Now that editors Wes Pruden and Frances Coombs have stepped aside, some kids inside the Washington Times newsroom are speculatiing that former editorial page editor Tony Blankley may be interested in rejoining the team. He joined a public relations firm in September, some say, because he was unhappy with the leadership of Pruden and Coombs. With John Solomon now in charge, he may want to stage a comeback.

Earlier: Live! Nude! Conservative DC Writers!

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John Solomon has been appointed executive editor of The Washington Times to succeed Wesley Pruden, who is retiring after 25 years in the newsroom. In recent years, Soloman has strengthened The Washington Post, where he has helped lead its national investigative and political reporting.

Frances Coombs, Pruden’s longtime number two, has said that he will be resigning, so that Solomon can pick his own staff.

The move by many media insiders as seen as an attempt to tone down the sharp editorial and controversially conservative edges the paper has become infamous for displaying.

Earlier: Shakeup @ Wash Times?

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And the link.

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OK, so we all know that FishbowlDC editor Patrick Gavin is totally lax in the giving credit department, but now we’ve learned that he totally sucks at checking the authenticity of a photo. Recently, you see, the Washington Times’ Kelly Jane Torrance asked him to post this pic of her during his annual media hotties contest:

We, of course, proceeded to talk about the oddness of the pic in this post. But now, new evidence has come to Big Head DC’s attention, indicating that the original Torrance pic was a hoax! The woman in the below pics, who we’ve been told is the actual Torrance, looks quite a bit different: Read more…

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Most people know that the media-arm of Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church own the Washington Times — and questions of his tolerance of homosexuals in that newsroom has long been questioned. But, as a keen Big Head DC reader points out, United Press International, too, has ties to Moon, who has called for the destruction of LGBT people. In a speech in 1997 he said: “What is the meaning of lesbians and homosexuals? That is the place where all different kinds of dung collect. We have to end that behavior. When this kind of dirty relationship is taking place between human beings, God cannot be happy.” Wonder what the gays in UPI’s newsroom, which tends to pride itself on tolerance (much moreso than the Washington Times), think about that?

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Did you know that there’s a whispering campaign going on inside the Washington Times newsroom against George Archibald, an award-winning former journalist with the publication (with some top editors calling him a “drunk” and making fun of his love life)? Well, there is. Yesterday, editors had a chance to direct their whispers directly to his face, as he unexpectedly showed up at the Times’ headquarters to snap some pictures for his forthcoming tell-all book about the newspaper. Instead, they kicked him out of the building.

“I was with a photographer who I retained to take pix for my book cover and inside pix for Journalism Is War, coming out in January, and to talk to my friends at the Washington Times about what’s going on there since I left in September 2005 and the brain-drain since,” Archibald tells Big Head DC. “National reporter Audrey Hudson walked through the lobby while I was signing in with my photographer…. It was moments later the lobby security receptionist got a call saying not to let me into the building.”

“Upper management” had dictated that Archibald be ordered off the property, although several old friends and colleagues stopped by to offer pleasantries to him. Read more…

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So, Washington Times’ editorial page editor Tony Blankley confirmed today Big Head DC’s scoop of last night that he’s moving on to greener pastures. That is, if your idea of greener pastures is joining the Edelman public relations firm and spewing verbosity at the right-wing Heritage Foundation.

He also thinks that editorial writers generally suck! (Please note that in addition to editing the FishbowlDC blog, our pal Patrick Gavin is also an associate editorial page editor at The DC Examiner!)

“In some newspapers, the writing style is fairly distinct,” the less-bloated-than-usual conservative said today. “It would probably be fair to say that an awful lot of editorial writing tends to be a little fudgy, and not quite as sharp as it could be. There is room for clarity and vigor in a lot of pages.”

Blankley, a former child actor, also said “straight opinion” is sometimes missing from many opinion pages. Because everyone’s gay!

You might also like: FishbowlDC’s Audacity of Scoops

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First on Big Head DC: Tony Blankley is leaving the Washington Times after several years at the conservative paper as its editorial page editor. Blankley was formerly a child actor and appeared in Rod Steiger’s child in the 1955 film The Harder They Fall. More to come….

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At least according to George Archibald, an employee of the rag newspaper for over twenty years! To wit:

The abysmal advertising and circulation numbers of the Times were an unfortunate joke.

No one on the editorial side of the newspaper could understand why the Times’ total classified advertising was no more than one or two pages a day while The Washington Post’s Saturday edition alone had five or six sections of classified ads totaling more than 100 pages.

Also the large ads from ideological zealots were an embarrassment to people in the newsroom. For example, the paper published 30 ads from 2004 onwards from neo-Nazi Stan Rittenhouse, head of a group called Exhorters that has a white-supremacist web site called Stormfront.

Why would any pacesetting newspaper accept such ads, let alone be dependent on them?

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So! Yesterday we pointed out that a couple of conservative female writers with the Washington Times have been posting rather salacious nudie pics of themselves online. And, suddenly, the Times was on Big Head DC like white on rice. First, we got a call from an editor there asking us where the original photos could be found. (Either he’s doing an HR investigation, or looking for whack off material, we guess.) Then we got this ridiculously stupid comment on the post: Read more…

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