Wesley Pruden is an American journalist and author. He was the editor-in-chief of The Washington Times from 1992 until his retirement in 2008.
His first job in the newspaper business was in 1951 when, as a 10th grade student at Little Rock Central High School, he worked nights as a copyboy at the Arkansas Gazette, where he later became a sportswriter and an assistant state editor. After high school, he attended a two-year college, Little Rock Junior College, now incorporated into 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. He retired in January 2008, and became editor in chief emeritus. His twice-weekly column on politics and national affairs, which has appeared in The Times since 1983, continues.
In 1991, he won the H.L. Mencken Prize.[1]
Every Saturday, the Times ran a full page of stories on the American Civil War, the only daily newspaper in the United States to do so. Pruden called it "probably our single most popular feature", and noted that "There are more books published on the Civil War than on any other American topic." Pruden said that "the Civil War page has just as many stories about glorifying the Union as it does the Confederacy." Soon after Pruden retired as editor-in-chief, the Times announced that the Civil War page would be expanded to include coverage of all America's wars and would be renamed "America at War."[2]
On November 17, 2009 Pruden published an opinion piece in the Washington Times titled "Obama bows, the nation cringes," where he set forth his thoughts on what he considered President Obama's breaches of etiquette committed on his tour of Asia, such as bowing to Emperor Akihito of Japan. In the article, he expressed the opinion that since President Obama was "sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii," he "has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what [America] is about."[3] A number of liberal commentators criticized the column as racist.[4]