WT2 Wash Times 2

TOP STORIES

Baseball is up, so is hockey. So what's behind the NBA ratings dip?

9th Circuit: California ban on large-capacity magazines violates 2nd Amendment

Trump on Durham probe netting guilty plea: 'It's just the beginning']

The blog post has outraged students, prompting a protest to take place Thursday afternoon. Corrinne Greene said her campus group, Young Progressives of America, wants the professor fired.

“To have someone in a position of power espousing sexual assault is not a joke,” Ms. Greene told CNN. “It’s something that needs to be taken seriously.”

Brooklyn College Provost Anne Lopes said officials planned to meet to discuss the issue, but declined to elaborate, saying the school protects free speech.

“[T]he First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects even speech that many experience as offensive, such as the faculty member’s post,” she told CNN.

Mr. Langbert later revealed that the post was satire and apologized to anyone who was offended.

“I was trying to be satirical, but I guess I’m no Jonathan Swift,” he said. “I appreciated that it may have been in bad taste and I have apologized for that and I will again. I’m sorry people got offended. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings or cause them to not feel respected. I honestly didn’t expect them to read it.”

Mr. Langbert also updated his original post to clearly state that it was meant to parody, “in the tradition of Swift’s (1729) ‘Modest Proposal,’” though he continued to defend Judge Kavanaugh.

“Given that it is unclear that Kavanaugh did a thing, the defamation that he has suffered at the hands of the media is a disgrace,” Mr. Langbert wrote in the update. “Intolerance of and defamation of anyone who does not toe the big government line are ongoing threats to freedom. The humiliation that Judge Kavanaugh has suffered is a disgrace. Perhaps more time should be spent on Horace and Swift, and less time on political indoctrination in college.”

Mr. Langbert told CNN that the backlash for the post has resulted in threats of violence, which he turned over to authorities.

guess who?

no lnx

$10M gift from Koch brothers rejected by N.Y. college over 'political correctness'

STORY TOPICS

BUSINESS_FINANCE

EDUCATION

MITCHELL LANGBERT

BROOKLYN COLLEGE

By Douglas Ernst - The Washington Times - Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Brooklyn College reportedly turned down an $10 million grant from the Koch brothers, and one professor at the CUNY college says it’s because of politics.

“It’s political correctness. It’s intolerance about anyone who doesn’t toe the left-wing line,” said Mitchell Langbert, the associate professor of business and deputy chairman for business at Brooklyn College, the New York Post reported.

The professor is so livid that the university would turn down the successful businessmen that he wrote a letter to the state Senate Education Committee saying, “The Charles G. Koch Foundation has repeatedly called Brooklyn College and me personally with an offer of as much as a $10 million grant. … This grant would have been considerably larger than any that I have seen in my nearly quarter-century of teaching.”

SEE ALSO: MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell gives thanks — to David Koch

Mr. Langbert said the decision to reject the $10 million grant was made by CUNY School of Business Dean William Hopkins, the Post reported.

“I have never seen a dean not interested in a $10,000 grant, much less a $10 million one,” Mr. Langbert said.

School spokesman Jason Carey told the paper, “We have neither received an offer from, nor submitted a proposal to the Koch Foundation at this time for the business school.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/do-republicans-have-a-god-given-right-to-infect-you/

leT

Writing at the Washington Times, Cheryl Chumley makes the argument we’re hearing a lot these days from those who are protesting against the measures being used to slow the spread of the coronavirus. She is particularly upset about any requirement for people to wear protective masks.

Major U.S. airlines have announced that as a condition of riding their friendly skies, passengers must all put on a face mask.

Let the muzzling of America commence.

After noting that some state governments are requiring people to wear masks under certain conditions—like working in a restaurant—Chumley writes this.

This seems a blatant violation of an individual’s right to choose — of an individual’s right to self-govern. America, after all, isn’t a nation founded on collectivism, but rather individualism — on the right of individuals to exercise their God-given authorities, absent government tinkering and intrusion. What gives government the authority to order citizens to cover their faces?

My immediate reaction was that she could make the same argument against things like speed limits, carrying explosives on airplanes, or even smoking in public places. After all, those laws restrict an individual’s right to self-govern. What gives the government the authority to order citizens to limit how fast they drive?

The answer, of course, is that we have always had laws that put restrictions on individuals to limit the damage their behavior could pose to others. Honestly, the kind of “individualism” Chumley describes is more akin to anarchy than anything our founders envisioned. They actually wrote a kind of collectivism into the Preamble to the Constitution.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

In our modern-day two-party system, the traditional argument has never been that “freedom” gives the individual the right to do anything they please. Instead, it has been to disagree about how far the government should go in intervening for the common good.

At the Democratic Convention in 2012, President Barack Obama laid out that tension as he focused on what citizenship means in a democratic republic.

We honor the strivers, the dreamers, the risk- takers, the entrepreneurs who have always been the driving force behind our free enterprise system, the greatest engine of growth and prosperity that the world’s ever known.

But we also believe in something called citizenship — citizenship, a word at the very heart of our founding, a word at the very essence of our democracy, the idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations…

We, the people — recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which asks only, what’s in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.

As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us, together through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That’s what we believe.

There is a reason why Obama focused his speech that year on the importance of citizenship. During a campaign appearance in Roanoke, Virginia, he had talked about the fact that economic growth is driven by a dynamic of both individual and collective effort.

If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own…somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.

Republicans, and their presidential nominee Mitt Romney, zeroed in on two sentences: “If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen,” claiming that Obama attacked the very foundation of our free enterprise system. They even went so far as todedicate a whole day of their convention to a rebuke of those two sentences taken out of context.

This battle between the individual and the collective has been the defining difference between Democrats and Republicans for years. It is important to recognize that when conservatives talk about “freedom” these days, it is most often in the context of freedom from any form of government action or intervention. The claim, as Chumley notes, is that self-government no longer refers to our collective responsibilities as citizens of a democratic republic, but “an individual’s right to self-govern” themselves. That is one of the more dangerous arguments that Attorney General William Barr made during his speech at Notre Dame.

In the words of Madison, “We have staked our future on the ability of each of us to govern ourselves…”

This is really what was meant by “self-government.” It did not mean primarily the mechanics by which we select a representative legislative body. It referred to the capacity of each individual to restrain and govern themselves.

What makes that argument so dangerous is that it wasn’t being made to promote anarchy or even libertarianism. Instead, it is a way to advocate for the idea of “religious liberty,” or the right of conservative Christians to impose their beliefs onto others via government intervention. In other words, it is all about freedom for me, but not thee.

That is precisely why we see the irony of people protesting the coronavirus restrictions carrying signs that read: “My body, my choice.” These people seem to believe in their freedom to threaten the lives of others during a pandemic, but the government should decide what a woman does with her body.

Even more dangerous is the kind of attitude on display with the protester who carried a sign that replicated the one on the gate of Auschwitz, translated “work will set you free.”

What I would observe is that the Republican Party has completely lost touch with concepts like “freedom” and “liberty” in an attempt to deny the collective responsibility of citizenship.

[hannity claims that seth r story somhow negates russia collusion? impeach? vid]

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/04/media/jerome-corsi-seth-rich/index.html

New York (CNN Business)Right-wing author Jerome Corsi issued an apology on Monday and retracted an InfoWars story he wrote spreading a conspiracy theory about murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich.

In the retraction, which was featured on the front page of InfoWars, a fringe website with a long history of spreading conspiracy theories, Corsi conceded that "his allegations were not based upon any independent factual knowledge."

"It was not Dr. Corsi's intent to rely upon inaccurate information, or to cause any suffering to Mr. Rich's family," reads the retraction. "To that end, Dr. Corsi retracts the article and apologizes to the Rich family."

The retraction was requested by the legal team for Aaron Rich, the brother of Seth Rich, a spokesperson for Aaron Rich's legal team told CNN.

Corsi's retracted story cited a Washington Times column that said, without evidence, that Seth Rich leaked a trove of DNC emails to WikiLeaks.

The Washington Times column, which Corsi relied on for his own article, was deleted in October 2018 after Aaron Rich filed a lawsuit against the conservative newspaper and others.

"The Column included statements about Aaron Rich, the brother of former Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, that we now believe to be false," read part of the Washington Times' retraction.

The Washington Times' column, which the lawsuit said was published both online and in print, stated that it was "well known in intelligence circles that Seth Rich and his brother, Aaron Rich, downloaded the DNC emails and was paid by Wikileaks for that information."

The Washington Times settles lawsuit with Seth Rich's brother, issues retraction and apology for its coverage

The Washington Times settles lawsuit with Seth Rich's brother, issues retraction and apology for its coverage

Seth Rich was fatally shot in Washington, DC, in July 2016. Police have said evidence indicates he was the victim of a botched robbery, but in the wake of his death, far-right activists and media organizations suggested something far more sinister.

Without real evidence, these far-right activists peddled a conspiracy theory that said Seth Rich leaked a trove of DNC emails to Wikileaks and was killed in retribution for the supposed leak. The theory was convenient for some on the right as they disputed allegations Russia hacked the DNC, something President Donald Trump had raised doubts about.

Joshua Riley and Meryl Governski, who also serve as part of Aaron Rich's counsel, said in a joint-statement that "the apology and retraction issued today by Mr. Corsi and posted by Infowars is another important step toward obtaining justice for the Rich family."

"We will continue to litigate our defamation claims against conspiracy theorists who refuse to retract and apologize for similar false statements," Riley and Governski said.

A representative for InfoWars did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday afternoon. But Corsi tweeted that as a Christian, he has "sympathy for the suffering the Seth Rich family has gone through."

Corsi also told CNN that he retracted this specific story because it relied on information that had been retracted by the Washington Times. However, he said that he continues to believe that it's possible that the leak of DNC emails was an inside job and that investigators should look into whether Seth Rich played a role.

Corsi, an acquaintance of Trump ally Roger Stone, has spent years spreading right-wing conspiracy theories. In recent months, he has found himself caught in special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into election interference.

