The Washington Times has lost more than $200 million--perhaps more than $250 million--since it began publication five years ago as "an alternative, conservative voice" to the Washington Post. But it's also become a serious and controversial player in the political/media arena of the nation's capital.
Patrick J. Buchanan says that when he was White House communications director, "It was read by everybody before the senior staff meeting . . . . It's got things . . . you can't find elsewhere . . . a lot of stories . . . the President would make phone calls on the basis of."
For the Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday April 28, 1987 Home Edition Part 1 Page 19 Column 1 National Desk 3 inches; 82 words Type of Material: Correction
Long controversial for his passionate anti-communism, De Borchgrave triggered controversy anew less than two months after taking over at the Times when he wrote a Page 1 editorial announcing that the paper was starting a $14-million fund-raising campaign to assist the contras in Nicaragua. (The editorial said $100,000 would be contributed to the fund by the paper itself--not by the Unification Church, as was inadvertently and erroneously reported in the Los Angeles Times on Sunday--and the paper then turned the fund raising over to a separate, independent agency.)
One reason people in the Reagan White House read the Washington Times is that the paper is avowedly conservative and anti-communist--so vigorously so that some staffers and readers say it distorts the news.
Washington Times editors deny this charge, but four months of reading the paper (and interviewing the people who run it and work for it) leaves one with the clear impression that its proprietors--a company owned by members and officials of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church--are far more interested in promoting anti-communism than Moonie theology with their newspaper.
The Washington Times is not just a handmaiden to the American right wing, though. Indeed, it was the Washington Times that first broke (and most aggressively pursued) the story of the lobbying efforts of former White House aide and Reagan intimate Michael K. Deaver (who has since been indicted for perjury).
The Washington Times breaks a lot of stories these days--in Washington and out--despite an editorial staff of just 230 men and women. (The Post has 540.)
Just last Wednesday, the paper broke a story that a confidential log containing the names of 500 people who had been tested for AIDS had disappeared from a city health clinic. The paper has also broken stories on the planned resignation of James G. Watt as secretary of the Interior; on the defection of Soviet KGB official Vitaly Yurchenko; on Sen. Paul Laxalt's secret 1985 mission to the Philippines with a special warning from President Reagan for then-President Ferdinand E. Marcos, and on French Premier Jacques Chirac's charge last year that West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl believed that a purported plot to blow up an Israeli jetliner was concocted by Israeli intelligence.
The Washington Times has won awards for its sports section and for its design, as well--it's one of the half-dozen or so most attractive, best-packaged papers in the country--and the director of the National Gallery of Art says the paper's art critic, Jane Adams Allen, is "one of the best in the business."
Joseph Laitin, who writes a column on the press for the Post and who has long been critical of his own paper's selection of stories for Page 1, says: "The Washington Times, on the whole, has better judgment of what to put on Page 1 than the Post does."
In fairness, it should be pointed out that the Washington Times has also missed some good stories (most recently, the purchase of Vincent van Gogh's "The Sunflowers" for nearly $40 million) and that its zeal for scoops (and its faith in the Reagan Administration) has also led it astray at times--as when it reported last year that American intelligence officials said (mistakenly, it turned out) that Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi had fled the country after the U.S. bombing raid there.
Far From Truly Competitive
For all its progress, the Washington Times is still far from being truly competitive with the Post, and even its most optimistic executives don't project a circulation beyond 250,000--which would be more than double its present 104,186 . . . and would still be about one-third the size of the Post's 735,998.
The Post reaches 52% of the homes in its metropolitan area during the week and 70% on Sundays--by far the greatest penetration/domination enjoyed by any major metropolitan paper in the country.
More important, since advertising revenue covers about 75% of the cost of publishing most daily newspapers, the Post now makes $112 for every $1 the Times makes in advertising revenue.
If it weren't for the Unification Church, "anybody who's a smart advertiser in Washington . . . would be supporting that paper . . . " says James K. Glassman, former publisher of the New Republic and now publisher of Roll Call, a weekly newspaper on Capitol Hill.
But advertisers seem reluctant to risk being tainted by association with the church. Moreover, the history of second newspapers in major American cities over the last 20 years suggests that even without the taint of church affiliation, the Washington Times would have trouble attracting large quantities of advertising.
Nevertheless, circulation of the paper did increase 17.6% last year, and advertising increased 51% in revenue and 30.5% in linage from fiscal 1985 to fiscal 1986 (which ended March 31).
Profit Not Immediate Goal
