The Washington Times: a cult favorite
by John
The flagship Republican newspaper claims to be separate from its owners, but the Unification Church considers the Times a divine mission. In the online Moonosphere, the Times appears again and again in the context of being one of Rev. Moon’s holy projects. Here’s an interesting speech by a Moonist, chuckling at the church’s early foibles in pushing phony circulation numbers. The speaker equates the Times with the church itself.
Vocab for today’s reading passage
MFT Training: Mobile Fundraising Team Training. The lowest rank in the Unification Church, it employs people on street corners selling flowers 12 hours a day.
| “Nonetheless, it was decided early on by the Unification Church leadership that a circulation of 100,000 daily papers (subscriptions and newsstands) would be a very respectable figure, despite the enormous cost in ink and newsprint. It would demonstrate that a significant portion of the population liked the paper (and by extension, liked the Unification Church, or at least didn’t hate it, which is almost the same thing). So the goal of 100,000 circulation became the new mantra, not unlike chanting “one for two, three for five” on MFT.” |
…yeah, I know how that is! The Times remains secretive about its circulation, which the Post estimates at an eighth of its own. Anyway, when your newspaper is run at a loss of $100 million a year, and doesn’t have to worry about winning fans, you can print editor Wesley Pruden‘s unadultered tracts, accusing Democrats of praying for the deaths of Americans.
| The hatred will darken and fester as the situation in Iraq improves, as it will, and as the economy pops and crackles to life, as it has begun to do. Only yesterday the Democrats thought such gods as they believe in were smiling on them, with Americans dying in Iraq and out of work at home. |
So those gods would be — Mars, I guess, and the God of Unemployment? In this article he also asks whether Jonathan Chait (author of the New Republic‘s “I hate Bush, except I thought the war was great” piece) is a pseudonym, even though Chait actually exists. It may be a joke. It’s this kind of deadpan whimsy, and endearing writing presence, that has made Wesley Pruden’s Looking Out for You! and Dude, Where’s Wesley Pruden’s Country? bestselling publishing phenomenons.
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Pruden (right) is described, in David Brock’s Blinded by the Right as “a taciturn Arkansan whose father was a chaplain to the White Citizens Council of Arkansas.” Not that this would be something to hold against Wes, if his newsroom weren’t a haven for journalism’s biggest apologists for black slavery.
While the Washington Times appeases these guys with their own Civil War section of the paper, this is a devil’s bargain for a War Between the States buff of any editorial integrity — for, in exchange, the newspaper is known to promote the church’s ludicrous proposals for a Religious United Nations.
This is why George Bush I called Moon “the man with the vision.”