JOURNALISM IS WAR CHAPTER 21
JOURNALISM IS WAR © George Archibald all rights reserved
MEDIA CRISIS
All I have ever really cared about is who is the best and hungriest reporter. Resumés are often a joke. I could care less about people's backgrounds or private lives. All I want is their best effort for [The Washington Times] when they're on the job. –- Francis B. Coombs, Jr., Managing Editor, The Washington Times, in an email to George Archibald, March 3, 2006.
Fran Coombs, product of a career Army family and graduate of William and Mary College in Virginia, is a go-for-the-jugular nut-crushing editor with a worldview that disdains women and mirrors the racial and cultural views of Nixon speechwriter Patrick J. Buchanan, as well as the tenacity and ferocity of Buchanan and his wonderful sister, Angela Bay Buchanan, former treasurer for the United States of America.
The problem for many of us with a Goldwater-Reagan libertarian-with-morality orientation who worked at The Washington Times was the ferocity of the nativist racial and cultural views of Coombs, his enabling supportive boss Wesley Pruden Jr., The Washington Times editor-in-chief, the Buchanans, and all their fellow-travelers in the worldwide media opinion business who stretched out through radio, television, the Internet, U.S. Postal Service, United Parcel Service, and Federal Express to respectable groups such as Rockford Institute and Chronicles magazine, the inimitable Human Events weekly conservative newspaper-of-record, and not-so-respectable groups such as the racist and anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby and its newspaper Spotlight, a vile hate-publication read by executed Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh that constantly fed the fever-swamps.
Coombs and the Buchanans have been very clever right-wing people, but have a mean edge, a people-smashing temper and anger. They unfortunately are fellow-travelers in the fever-swamps of racial prejudice and rancor –- and for decades fueled the likes of McVeigh and other racially-bigoted crazies of the world.
Coombs’ discomfiting racially-tinged attitude permeated the newsroom at The Washington Times during much of my last 17 years as senior investigative reporter, although great editors before such as Arnaud deBorchgrave tempered the savages as much as he could.
Yet Coombs, editorial writer Samuel Francis, and managing editor Pruden who moved up to become editor-in-chief, combined with founding editor Josette Sheeran Shiner to topple deBorchgrave in Spring 1991.
Shiner, who went on to be chief policy adviser to World Bank president Robert Zoelick when he was U.S. Trade Representative and at the State Department with Condoleezza Rice, was marvelous and clever, a superb White House reporter for News World, a New York City newspaper founded by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who founded The Washington Times.
Shiner was a keen devotee of Reverend Moon and married Whitney Shiner, a graduate of Yale University divinity school, in Reverend Moon’s first mass wedding at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in Washington, D.C. in May 1982. Shiner and Colonel Bo Hi Pak, Moon’s right-hand man in founding The Washington Times, hired me as the newspaper’s first reporter in pre-publication days in February 1982.
But Pruden, who joined the paper in August 1982 as political correspondent, and Coombs, who came to the paper as a national political reporter in 1988, combined forces three years later to topple deBorchgrave as editor-in-chief, because he was a threat to their aim to take over and use The Washington Times as a vehicle to skew the news for their Buchanan-oriented nativist racial objectives. Shiner left the newspaper disgusted in August 1997.
The Washington Times was in crisis many years before the 2006 congressional elections because its senior editors did not respect good seasoned reporters.
Pruden and Coombs pitted young, immature and inexperienced reporters and editors hungry for advancement against the higher tier of seasoned reporters and editors who could get stories the younger hires could not imagine, let alone report.
As a result, from 2001 onward, there was a greater exodus of seasoned reporting talent from The Washington Times. The exodus started long before but heightened dramatically after The Washington Examiner came to the nation’s capital.
The Times’ parent company, News World Communications, ultimately conducted an internal management probe to save the newspaper from plummeting employee morale and its decades-long advertising-circulation morasse.
The abysmal advertising and circulation numbers of the Times were an unfortunate joke.
No one on the editorial side of the newspaper could understand why the Times’ total classified advertising was no more than one or two pages a day while The Washington Post’s Saturday edition alone had five or six sections of classified ads totaling more than 100 pages.
Also the large ads from ideological zealots were an embarrassment to people in the newsroom. For example, the paper published 30 ads from 2004 onwards from neo-Nazi Stan Rittenhouse, head of a group called Exhorters that has a white-supremacist web site called Stormfront.
