Press: Underdog to an 800-Pound Gorilla

* 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.