The Washington Times

The Washington Times (워싱턴 타임스): The Providential Office of the Press in Unification Doctrine

워싱턴 타임스 · 言論 · The Press, Eonron

What Is the Washington Times?

The Washington Times is the daily newspaper founded in Washington in 1982 by Rev. Sun Myung Moon, described by him as a conservative news medium established to show the American nation the path it should follow. Within Unification teaching, it is not classed as a commercial venture and not principally as a political one.

It is classed under 언론, the press, which the corpus treats as a providential office carrying a specific responsibility: to supply a moral standard that neither the market nor the state can generate on its own.

The paper belongs to a family of media undertakings rather than standing alone.

Rev. Sun Myung Moon spoke of it alongside the magazine Insight, the Korean daily Segye Ilbo founded seven years later, a broadcasting operation, and the World Media Association, and he applied the same vocabulary to all of them: role, responsibility, and mission.

This entry argues that the paper’s identity in the corpus is functional rather than proprietary. It matters as an instance of an office, not as a possession, and the office is what the preaching is actually about. Two facts follow from this reading and are difficult to explain without it. Across fifty-four years of preaching, Rev. Sun Myung Moon gave eighteen addresses whose titles name 언론 as such and only two whose titles name the Washington Times, both of them delivered in 1998 and 1999. And the founding itself is recorded in the corpus not as a strategic acquisition but as an act of love directed at a nation that had treated him as an adversary.

In 1982, in accordance with God’s will, I founded the Washington Times here

— Sun Myung Moon, Cheon Seong Gyeong

The phrase “in accordance with God’s will” is the operative one, and the address goes on to describe the paper as having led American public opinion by showing the path the nation must follow. A newspaper conceived that way is answerable to a standard outside its readership, which is precisely what the corpus means by the responsibility of the press.

Methodology Note

This entry reads the official English Cheon Seong Gyeong compilation and the title-level index of the Korean speech archive of Rev. Sun Myung Moon, covering 6,118 addresses from 1956 to 2010. The canonical texts are read as authoritative within the tradition, attending to their historical and rhetorical setting; the aim is doctrinal clarification, not external evaluation. The entry does not attempt a corporate history of the newspaper, an account of its editorial positions or coverage, an assessment of American politics or journalism, or a treatment of Victory over Communism, which has its own entry. Inter-religious comparison is omitted since the term is an internal institutional one with no meaningful cross-tradition parallel. Korean preaching material not verified against a named archive file is reported in prose rather than quoted. All blockquotes come from the official English Cheon Seong Gyeong and are cited by the date of the underlying address where a date is established.

The paper is an instance of an office the corpus calls 언론

The Korean word governing this whole area of the teaching is 언론 (言論), which covers the press, public discourse, and the media as an institution. It is a wider word than "newspaper," and the width is the point.

Across the indexed corpus, eighteen sermon titles contain 언론, and their vocabulary is remarkably stable across twenty-four years. The nouns that attach to it are 책임, responsibility; 역할, role; and 사명, mission. The first, delivered in October 1982, five months after the newspaper began publishing, is titled “The Problems of Society and the Responsibility of the Press” (Moon 1982, vol. 120). The last in the sequence, in August 2006, is titled with a piece of characteristic bluntness about the movement’s standing among media institutions (Moon 2006, vol. 536).

What these titles never do is treat the press as a business. The word that would signal a commercial frame does not appear, and the addresses that name media alongside other undertakings place them in a list of instruments for a purpose rather than a portfolio.

I have created media organizations and a summit council that can move the world.

— Sun Myung Moon (01/01/1991) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The sentence sits in a passage listing external conditions Moon describes himself as having completed, alongside the Professors World Peace Academy and the federations for interreligious and world peace. Media organizations appear in that list in the plural and without individuation. This is the grammar of an office being filled rather than of assets being held.

The same grammar shows in how the movement’s outlets are named. Speaking of the organizations he had founded, Rev. Moon observed that they carry the word “peace” in their names, listing among them a newspaper association for peace.

All those organizations have the word peace in their names

— Sun Myung Moon (04/02/1994) Cheon Seong Gyeong

A naming convention is a statement of category. Whatever else the newspapers were, they were classed with the peace organizations rather than with the businesses, and the corpus keeps them there consistently.

The content of the office is also specified. In an address of August 1997, Rev. Moon named politicians, economists, writers, and journalists together as those who must lead a movement against a moral condition he regarded as destroying the young. Journalists appear in that list on the same footing as legislators, which is a considerable claim about what a newspaper is for. The office is not an observation. It is a formation.

The founding is recorded as love toward an adversary

The single most important interpretive key to this term is a sentence Rev. Sun Myung Moon spoke in December 1985, and it is not the sentence a reader would predict.

A person in the secular world would have sought revenge, but I did not.

— Sun Myung Moon (12/24/1985) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The passage in which it stands says that America was like an enemy to him, that he nonetheless established organizations to save it beginning with the Washington Times, and that the alternative a secular person would have chosen was revenge. He adds a three-word instruction: one must give love.

