is still a mere one-eighth of the Post's. Over the course of its short life span, the Times has cost its owners over a billion dollars. Though its executives claim they are closing the gap, the paper continues to be a money pit. Most damaging of all, plenty of D.C. residents still dismiss the Times as "that Moonie paper." They're wrong. While the Moonies may occasionally have exercised questionable influence in the past, that's no longer the case. The real problem is the Times's tendency to allow its conservative tilt--otherwise a positive attribute--to periodically contaminate its news coverage. As Slate deputy editor, and long-time D.C. media watcher Jack Sharer observes, the Times "has this weird compulsion to dip itself in manure every couple years. It's the journalistic equivalent of Tourette's Syndrome. They just have to soil themselves every so often"

But a growing number of fans, many of them liberals, have stumbled upon a useful little secret: The Washington Times has become a must-read. 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. "You can't not read the Times if you're working in government and politics in Washington," says one White House official. "There's unique information that they get that you won't find anywhere else."

You Sank My Battleship

To begin with, the Times has capitalized on the advantages of its underdog status. 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. "We're happy to cede that ground to the Post," says Assistant Managing Editor Francis Coombs. 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. "They are like a big old battleship," explains Shiner, "and we are like a PT boat. We get to zip around and go where the opportunities are"