Since their recent electoral drubbing, many Republicans are rethinking their party’s relationship (or lack of one) to blacks and Hispanics, and embracing what Rick Santorum calls “a broader, bolder and more inclusive vision of freedom and opportunity.” One sign of this is the sea change on immigration policy. Just days ago, four prominent Republican senators, including heavyweights John McCain and Marco Rubio, joined a bipartisan coalition to unfurl a broad roadmap for reform. One of the pillars was a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. This is a far cry from just a few months ago, when the GOP’s presidential nominee was peddling “self deportation” as the answer to our immigration quandary.
But while some conservative leaders are courting minority groups, one of the movement’s ideological lodestars is taking a hard turn in the other direction. Last month, The Washington Times tapped Wesley Pruden, its one-time editor in chief, who was pushed out amid allegations that he allowed racism to fester in the newsroom, to run its Commentary section. Pruden’s return—part of a wide-ranging shakeup following the death of the Times’s founder—is a troubling sign for the opinion pages, long a key pipeline for conservative ideas and a training ground for right-of-center pundits.
Under Pruden’s leadership, from 1992 to 2008, the Times became a forum for the racialist hard right, including white nationalists, neo-Confederates, and anti-immigrant scare mongers (all of which the Southern Poverty Law Center and The Nation magazine have documented at length). Pruden’s own column, Pruden on Politics, was occasionally tinged with racial animus, too. In 2005, for instance, he lambasted the Senate for succumbing to “manufactured remorse” and passing a resolution of apology for blocking anti-lynching laws during the Jim Crow era.
Many Times insiders fear his return will stain the paper’s image, especially in the current political climate. “Its a huge blow to the influence and credibility of the paper,” says a senior Times official who worked closely with Pruden during his earlier reign.
Pruden’s predecessor in the Commentary section, Brett Decker, came to the Times from The Wall Street Journal. Like William F. Buckley, who mentored him early in his career, Decker sought to kindle debate by bringing various factions of the conservative movement together on his pages. Decker also recruited writers and editors with deep political connections, and encouraged them to mine their rolodexes to track emerging issues and woo big-name conservatives to write for their pages. According to Jonathan Slevin, who was the Times president and publisher from 2009 to 2010, this approach “brought new life into the section.” So much life that Slevin agreed to add two people to Decker’s team even as he was slashing other departments to the bone. “The one place where I could keep the identity and the relevancy of the Times was the Commentary section,” Slevin said. “It was a really vibrant place, and the staff was very connected. Decker’s perspective was you go out and function as a reporter and really get yourself into the mix, so you’re not just writing from an ivory tower.” Readers seemed to like the approach, too. Commentary pieces often dominated the most-read list on the paper’s website.
But Decker butted heads with Slevin’s successor, Tom McDevitt. According to current and former Times officials, eight of whom were interviewed for this story, this is partly because McDevitt didn’t care for Decker’s editorial approach, and partly because the two didn’t see eye to eye on journalistic ethics. (McDevitt did not respond to emails seeking comment.)
"stain the paper’s image"
"a huge blow to the influence and credibility of the paper"
Boy, that's some strong stuff, there, about a paper which had the same sort of image and credibility as Fox News and the WSJ opinion page. I'm sure it had a good deal of influence, seeing as how the Times peddled the same lunatic fantasies that have become a staple of the Reactionary turntable, and self-referential, self-reinforcing material is always vitally important for that kind of religious thought. That doesn't mean it was any more of a serious newspaper than Pravda or Le Moniteur were in their heydays. The purpose of the Times was simply to present the daily Reactionary Party talking points in some sort of authoritative-looking fashion, and it did that reasonably well. In all other respects, it's been no more credible or important than the News of The World, or The National Enquirer.
#1 Posted by JohnR, CJR on Tue 12 Feb 2013 at 01:51 PM
Wow, from the heat generated here, you'd think that the Times ran a number of stories justifying a mass-murder spree by a race-obsessed former police officer by recourse to left-leaning racial prejudices and stereotypes. Oh, sorry, wrong 'Times'.
#2 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Wed 13 Feb 2013 at 12:50 PM
To the editor:
In the article “The Washington Times takes a giant step – backwards,” published February 11, you have chosen to repeat the falsehoods about me published by The Nation several years ago. I hope you will have the professional honesty to now publish portions of the letter I sent to The Nation at that time which are relevant to your article. These comments also apply to the “quotations” attributed to me by George Archibald in his vanity-published “book” which you cite in your article.