Despite previously saying he was cooperating with investigators, Corsi filed a lawsuit in December 2018 against Mueller claiming federal authorities unconstitutionally searched his phone and electronic records.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/right-wing-media-outlets-are-booming-in-the-trump-era-report/

no lnx

Right-wing media outlets are booming in the Trump era: report

Written by Alex Henderson August 26, 2019

Right-wing media outlets have traditionally experienced their biggest growth when a Democrat was in the White House. Many far-right outlets knew how to turn fear-mongering over President Bill Clinton in the 1990s or President Barack Obama in the late 2000s/early 2010s into major advertising revenue. But in a report for Axios, Sara Fischer explains that some right-wing outlets have been enjoying substantial growth under a Republican president: Donald Trump.

Citing a Columbia Journalism Review analysis of right-wing websites using Comscore data, Fischer reports that RedState, the Washington Times and the Washington Examiner are among the outlets that have been thriving during the Trump era. Those sites, Fischer notes, “are experiencing major growth by widening their coverage. Their goal is to cover whatever is capturing the world’s attention that day, from human interest stories to trending entertainmentdevelopments.”

Fischer notes that although the right-wing Weekly Standard folded in late 2018, other websites on the right continue to “rank high” in terms of “engagement on Facebook” — and Fox News, according to Fischer, remains “the #1 news site on Facebook” in 2019 “in terms of reader engagement,” according to the analytics company Newswhip.

Podcasts that have been thriving in the Trump era, Fischer reports, include “The Joe Rogan Experience” and “The Ben Shapiro Show.” Shapiro, she points out, has “built a megabrand aimed at targeting younger conservatives.”

Fischer stresses, however, that although “conservative media remains strong across most major media platforms,” some “left-leaning outlets” — including HuffPost— “rank highly” in the Trump era. But Trump’s presidency and the 2020 election, she writes, continue to benefit right-wing media.

“Typically, the opposition party has a media explosion in response to whichever political group is in power,” Fischer reports. “But the economic stress of the media industry, combined with the Trump-driven conservative strategy of broad messaging, has upended that dynamic.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/democratic-rep-grijalva-calls-on-sec-ryan-zinke-to-resign-zinke-calls-him-a-drunk

no lnx

democratic Rep. Grijalva Calls on Sec. Ryan Zinke to Resign. Zinke Calls Him a Drunk.

Starting next year, Grijalva may have top oversight over Zinke’s agency. But that didn’t stop the interior secretary from publicly calling him a drunk.

Pilar Melendez

11.30.18 2:00 PM ET

Hours after Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) penned an op-ed calling for Ryan Zinke’s resignation, the interior secretary hit back by calling the top Democrat a “drunk.”

“It’s hard for him to think straight from the bottom of the bottle,” Zinke tweeted on Friday. “This is coming from a man who used nearly $50,000 in tax dollars as hush money to cover up his drunken and hostile behavior.”

The Trump cabinet official continued: “He should resign and pay back the taxpayer for the hush money and the tens of thousands of dollars he forced my department to spend investigating unfounded allegations.”

Secretary Ryan Zinke

@SecretaryZinke

My thoughts on Rep. Grijalva’s opinion piece. #TuneInnForMore

2,962

9:02 AM - Nov 30, 2018

4,690 people are talking about this

The Arizona congressman, who will likely chair the House Natural Resources Committee, which oversees Zinke’s agency, said in a USA Today op-ed on Friday morning that Zinke should step down because of his multiple “ethical and managerial failings.”

“While the secretary continues to project confidence, questions have grown since the election about his future plans, and the White House reportedly fears that he would be unable to withstand scrutiny on Capitol Hill,” Grijalva wrote. “Those fears are justified. Mr. Zinke has never even tried to offer an explanation for the sheer scope of his well-documented scandals.”

Zinke’s allegations mirror a report by the Washington Times claiming that in 2015 the Arizona congressman pushed a severance package on a former employee who complained of Grijalva’s alleged frequent drunkenness and hostile work environment—allegations the lawmaker vehemently denies.

“Last week, the Washington Times contacted me seeking comment on what it described as a sexual harassment claim that, in fact, had never been made,” Grijalva said in a statement regarding the employee’s legal threats. “Once the paper realized its original story was provably false, staff regrouped over the holidays and decided to run a misleading article trying to link me to sexual harassment complaints made against other people.”

https://tucson.com/news/local/update-grijalva-calls-for-apology-after-paper-reveals-settlement/article_dbf11be2-d44e-11e7-b592-47e04e5e0238.html

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ryan-zinke-out-as-donald-trumps-interior-secretary-leaving-at-end-of-the-year

Embattled Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is resigning from his position in the wake of legal issues, Bloomberg reported Saturday morning. According to Bloomberg, “concern about legal costs and scrutiny of his travel, political activity and potential conflicts of interest were factors in Zinke’s decision.” Zinke has notified President Trump that he is stepping down. Shortly after Jacobs broke the news, Trump tweeted, “Secretary of the Interior @RyanZinke will be leaving the Administration at the end of the year after having served for a period of almost two years. Ryan has accomplished much during his tenure and I want to thank him for his service to our Nation.......” Potential candidates that have surfaced include Nevada Sen. Dean Heller, Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Ohio Gov. Butch Otter and Utah Attorney General Scott Reyes are among the contenders, Jacobs noted. Zinke’s decision comes several months after an internal report found that he had violated regulationsby letting his family ride alongside him in government vehicles, and a subsequent Department of Justice Investigation.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/we-have-cia-thank-qanon-conspiracy-theory

As the editor of the JFK Facts blog, I try not to spend a lot of time on stupid conspiracy theories, but given widespread ignorance and confusion on the subject, unpleasant journalist duty often calls.

Who killed JFK? The Federal Reserve? Nah. The Secret Service man? A hoax. Ted Cruz’s father? Pure B.S. George H.W. Bush? Heavy breathing is not the same as credible evidence. On a recent Black Vault podcast, the most common JFK question I heard was, “Was Kennedy assassinated because of his interest in UFOs?” Um, no, he was not.

Which brings me to QAnon, the imaginative conspiracy theorist now dominating the internet, attracting followers of President Trump, and obsessing the Washington Post, which has published a dozen articles about QAnon in the span of four days. Like many conspiracy theories, the QAnon fever dream can be traced back to the assassination of JFK. The QAnon conspiracy theory is a psychedelic mushroom planted in the fertile manure of the Warren Commission. This mind-altering proposition grows in the gloom of anonymous chat groups. It is then stimulated by the bright lights of social media. And finally it is harvested and ingested by Trump cultists eager to prolong the alt-reality buzz that commenced on January 20, 2017.

But it all began on November 22, 1963.

Who Is QAnon?

For the uninitiated, “Q” is the moniker of a person or group of persons who post to 4Chan, a popular image website favored by the anonymous. Q’s “theory” (and I use the term generously) is that President Trump was persuaded by the military to smash a network of “deep state” pedophiles that has ruled America for decades. The president (it is said) is working with John F. Kennedy Jr. (who did not die in a plane crash). They will soon smash the perfidious plotters, QAnon predicts, and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will be sent to Guantanamo.

You may think this is nutty stuff. Buzzfeed News speculates that QAnon is actually a leftist goof on right-wing suckers. But read the respectful coverage of the pro-Trump Washington Times, where QAnon is described as a “mysterious figure” who has been “posting provocative questions about the government since October.” This stuff is taken seriously.

The historical foundation of this mash-up of the preposterous, the ludicrous and the vile is, you guessed it, the assassination of JFK.

From a December 2017 QAnon post about Trump’s alleged enemies:

As a backup, they defined ‘conspiracy’ as crazy/mentally unstable and label anything ‘true’ as such.
This works given most of what they engage in is pure evil and simply unbelievable (hard to swallow).
The ‘fix’ has always been in – no matter which party won the election (-JFK (killed)/Reagan(shot)).

Why do people believe this nonsense?

One reason is that a few kernels of it are not nonsense. The CIA, in this April 1967 memo, launched a worldwide campaign to demonize critics of the Warren Commission as “conspiracy theorists.” Skepticism about official theory of JFK’s assassination, wrote one agency official with the approval of CIA director Richard Helms, “is of concern to the U.S. government including our organization.”

The agency distributed talking points for “friendly elite contacts,” including the bald-faced lie that accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was “an unknown quantity to any professional intelligence service.” In fact, CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton had monitored Oswald’s movements, politics, personal life and foreign contacts for four years before he allegedly killed JFK.

If that fact became known, the CIA would have a world of hurt on its hands. So the agency said in its memo that the members of the Warren Commission were eminent men and “efforts to impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast doubt on the whole leadership of American society.”

The Commission’s critics, said the CIA, “are enticed by a form of intellectual pride: they light on some theory and fall in love with it; they also scoff at the Commission because it did not always answer every question with a flat decision one way or another.” In other words, the CIA did define belief in “conspiracy” as a symptom of the mentally unstable and patriotically unreliable.

In fact, the doubts were fact-based. Skepticism about the Warren Commission’s conclusions percolated among the Washington insiders (including Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and Jackie Kennedy) and among foreign leaders (including Fidel Castro and Charles DeGaulle). All of them concluded privately that JFK had been killed by his enemies, not by a lone gunman.

Of course, there are other factors contributing to the vogue of QAnon that have nothing to do with JFK.

The echo chamber effects of social media encourage the credulous. So does a president enamored with “alternative facts” (aka bullshit). The exhaustion of the Americaneconomic system, which no longer provides the majority with affordable education or upward mobility, leaves young people grasping for explanation of their plight.

But the U.S. government’s implausible account of JFK’s assassination—and the CIA’s self-serving defense—can always be cited by those who say “The government is lying.” So if you want to trace the roots of QAnon in American society, look to the Warren Commission and Langley. Please leave us JFK researchers out of it.

