Underdog to an 800-Pound Gorilla

By Laurence Zuckerman

* It should not be said that Arnaud de Borchgrave never sleeps. True, he puts in 18-hour days at the Washington Times, showering his staff with "Arnaud- grams," notes scrawled on yellow paper suggesting stories and sources. He bounces around the newsroom, nagging, second-guessing or just plain giving orders. But he does sleep. The proof is in his office, which contains a queen- size bed. Though de Borchgrave owns an apartment in Washington, he spends many nights at work, rising before dawn to read the day's papers.

Such industriousness has been a boon for the troubled Times, the conservative newspaper owned by a group of Korean investors affiliated with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. Founded in 1982 as an alternative to what the Times has called the "town's 800-pound gorilla," the mighty -- and liberal -- Washington Post, the five-day-a-week paper has not entirely erased its image as a "Moonie" sheet tainted by its owners' politics. Still, the Times has gained a place at some of the capital's most powerful breakfast tables, and is among the few newspapers that are regularly excerpted for Ronald Reagan's daily news briefing book. Chief of Staff Howard Baker has noted that both the Times and the Washington Post are "required reading" at the White House, joking that "one of them is read for the news and the other for Art Buchwald."

Most days, of course, the 230 reporters and editors at the Times (circ. 104,000) are no match for the 450-strong Post (circ. 796,000), but the paper, the only local alternative to the Post, has had a few impressive scoops. The Times broke the story alleging that Michael Deaver had improperly used his White House ties to advance his lobbying business and, two months ago, revealed Mobil Oil's decision to move its headquarters from Manhattan to suburban Washington. Though the Times has serious weaknesses (its national political coverage is abysmally shallow, for example), its strengths include a scrappy metropolitan staff, lively cultural reporting, and a generous amount of foreign news for a publication its size. "The paper you see now is not the paper we saw five years ago," says Press Critic Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution.

Much of the credit belongs to de Borchgrave, 60, a Newsweek foreign correspondent for 29 years before joining the Times in 1985. Sometimes de Borchgrave calls a wrong shot (a Times exclusive that Libya's Muammar Gaddafi had fled to Yemen remained exactly that: an exclusive), but overall, the editor rates highly with his staff. "He's not an intellectual genius, but he's incredibly passionate and energetic," says David Brooks, who recently left the Times for the Wall Street Journal.

The Times has already lost $250 million, and is expected to lose an additional $35 million by next spring. The debts have been covered by members of Moon's church, whose worldwide network of businesses generates hundreds of millions of dollars. Infamous in the 1970s as a messianic cult leader who "brainwashed" young people and sent them out to sell flowers, Moon, 67, was implicated in the 1978 influence-peddling scandal known as Koreagate and later served eleven months in prison for tax evasion. In recent years he and his chief aide, former South Korean Army Colonel Bo Hi Pak (now president of News World Communications, the holding company that owns the Times), have emphasized an anti-Communist crusade rather than the church's ambition of a world theocracy headed by Moon.

Times executives have always insisted that the paper is independent of Moon, but charges of church interference have bedeviled the paper. When Moon was released from prison two years ago, Times reporters complained that a U.P.I. story about his case was doctored to portray Moon in a better light. James Whelan, the paper's founding editor, quit in 1984, declaring that the church had undermined him. In April, Editorial Page Editor William Cheshire and four staffers resigned, charging that de Borchgrave, after talking with a Moon associate, tried to revise an editorial critical of South Korean President Chun Doo Hwan. "I just don't understand how people ride over the problems of their ownership," argues Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, but he refuses to critique his competitor. "That's a minefield," he says. De Borchgrave dismisses the charges of church meddling. "If any representative of the owners had given me any direction," he says, "I would have immediately walked out."

Having just signed a new three-year contract, de Borchgrave is overseeing the introduction of new metro, business and weekend sections in September. News World Communications has spent $95 million on two other publications: Insight, a slick, conservative newsweekly distributed free of charge to 1.1 million "decision makers"; and The World & I, a glossy monthly journal of reviews and opinion that usually runs 700 pages (yes, 700) and could easily be mistaken at five paces for the Sears catalog.

Times reporters insist that they receive no favors from the Administration, but the perception of the paper as a White House organ persists. De Borchgrave believes the paper will do better with a Democratic Administration. "It is far more difficult to be lively when you're in a semiofficial mode than in opposition," he says. Perhaps. But others feel that the paper will survive only so long as Moon's followers think they are getting their money's worth. If the Times stops being read at the breakfast tables of power after 1988, the owners' pockets may prove to be not that deep after all.

With reporting by Steven Holmes/Washington