Moonie journalism; at the Washington Times, it's better than you might think.

• Author: McNichol, Tom

Moonie Journalism

Last November, an unusual thing happened to The Washington Times, no stranger to the unusual. In an exclusive interview, French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac told the Times's editor-in-chief, Arnaud de Borchgrave, that West German leaders believed a purported plot to blow up an Israeli airliner the previous April had been faked by Israel's secret service to implicate Syrian President Hafez al-Assad.

That The Washington Times broke a major story wasn't news. It had beaten the pack on stories such as Frank Carlucci's appointment to the National Security Council, James Watt's resignation, and Senator Paul Laxalt's secret mission to the Philippines in 1985. Nor was it unusual that the Times interview produced an international flap, causing an uproar in France where it became known as "l'affaire Chirac.' An exclusive interview with imprisoned South African black leader Nelson Mandela in August 1985 had received world-wide notice. What was unusual was the way it was covered by The New York Times. The newspaper of record published Chirac's charges, credited The Washington Times, and managed to avoid a single mention of the Rev. Sung Myung Moon or the Unification Church. For the The Washington Times, it was something of a breakthrough.

Since it was founded in 1982, the paper has spent nearly as much time explaining its ownership as it has chasing down stories. As Times officials are fond of saying, at least once every five minutes in the presence of any outside reporter, the paper is owned, not by the Unification Church itself but by News World Communications, a for-profit holding company owned by church officials. But in its efforts to bury the ownership controversy, scoop by journalistic scoop, the Times has found that the job might be done better with a 10-ton earth mover. Unlike most organizations associated with funding a major daily newspaper, the Unification Church has been accused of brainwashing its followers, aiding the Korean CIA, and trying to establish a worldwide theocracy. The Sulzbergers and Grahams may have skeletons in their closets, but you don't see them marrying off their progeny in Madison Square Garden.

Yet, the Chirac scoop and many others like it are helping to shift the public focus from the Times's ownership to its performance, and by that standard the Times is a pretty good paper. By being the conservative paper under a conservative administration, it has scored its share of exclusives. President Reagan calls it his favorite paper which should say something about both the paper's conservative tilt and its colorful easy-to-read format. And with thorough local coverage, this unabashedly conservative Korean-owned paper is stealing black readers from the more liberal Washington Post. All said, the Times is well worth the quarter.

The Moon and the Star

While many Unification Church papers, particularly The New York City Tribune, are dressed-up propaganda sheets produced almost exclusively by church followers, the Times's reporters are mostly professional journalists, though a few Moonie holdovers from the paper's earlier days remain in the newsroom.

Very early in the game, the Koreans got the word that the best way to influence public opinion was to have their paper resemble everyone else's. Neither the newspaper nor its headquarters look out of the ordinary. (Indeed, if you were to visit the Times's building and then USA Today's lobby, which is dominated by a huge bust of owner Allen Neuharth, you would have a tough time deciding which one was owned by a cult leader.) When The Washington Times was launched in May 1982 it could draw from a ready pool of reporters who had been laid off when The Washington Star folded the year before. "In the early days, we used to say that the Star was alive and living on New York Avenue,' recalls Wesley Pruden, now Times managing editor. Even today, there's more Star than Moon in The Washington Times. Not only are many of the Star alums conservative, like their bosses, but they also share an almost pathological hatred of the Post, the liberal nemesis that put them on the street and lacked the good sense to offer them jobs.

At first, the Times was a cranky underdog, scarcely running an issue without a dig at the Evil Empire on 15th Street. For instance, in 1984, when the Post prominently mentioned the Times in a series on the Unification Church, the Times quickly countered with its own "investigative' series, "Inside the Post.' The series was mostly cocktail party back-biting accompanied by a crude drawing of a feeding shark, by the daughter of Times Executive editor Smith Hempstone.

Such snarling has yet to hurt the Post, whose 796,000 circulation is roughly eight times that of the Times. On Sundays, the Post is read by an incredible 78 percent of the Washington area, the highest "penetration' in the country; the Times doesn't even publish on weekends. More importantly, the Post's lead in annual advertising revenue ($473 million to $4.2 million) makes it practically invincible.

Yet in recent years, particularly since the arrival of de Borchgrave, the Times has gone after the Post with dogged...