Press: Underdog to an 800-Pound Gorilla

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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.