Washington Times lies, but radio complies

In the wake of the debut of a third right-wing talk station in Cincinnati - WQRT - we're trying to investigate the new radio talk show launched by the far-right Washington Times, which WQRT will carry.

Little information has been found so far, and most of it centers on relatively recent instances of the actual paper's lack of journalistic credibility.

The Times was begun in 1982 by right-wing cult founder and tax cheat Sun Myung Moon. His cult continues to run the paper as a conservative organ.

Just last year, historian Thomas Frank said the Washington Times is "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."

One of the goofiest recent Times scandals was its story claiming that the National Education Association (America's largest teachers' union) was teaching anti-American propaganda regarding 9/11 to schoolchildren. This Times piece was debunked instantaneously by several sources.

(For some reason, the NEA has long been a conservative target. To hear conservatives talk, you'd think America's educator posts are teeming with leftists. In this world we call reality, however, I don't think I've ever had a liberal school principal - and I don't remember many liberal teachers either.)

Now you know what nonsense is in store for listeners of Cincinnati's near-dead AM band.

The FCC used to take an extremely dim view of stations intentionally distorting news. That's because - although most stations are owned by private interests - the airwaves themselves are a public trust with limited space. It's not a stretch to say the FCC should make a serious review of WQRT's license instead of just rubber-stamping its renewal.