The excerpts from my letter to The Nation are as follows:
“George Archibald, a former employee of The Washington Times, is virtually the only named source in Max Blumenthal’s article, Hell of a Times. He also is clearly the overall architect of the piece.
“Mr. Archibald resigned under pressure from The Times in August 2005. In a series of e-mails beginning Oct. 25 and in a meeting in my office between Christmas and New Year’s Day, he pleaded to come back but was not rehired for well-documented reasons that he is thoroughly aware of. Since then Mr. Archibald has engaged in an increasingly vicious and fictitious cyber-campaign against The Washington Times and me in particular. Mr. Blumenthal was aware of Mr. Archibald’s employment history at The Times but chose not to mention it in his article.
“Every situation involving me described by Mr. Archibald is a fabrication.
“Every quotation attributed to me by Mr. Archibald is false and repugnant.
"The newsroom described by Mr. Blumenthal in his article with Mr. Archibald’s help is a fiction. …
“Please do not regard my failure to mention other portions of the article as an acknowledgement of their veracity. In the interest of brevity, I am merely citing a few key examples to illustrate the overall mendacity of Mr. Blumenthal’s piece.”
The full text of the letter is available in the online archives section of The Nation.
Sincerely yours,
Francis B. Coombs, Jr.
#3 Posted by Francis Coombs, CJR on Thu 14 Feb 2013 at 10:15 AM
While I welcome feedback from Francis Coombs, his comments don’t actually address the substance of my story. The piece does not rehash the contents of The Nation’s 2006 investigation. Nor does it rely heavily on George Archibald. In fact, the only reference to Archibald is the following passage.
*****
According to an internal Times investigation—which was conducted by the law firm Nixon Peabody and quoted in the book, Journalism is War, by the paper’s longtime investigative reporter, George Archibald—Coombs told subordinates that blacks were born with IQs 15 to 20 points lower than whites. The probe also found that Coombs was a vocal supporter of abortion because “it disproportionately impacts blacks and minorities” and “helps to keep the black and minority population down.”
*****
Multiple Times official with direct knowledge of the matter have confirmed that this passage accurately characterizes Coombs’s behavior and the contents of the Nixon Peabody report. These statements are also consistent with the findings of the Southern Poverty Law Center:
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2005/spring/the-news-that-fits
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2003/summer/defending-dixie?page=0,0
It’s also worth noting that my story focuses mostly on the paper’s coverage of race under Pruden and Coombs rather than the two men’s personal views. See, for example, the passage below.
***
Between 1998 and 2004, the Times covered each of the biennial American Renaissance conferences, hosted by the white supremacist New Century Foundation. What’s more, the paper’s coverage of these events—which are hotbeds for holocaust deniers, neo-Nazis, and eugenicists—was stunningly one sided. One 1998 story, called “Whites Ponder Future of Their Race,” was patched together largely from presentations by firebrand researchers who defended discredited theories on the genetic gap between races and argued that human beings are genetically programmed to prefer their own ethnicity….
Four years later, the Times ran a piece based solely on an American Renaissance speech by Glenn Spencer, who founded the anti-immigrant hate group, American Border Patrol, and has called immigrants a “cultural cancer.” It warned that the Latino migrants flooding into California were part of a secret plot to re-conquer the American southwest and turn it into “an independent Hispanic territory.”
Similarly, under Pruden, the paper’s Culture Briefs section regularly printed excerpts from racist hard-right publications, such as VDARE and American Renaissance magazine, along with rants from Bill White, the infamous neo-Nazi. One typical Culture Briefs snippet from 2006 argued that “genetic diversity” cause by the mixing of races was “a threat to civilization.” During the Pruden era, an entire page in each week’s Saturday edition was also reserved for the Civil War, with many articles devoted to glorifying the Confederacy.
***
The biases speak for themselves.
#4 Posted by Mariah Blake, CJR on Thu 14 Feb 2013 at 02:12 PM
Mariah Blake’s story about Wesley Pruden’s return to The Washington Times to assume control of the paper’s editorials, letters to the editor, and Commentary section was well-reported, despite the comments published above by longtime Pruden ally Fran Coombs who asserts the report did not accurately portray Pruden’s (and Coombs’) strong passion for “glorifying the Confederacy,” racial separatism, and class warfare.