A point of chronology should be noted rather than smoothed over. The newspaper began publishing in 1982, two years before the imprisonment at Danbury, and Rev. Moon in this retrospective groups it with initiatives he associates with the prison period. The grouping is thematic rather than sequential. What he is doing is assembling the American undertakings under a single motive, and the motive is the one the sentence names.

The same reading recurs in a later address, where the founding of the newspaper and of a broadcasting station is presented as an effort devoted to giving life to a nation whose federal government had humiliated him and brought him before a court. In both passages, the structure is identical: adversary, opportunity for retaliation, and a newspaper founded instead.

This is the doctrinal ground on which the entry rests its claim that the paper is not primarily an instrument of confrontation. A movement founding a newspaper as a weapon would not narrate the founding as a refusal of retaliation, and would have no reason to.

There is a second register in the corpus, and honesty requires reporting it, since it appears to pull the other way.

I had to slap the American media on the cheek using the Washington Times

— Sun Myung Moon (01/24/1986) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The image is combative, and the surrounding address speaks of a hundred and twenty days in which the world’s media had to determine their direction. But the stated aim even here is that other media should determine a direction, not that they should be destroyed, and the same address describes building a bridge of love toward those who had opposed him. The two registers are the same argument in two tempers: the office of the press is corrective, and correction addressed to an institution is not revenge taken on a person.

Media were built as a base, and a base is subordinate to what it carries

The corpus is unusually explicit about where media sit in the order of means and ends, and the placement settles whether the newspaper is a terminus or an instrument.

Through these media, we are creating the means to influence the world.

— Sun Myung Moon (09/30/1985) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The passage names the Washington Times and Insight together and describes their purpose as securing a global media base. "Base" is the word to hold onto.

In Unification vocabulary, a base is a foundation on which something else can then be done, and it is defined by what it supports rather than by itself. The same address places this media base alongside an economic foundation being built in another sector entirely and treats both as preparation.

The Korean side of the movement’s media work shows the same subordination and provides it a date. In September 1988, Rev. Moon told an audience that a newspaper publishing company needed to be established and that the matter was time-sensitive.

we need to establish a newspaper publishing company

— Sun Myung Moon (09/05/1988) Cheon Seong Gyeong

The reason given in the passage is that university graduates had stepped forward as a unit of activity and needed complete support, which places the newspaper in service of an educational effort already underway. The archive corroborates the sequence: an address on the way Segye Ilbo should go is dated August 12, 1988, some months before the paper began publishing (Moon 1988, vol. 179).

The clearest late statement of the subordination joins the press to education directly. The second of the only two title-level occurrences of the Washington Times in the whole corpus, dated April 4, 1999, names the paper’s role together with education in the Word (Moon 1999, vol. 309). A newspaper described in the same breath as scriptural education is not being described as an end in itself.

The corpus preaches to the office constantly and names the paper twice

The archive gives this term an unusually clean signature, and the shape of it is the argument.

Across 6,118 indexed sermons, two titles contain 워싱턴 타임스. They are dated December 19, 1998, and April 4, 1999, and both are about the paper’s role. That is the entire title-level presence of the Washington Times across fifty-four years of preaching, sixteen years after its founding, and after the end of the confrontation with which its early years are most often associated.

By contrast, eighteen titles name 언론, running from October 1982 to August 2006, and nine name 세계일보, running from August 1988 to April 2006. Twenty-nine addresses in all put a media term in the title; two of them put the Washington Times there.

Three features of the sequence carry weight.

The first is the continuity across 1991. If the newspaper and the wider media effort had been essentially instruments of the ideological confrontation, the collapse of that confrontation should register in the preaching. It does not. Titles on the responsibility and role of the press appear in 1990, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, and 1997, at the same rate as before, and the density increases rather than decreases after 2000.

The second is the vocabulary shift after 2002. The earlier titles ask what the press is responsible for; the later ones speak of using media institutions, of a peace movement conducted through them, and in June 2006, of publishing spirit-world messages and their influence. The office remains constant while the assignment becomes more specific, which is the same profile the encyclopedia has recorded for other institutional terms.

The third is the paper’s own belatedness in the titles. A reader who assumed the Washington Times was the centre of the movement’s media doctrine would expect it to dominate the sermon titles of the 1980s. It appears in none of them. What appears instead is the office, from five months after the paper’s first issue onward.

Analytical Synthesis

The thesis was that the Washington Times figures in Unification teaching as an instance of a providential office rather than as a possession or a partisan instrument and that its identity is therefore functional. Four lines of evidence converge. The corpus classes it under 언론 and applies to it the same vocabulary of responsibility, role, and mission that it applies to every other outlet. The founding is narrated as a refusal of retaliation rather than as a strategic move. Media are repeatedly described as a base, which in this vocabulary is defined by what it supports. And the title-level distribution shows the office preached eighteen times and the paper named twice, both times late.