The Origins of JFK Theories

https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2017/09/08/right-wing-medias-new-voter-fraud-proof-even-more-asinine-usual/217887

Right-wing media's new voter fraud "proof" is even more asinine than usual

Research ››› September 8, 2017 3:34 PM EDT ››› ZACHARY PLEAT

Right-wing and fringe media outlets and figures, including Kris Kobach, vice chairman of the Trump administration’s election integrity commission, are citing a Washington Times article about several thousand New Hampshire voters using out-of-state driver’s licenses to register to vote to bolster conservative claims of fraud and say that Republicans may have actually won the state.But journalists and election experts shot down these claims of voter fraud and explained that New Hampshire’s voter ID law permits out-of-state driver’s licenses to be used as proof of identity when voting, an option that college students often exercise.

Sarah Wasko / Media Matters

Conservative and fringe media figures: Out-of-state driver’s licenses used to vote in New Hampshire prove voter fraud against Republicans

Wash. Timesused data of voters registering with out-of-state driver’s licenses in New Hampshire to promote conservative claims of voter fraud. A September 7 Washington Times article published information released by a New Hampshire Republican showing that “more than 6,500 people registered to vote in New Hampshire on Nov. 8 using out-of-state driver’s licenses” to bolster conservative claims of voter fraud. While admitting that these statistics “don’t prove those accusations,” the Times wrote that “they do corroborate them,” citing further data that more than 5,000 of those voters haven’t yet obtained a New Hampshire license or vehicle registration:

More than 6,500 people registered to vote in New Hampshire on Nov. 8 using out-of-state driver’s licenses, and since then the vast majority have neither obtained an in-state license nor registered a motor vehicle.

Conservatives say the state’s same-day registration is an invitation for fraud because of loose proof-of-residence rules.

New Hampshire House Speaker Shawn Jasper, a Republican, issued the numbers Thursday based on inquiries he made to the Department of State, which oversees elections, and the Department of Safety.

Since Election Day, Republicans have charged that a significant number of nonresident Democrats, principally from Massachusetts, flowed into New Hampshire to vote illegally, tilting a close race to their party.

“Having worked before on a campaign in New Hampshire, I can tell you that this issue of busing voters into New Hampshire is widely known by anyone who’s worked in New Hampshire politics. It’s very real. It’s very serious. This morning, on this show, is not the venue for me to lay out all the evidence,” White House policy adviser Stephen Miller told ABC News in February.

Though Mr. Jasper’s findings don’t prove those accusations, they do corroborate them.

[...]

New Hampshire law gives drivers 60 days upon establishing residence to obtain a state license.

But more than 80 percent of voters who registered on Nov. 8 using out-of-state driver’s licenses, or 5,313 of them, neither had a state license nor registered a motor vehicle almost 10 months later. [The Washington Times, 9/7/17]

Breitbart.com’s Kris Kobach cited the data in the Wash. Times article as “proof” of “fraudulent votes” in New Hampshire and claimed Hillary Clinton and Sen. Maggie Hassan may have fraudulently won the state. Kris Kobach, Kansas’ secretary of state, vice chairman of President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission, and a paid Breitbart.com columnist, cited the Washington Times article as “proof” of voter fraud in New Hampshire in his September 7 column:

It has long been reported, anecdotally, that out-of-staters take advantage of New Hampshire’s same-day registration and head to the Granite State to cast fraudulent votes. Now there’s proof.

According to statistics released by the Speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, on the date of the general election in November 2016, there were 6,540 same-day registrants who registered to vote in New Hampshire using an out-of-state driver’s license to prove their identity. In and of itself, that doesn’t prove that any fraud occurred – theoretically, each of those individuals could have been someone who recently moved to the State and had not yet had time to get a New Hampshire driver’s license. According to New Hampshire law, a new resident has 60 days to obtain a New Hampshire driver’s license.

So if those 6,540 voters were bona fide New Hampshire residents, they would get their driver’s license no later than January 7, 2017. However, the numbers tell a very different story. It turns out that, as of August 30, 2017 – nearly ten months after the election – only 1,014 of the 6,540 same-day registrants who registered with an out-of-state license had obtained a New Hampshire driver’s license. The other 5,526 individuals never obtained a New Hampshire driver’s license. And, of those 5,526, only 213 registered a vehicle in New Hampshire.

So 5,313 of those voters neither obtained a New Hampshire driver’s license nor registered a vehicle in New Hampshire. They have not followed the legal requirements for residents regarding driver’s licenses, and it appears that they are not actually residing in New Hampshire. It seems that they never were bona fide residents of the State.

5,513 is a big number – more than enough to swing two very important elections. The closest major election was the contest between incumbent Republican U.S. Senator Kelly Ayotte and challenger Maggie Hassan (D). Hassan won the election by a razor-thin margin of 1,017 votes. Those 5,313 fraudulent votes were more than enough to swing the election. If 59.2 percent or more of them went for Hassan, then the election was stolen through voter fraud. That’s likely, since the surrounding states are Democrat strongholds.

It’s also possible that New Hampshire’s four electoral college votes were swung to Hillary Clinton through illegal voting by nonresidents. Clinton won New Hampshire by only 2,732 votes. If 74.8 percent of the 5,513 fraudulent votes were cast for Clinton, then the presidential election in New Hampshire was tipped as well. [Breitbart.com, 9/7/17]

FoxNews.com: “Out-of-staters may have won New Hampshire for Clinton.” A September 8 FoxNews.com article cited the Washington Times report, saying the data it included “could potentially call into question the validity of the New Hampshire results for Nov. 8, when Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton outpolled Republican nominee Donald Trump by a mere 2,736 votes.” [FoxNews.com, 9/8/17]

Gateway Pundit: “VOTE FRAUD: More Than 5,000 Out-of-State Hillary Voters May have Tipped New Hampshire Against Trump.” Right-wing fringe website Gateway Pundit cited the Washington Times story to scream “VOTE FRAUD” in the headline of a September 7 post, which claimed: “It is well known that people are bussed in to vote in New Hampshire. This is why the Democrats are fiercely working to stop any investigation into vote fraud and are working to prevent any type of voter I.D. laws. Strict laws would have tipped New Hampshire in Donald Trump’s favor.” [The Gateway Pundit, 9/7/17]

WND: “New Evidence Backs Trump Vote-Fraud Claim.” Conspiracy theory website WorldNetDaily cited the Washington Times story in a September 7 post to claim, “The discovery that more than 6,000 people used out-of-state driver’s licenses to vote in New Hampshire last November bolsters Donald Trump’s claim he lost the state because thousands of Massachusetts residents came in to vote.” [WorldNetDaily, 9/7/17]

Drudge Report:“PAPER: 5,000 out-of-state voters may have tipped NH…”

DRUDGE REPORT @DRUDGE_REPORT

dapl Nat am

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/oct/27/authorities-begin-removal-dakota-access-protest-ca/

Right-Wing Op-Eds Pushed False Claim that Paris Agreement Would Be Economically Disastrous

Conservative op-ed writers falsely claimed that the Paris accord would impose massive costs on U.S. businesses and families.

In an opinion piece in The Washington Times, Ed Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, argued that the U.S. should withdraw from the agreement, adding, "As economist Nicolas Loris and U.N. expert Brett Schaefer recently noted, 'The U.S. regulations alone would increase energy costs for U.S. families and businesses, causing an overall average shortfall of nearly 400,000 jobs and total income loss of more than $20,000 for a family of four by the year 2035.'" The figures were based on a 2016 Heritage Foundation report that claimed former President Obama's keystone policy for meeting Paris obligations, the Clean Power Plan, would cause an "aggregate gross domestic product loss of more than $2.5 trillion" by 2035. And Loris, who also works for the Heritage Foundation, penned his own opinion piece in the Boston Herald claiming, "Compliance with the Paris agreement will cost the global economy trillions of dollars over the next 80 years."

koch fw stephen moore:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/3/happy-american-energy-independence-day/

repost am thunk:

Thirteen state GOP attorneys general have sent a letter to the Democratic AG's who are investigating ExxonMobile for fraud in climate change research, telling them that if minimizing the danger of climate change is fraud, so is exaggerating the peril. They threaten to prosecute climate alarmists for making spectacular claims of disaster that have not materialized.

Washington Times:

If Democratic attorneys general can pursue climate change skeptics for fraud, then also at risk of prosecution are climate alarmists whose predictions of global doom have failed to materialize.

The “cuts both ways” argument was among those raised by 13 Republican attorneys general in a letter urging their Democratic counterparts to stop using their law enforcement power against fossil fuel companies and others that challenge the climate change catastrophe narrative.

"Consider carefully the legal precedent and threat to free speech, said the state prosecutors in their letter this week, headed by Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange.

“If it is possible to minimize the risks of climate change, then the same goes for exaggeration,” said the letter. “If minimization is fraud, exaggeration is fraud.”

The letter comes as Exxon Mobil fights off subpoenas by two prosecutors — Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude E. Walker — for decades’ worth of climate-related documents and communications with academics, universities and free-market think tanks.

New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman and California Attorney General Kamala Harris have also reportedly launched probes.

The 17 attorneys general — 16 Democrats and one independent — announced at a March 29 press conference that they had formed a coalition, AGs United for Clean Power.

“We think this effort by our colleagues to police the global warming debate through the power of the subpoena is a grave mistake,” said the letter.

The name of the coalition itself shows that the attorneys general “have taken the unusual step of aligning themselves with the competition of their investigative targets,” namely the solar and wind energy.

“If the focus is fraud, such alignment by law enforcement sends the dangerous signal that companies in certain segments of the energy market need not worry about their misrepresentations,” said the GOP letter.

Democrats have denied that the effort violates Exxon’s free-speech rights. Schneiderman spokesman Eric Soufer said in a statement that, “The law is clear: the First Amendment does not give any corporation the right to commit fraud.”

Think of how many global warming predictions over the last decade or so have been based on junk science or no science at all. The melting of the arctic ice cap by 2014 is my favorite. But the most important prediction that failed to come true is the failure of every single model that predicted a rise in temperature. Even the Intergovermmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) agrees that there has been a pause in warming. The predictions about the rise in ocean levels has also been laughably wrong.

If the AG's go through with their threat, their number one target should be Al Gore. He has not only been spectacularly wrong in many of his predictions, but he has also become fabulously wealthy by gaming the carbon trading system and capitalizing on his notoriety as the number one scaremonger in the world. I fantasize about putting him in an orange jumpsuit and making him do the perp walk in front of the cameras.