Why would any pacesetting newspaper accept such ads, let alone be dependent on them?
How the owners of the Times tolerated the lack of sales by its advertising and circulation staffs for so many years was a complete mystery to us in the newsroom. The Times’ advertising hole was less than almost any tiny suburban paper in suburban Virginia and Maryland. Even the give-away Washington Examiner tabloid, which started in 2005, had more advertising and circulation on its first day than the Times had built up over almost a quarter century.
On top of the advertising and circulation problems, the editorial side of the Times became far-right under the leadership of senior editors Pruden Jr. and Coombs, who as national and managing editor for many years was a supporter of white supremacists.
Coombs repeatedly told us in the newsroom that he believed blacks were “born genetically 15 to 20 IQ points lower than a white person” and that abortion was necessary “to keep the black and minority population down in this country.” His wife, Marian Kester Coombs, confirmed this, on the record, in a fall 2006 interview with reporter Max Blumenthal of The Nation magazine.
Those of us in the Times newsroom were grateful to be working for a respected daily newspaper in Washington and suffered in silence as Coombs voiced extreme views on racial and cultural issues.
We in the newsroom knew Coombs to be an unreconstructed “racial nationalist” and hater of blacks and other minorities.
Marian Coombs, a self-proclaimed “white nationalist” wrote for white supremacist magazines and lunched with neo-Nazi leaders such as William A, White of Roanoke, Va., commander of the American National Socialist Workers' Party.
White lauded Fran and Marian Coombs and Times Assistant National Editor Robert Stacy McCain, another staunch anti-black segregationist advocate, who Fran Coombs appointed to run the Page A2 Culture Page of The Washington Times, which under McCain often prominently ran pieces by White.
On his neo-Nazi Web site, Overthrow.com, White described McCain as “a pretty good friend of mine.”
Max Blumenthal, reporter for the leftist Nation magazine, asked Marian Coombs in an on-the-record taped interview for an October 9, 2006 cover story about The Washington Times whether her husband shared her political and racial views.
“Pretty much,” she said, while insisting that Fran Coombs’ personal views were not reflected in the pages of the Times.
That was not true. Fran Coombs directed and micro-managed news stories as much as possible. He and Pruden would go into stories late at night and rewrite leads, add whatever they wanted, which was the reason a lot of people left the paper over the years.
I fortunately had other good editors such as Jeffrey Kuhner and Victor Morton, who strengthened my copy and usually kept me clear of the late-night changes by Pruden and Coombs, except the Pruden-Coombs duo always rewrote front-page leads, directed story placement and headlines readers saw when papers hit single-copy boxes before dawn.
But on two occasions involving the suicide of President Bill Clinton’s deputy White House counsel, Vincent Foster Jr., and the Catholic priest homosexual scandal, Pruden and Coombs spiked my stories involving more than a year’s work on both projects because they disagreed with the results of my reporting.
Marian Coombs was a close friend of Jared Taylor, notorious white supremacist and founder of the neo-eugenicist group, American Renaissance. She admitted in her interview with reporter Max Blumenthal of The Nation that she attended American Renaissance conferences to meet with her old friend, Nick Griffin, leader of the neo-fascist, whites-only British National Party (BNP).
Marian Coombs frequently wrote for Occidental Quarterly, an openly white supremacist and anti-Semitic publication. In one article, she wrote the United States had become a “den of iniquity” because it allowed too many minority immigrants. In another piece, she criticized interracial marriage, stating: “white men should ‘run, not walk’ to wed ‘racially conscious’ white women and avoid being outbred by non-whites.
On American Renaissance's Web site, she posted this comment in 2001: "Whites do not like crowded societies, and Americans would not have to live in crowds if our government kept out Third-World invaders."
Pruden revealed in a CNN interview in 2006 that he would retire in 2008 and named Coombs as his probable successor – a public announcement that greatly upset the paper’s corporate chiefs. Why would they want a white supremacist and neo-eugenicist as the Times’ top editor?
A report about Coombs’ management and ideology was compiled and submitted in June 2006 to Dong Moon Joo, South Korean president of The Washington Times Corp. (who had anglicized his name to Douglas M. Joo). The report documented Coombs’ extensive racist comments and abusive, unpopular management style. It revealed that several Times employees who attended a party at a Times editor’s home in spring 2003 were told by Coombs that, “I would never want to be born black. This would mean that I would be born genetically 15 to 20 IQ points lower than a white person.”
