Wesley Pruden

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Wesley Pruden is the editor-in-chief of The Washington Times, a position he has held for 13 years. In June 2005, he told C-SPAN that he planned to leave in a few years; that would be roughly around the 25th anniversary of the Times.[1]

[edit] Education and career

Pruden's first job in the newspaper business was in 1951 when, as a 10th grade student at Little Rock High School, he worked nights as a copy boy at the Arkansas Gazette, where he later became a sportswriter and an assistant state editor. After high school, he attended Little Rock Junior College, now the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

In 1956, he began working at the Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1963, he joined the National Observer, a national weekly published by Dow Jones & Co., where he covered national politics and the civil rights movement. In 1965, he was assigned to cover the Vietnam War. For the next decade, he was a foreign correspondent, based in Saigon, Hong Kong, Beirut, and London. The National Observer ceased publication in 1976.

Between 1976 and 1982, Pruden worked on a novel, a satire for which he could not find a publisher. In 1982, he joined the Washington Times, four months after the paper began, as chief political correspondent. He became assistant managing editor in 1983, managing editor in 1985, and editor-in-chief in 1992.

In 1991, he won the H.L. Mencken Prize.

[edit] Southern sympathies

Pruden's father, Wesley Pruden, Sr., was the chaplain to the Capital Citizens Council in Little Rock, Arkansas, a segregationist group that battled integration throughout the 1950s and 1960s. When President Dwight Eisenhower sent Army troops to protect nine black teenagers attempting to integrate Little Rock Central High School in 1957, Pruden Sr. reportedly told an assembled mob, "That's what we gotta fight, niggers, Communists and cops." (Page 225, Faubus: The Life and Times of an American Prodigal, by Roy Reed, University of Arkansas Press, 1997.) Pruden says that he was at the school on the occasion, as a reporter for the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and does not believe his father said this. According to Pruden: "This was not the way he spoke, there are no other occasions on which he was ever quoted as using such language. He was a careful speaker, and I know for a fact that he, like most Southern whites of his generation a segregationist, did not attribute the movement toward desegregation to Communists."[2]

In 1998 Pruden made a speech to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, at the Manassas battlefield. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), he said "Southerners ... hold loyalty to two countries in our hearts." The second country is one "baptized 137 years ago on this very field in the blood of First Manassas, a country no longer at the mercy of the vicissitudes in the tangled affairs of men, a country that lives within us, a country that will endure for as long as men and women know love. ... God bless America, God bless the Confederate States of America, and God bless you all."

Under Pruden, the Washington Times employs Robert Stacy McCain as its assistant national editor. McCain is a member of the neo-Confederate organization League of the South, which the SPLC has called "rife with white supremacists and racist ideology."

Every Saturday, the Times runs a full page of stories on the Civil War, the only daily newspaper in the United States to do so. Pruden calls it "probably our single most popular feature", noting that "There are more books published on the Civil War than on any other American topic." Pruden says that "the Civil War page has just as many stories about glorifying the Union as it does the Confederacy."