The racist editor at the Moonie Times
The right-wing, Moonie-funded Washington Times ran a series last week on female feticide in India. The issue is very real and quite serious, but the series comes off as a hatchet job, shrill and full of hyperbole. It’s full of phrases like ‘genocide’ and ‘the slaughter of Eve’ and quotes like, ‘You hope someone else would be stupid enough to produce a girl but not you.’ These are normally found in op/eds and advocacy group position papers, not news features.
Now we know why the piece was so slanted. An ex-reporter says the managing editor is an anti-immigration wingnut who wanted to highlight feticide to stave off immigration and interracial marriage:
“The reason we are running this story is that Coombs thinks all the aborted girls means that Indian men will be immigrating to the United States to marry our girls.” That is an exact quote, what [foreign desk editor] Jones told his colleagues on the foreign desk.‘Coombs thinks… that Indian men will be immigrating to the United States to marry our girls’
[Managing editor Fran] Coombs has told me and others repeatedly that he favors abortion because he sees it as a way to eliminate black and other minority babies… [Link via Washington Monthly (liberal blog)]
The Washington Times managing editor, Fran Coombs, reportedly has a long history of making racist statements and sexually harassing subordinates:
… when he showed Coombs a photo of his nephew’s African-American girlfriend, Coombs “went off like a rocket about interracial marriage and how terrible it was. He actually used the phrase ‘the niggerfication of America.’ He said, ‘Not in my lifetime. If my daughter went out with a black, I would cut her throat…’”
All of a sudden Fran blurts out that he is pro-abortion. I argued with him and he said, ‘How do you think we’re going to stop the population growth of the minorities and all the welfare people?’” Another Times senior staffer recounted similar statements about abortion and race by Coombs at a party, where Coombs called himself a “racial nationalist.” A former staffer alleged that Coombs used racial slurs including “spic” and “towel-head” inside the Times…
Coombs’s speech that year at the Capitol [hailed] Confederate President Jefferson Davis… “Fran is the really hard-core ideological white supremacist…”
Coombs splashed a favorable review of Pat Buchanan’s book State of Emergency across the paper’s front page. Buchanan’s book is a diatribe calling for an immediate moratorium on all immigration, to stave off the demise of Western civilization… Coombs, the staffer continued, “will literally stand there and scan websites and look for anything that’s anti-Hispanic, that’s immigrant-bashing, and he will order the editors to go with it…” [Link]
His wife is allegedly a white supremacist:
Marian Kester Coombs… [has written that] white men should “run, not walk” to wed “racially conscious” white women and avoid being out-bred by non-whites… Muslims are “human hyenas” who “smell blood” and are “closing in” on their “weakened prey,” meaning “the white race…”
In at least two Times pieces, [Marian] Coombs cites Nick Griffin, head of the British National Party (BNP), as an authority on Muslim culture… the BNP is a whites-only extremist party whose leader has been convicted in England of race-hate crimes…
Marian Kester Coombs is married to Francis Booth Coombs, managing editor of the hard-right newspaper, The Washington Times. [Link]
So here’s the rub: Coombs isn’t a lone wacko, he’s managing editor of the biggest conservative paper in Washington, the print equivalent of Fox News:
President Reagan once described it as his favorite paper. The first President Bush said it “in my view brings sanity to Washington, D.C.”
That influence may have reached a public peak [in January 2005], when President George W. Bush invited its top leaders — including Coombs, Pruden, Hanner and others — to the White House for an exclusive, 40-minute interview. [Link]In January 2005 Bush hosted Coombs, Pruden and a handful of Times principals for an exclusive interview and tour of the Oval Office. Two months later Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was queried about her presidential ambitions by Pruden, Coombs and several Times reporters at the paper’s offices. [Link]
George Allen, Ann ‘Tourette’s Syndrome’ Coulter and Fran Coombs are sad reflections on the troglodyte racist wing of the modern Republican Party.
SM has more.
on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007, 3:04 am in Issues, Media, Politics › 
Email this
› 
Retweet
› 
Reddit this
› Link
› Reader links
hmm..
I dont know I have to agree with some issues in the washington times article, though I did not read the article completely..
Last 10yrs living in US I almost forgot that dowry is a big issue with Indian marriage system until I had to break my own engagement because of dowry issues. I got engaged to a Indian doctor guy born and brought up in US with his family and parents living in US last 30yrs , so I thought they would be broad minded but after engagement I realised indian marriage system didnot change all these years, they started asking for diamonds and rolex watches, I was shocked that dowry still exists even in well educated communities and even in Indian communities who lived in US for years..I wonder sometimes about people in India and all those innocent girls in villages in India..Iam sure dowry is a huge burden on parents of those girls and no wonder no one wants a girlchild..
A lot of people in my small town and communities in India still dont want a girlchild..There is inequality everywhere..when my father passed away, everyone was upset that my father had 2 girls and had no son to burn his body…my own family didnot let me burn my dads body bec I was a girl though I was the first born..until my cousin brother first set fire to the pyre and then I was allowed to set fire to the pyre at the cemetry and do all the rituals after he started everything because I was a first born girlchild..
I dont think equality exists Manish, India still has evils like dowry and all that..and still a lot of people in India want boys rather than girls..
What would the Indian parents think about this statement? :)
manish —
i read this article, but i’m not sure why you were so offended by it. it had a few irrelevant points about why female infanticide is important for a country with strong strategic and military ties to America, but all the expressions you were offended by, (”genocide”, “eve…”) came from quotations, not from the editorial content of the article. the author was just representing other points of view, which while maybe constitute hyperbole, hardly make the piece a “hatchet job”.
in fact, as a journalist myself, and currently an NGO worker who works with a Tamil Nadu-based anti female infanticide group (called Rural Rehabilitation Center… based in Usilampatti, a region famous for this problem), I think it’s fantastic that American papers (rags they might be…) are covering this issue. It’s a horrific practice that I was unaware of before moving to India, and I spend a lot of time writing promotional materials for RRC that seek to achieve merely one thing: raise awareness of the problem and motivate people to give money to stop it. The “Moonie Times” article may have done just that, which find to be progressive and valuable.
on an unrelated note, after reading your post about a struggling canadian actress in bollywood, i emailed my friend cara with the link, because i thought she would find it interesting that other people are out there pondernig the same things as her. turns out it was her. small world.
-robbie whelan
bandra
Quoting alone isn’t an out. You could construct a news feature solely by quoting extremists or using hyperbolic sound bites and end up with something that’s a rant. The tone of this piece immediately struck me as an op/ed masquerading as a news feature.
Just as an example, feticide is not genocide except in a figurative sense. The 1971 massacre of Bangladeshis, Pol Pot, Darfur, those are genocides.
I’d have no problem with this piece being run as an op/ed and indeed we need op/eds on the issue. Feticide is a massive issue, and I’m a feminist, but this isn’t a news series by a long shot. And the editor’s orders show why.
Dowry is really a bad practice in asian countries.No one accept the women without a large dowry.Demands of in-laws of girls are higher than the financial status of their parents.Because of dowry parents dont want girls they think them a burden on this society