The strongest objection reverses the emphasis. On this reading, the newspaper was founded in the American capital in 1982, at the height of the movement’s campaign against communism, precisely because a daily paper in Washington is an instrument of influence in the place where influence matters most; the theology of the press is then the frame placed around a decision made on other grounds. The objection has real support. Rev. Moon himself describes the media effort as creating the means to influence the world, speaks of striking the American media, and situates the paper among undertakings intended to secure a position in the United States.

The objection is serious, and it preserves something this reading must not lose. The paper was founded in a particular city at a particular moment for reasons that were not accidental, and the corpus does not pretend otherwise.

But two features of the evidence favor the office reading where the two diverge.

The first is the survival of the vocabulary past the moment that would have exhausted it. An instrument built for a confrontation loses its rationale when the confrontation ends. Instead, the preaching on the responsibility of the press continues at an unbroken rate through the 1990s and intensifies after 2000, and the two addresses that name the newspaper directly fall in 1998 and 1999.

Whatever the paper was founded to do in 1982, the doctrine attached to it was still being developed sixteen years later, and the later development runs toward education rather than toward confrontation.

The second is the treatment of the Korean paper. Segye Ilbo receives nine title-level addresses, more than four times as many as the Washington Times, and it was founded in a country where the movement’s concern was reunification rather than ideological defence.

If the media doctrine were downstream of the American campaign, this distribution would be inexplicable. If the doctrine is about an office that any outlet can occupy, the distribution follows directly since the Korean paper stood closer to the providential centre.

What the argument does not entail should be stated plainly. It does not entail that the newspaper was politically neutral, since Rev. Moon himself described it as a conservative news medium, and the entry reports that description as his. It does not entail that the confrontation with communism was irrelevant to its founding, since the corpus places the media effort among the instruments of that period.

Furthermore, it does not entail any judgment about the paper’s journalism, coverage, or editorial positions, which lie outside the scope of a doctrinal encyclopedia. And it does not entail that the office of the press is peculiar to this movement’s own outlets, since the addresses on 언론 are directed at the institution as such and were delivered to gatherings of journalists from many countries.

What it does entail is a rule for reading the term. When the corpus speaks of the Washington Times, it is almost always speaking about what a newspaper is for, and the answer it gives is that a newspaper exists to hold a society to a standard it did not set for itself.

Key Takeaway

• The Washington Times is the daily newspaper founded in Washington in 1982 by Rev. Sun Myung Moon, and Unification teaches classes under 언론, the providential office of the press.
• The office is defined by responsibility, role, and mission rather than by ownership or commerce, and the same vocabulary governs every media undertaking of the movement.
• Rev. Sun Myung Moon narrated the founding as a refusal of retaliation toward a nation that had treated him as an adversary, saying that a secular person would have sought revenge.
• Media are repeatedly described in the corpus as a base, a term that in this vocabulary is defined by what it supports rather than by itself.
• A second and more combative register exists in the corpus, but its stated aim is that other media should correct their direction rather than be destroyed.
• Across the 6,118-sermon Korean archive, eighteen sermon titles name 언론, nine name 세계일보, and only two name the Washington Times.
• Both Washington Times titles fall in December 1998 and April 1999, sixteen years after the paper’s founding, and one of them joins its role to educate in the Word.
• Preaching on the responsibility of the press continues without interruption through the 1990s and intensifies after 2000, which is not the profile of an instrument built for a single confrontation.

References

Cheon Seong Gyeong: Selections from the Speeches of Sun Myung Moon. 2003. 2nd ed. Seoul: Family Federation for World Peace and Unification.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1982. “사회의 제문제와 언론의 책임.” Sermon, October 5, 1982. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 120, sermon 2.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1984. “언론의 신뢰성과 사회적 책임.” Sermon, November 19, 1984. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 133, sermon 11.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1987. “분단된 세계에서의 언론의 책임.” Sermon, September 21, 1987. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 168, sermon 5.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1988. “세계일보의 갈 길.” Sermon, August 12, 1988. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 179, sermon 6.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1990. “언론의 역할과 사명.” Sermon, October 4, 1990. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 206, sermon 4.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1992. “21세기 언론인의 사명.” Sermon, August 22, 1992. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 234, sermon 5.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1995. “21세기 언론의 방향과 역할 그리고 책임.” Sermon, August 22, 1995. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 271, sermon 7.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1998. “워싱턴 타임스의 역할.” Sermon, December 19, 1998. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 308, sermon 5.

Moon, Sun Myung. 1999. “＜워싱턴 타임스＞의 역할과 말씀 교육.” Sermon, April 4, 1999. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 309, sermon 2.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2003. “언론의 섭리적 책임.” Sermon, January 22, 2003. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 403, sermon 4.

Moon, Sun Myung. 2006. “우리가 언론기관의 왕초.” Sermon, August 22, 2006. In Mun Seonmyeong Seonsaeng Malsseum Seonjip, vol. 536, sermon 5.