DESPERATE

Whether folks at The Washington Times like it or not, the year-long civil war between the newspaper's ossified senior editors and the company's Insight Online, a big-hit internet property, spilled out in a January 29 New York Times hit-job story about Insight's reporting of Illinois Senator Barack Obama's Muslim background and the fact he subdues the fact his middle name is Hussein and he went to an anti-Western Muslim school in his formative youth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/us/politics/29media.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=us

The published quote of Washington Times editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden was desperate: “Some of the editors here get annoyed when Insight is identified as a publication of The Washington Times."

Well, when a sister publication is beating Mister Pruden's pants off, and morale in his newsroom is at rock-bottom because he and fellow senior editors mistreat people terribly, and he is an absentee landlord who works out of his comfortable home each day instead of the office, making a quarter-million bucks plus expense account while most of the paper's best reporters pull in less than forty-thousand, please, Mister Pruden, get a life before you retire.

And please get a different mugshot over your column without the stupid hat pushed over your head as you never were a true newsman in the tradition of Bartholomew Green, who printed the first genuine American newspaper, the Boston News-Letter, in April 1704, or Henry L. Mencken of The American Mercury and Baltimore Sun in the 1920s, after whom you pretend to pattern yourself. You write well, Mister Pruden, but your mugshot is stupid, and unfortunately reflects your horrible roots as a racist redneck.

Also, Wes Pruden and Fran Coombs, please stop spreading your unfounded speculation that I am the source of Insight stories that best you every week. I am not their source or reporter. This is an unwinnable game you are playing as you have not bested Insight over more than a year.

Insight's reported source of its recent Obama story was the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. The New York Times reporter questioned this, but his story ended up with no evidence to repudiate the Insight story. I believe from my own independent reporting since publication of the Insight piece that the source of the Insight story was, as reported, people within Hillary Clinton's exploratory presidential campaign. The Clinton campaign has not denied it.

The New York Times story by reporter David Kirkpatrick was good, except as I told him in several telephone conversations before the story was published, I knew the sources were fully vetted by a very good editor, and the New York Times story did not repudiate the basic facts reported by Insight, but instead launched an attack on Insight itself and its editor.

I called David Kirkpatrick after the story was published to express disappointment his story had not even one sentence from any longtime news colleague of Jeffrey Kuhner extolling Kuhner's virtues.

I was very plain in my on-the-record interviews with Kirkpatrick, extolling Jeff Kuhner's virtues, as I know others did, but nary a word about Kuhner's many virtues appeared in Kirkpatrick's piece. So much for fair and balanced journalism.

I spent more than an hour of my time in several telephone conversations with Kirkpatrick over an otherwise busy weekend, going over The Washington Times civil war detailed in Max Blumenthal's accurate cover piece last October in The Nation magazine, which Kirkpatrick said he had, and all the ins and outs of the Insight piece and the internal civil war.

This was just my take, and Kirkpatrick had to vet that with others. Most people were not willing to go on the record. I was always on the record with him, except for one brief moment when I did not want to speak ill of a former editor on the record.

I told Kirkpatrick on the record that Jeff Kuhner was one of the best editors I ever worked with, a Catholic man of moral courage and vision who respected truth and often told me to go back and re-check stuff my sources had told me.

There was not a single sentence in Kirkpatrick's story that quoted any assocate of Kuhner in favor of his known high journalism standards and qualities, and I told David in our telephone conversation that this was a big disappointment to me, because Jeff Kuhner is a good and honest man.

David Kirkpatrick told me that Washington Times people he spoke to "speculated" that I was the author of the Insight piece about Senator Barack Obama's Muslim heritage. I told David that was false. Who at the Times would peddle such false speculation?

I was told by Washington Times sources that editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden and managing editor Francis B. Coombs Jr., in their effort to continue to discredit me, were the source of the false speculation about the authorship of the Insight piece.

Washington Times national editor Kenneth Hanner, in a lengthy telephone conversation with me January 29, would not confirm this. But he did tell me that people in the TWT newsroom had told him they believed I was the writer of the Insight story. But he said he had no verification as he and senior editors peddled this calumny against me.

I asked reporter David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times who was the source of lies against me, which he did not report and none of this appeared in his story. From whom did he get this false information, and why were they spreading it? Kirkpatrick did not run this vein of his story to earth or even report it as part of his story. The whole issue of this calumny was just dropped.

Here's the real story: The Washington Times has never made money. Its advertising and circulation people have tried hard but never really made a dent in a market totally owned by The Washington Post and other media.

The fault lies with newspaper executives over the years who just wanted big compensation packages for themselves but had no real commitment to getting the advertising/circulation job done that they were hired for. So the owners of The Washington Times got screwed by managers on the business side of the newspaper.

They also got screwed by their senior editors on the editorial news side -- editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden Jr., and managing editor Francis B. Coombs Jr., and some of their underlings, including culture page editor Robert Stacey McCain, who subscribed to a racist philosophy and were workplace bullies.