The GOP AG's point is sound. A scientific disagreement should not be criminalized. Nor should free speech be chilled by prosecuting people you disagree with. Their plea will fall on deaf ears, however, because of the billions of dollars that the Democrats are looking to extort from Exxon.

Compared to that, free speech just doesn't matter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/04/business/james-r-whelan-first-editor-of-the-washington-times-dies-at-79.html?_r=0

The Washington Times is a newspaper owned by Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, through its company News World Communications. The paper was first published on May 17, 1982. [1]

It is a key player in escalaor effect

In January 2008, John Solomon was named Times executive editor, replacing the retiring Wesley Pruden.[2]

History

In a speech on the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Washington Times, Moon explained his motivation behind establishing the paper. "I founded The Washington Times as an expression of my love for America and to fulfill the Will of God, who seeks to establish America in His Providence," he said.

"In the context of God's Will, there needed to be a newspaper that had the philosophical and ideological foundation to encourage and enlighten the people and leaders of America," he explained.

In Moon's analysis, there was animportant role for the paper in bolstering support for the continuance of the cold war against Russia. "The Washington Times' editorials and columns supported the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) at a time when many were trying to block this critical development," he said.

"I do not have the slightest doubt that God used The Washington Times to help bring an end to the most pernicious worldwide dictatorship in history and gave freedom to tens of millions of people!" he said.

With the collapse of the USSR, Moon's support for anti-communist campaigns shifted to central America. "In the 1980s, the Contras in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and other countries were fighting for their lives against the communist Sandinistas who were seeking to seize control of their countries, slaughtering thousands of people. While other media failed to recognize the seriousness of the situation. The Washington Times emphasized through its stories and columns the dangers of communist expansion in the hemisphere and why the freedom fighters should be supported. Once again, The Times news and information helped the leaders in Washington stay strong in their support for the Contras," he said.

During the 1990's with opportunities for anti-communist campaigns fading, Moon shifted focus to the "Cultural War" - "the fight against the degradation of values".

While editors of the Washington Times argue that the owners of the paper have no role in setting editorial policy, Moon made clear that he plays a critical role in the priorities of the publication. "Ten years ago, at the 10th anniversary celebration for The Times, I defined another mission for the media. This is the need for media to promote ethics and moral values in our society. For its second ten years, I envisioned for The Washington Times the task of contributing tobringing about a moral society. Because a peaceful world is only possible based on the existence of peaceful, ideal families, The Times became a newspaper that helped people understand the importance of strong moral, family values," he said.

In its third decade Moon has new priorities for the title: "...this is the time to emphasize and support faith, the time to emphasize and support spiritual values that are based on the faith of each individual," he said.

"While the media can provide all the facts, they also have the responsibility to provide values to prevent confusion and to provide leadership and direction, especially today when the entire world is flooded with news and information. The Washington Times and its affiliated media properties are taking a leading role in this regard," he said. [3]

In an article on the Unification Church website discussing the prospects of re-unification of North and South Korea, Rev. Sun Myung Moon, wrote: "With the establishment of The Washington Times in America we initiated a worldwide movement of ideally educating the free world, anintention that I had for a long time; we are also organizing around the globe to form many newspapers, to educate the world media, to give direction to university professors worldwide, to guide student movements in every nation, to bring about cooperation among various South American countries and to form understanding among the world religions." [4]

"This new era of media, with the massive distribution of news and information, requires leadership and clear guidance for the betterment of individuals based on values and on the knowledge of God and spirit world. The Washington Times and our family of media have been providing this direction for the past two decades and will continue to do so into our third decade. My hope is that each one of you as well will embody the qualities of defending freedom, promoting family values, and strengthening your faith in God so that you may become leaders of the world," he said.[5]

In an August 2002 address at the Heritage Foundation, the Editor in Chief of The Washington Times, Wesley Pruden, who started work with the paper when it commenced in 1982, explained the mood of the time. "Ronald Reagan was new in town, trying to stoke the fires of the free market and pluck up the courage of those of us who still wanted to make a fight of it. He had managed to get himself elected President of the United States, but he was greeted, like the media establishment greeted us, with incredulity, suspicion, frustration, even anger," Pruden said.

Pruden defends his papers style of journalism as being more in tune with the public than other mainstream media. "We would not only cover the news without slant or bias, but give voice to those who had been shut out of the national debate. This challenged a smug and entrenched journalism establishment that was swiftly losing touch with its constituency," was how he explained the charter of the paper.

"The one constant would be our editorial independence. We would never be told to put anything in the paper; more important, perhaps, we would never be asked to leave anything out. All that was ever asked was to be faithful to the task of reporting the news without fear or favor, to get it first and get it right", Pruden told those attending the Heritage Foundation's 'Second Annual Distinguished Journalist Lecture'.

"We hold to conservative political views, but we do not cover the news with a conservative slant or bias. A newspaper with a conservative bias in covering the news is no better than the newspapers with a liberal bias, because the reader can never know when someone is blowing smoke at him. We keep our opinions, and we have a few, to the editorial and commentary pages, or to columns clearly identified as opinion, in the honored tradition of American newspapers," he said.

Gene Grabowski, who resigned in 1988 over the misleading alternation of an article, said of the Washington Times: "It's the Fox News of the print world." [6]

Another reporter, Dawn Ceol - daughter of Paul Weyrich resigned too after Pruden - who has been editor in chief since 1992 - altered a story she wrote about Anita Hill to be more critical of Hill. [7]

Beirich and Moser, writing in the Intelligence Report published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, argue that those who dismiss The Washington Times as having little influence are mistaken. "But nobody has to actually read the Times to imbibe its spin on the news; the wilder its stories, the more likely television and print media are to pick them up and run with them," they wrote.

In particular they cited the case of a series of stories and editorials initiated by Washington Times reporter, Audrey Hudson, claiming that scientists had been caught attempting to fabricate evidence that lynx were more widespread than they really were.

The story was picked up by Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, and the Seattle Times, gaining widespread coverage within the US and even internationally. While the story was that the biologists who made the unauthorized lynx hair submissions[8] claimed to be submitting blind samples in order to test the labs[9], the limited after the event retraction did little to diminish the impact of the original story.

In May 1992, after the Times had been operating almost ten years, Moon disclosed that he had invested "close to $1 billion" in the paper. [10]

Despite the major investments of previous years, as of late, the paper is struggling financially. A statement from the newspaper’s management did not mention a specific number of layoffs, but staff members said they received a letter that said the paper would be “reducing its work force by a minimum of 40 percent”. The layoffs were part of a strategy to revamp and re-energize the paper, according to Jonathan Slevin, the paper’s acting president and publisher. In another proposed changed to be instituted in the first quarter of 2010, The Washington Times will become a free newspaper in some areas of Washington, D.C.^[1]

References

↑ "Staff Cuts Announced at the Washington Times",New York Times Online", December 2, 2009.

Contact Information

3600 New York Ave NE

Washington, DC 20002-1947

Phone (Switch): (202) 636-3000 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (202) 636-3000 end_of_the_skype_highlighting

Website: http://www.washtimes.com/

External link

Articles & Speeches By Moon

Sun Myung Moon,"Way Of Unification" (Part 2), unification.net, November 21, 1986.
Sun Myung Moon, Founder's Address: "Absolute Values and The New Cultural Revolution: True Love and the Unified World," Fifteenth International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences, J.W. Marriott Hotel, Washington, D.C., unification.net, November 28, 1986: "With the Washington Times as the core, we are establishing preeminence in the American print media."
Sun Myung Moon, Leader's Meeting, June 12, 1991: ""In the last nine years, the Church poured eight hundred million dollars in cold cash into The Washington Times. ... "
Sun Myung Moon, Founder's Address: "True Family and True Universe. Centering on True Love" 15th Anniversary of The Washington Times, June 16, 1997: "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."
Sun Myung Moon, "Freedom, Family, Faith - The Role of the Media in the 21st Century", Washington Times 20th Anniversary Banquet Washington DC, May 21, 2002.

General Articles

"The Dark side of Rev. Moon," The Consortium for Independent Journalism. This page has a small archive of stories relating to Rev. Moon and American politics between 1997 and early 2001.
Heidi Beirich and Bob Moser, "Defending Dixie:The Washington Times has always been conservative and error-prone -- now it's helping to popularize extremist ideas", Intelligence Report, Southern Poverty Law Center, undated.
Elisabeth Bumiller, "The Nation's Capital Gets A New Daily Newspaper", Washington Post, May 17, 1982; page C01.
Fred Clarkson, "Behind the Times: Who Pulls The Strings at Washington's No. 2 Daily?", Exra!, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, August/September 1987.
Allan Freedman, "Washington's Other Paper: Is the time right for the Times?", Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 1995.
Heidi Beirich and Bob Moser, "America's Newspaper?: The Washington Times has a long record of hyped stories, shoddy reporting and failure to correct errors", Intelligence Report, Southern Poverty Law Center, undated (circa 2002).
"Canada Lynx Survey: Unauthorized Hair Samples Submitted for Analysis." Statement of Ronald Malfi, Acting Managing Director, Office of Special Investigations. US GAO Publication GAO-02-496T, March 6, 2002.
Paul Tolme, "The Washington Times' Hair-Raising Tall Tale Lynx fur "hoax" story shows the power of right-wing media, Extra!, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, May/June 2002.
Frank Ahrens, "Moon Speech Raises Old Ghosts as the Times Turns 20", Washington Post, May 23, 2002.
Wesley Pruden,"Fear and Loathing on the Potomac: The Washington Times at Twenty", Heritage Lecture No 757, August 15, 2002.
Wayne Madsen, "Moon Shadow:The Rev, Bush & North Korea", CounterPunch, January 14, 2003.
"Engineering a scandal: How the Washington Times Manipulated the Lynx Story", Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), undated, accessed December 9, 2003. PEER has created a webpage with links to the various uinvestigations rebutting the Washington Times claims.
Charles Babington and Alan Cooperman, "The Rev. Moon Honored at Hill Reception", June 23, 2004.
Robert Parry, "Money, Media & the Mess in America", Consortium News, January 28, 2005.
"On the pages of Wesley Pruden's Washington Times, the South rises again", Media Matters for America, June 30, 2005.
George Archibald, "Can The Washington Times Survive?", George Archibald (Blog), December 21, 2006.
George Archibald, "Unhinged," GeorgeArchibald (Blog), February 28, 2007.
Bill Berkowitz, "Moon waning in Washington?", Media Transparency, April 12, 2007.
"Times Men Pruden and Coombs Welcome Postie Solomon", U.S. News & World Report, March 26, 2008.

