The Washington Times

What you're reading

The Washington Times is a US daily newspaper founded in 1982 in Washington, DC, established by the Unification Church (founded by Sun Myung Moon) explicitly as a conservative alternative to the Washington Post in the Reagan-era Washington political-press market. It is owned by Operations Holdings, a corporate structure linked to the Unification movement, and ownership has continued through Unification-affiliated entities after Moon’s death in 2012. It publishes a print daily and a digital edition.

Coverage centers Washington politics, the federal government, national security and defense (a long-running specialty), foreign policy, the federal courts, and conservative policy and politics broadly. The opinion pages are a major part of the brand, with a stable of long-tenured conservative columnists. Audience is concentrated among Washington conservatives, conservative congressional staff, the defense and national-security community, and national conservative readers who use the Times as a Washington-political reading complement to the Examiner, National Review, and The Daily Caller.

Ownership & funding

Operations Holdings / Unification movement-linked ownership. Funded primarily through subscription + ads.

Subscription and ad funding under Unification-linked ownership through Operations Holdings means the paper does not operate on a standard commercial-news business model and has at various periods been described as effectively subsidized by ownership rather than self-sustaining. That removes the pageview-and-subscription pressure that disciplines most newspapers but creates the standard owner-influence concern, more pointed here than at billionaire-owned outlets because the ownership has explicit ideological and religious commitments that the paper was founded to advance. Editorial-side independence from ownership has been a topic of internal and external debate across the paper’s history.

Where they land on the spectrum

nwsly's editorial team places The Washington Times at Lean Right with a factuality rating of Mostly Factual.

nwsly places The Washington Times at Lean Right because story selection consistently centers issues where conservative policy positions have more to say — immigration enforcement, the federal regulatory state, conservative judicial nominations and litigation, religious liberty, gun rights, defense and national-security policy, and scrutiny of Democratic administrations on foreign policy and intelligence matters. Sourcing draws on Republican members of Congress, conservative think tanks, the defense and intelligence community, and conservative legal organizations.

The pattern breaks across the national-security and defense desk, which sources across the political spectrum because the beat itself crosses partisan lines, and across coverage of Trump-era Republican intra-party disputes where the Times has at times taken positions closer to the establishment-conservative (“liberal conservative”) tradition consistent with the ideology label. The Mostly Factual rating reflects accurate reporting on Capitol Hill, defense, and national-security beats backed by a corrections policy; the gap to High reflects the opinion-and-commentary heavy nature of the product, the ownership-influence concern, and occasional coverage of contested political stories where framing has outpaced the documentary support.

Editorial vs news side

The Washington Times has a news desk and an opinion section, both leaning conservative. The opinion section is the more openly partisan product; the news desk runs straight Washington-political coverage but with story selection that centers conservative-priority topics. Both sides of the masthead lean in the same direction, which is why the overall Lean Right rating holds rather than splits. Readers should treat the news desk as conservative-leaning political coverage and the opinion section as conservative argument from a long-tenured columnist roster.

Why we include them in nwsly

Washington daily newspaper founded in 1982.

The Washington Times earns its slot as the second of nwsly’s two main Washington conservative political-news outlets (alongside the Examiner). In the Lean Right band, nwsly pulls it for national-security and defense coverage from a conservative vantage point, for federal-courts and conservative-legal-movement reporting, and for opinion that represents the long-tenured-columnist Washington conservative tradition — coverage other Lean Right outlets don’t produce at the same Washington-political-news depth.

Recent nwsly briefs citing The Washington Times

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