As The Nation piece scrupulously documented, these men and their sycophants in The Washington Times newsroom are racist, sexist, homophobe, anti-black and anti-Hispanic.

Check The Washington Times culture page over the past several years and the newspaper's coverage of the immigration issue and you will see how strident they have been in attacks against people looking for liberty and economic opportunity in our country.

Hopefully, come May 17, when The Washington Times will celebrate its 25th anniverary, the newspaper's owners will clean out all these stale dinosaurs and put in a new team that celebrates the newspaper's commitment to liberty, economic opportunity throughout the world, and its own longtime stalwarts hopefully rejuvenated by a new team of young, vibrant newspaper pacesetters.

They are out there, working for community newspapers throughout America and in great colleges with good communication and fine arts schools.

A new day is coming in America's media. The desperate dinosaurs are on their way out. Thanks be to God.
>
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/us/politics/29media.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=us

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: January 29, 2007

Feeding Frenzy for a Big Story, Even if It’s False

WASHINGTON, Jan. 28 — Jeffrey T. Kuhner, whose Web site published the first anonymous smear of the 2008 presidential race, is hardly the only editor who will not reveal his reporters’ sources. What sets him apart is that he will not even disclose the names of his reporters.

But their anonymity has not stopped them from making an impact. In the last two weeks, Mr. Kuhner’s Web site, Insight, the last remnant of a defunct conservative print magazine owned by the Unification Church led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, was able to set off a wave of television commentary, talk-radio chatter, official denials, investigations by journalists around the globe and news media self-analysis that has lasted 11 days and counting.

The controversy started with a quickly discredited Jan. 17 article on the Insight Web site asserting that the presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was preparing an accusation that her rival, Senator Barack Obama, had covered up a brief period he had spent in an Islamic religious school in Indonesia when he was 6.

(Other news organizations have confirmed Mr. Obama’s descriptions of the school as a secular public school. Both senators have denounced the report, and there is no evidence that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign planned to spread those accusations.)

In an interview Sunday, Mr. Kuhner, 37, said he still considered the article, which he said was meant to focus on the thinking of the Clinton campaign, to be “solid as solid can be.” But he declined to say whether he had learned the identity of his reporter’s sources, and so perhaps only that reporter knows the origin of the article’s anonymous quotes and assertions. Its assertions about Mr. Obama resemble rumors passed on without evidence in e-mail messages that have been widely circulated over the last several weeks.

The Clinton-Obama article followed a series of inaccurate or hard-to-verify articles on Insight and its predecessor magazine about politics, the Iraq war or the Bush administration, including a widely discussed report on the Insight Web site that President Bush’s relationship with his father was so strained that they were no longer speaking to each other about politics.

The Washington Times, which is also owned by the Unification Church, but operates separately from the Web site, quickly disavowed the article. Its national editor sent an e-mail message to staff members under the heading “Insight Strikes Again” telling them to “make sure that no mention of any Insight story” appeared in the paper, and another e-mail message to its Congressional correspondent instructing him to clarify to Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama that The Washington Times had nothing to do with the article on the Web site.

“Some of the editors here get annoyed when Insight is identified as a publication of The Washington Times,” said Wesley Pruden, editor in chief of The Washington Times.

And in an interview, John Moody, a senior vice president at Fox News, said its commentators had erred by citing the Clinton-Obama report. “The hosts violated one of our general rules, which is know what you are talking about,” Mr. Moody said. “They reported information from a publication whose accuracy we didn’t know.”

Mr. Kuhner’s ability to ignite a news media brush fire nonetheless illustrates how easily dubious and politically charged information can spread through the constant chatter of cable news commentary, talk radio programs and political Web sites. And at the start of a campaign with perhaps a dozen candidates hiring “research directors” to examine one another, the Insight episode may be a sign of what is to come.

To most journalists, the notion of anonymous reporters relying on anonymous sources is a red flag. “If you want to talk about a business model that is designed to manufacture mischief in large volume, that would be it,” said Ralph Whitehead Jr., a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts.

With so much anonymity, “How do we know that Insight magazine actually exists?” Professor Whitehead added. “It could be performance art.”

But hosts of morning television programs and an evening commentator on the Fox News Network nevertheless devoted extensive discussion to Insight’s Clinton-Obama article, as did Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk radio hosts.

And the Fox News rival MSNBC has picked up several of Insight’s other recent anonymous “scoops.” Among them: that Mr. Bush was afraid to fire his adviser Karl Rove because “he knows too much”; that there is a rift between President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice over the president’s support for Israel; and that Mr. Bush spent the months before the midterm elections in a bunker-mentality focused on the Iraq war and the elections to the exclusion of all else. Mr. Kuhner has appeared as a guest on both networks.

A spokesman for MSNBC declined to comment. Representatives of News World Communications, the arm of the Unification Church that owns Insight, could not be reached for comment on Sunday night.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company