Retrieved from "http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Washington_Times"

Categories: Media | Newspapers | Politics (U.S.) | Religion | United States

----

SEPP

**Science and Environmental Policy Project**

This corporate science mill began in 1990 as an offshoot of the Moonie-funded think-tank Washington Institute for Values in Public Policy. Its goal is to discredit global warming, ozone depletion, and acid rain. Its director, physicist Dr. S. Fred Singer, is a former chief scientist for the Department of Transportation who has received thousands of dollars in "consulting fees" from Exxon, Shell, Arco, Unocal, and Sunoco. Singer lambastes global warming science in regular editorials in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Times. Funded by: Monsanto, Texaco, Philip Morris, and the Bradley, Forbes, and Smith Richardson foundations.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedi

Jump to: navigation, search

The Washington Times| |

Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Broadsheet
Owner	News World Media Development
Editor	Sam Dealey
Founded	1982
Political alignment	Conservative
Headquarters	Washington, D.C.
Official website	washingtontimes.com

The Washington Times is a daily broadsheet newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States. It was founded in 1982 by Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon, and until 2010 was owned by News World Communications, an international media conglomerate associated with the Unification Church which also owns newspapers in South Korea, Japan, and South America. The Times is sometimes considered to be a socially and politically conservative alternative to the larger and more well-known Washington Post.

Contents[hide]

[edit] Founding

The Washington Times was founded in 1982 by Unification Church founder and leader Sun Myung Moon.^[1] Bo Hi Pak, Moon's chief aide, was the founding president and the founding chairman of the board.^[2] At the time of founding of the Times Washington had only one major newspaper, the Washington Post. Massimo Introvigne, in his 2000 book The Unification Church, said that the Post had been "the most anti-Unificationist paper in the United States."^[3] In 2002, at an event held to celebrate the Times' 20th anniversary, Moon said: "The Washington Times is responsible to let the American people know about God" and "The Washington Times will become the instrument in spreading the truth about God to the world."^[4]

[edit] Funding

The Washington Times has lost money every year that it has been in business. By 2002, the Unification Church had spent about $1.7 billion subsidizing its operation of the Times.^[5] In 2003, The New Yorker reported that a billion dollars had been spent since the paper's inception, as 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".^[6] In 2002, Columbia Journalism Review suggested Moon had spent nearly $2 billion on the Times.^[7] In 2008, Thomas F. Roeser of the Chicago Daily Observer mentioned competition from the Times as a factor moving the Washington Post to the right, and said that Moon had "announced he will spend as many future billions as is needed to keep the paper competitive."^[8]

History

The Times was founded the year after the Washington Star, the previous "second paper" of D.C., went out of business, after operating for over 100 years. A large percentage of the staff came from the Washington Star. 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. Although USA Today used color in the same way, it took several years for the Washington Post, New York Times and others to do the same. 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. This design and its editorial content attracted "real influence" in Washington.^[9] When the Times began it had 125 reporters, 25% of them Unification Church members.^[10]

Former speechwriter for President George W. Bush David Frum, in his 2000 book How We Got Here: The '70s, wrote that Moon had granted the Times editorial independence.^[9] But insiders, including the newspaper's first editor and publisher, James R. Whelan,have insisted that the paper was under Moon's control from the beginning. Whelan, whose contract guaranteed editorial autonomy, left the paper when the owners refused to renew the contract, asserting that "I have blood on my hands" for helping Moon acquire legitimacy.^[11] Three years later editorial page editor William P. Cheshire and four of his staff resigned, charging that then-editor Arnaud de Borchgrave had stifled editorial criticism of political repression in South Korea at the explicit direction of Sang Kook Han, a top official of the Unification Church. ^[12]

The Times circulation has always been much less than the Washington Post. In 1992 the New York Times reported the Times had only one-eighth the circulation of the Post (100,000 to 800,000) and that two-thirds of its subscribers also subscribed to the Post.^[13] In 1994, the Times introduced a weekly national edition, especially targeted to conservative readers nationwide.^[14]

In 1997, the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (which is critical of United States and Israeli policies), praised the Times (along with The Christian Science Monitor owned by the Church of Christ, Scientist), and the Times’ sister publication The Middle East Times for their objective and informative coverage of Islam and the Middle East, while criticizing the Times generally pro-Israel editorial policy. The Report suggested that these newspapers, being owned by churches, were less influenced by pro-Israel pressure groups in the United States.^[15] In 1998 the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram wrote that the Times' editorial policy was "rabidly anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and pro-Israel."^[16]

In 2002, the Times published a story accusing the National Educational Association (NEA), the largest teachers' union in the United States, of promoting teaching students that the policies of the United States government were partly to blame for the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.^[17] This was denied by the NEA and by other commentators.^[18][19]

In 2002, Post veteran Ben Bradlee said, "I see them get some local stories that I think the Post doesn’t have and should have had."^[20] 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]

As of 2007, home delivery of the paper in its local area was made in bright orange plastic bags, with the words, "Brighter. Bolder. The Washington Times" and a slogan that changes. Two of the slogans are "The voice and choice of discerning readers" and "You're not getting it all without us".^[21]

In 2009, the Manila Times criticized the Times for an editorial which it said interfered with the political process in the Philippines,^[22] while the New York Times criticized it for an editorial linking proposed health care reforms in the United States to policies of Nazi Germany.^[23][24]

[edit] Political leanings

The political views of The Washington Times are often described as conservative.^[25][26][27] The Washington Post reported: "the Times was established by Moon to combat communism and be a conservative alternative to what he perceived as the liberal bias of The Washington Post."^[4] In 1994 Reed Irvine, chairman of Accuracy in Media, a conservative media watchdog group, said: "The Washington Times is one of the few newspapers in the country that provides some balance."

The Times was read every day by President Ronald Reagan during his terms in office.^[28] In 1997 he said:

The American people know the truth. You, my friends at The Washington Times, have told it to them. It wasn't always the popular thing to do. But you were a loud and powerful voice. Like me, you arrived in Washington at the beginning of the most momentous decade of the century. Together, we rolled up our sleeves and got to work. And--oh, yes—we won the Cold War.^[29]

Commentator Paul Weyrich has called the 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.^[30]

In 1999 the Times was criticized by the Daily Howler for misquoting vice-president Al Gore.^[31] In 2000 the Howler criticized the Times again, this time for making unsubstantiated allegations about Gore's campaign fundraising.^[32] In 2004 the Howler criticized a Times' front page story which made fun of Democratic Party presidential candidate John Kerry's vacationing in France.^[33]

Conservative-turned-liberal writer David Brock, who worked for the Times' sister publication Insight on the News, said in his 2002 book Blinded by the Right that the news writers at the Times were encouraged and rewarded for giving news stories a conservative slant. In his 2004 book The Republican Noise Machine, Brock wrote "the Washington Times was governed by a calculatedly unfair political bias" and that its journalistic ethics were "close to nil."^[34]

In his 2003 book, Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, comedian, author, and later senator Al Franken devoted a chapter to criticizing the Times after executive editor Wesley Pruden re-wrote a reporter's story—without the reporter's knowledge—about Franken's performance at a White House party. According to Franken, the rewrite was made to appear as if Franken had received a negative reception, which he says was not the case.^[35]

In 2004 the Washington Post reported dissention between some of the Times staff and ownership over the paper's stance on international issues, including support for the United Nations.^[36]

The Washington Times was accused by Max Blumenthal in The Nation of promoting racist views. Blumenthal, quoting veteran "Times" news reporter George Archibald and others, reported that Times editor Fran Coombs[wife of ?] had made a number of racist and sexist comments and was being sued by his colleagues for his remarks.^[37] The Southern Poverty Law Center in its Spring 2005 report criticized the wife of Fran Coombs, for writing articles in what the report claimed as white nationalist websites such as the Occidental Quarterly.^[38]

In 2007, Mother Jones said that the Times had become "essential reading for political news junkies" soon after its founding, and quoted James Gavin, special assistant to Bo Hi Pak:

We're trying to combat communism and we're trying to uphold traditional Judeo-Christian values. The Washington Times is standing up for those values and fighting anything that would tear them down. Causa is doing the same thing, by explaining what the enemy is trying to do.^[39]

In a 2008 essay published in Harper's Magazine, historian Thomas Frank linked the Times to the modern American conservative movement, saying:

There is even a daily newspaper—the Washington Times—published strictly for the movement’s benefit, a propaganda sheet whose distortions are so obvious and so alien that it puts one in mind of those official party organs one encounters when traveling in authoritarian countries.^[40]

In 2009 the New York Times reported:

With its conservative editorial bent, the paper also became a crucial training ground for many rising conservative journalists and a must-read for those in the movement. A veritable who’s who of conservatives — Tony Blankley, Frank J. Gaffney Jr., Larry Kudlow, John Podhoretz and Tony Snow — has churned out copy for its pages.^[41]

The Times has generally opposed gay and transgender rights.^[42] In 2010, the Times published an editorial opposing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act because of its legal protections for transgender people.^[43][44][45] The editorial criticized transgender people and said that gender identity can be a choice, not an innate characteristic.^[43]