At the party, the report disclosed, Coombs repeatedly said he was “unequivocally for abortion … since abortion disproportionately impacts blacks and minorities, it helps to keep the black and minority population down in this country.”
I personally heard Coombs express the same racist comments over many years as a senior national reporter at the Times.
Coombs claimed in an interview with The Nation’s Blumenthal that he never said such things. Yet Blumenthal reported that at least three other Times sources confirmed such statements by Coombs. I was on the record with Blumenthal –- others confirmed privately -- that Coombs frequently and vehemently lauded abortion as a means to stem the tide of black, brown, and Asian babies – a form of ethnic genocide.
Nixon Peabody LLP, a high-powered Washington law firm, was retained to go around the Times’ longtime workplace and libel attorney, Allen J. Farber, in order to uncover the truth regarding explosive allegations being investigated by reporter Max Blumenthal of the leftist Nation magazine.
But the internal corporate inquiry by the parent company was fiercely resisted by Pruden and Coombs, targets of the probe, who in turn convinced Joo to resist the Nixon Peabody probe and hire public relations firm Hill & Knowlton to do damage control before and after The Nation piece hit the newsstands on Oct. 9, 2006, and the magazine’s own Web site a week earlier.
Pruden came back from Memphis while on vacation in August 2006 to threaten Preston Moon, News World’s chief executive officer, that he –- Pruden –- would hold a news conference to publicly accuse the owners of “editorial interference” if they continued with the probe of editorial mismanagement, racial prejudice, anti-Semitism, and sexual harassment on the part of Coombs, with Pruden’s acquiescence and support.
Nixon Peabody’s attorneys had already scheduled interviews that would result in sworn depositions by Kenneth Hanner, Washington Times national editor, and his deputy, Victor Morton. Pruden hit the roof and went against Preston Moon with the editorial interference card. What other news organization in America can tell its corporate owners to go to hell in the face of serious management issues or problems that company executives want to explore and resolve?
This was a stonewalling and cover-up move by Pruden and Coombs in the face of impending devastating charges in The Nation’s forthcoming investigative story, and it was a strategy doomed from the beginning, because the truth would prevail, as Pruden and Coombs from their very comfortable perches should have realized.
They knew the jig was up, and Coombs told deputy managing editor Ted Agres he wanted a buyout if the owners wanted him to go. But Pruden and Coombs hunkered down anyway to retain their perquisites and hoped the company’s owners and senior corporate leaders would back down and continue to allow them to have their way, as they had for going on 15 years.
This was a failed strategy because Pruden and Coombs had made The Washington Times a marginalized and irrelevant ultra-right-wing newspaper and were driving the newspaper into the ground with a white supremacist ultra-conservative ideology.
Coombs even took on Michael Keating, The Washington Times’ former assistant managing editor, who moved on to found and run the company’s very successful Washington Golf magazine. Coombs and Keating, for some reason, hated each other as they both moved up the company ladder and nearly came to blows one day in the company parking lot.
Keating, formerly married to a very good Washington Times reporter, Susan Katz, was known to have a terrible temper and mean streak. A slug-out between Coombs and Keating in the parking lot of The Washington Times would have been welcomed and applauded by most employees, as both are quite nasty, hateful and deserved a good pasting by each other. It would have been a great slug-fest.
Ultimately the owners, who had put more than $3 billion into The Washington Times over almost 25 years, were not going to allow the management fiasco and hemmorhaging to continue. Preston Moon, oldest son of the newspaper’s founder with a Harvard University master’s degree in business administration, asserted his authority as CEO of the parent company, News World Communications, and Pruden and Coombs charted a suicide path for themselves as Preston Moon moved extricate the newspaper from their prejudiced neo-Confederate ideology and mismanagement.
But Pruden and Coombs fought back, insisting they could get President George W. Bush, White House spokesman Tony Snow (former editorial pages editor of the Times), and the president’s cabinet secretaries on the phone anytime they wanted --and the Koreans fell for this gambit.
It was not only a bottom-line issue for the owners, but their reputation was continually besmirched by the daily skewing of news coverage by the top editors of their flagship publication.
Because of the financial hemorrhaging over two decades, the owners had to close their successful central and South American flagship newspaper, Tiempos del Mundo, and a marvelous academic cultural and opinion journal, World & I.