The headline writer’s depiction of Pruden’s return as “a giant step backward” for the paper I believe missed the point. As an Arkansas native with strong ties to segregation-era kingpins of that state from the 1950s onward through the period of Southern “massive resistance” to racial integration, which continued beyond the JFK-LBJ presidencies, Pruden has a deep-seated hatred of Arkansas’ famous political duo, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and I know from personal experience during two decades under editor Pruden that he gleefully looks down the political road to “mess up” the Clintons again in the Times’ pages, however he can, with the clever “stylistic touch” that Mariah Blake properly noted.
For example, the Times front page on Jan. 24, above-the-fold, twinned its lead news story, “Tears and rage on Benghazi: [Hillary] Clinton takes hit for consulate attack,” with the boxed lead of Wes Pruden’s opinion column, headlined “Hillary Clinton’s last hurrah? A lasting image.” What a huge mistake to mix subjective opinion commentary with news so glaringly like this –– particularly with such an important breaking story that so much of Washington and the country is focused upon. The twinning not only tainted otherwise good balanced factual reporting, but the column was so totally Pruden’s usual “combative” anti-Clinton venom with both-barrels blazing, which is steeped in Wes’s long-ago Arkansas Dixiecrat roots.
Adding insult, Wes got facts mixed up in his second graph, saying “Pressed for the first time to answer sharp public questioning about her part in the episode, she grew angry and combative, more like the Hillary who screamed vulgarities and threw lamps at her husband at the White House…” That was wrong –– the screaming and “threw lamps” (and china) episode actually occurred years before Bill Clinton was president, at the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock when he returned in the personal car of state trooper Larry Ferguson of his protective detail from an after-midnight sexual encounter with mistress Gennifer Flowers. Hillary was waiting bathrobed in a rage to greet him with a shower of thrown plates and pots. I reported that story for the Times when Pruden-Coombs were senior editors in the 1990s.
In his new role at the Times, Pruden is back at his old tricks influencing the focus of the main national and global news sections and having the “last say” as late-night editor as well.
Coombs’ comments do not change this point. As for Max Blumenthal, author of The Nation piece in October 2006, I never met him but had just one surprise telephone interview with him about Pruden-Coombs assigning me to Arkansas in 1992 for interviews with former state Supreme Court Justice Jim Johnson and other Gov. Orville Faubus appointees and leaders of the state anti-integration Capital Citizens Council for which Pruden’s Baptist minister father, James Wesley Pruden, had been chaplain throughout Wes’s childhood and high school years.
As for my book Journalism Is War, which came out in August 2009, nothing in the book about the earlier internal Times investigation commissioned by the owners after I retired –– the so-called Nixon-Peabody report that led to the ouster of Pruden and Coombs from their editors’ posts –– has been factually controverted by anyone despite all Coombs’ blustering denials.
Mariah Blake apparently interviewed many well-informed and highly-placed Times’ people who were willing to speak candidly, so her piece is well-sourced.
#5 Posted by George Archibald, CJR on Thu 14 Feb 2013 at 06:01 PM
It would take more space than you’re likely to give me to correct all of the problems with this article, so I’ll just mention a couple of the most flagrant errors related to me.
I’ve been a journalist for nearly four decades, starting out as a newspaperman and then traveling the world for 23 years as a correspondent and bureau chief for Time magazine before branching out into online and broadcast journalism. During all of those years I spent less than one year as a speechwriter and senior advisor at the State Department. To sum up my career as “a former State Department flack” is not only untrue but is clearly misleading. My professional background is well documented and easily found on the Internet, so why would your writer deliberately misstate it?
As for my record at the Voice of America, even a perfunctory search online would have shown that the discredited claims your writer cited about my leadership there have been authoritatively rebutted by me and others. And that accusation of “ruthless cost cutting” reflects a surprising lack of understanding of how the federal government works; departmental budgets are set (and cut) by the President and the Congress, not by an agency head. The fact that VOA is a competitive international broadcaster today is due in no small part to the fact that I successfully converted what was once a radio-focused agency into an influential force in television broadcasting around the world, resulting in a 33 per cent growth in VOA’s global audience – from 90 million to 120 million – during my four years as director. Throughout that time I had the full support of the bipartisan, presidentially-appointed board that was responsible for ensuring that VOA’s broadcasts are balanced, objective, and nonpartisan. Any hint of political bias in those broadcasts would not have been tolerated by anyone on that board, Democrat or Republican, or by me.