[edit] Recent changes

In January 2008, editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden retired and John F. Solomon began work as executive editor of the Times. Solomon is known for his work as an investigative journalist for the Associated Press and the Washington Post,and was most recently head of investigative reporting and mixed media development at the Post.^[46][47][48] Within a month the Times changed some of its style guide to conform more to mainstream media usage. The Times announced that it would no longer use words like "illegal aliens" and "homosexual," and in most cases opt for "more neutral terminology" like "illegal immigrants" and "gay," respectively. The paper also decided to stop using "Hillary" when referring to Senator Hillary Clinton, and the word "marriage" in the expression "gay marriage" will no longer appear in quotes in the newspaper. These changes in policy drew criticism from some conservatives.^[49] Prospect magazine attributed the Times' apparent move to the center to differences of opinion over the United Nations and North Korea, and said: "The Republican right may be losing its most devoted media ally."^[50]

On November 30, 2009 the New York Times reported that the Washington Times would no longer be receiving funds from the Unification Church and might have to cease publication or go to online publication only.^[41] In December 2009 the Times announced it would lay off 40% of its 370 employees and stop subscription service, instead distributing the paper free in some areas of Washington including branches of the government. It said that it would focus on its "core strengths," which it identified as "exclusive reporting and in-depth national political coverage, enterprise and investigative reporting, geo-strategic and national security news and cultural coverage based on traditional values." ^[51] Later that month the Times announced that it would cease publication of its Sunday edition, along with other changes partly in order to end its reliance on subsidies from the Unification Church ownership.^[52] On December 31, 2009 it announced that it would end its coverage of sports.^[53][54]

In July 2010 international leaders of the Unification Church issued a letter protesting the direction the Times was taking and urging closer ties between it and the church.^[55] In August 2010, a deal was made to sell the Times to a group more closely related to the church. Editor-in-chief Sam Dealey said that this was a welcome development among the Times' staff.^[56] On November 2, 2010, Moon and a group of former Washington Times editors purchased the paper from Moon's son, Preston Moon, for $1. This ended a stalemate that had been threatening to shut down the paper completely.^[57]

As of September 2010 the daily circulation was reported (by the Washington Post) to be only 40,000. On October 5, 2010 (page A2), the Times printed that their current circulation was 37,597, down from 49,907 a year earlier; which includes 8,844 free copies and 28,753 paid copies.Home delivered copies, versus dealer sales, was not specified.

[edit] Notable current and former writers

News

George Archibald (Congressional, political, United Nations, and education reporter)
Jeffrey H. Birnbaum (Managing editor, WashingtonTimes.com)
Stephen Dinan (Immigration and political reporter)
Bill Gertz (Defense and foreign policy reporter)
Ralph Z. Hallow (Political reporter)
Donald Lambro Political reporter)
John McCaslin ("Inside the Beltway" columnist)
Jerry Seper (Investigative reporter)

Opinion

Sports

Dan Daly (columnist)
Dick Heller (columnist)
Tom Knott (columnist)
Thom Loverro (columnist)

Computers

Mark Kellner

Metro

Gary Emerling (D.C. Reporter)
Adrienne T. Washington (columnist)
Tom Knott (columnist)
Fred Reed (police beat, later took on a broader purview)

Former

David Brooks (journalist)
Dave Fay (deceased)
Samuel T. Francis
Jeremiah O'Leary (deceased)
Bill Sammon
Rowan Scarborough
James G. Lakely
Wes Johnson (Cartoonist, Martini 'n Clyde - 1990-1992)

[edit] Executives, editors and managers, present and past

[edit] Editors-in-chief

James R. Whelan (1982-1984)
Smith Hempstone (1984–86)
Arnaud de Borchgrave (1986–1992); currently editor-at-large
Wesley Pruden (1992–2008) http://simplyappalling.blogspot.com/2009/06/racist-of-day-wesley-pruden.html KKK
John F. Solomon (2008–2009)
Sam Dealey (2010- )

[edit] Managing Editors

Coit Taylor Hendley Jr. (1982–1985)
Josette Sheeran Shiner (1992–1997)
William Giles (1997–2002)
Fran Coombs (2002–2008)
David W. Jones (2008–present)

[edit] Editorial Page Editors

Ann Crutcher (1982–1984)
William P. Cheshire (1984–1987)
Tony Snow (1987–1990)
Tony Blankley (2002–2007)

[edit] Others

Daniel Wattenberg - Arts and Entertainment Editor

Intelligence Report, Summer 2003, Issue Number: 110

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2003/summer/defending-dixie?page=0,2

America's Newspaper

America's Newspaper?

The Washington Times has a long record of hyped stories, shoddy reporting and failure to correct errors

SPLC

By Heidi Beirich and Bob Moser

In the summer of 1999, The Washington Timesignited a scandal that embarrassed Al Gore's fledgling presidential campaign— and became a famous example of the paper's talent for floating sensational stories into the mainstream media, even when those stories turn out to be riddled with factual errors and laced with baldly deceptive rhetoric.

A month after announcing his bid for the White House, Gore had tried to highlight his environmental message by paddling down the Connecticut River with a canoe full of reporters and local politicians. At the end of the ride, he stopped for a press conference where he announced some big grants designed to protect rivers. So far, so good.

But Gore's outing backfired the next morning, when the Times'front page reported that local authorities had blown $7 million to keep Gore's canoe from running aground on the drought-stricken river, raising the water level by releasing nearly 4 billion gallons from a nearby dam.

"New Hampshire opts to float Gore's boat," read the chiding headline. A scandal that would soon grow to such proportions that it had a name — "Floodgate" — was born.

"The implication was clear," Eric Boehlert later wrote in Rolling Stone magazine. "In a clumsy abuse of power, Al Gore, a supposed friend of the environment, gladly wasted precious natural resources to stage a political event."

The Timesexposé was much too juicy for the scandal-hungry press to pass up. The same afternoon the Times undammed Floodgate, the impact of the scandal was already being debated on CNN's "Inside Politics."

The print media hopped on board, too: "Gore in environmental quandary," said the Associated Press. "Critics Paddle Gore in 'Dam' Rowing Row," said the New York Post. "A Canoe Trip Becomes a Political Misadventure for Gore," said The New York Times.

One problem: The Washington Times had gotten the story wrong. No one affiliated with the Gore campaign had requested the water level be raised; the head of the river commission had come up with the idea, hoping Gore's canoe ride would bring national attention to her cause.

The $7 million price tag was wildly misleading; the local utility company that owned the dam had already planned the release the water, as it habitually does, and simply moved up the release time to accommodate Gore's trip.

Rather than being wasted, the water passed through hydroelectricturbines and generated power that was sold to other utility companies. And the amount of water released was not 4 billion gallons, but perhaps 500 million — a fact that the Times didn't correct until a week after the original story, long after other media outlets had taken Floodgate and run with it.

'Gong Show Journalism'

For most American newspapers, making so much noise with an inaccurate story would have been a huge embarrassment. Heads would roll. Penitent promises of stepped-up fact-checking and editorial trustworthiness would be made to readers.

But The Washington Times is not most American newspapers.

"It's the Fox News of the print world," says Gene Grabowski, who in 1988 became one of a number of Timesreporters to resign in protestof the paper's flouting of journalistic ethics.

While interviewing a relative ofMichael Dukakis, Grabowski had asked whether the Democratic presidential nominee sought psychiatric help during a low period in his life. "

It's possible but I doubt it," the relative had replied.

Grabowski's editors removed the phrase "but I doubt it,"highlighted the phrase "It's possible" in a dramatically misleading opening to his story, and headlined the piece "Dukakis kin hints at sessions."

For 20 years, the most notoriously ideological editor at the Times has been Wesley Pruden, the right-wing Arkansan who rose from managing editor to editor in chief in 1992.

In 1991, Pruden ordered major changes to a story the Times' Supreme Court reporter, Dawn Ceol, had written about Anita Hill, the law professor who accused Clarence Thomasof sexual improprieties during his confirmation hearings.

In the paper's first edition on Oct. 14, Ceol's article was headlined, "Thomas accuser lauded, assailed." In subsequent editions, with the story rewritten to play up accusations against Hill, the headline was changed to something far less balanced: "Miss Hill painted as 'fantasizer.'"

Ceol, the daughter of influential conservative fund-raiserPaul Weyrich, was certainly no left-winger. Still, she resigned over the editorial meddling, though it should not have come as a surprise; in his "Pruden on Politics" column, Ceol's editor had become one of Thomas' most boisterous defenders, taking aim at "hysterical feminists" engaged in "media harassment" of the judge.

Pruden and the other men who call the shots at The Times say their news is no more ideologically driven than anybody else's. But many media critics disagree. Summing up a widely held view, Bob Somerby, who edits the online "Daily Howler," calls the Times, "gong-show journalism."

Putting a kinder spin on it, Howard Kurtz of CNN and the Washington Post has deemed the Times "a happy anachronism — a throwback to a simpler time, when Whigs and mugwumps strode the land and newspapers … were unapologetically partisan vehicles."

When the Times' unapologetic partisanship has led it into error, the paper has not always issued the kinds of factual corrections that are de rigeur elsewhere.

Even when Kurtz revealed last year that two hard-hitting Times stories about Palestinian atrocities against Christians in the West Bank had been written under a false byline— a practice unheard of in contemporary journalism, and largely verboten even in the days of mugwumps and Whigs — the paper defended its decision not to inform readers of the deception. The reporter "said his life would be in danger" if he used his real name, explained Deputy Foreign Editor Willis Witter.

Managing Editor Francis Coombs did admit, when questioned by Kurtz, that a "legitimate case could be made that we at least should have informed the reader" that the stories were not really written by a reporter named Sayed Anwar.

The Wilder the Better

Given the Times' track record, it might seem surprising that other media outlets trust its stories enough to repeat them without independent verification.

Michelangelo Signiorile, media critic for the New York Press, believes the very outrageousness of the Times has, ironically enough, shielded the paper from widespread scrutiny.

"People in media want to dismiss it," he says. "Their attitude is: 'Oh, they're crazy. Nobody believes that paper. Nobody really reads it.' "

But nobody has to actually read the Times to imbibe its spin on the news; the wilder its stories, the more likely television and print media are to pick them up and run with them.