Yet the dam broke with Blumenthal’s piece in The Nation on October 9. 2006. As this young reporter, son of seasoned reporter Sidney Blumenthal, conducted interviews for The Nation article from May through September 2006, many Times reporters and editors felt they could finally express themselves without fear of retaliation, although upper editorial managers certainly tried their best to intimidate and threaten those who were talking. The result was a practical revolt in the newsroom.
I could no longer remain silent about what I witnessed at The Washington Times. I had retired to write books and do other things and was gone. But Pruden and Coombs had transformed a once dynamic paper into one characterized by slumping circulation and growing disaffection in the newsroom on all desks, which was a shame to all of us who had spent years of effort to build a great newspaper.
There was ideological sclerosis, often-voiced racist and anti-Semitic views in editors’ meetings aimed at slanting the news, abusive power tactics by senior editors to get stories written the way they want, and even sexual misconduct that was covered up by the Times’ human resources department and its own attorneys at the behest of senior editors and managers.
Departing The Washington Times was one of the most heart-wrenching actions in my life, but I could no longer stomach the news-slanting driven by openly-stated bigotry and mismanagement by top editors. I could no longer stand to watch this great institution being slowly driven into the ground.
For me, it was necessary to take a stand in gratitude for devoted service to the Times by so many wonderful reporters, writers, editors, photographers, and support staff - my colleagues over almost a quarter century.
I’m one of those old-fashioned Church of England types, Episcopalians in America, committed to upholding truth and faith, not to wear it on one’s sleave, but to live one’s faith as best as possible as a decent, honest, and truthful person according to Scripture.
I was surprised to find out how many Times staffers were willing to talk to The Nation’s Max Blumenthal regarding rampant racism and abusive management of Fran Coombs and his sychophants at The Washington Times. It took a lot of courage for Times people to speak out.
Nothing illustrated this better than the joint reaction of Pruden and Coombs to The Nation piece. They refused to answer the serious points raised by Blumenthal’s many sources in The Washington Times newsroom, but instead went on a hunting expedition to intimidate everyone in sight and discredit anyone who was willing to put their name on a quote.
Well, that’s corporate America, but Pruden and Coombs are staff members of The Washington Times like everyone else. They haven’t poneyed up the billions to make the newspaper successful over the years, and there are many hundreds of loyal employees who have done much more than them to achieve the newspaper’s success.
So what’s the gain for them to take the newspaper so far-right and go on a jihad against anyone and everyone on the staff not in favor of taking the newspaper to an extreme ideological position?
The owners will have to work that out, just as all publishers do faced with editors and managers who do not fit a justifiable cultural, ideological, and religious mold for readers.
The Washington Times has had a good run, but lately lost most of its best reporter talent.
William F. Buckley, Jr., founder of National Review magazine, was my hero growing up, and I watched him come to a point in the 1970’s and 1980’s where he and his NR colleagues decided they had to take on the bigoted, white supremacist, anti-semitic hate groups and leaders such as Liberty Lobby’s Willis Carto and Spotlight newspaper that helped spawn the likes of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
These far-right-wing bigots had infiltrated the conservative movement and sold themselves to middle-class people throughout the country as allies of conservative causes for less government intrusion and more personal liberty.
Buckley felt compelled in the 1980s to take on the bigoted people on the political right. Their ascendance caused considerable angst, and people left the fold because they couldn’t stomach the direction of Pat Buchanan and even more far-right advocates such as Willis Carto and Liberty Lobby.
The same challenge has faced talented reporters and editors at newspapers like The Washington Times and a big television operations like CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN.
No reporter, editor or producer worth their salt wants top-down skewing of news in an ideological or political direction.
Certainly journalism is war. But the badge of honor for all of us, regardless of our own personal political, cultural, and religious beliefs, is to be honest and complete in our reporting for readers, listeners, and viewers as we also work to counter those news organizations that do not provide a complete and honest report.
But to go over the edge in one ideological direction or the other, to be racially-bigoted, anti-black, anti-Hispanic, anti-white, anti-Semitic –- whatever bigotry -- and spin the news to promote a prejudicial bigoted perspective on any side of the cultural divide is dishonest and nasty, whether on the left or right of the ideological spectrum.
JOURNALISM IS WAR © George Archibald all rights reserved