The errors in your article that I’ve mentioned only hint at the range of mistakes in it. If CJR is truly dedicated to upholding the standards of professional journalism, it could start by publishing writers who have at least a modicum of respect for facts.
David S. Jackson
Executive Editor
The Washington Times
#6 Posted by David S. Jackson, CJR on Wed 20 Feb 2013 at 06:31 PM
There is no way for me to respond to David Jackson's allegations about unspecified factual errors. I would, however, like to address the points he raises about his professional track record. While it is true that he once worked for Time magazine, according to his LinkedIn profile, Mr. Jackson has spent the last 12 years working for U.S. government agencies, mostly in public relations. Prior to joining The Washington Times, he worked as a public affairs specialist for the State Department. Thus my description of his credentials is accurate.
It is also worth noting that Mr. Jackson’s LinkedIn profile makes no mention of any newspaper experience, though his colleagues at The Washington Times say he spent a year at a newspaper after graduating from college.
As for Jackson's tenure at Voice of America, the turmoil is well documented. In 2005, the man who preceded him as director of VOA, Sanford J. Ungar, wrote a lengthy lament for Foreign Affairs (http://tinyurl.com/b8jpdrk). Among other things, Ungar argued that VOA--"the country's best instrument of public diplomacy"--was "being systematically diminished under Mr. Jackson’s leadership. Below is a snippet.
***
[E]mployees in the VOA's battered newsroom have tried to fend off directives from VOA director David Jackson and other political appointees, who have suggested that the network report more favorably on the actions of the Bush administration in Iraq and the Middle East and more deliberately try to enhance the United States' reputation around the world. Editors have repeatedly been asked to develop "positive stories" emphasizing U.S. successes in Iraq, rather than report car bombings and terrorist attacks, and they were instructed to remove from the VOA Web site photographs of abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison, even though they were already widely available elsewhere. On several occasions since 2002, VOA management has objected to stories quoting Democratic politicians or newspaper editorials critical of the Bush administration's foreign policy. In July 2004, Jackson demoted and reassigned the VOA's news director, Andre de Nesnera, a veteran correspondent, purportedly as part of a move to bolster the role of a television production unit recently incorporated into the VOA. Colleagues insisted, however, that de Nesnera was being punished for refusing to make the daily news report more overtly sympathetic to President George W. Bush. Yet when nearly half of the VOA's staff of 1,000 signed a petition protesting this and other changes -- a gesture that received much attention in the outside media.
***
Other news outlets have reported similar findings:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4707444
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/bully-pulpit#
While Jackson has denied some of the specifics details in these stories, he has provided little evidence to back up his denials. Nothing, to my knowledge, has been “authoritatively rebutted.”
#7 Posted by Mariah Blake, CJR on Wed 3 Apr 2013 at 06:34 PM
No, you’re still wrong, Ms. Blake.
The past “dozen” (actually, 11) years you refer to included more than four years when I was director of the Voice of America. That was obviously not a public relations agency or role. Beginning the week after 9-11, I spent one year working for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. Since the Assistant Secretary knew of my past experience as Time magazine’s chief technology correspondent, she hired me as a consultant to create and run a website devoted to news and information about the war against terrorism. At State, as I mentioned before, I worked primarily as a speechwriter. Although I was brought on board in a Public Affairs Specialist “slot”, I was not associated with the Public Affairs bureau. So even using the most liberal interpretation, all of this adds up to less than two years in a government position that could be even remotely linked to “public affairs”.
As for my resume, when one has decades of professional experience (you apparently don’t have this problem), it’s customary to list only the most recent positions. In fact, my professional career started at City News Bureau, a wire service where I spent over a year, followed by four and one-half years as a reporter at The Chicago Daily News. From there I went to The Chicago Sun-Times, and then I was hired by Time Magazine.
Finally, citing three stories that all relied on the same discredited source does not make them credible. As I noted earlier, even the Democrats on VOA’s bipartisan oversight Board dismissed Mr. Ungar’s allegations as false. And contrary to your description, I denied not only “some” of those claims, I denied all of them, specifically and with details. If you were really interested in the facts, you would have quoted from my printed rebuttal in Foreign Affairs (and it was not the only one).
But it appears neither you nor CJR is interested in the facts.
#8 Posted by David S. Jackson, CJR on Fri 5 Apr 2013 at 05:53 PM