In late 2001 and early 2002, for instance, the Times dedicated 10 articles, two editorials and an opinion piece to what sounded like an egregious case of "biofraud." Reporter Audrey Hudson wrote that government wildlife regulators had "planted" fake lynx hair in states where there were no lynx, hoping to create new critical habitats that would close national forests to human visitors.

It turned out that Hudson had botched the story. No fur had been "planted," and even if it had been, no forests would have been closed without further investigation. No matter: The "Lynxgate" myth spread rapidly, picked up by The Associated Press and repeated in papers like The Wall Street Journal, Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Times, which complained of "Lynx hairs, lies and spins."

Magazines like the conservative Weekly Standard and U.S. News and World Report cited the Times series as an example of how government scientists manipulate data to serve their political ends.

It wasa month beforeThe Washington Timesgot around to quoting biologists who disputed Hudson's baseless charges. Once the story had been thoroughly debunked elsewhere, theTimesrefused to correct the facts.

Instead, as Extra! magazine reported, two groups that defended the embattled government biologists were contacted by an advertising salesperson from the Times.For $9,450, the groups were told, they could buy full-page advertisements to correct the Times' mistakes.

----

Intelligence Report, Summer 2003, Issue Number: 110

Defending Dixie

The Washington Times has a long record of hyped stories, shoddy reporting and failure to correct errors.

By Heidi Beirich and Bob Moser

starts here

When President George W. Bush nominated John Ashcroft for attorney general, it didn't take long for the press to unearth Ashcroft's 1999 interview in Southern Partisan magazine. Ashcroft had praised the neo-Confederate publication for "defending Southern patriots" such as Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson, and he'd pledged to follow the magazine's example.

"I've got to do more," Ashcroft said. "We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda."

Most media outlets depicted the flap over Ashcroft's pro-Dixie sentiments as a side issue, just one more reason why his nomination was controversial. But the nation's "conservative paper of record," The Washington Times, saw something different. On Jan. 16, 2001, the day Ashcroft began facing his critics in Congress, the Times devoted a chunk of its front page to an unusually long story with a provocative headline: "How the Democrats made loving Dixie a hate crime."

For a paper with a loyal readership on Capitol Hill, the story, written by Assistant National EditorRobert Stacy McCain, was nicely timed for maximum impact. But despite the headline, it did not detail a Democratic effort to outlaw Dixie-loving.

Instead, it described a growing resistance to Confederate displays and symbols as seen through the eyes of six experts, five of them arch-conservatives with well-established neo-Confederate sympathies. An NAACP representative was also quoted, deep in McCain's story, but his comments were immediately rebutted by Charles Lunsford (see Hate and Heritage), the neo-Confederate activist who coined the phrase, "heritage, not hate," and by leftist-turned-rightist David Horowitz (see Center for the Study of Popular Culture), who called the NAACP "a defamation and shakedown organization."

Casual readers of The Washington Times might well have been puzzled. Why would a major daily newspaper — one that bills itself as "America's Newspaper," no less — turn the Ashcroft controversy into a battle over loving Dixie? And why would it showcase a story so heavily slanted toward neo-Confederate opinions on race and heritage?

For devoted readers of the Times — a group that includes many of the nation's leading conservative politicians, journalists and think-tankers -- McCain's story was old hat. These readers know the Times loves to stir controversy with headlines and stories so provocative that other media outlets can't resist repeating them. They know the Times is the only major American newspaper that still features a weekly Civil War page. They know the Times has become a reliable source for extremist views on race, religion, immigration and Dixie.

What they don't know is why.

Money, Media and Moonification

Founded in 1982 by the Rev. Sun Myong Moon, the right-wing cult leader from South Korea, The Washington Times quickly made a name for itself with an approach to news reporting that was unusually ideological.

While mainstream media critics scoffed at "The Moonie Times" for enthusiastically championing the Rev. Moon's staunch anti-communism and his efforts to move the Republican Party farther right, the Times made a splash in conservative circles. President Ronald Reagan said it was his favorite paper. Right away, the Times showed a knack for taking its message to the mainstream, advertising itself as the "third most quoted paper" in the U.S. by its third year.

The Times' quotability and importance to conservative leaders quickly gave it a stature that outstripped its relatively small circulation. While the crosstown rival Washington Post moves more than 800,000 papers each weekday, the Times' circulation has never climbed much higher than 100,000. By his own estimate, Moon has spent upwards of $2 billion to keep the unprofitable paper afloat.

While the Times made itself must reading for right-wingers, it was also developing a reputation for shoddy journalism. From the start, the Times' front page was studded with scandalous stories bearing catchy headlines and sensational openings that more closely echoed the style of European tabloids than that of large American newspapers.

Whether they were taking aim at Democratic politicians like Barney Frank and Bill Clinton, assailing out-of-step conservatives like Sen. John McCain, or slamming "liberal" organizations like the National Education Association and the NAACP, these eye-popping stories often rippled through the rest of the scandal-hungry media --even though some of them were later proven to be slanted, deceptive, or downright false.

"The Washington Times is like no major city daily in America in the way that it wears its political heart on its sleeve," said the nation's leading journalistic watchdog, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), in 1995. "No major paper in America would dare be so partisan."

The folks who call the shots at the Times insist that their news is no more infected with ideology — or riddled with error — than anybody else's. The Intelligence Report made repeated attempts to talk with Washington Times Editor in Chief Wesley Pruden, Managing Editor Francis Coombs and National Editor Ken Hanner about the allegations and criticisms in this story. These requests were either ignored or, in Coombs' case, declined.

But Pruden has given his side of the story to Southern Partisan and CJR. "I don't ever want the Times to be known as a newspaper that writes the news from a conservative point of view," he told Southern Partisan. Where the conservatism creeps in, he told CJR, is in which stories the paper chooses to designate as news. The Times, Pruden said, is different simply because it reports "stories other papers are loath to cover."

One such story appeared in early July, when "Inside the Beltway" writer John McCaslin endorsed the so-called "NORFED Liberty Dollar" in his column. This "alternative currency" has been marketed aggressively to antigovernment "Patriots" as a challenge to the Federal Reserve, which is seen as responsible for a host of financial ills.

McCaslin uncritically repeated NORFED founder Bernard von Nothaus' claim that widespread use of the Liberty Dollar could eliminate the national debt "completely." The currency is supposedly fully backed by silver, but in fact is sold for almost twice the market value of the silver that it can be reimbursed for.

Even more stunning, the expert source McCaslin cites on Liberty Dollars — calling him "a Web development consultant for political and corporate clients" — is Bill White, a notorious anti-Semite who runs the neo-Nazi web site Overthrow.com. "I spend them everywhere," White gushes. In fact, they can be used almost nowhere.

A few days later, The Washington Times' knack for floating stories into the mainstream �� no matter how outrageous — was demonstrated once again.ABC Radio stalwart Paul Harvey, in his unmistakable boom of a voice, aired a glowing story about the Liberty Dollars.

---

start p2

Defending Dixie: A Family Affair

Pruden was elevated from managing editor to top dog of the Times in 1992. It was pivotal time for the paper. With the Cold War won and conservative politics in the ascendant, the paper needed a fresh sense of mission. When he sat down for a long interview with Southern Partisan not long after his promotion, Pruden left little doubt about where he would lead the paper.

After singling out the Southern culture warrior,Sen. Jesse Helms, as a political hero, Pruden bragged about his great-grandmother shooting a Union cavalryman and boasted that the Times was the most "in-your-face" conservative newspaper in America. When Robert E. Lee's birthday rolls around every year, he said, "I make sure we have a story" — especially because the occasion "falls around Martin Luther King's birthday."

Pruden started with the Times shortly after its founding. He was originally hired on a probationary basis, founding editor and publisher James Whelan told the Washington Business Journal, because Pruden had run into ethical problems as a reporter.

According to Whelan, Pruden was fired in 1978 by the now-defunct National Observer, where he had worked for 14 years, under suspicion that he had "manufactured" quotes in his stories. (Pruden refused to comment on the reasons for his ouster, except to say it involved "a couple of stories I'd done.")

Born and raised in Arkansas, Pruden has a deep-rooted affection for Dixie. His father, the Rev. Wesley Pruden Sr., was a leading spokesperson for Little Rock's racist Capital Citizens Council, which fought bitterly against school desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s. During the landmark confrontations at Little Rock High School in 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower sent National Guard troops to protect nine black teenagers as they entered the white school, Pruden Sr. reportedly told the assembled mob: "That's what we've got to fight! Niggers, Communists, and cops!"

The Rev. Pruden's son has avoided commenting on his father's politics. But in 1995, the Times ran two long op-ed pieces by the senior Pruden's old Citizens Council cohort,"Justice Jim" Johnson.

According to an investigation by Salon.com, Johnson'sWashington Timesstories were part of the anti-Clinton Arkansas Project, which mounted a well-financed campaign to discredit Henry Woods, the federal judge originally appointed to preside over criminal proceedings in the Whitewater case. The doubts about Judge Woods raised in Johnson's op-ed pieces percolated through the media for months, and Woods was eventually replaced by a judge more friendly to Whitewater investigators.

Pruden's contribution to the anti-Clinton efforts didn't stop there. Even as he oversaw his paper's wall-to-wall coverage of Whitewater and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the editor was creating a stir with his own op-ed columns about Clinton — including one thatbroke the "news" about Bill, Monica and the cigar.Pruden is also legendary, as an editor, for manipulating headlines and stories to ratchet up their political slant — so much so that Washington Times staffers coined a verb, "Prudenizing," to describe the tampering that has led some of them to resign in protest.

In 1998, Pruden, whose newspaper is the only major daily in America that runs a weekly page about a war that ended 138 years ago, spoke to the United Daughters of the Confederacy at the Manassas Battlefield Park. He began by making the kind of promise most editors avoid at any cost: "I will never fail to respond to you when you call on me for help, because I believe in what you are doing to cherish and protect and preserve the heritage of our great Southern people."

Concluding with a flourish, Pruden said "Southerners ... hold loyalty to two countries in our hearts." The second country is one "baptized 137 years ago on this very field in the blood of First Manassas, a country no longer at the mercy of the vicissitudes in the tangled affairs of men, a country that lives within us, a country that will endure for as long as men and women know love. ... God bless America, God bless the Confederate States of America, and God bless you all."

