The Washington Times - Political Leanings

Political Leanings

The political views of The Washington Times are often described as conservative. The Washington Post reported: "the Times was established by Moon to combat communism and be a conservative alternative to what he perceived as the liberal bias of The Washington Post."

Conservative commentator Paul Weyrich has called the Times an antidote to its liberal competitor:

The Washington Post became very arrogant and they just decided that they would determine what was news and what wasn't news and they wouldn't cover a lot of things that went on. And the Washington Times has forced the Post to cover a lot of things that they wouldn't cover if the Times wasn't in existence.

In 1999 the Times was criticized by the Daily Howler for misquoting vice-president Al Gore. In 2000 the Howler criticized the Times again, this time for making unsubstantiated allegations about Gore's campaign fundraising. In 2004 the Howler criticized a Times' front page story which made fun of Democratic Party presidential candidate John Kerry's vacationing in France.

Conservative-turned-liberal writer David Brock, who worked for the Times' sister publication Insight on the News, said in his 2002 book Blinded by the Right that the news writers at the Times were encouraged and rewarded for giving news stories a conservative slant. In his 2004 book The Republican Noise Machine, Brock wrote "the Washington Times was governed by a calculatedly unfair political bias" and that its journalistic ethics were "close to nil."

In 2007, the liberal Mother Jones news magazine said that the Times had become "essential reading for political news junkies" soon after its founding, and quoted James Gavin, special assistant to Bo Hi Pak:

We're trying to combat communism and we're trying to uphold traditional Judeo-Christian values. The Washington Times is standing up for those values and fighting anything that would tear them down. Causa is doing the same thing, by explaining what the enemy is trying to do.

In a 2008 essay published in Harper's Magazine, historian Thomas Frank linked the Times to the modern American conservative movement, saying:

There is even a daily newspaper—the Washington Times—published strictly for the movement’s benefit, a propaganda sheet whose distortions are so obvious and so alien that it puts one in mind of those official party organs one encounters when traveling in authoritarian countries.

In 2009 the New York Times reported:

With its conservative editorial bent, the paper also became a crucial training ground for many rising conservative journalists and a must-read for those in the movement. A veritable who’s who of conservatives — Tony Blankley, Frank J. Gaffney Jr., Larry Kudlow, John Podhoretz and Tony Snow — has churned out copy for its pages.

Though not listed, another conservative writer who trained there was New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks, a Washington Times editorial writer in the 1980s.

The Times has generally opposed gay and transgender rights. In 2010, the Times published an editorial opposing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act because it granted legal protective status for transgender people. The editorial criticized transgender people and said that gender identity can be a choice, not an innate characteristic.