Extremism Gets a Voice

Though he declined to talk with the Intelligence Report for this story, Pruden has denied that his personal beliefs color The Washington Times."We are editorial page conservative," Pruden told Southern Partisan. "But we like to think that on news we just lay it down the middle and let people make up their own minds."

In 1995, Pruden appeared to strike a blow for "down the middle" fairness by firing The Times' other voice of the extreme right, syndicated columnist Samuel Francis. A new book by neoconservative stalwart Dinesh D'Souza had quoted Francis' speech at a 1994 conference on "Race and American Culture" sponsored by American Renaissance, a white supremacist journal that promotes eugenics and believes, among other things, thatwhites are inherently smarter and less violent than blacks. After D'Souza portrayed Francis as a purveyor of the "new spirit of white bigotry," Pruden told him the Times would no longer run his column.

The firing was something of a mystery, since Francis had often expressed views on race that appeared quite compatible with Pruden's. (Ironically, Francis now edits the Citizens Informer, a newsletter published by the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, successor to the Citizens Council that Wesley Pruden Sr. belonged to.)

In 1994, Francis had been demoted to a half-time staff position after he wrote a column lambasting the Southern Baptist Convention for officially "repenting" for its support for Southern slavery — even though Pruden had expressed a similar view in a column of his own, published in Southern Partisan.

Still, if the reasons for Francis' dismissal were murky, the public symbolism was clear enough: Even on its unabashedly conservative editorial page, the Times did have its limits.

But only two years later, the Times reversed coursedramatically, hiring a writer whose views on race and Southern heritage are arguably more extreme than either Francis' or Pruden's. And this time, those views would be expressed not in op-ed columns but on the Times' news pages.

With the arrival of Assistant National Editor Robert Stacy McCain in 1997, the Times' disassociation from the racism of American Renaissance became a distant memory. McCain, who wrote the story about Democrats and Dixie, has covered the group's biannual conferences in 1998, 2000 and 2002, making the Times the only major American newspaper to devote news stories to American Renaissance. Since 1999, the Times has also reprinted at least six excerpts from American Renaissance in its page-2 culture section, never acknowledging the highly controversial nature of the source.

"Activist warns of border war," blared the headline for McCain's latest American Renaissance story on Feb. 25, 2002. McCain was covering an American Renaissance conference on immigration, and his opening paragraph was almost as sensational as the headline: "A border war between the United States and Mexico 'could happen any day,' a California activist warned at a weekend conference in Virginia."

All 572 words of the story either paraphrased or quoted this same "activist," Glenn Spencer, who runs the anti-immigration group, Voice of Citizens Together, which the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League officials have described as a hate group. Without questioning their factuality, McCain's story reported Spencer's assertions that Mexican leaders were conducting an "invasion" of the United States and that "I love Osama bin Laden" T-shirts were all the rage south of the border after 9/11. No opposing viewpoint was offered or even referenced.

"Sending a reporter to this conference was like sending a reporter to a Ku Klux Klan rally," a flabbergasted reader wrote to the Times. Though the paper printed his letter, the reader's objections appear unlikely to be heeded. McCain has made no bones about being a fan of American Renaissance, writing a letter of "warm congratulations" to the magazine in 1997. It is extremely rare — in fact, it is typically expressly forbidden — for a journalist to publicly express admiration (or disdain) for a group he writes about. end p2

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2003/summer/defending-dixie?page=0,2

...

'A Natural Revulsion' p3

Something else about McCain is even rarer: he belongs to a hate group — the League of the South (LOS) — that shares some of American Renaissance's views on race. The League, a white-supremacist organization that opposes racial intermarriage, has defended historical segregation and even slavery, and advocates a second Southern secession from the U.S.

Washington Times readers have not been informed of McCain's hate-group membership, even when he's written on subjects near and dear to the hearts of his co-religionists. (McCain has been identified as a League member on DixieNet, the Web site that has reprinted several of his stories and essays from the Times, and he's mentioned his affiliation with the League in on-line postings.)

If McCain and his editors followed the usual rules of journalistic ethics, steering him clear of subjects related to his partisan beliefs, his hate-group membership might not be an issue. But the 43-year-old Georgia native, who left the Rome News-Tribune (circulation 17,000) for The Washington Times in 1997, has specialized in subjects that are vital to League of the South members: race, religion, guns, immigration, and controversies over Confederate flags and "heritage."

An avid poster on Internet discussion groups, McCain has aired strong personal views on these subjects. In December, New York Press media critic Michelangelo Signiorile published some of McCain's contributions to FreeRepublic.com, written under the pseudonym BurkeCalhounDabney.

McCain asserted that the civil rights movement inspired "black criminality" by encouraging people to get arrested at demonstrations. "I am disturbed … by [Jesse] Jackson's idea that 'breaking white folks' rules' was somehow inherently just," McCain wrote. "If rules were to be broken merely because they were the work of white folks, then hasn't Jackson gone a long way toward explaining the explosion of black criminality that began in the 1960s?"

Signiorile, who was alerted by a reader to McCain's postings, told the Intelligence Report he was "amazed" by what he found. In one posting, McCain suggested that Harvard University President Lawrence Summers be "persecuted and run out of town" for supporting gay rights.

In another, McCain gave his take on interracial relationships: "[T]he media now force interracial images into the public mind and a number of perfectly rational people react to these images with an altogether natural revulsion," McCain wrote. "The white person who does not mind transacting business with a black bank clerk may yet be averse to accepting the clerk as his sister-in-law, and THIS IS NOT RACISM, no matter what Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Washington tell us."

Shortly after Signiorile's story appeared, and McCain's extremist views began to circulate around journalistic and political circles, every posting by BurkeCalhounDabney was deleted from FreeRepublic.com.

Taking His Stand in Dixie

McCain's beliefs often creep into his stories in ways that readers might not notice. In 1998,McCain wrote the Times' obituary for George Wallace, the Alabama governor who became the South's most famous segregationist.

Hailing Wallace as "a man who transformed American politics" and paved the way for conservative electoral triumphs, McCain quoted three scholars on Wallace. All the scholars were identified as history professors — but not as leaders in the same hate group McCain belongs to, the League of the South.

"[A]s a working journalist with 10 years' experience," McCain once wrote on the League's DixieNet Web site, "I am well aware of how reporters can subtly frame their stories to suggest which side in any controversy is in the right." McCain's stories for the Times often display this expertise, relying on sources from hate groups without acknowledging the controversial nature of their views — and immediately shooting down any opposing viewpoints, like those of the NAACP leader in McCain's story on Dixie-loving as a "hate crime."

If McCain's not-so-subtle framing of the news has raised eyebrows around the Times' newsroom, it doesn't appear to have affected the kinds of stories he's assigned to write. In 2000, when African-American writer Lerone Bennett Jr. published a controversial book accusing Abraham Lincoln of being a racist (see related story Lincoln Reconstructed), McCain wrote an approving feature about the book even though — perhaps unbeknownst to his editors — he had already expressed vehement opinions on the subject.

In an Internet discussion group, McCain had written that Lincoln was a "war criminal" who should have been tried for "treason." On DixieNet, McCain — using his own name — had even concocted a mock "Wanted" poster for Lincoln, whom he described as the "1st RULER and TYRANT of the AMERICAN EMPIRE" and a perpetrator of "Murder, False Imprisonment, and numerous HEINOUS crimes against the SOUTHern states and AMERICANS in general!"

"I cannot believe that they allow him to stay" at the Times, says Signiorile. "I don't think any paper should have anyone in a racist group covering these issues, or covering racial politics. It's completely outrageous to have someone like that covering news at all."

McCain and his editors declined several invitations to talk to the Intelligence Report about his League of the South affiliation and its impact on his reporting. But McCain has expressed typically strong views on who should be covering news — especially news about the South.

In 1996, a year before he was hired by The Washington Times, McCain co-wrote a manifesto called "Down on Dixie: the Confederate Cause and the South's Scalawag Press." Advertised for $1.50 apiece on DixieNet, the 16-page pamphlet looks nostalgically at "a time, not so many years ago, when newspapers in the South were also expected to be newspapers of the South and newspapers for the South." By contrast, McCain and his co-author, now-deceased Sons of Confederate Veterans member Gilbert Smith, accuse modern-day Southern journalists of waging "a vicious campaign of propaganda and distortion" by saying, among other things, that the Civil War was fought over slavery.

"[L]et Southern journalists continue to sneer in ignorance at those things which they imagine are represented by the Confederate battle flag," McCain concludes, in a condensed version of the pamphlet that appeared on DixieNet. "But this I shall not do. I shall not buy into the North's hypocritical claims of moral superiority. Like my ancestors before me, I'll take my stand in Dixie."

And as long as he continues to take that stand in The Washington Times, with the powerful backing of his editor in chief, one thing is for sure: Nobody will accuse the Times of succumbing to the Scalawag Press....end all end p3

http://simplyappalling.blogspot.com/2009/06/racist-of-day-wesley-pruden.html KKK

th frank:

One of Jack Abramoff’s tricks, you will recall, was to hand intellectuals cash and trips to tropical islands in exchange for such intellectual services as might get the tycoons who owned the sweatshops in those paradises off the regulatory hook. And how different was the Abramoff model of enlightenment from the activities of the Cambridge, Massachusetts consultancy called "Monitor,” with its prominentHarvardconnections? According to the Boston Globe:

The management consulting firm received $250,000 a month from the Libyan government from 2006 to 2008 for a wide range of services, including writing [a] book proposal, bringing prominent academics to Libya to meet Khadafy “to enhance international appreciation of Libya” and trying to generate positive news coverage of the country.

“Trying to generate positive news coverage,” by the way, included placing pro-Qaddafi stories by prominent scholars in The New Republic, the Washington Post, Newsweek International, and the Guardian—a record far more impressive than the Bush administration’s suborning of syndicated columnist Armstrong Williams or Abramoff’s own episodic triumphs on the op-ed page of the Washington Times.