Insight on the News

For other uses, see Insight.

Insight

File:Insight on the News magazine logo.gif
Type	weekly online magazine
Format	magazine
Owner(s)	News World Communications and the Unification Church
Editor	Jeffrey T. Kuhner
Founded	1980s
Political alignment	conservative
Headquarters	3600 New York Avenue NE Washington DC 20002
Website	insightmag.com

Insight (formerly Insight on the News) is an American conservative Internet magazine now edited by Jeffrey T. Kuhner and owned by News World Communications, identified by Columbia Journalism Review as "the media arm of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church", which also owns United Press International and publishes The Washington Times.

Background

Insight was founded in the 1980s by News World Communications as a print weekly called Insight on the News, and was known for its reports about alleged scandals in the administration of U.S. President Bill Clinton.

Originally, the magazine circulated midway in frequency between sister publications The Washington Times (a daily newspaper) and the monthly World&I magazine. All three periodicals remain part of News World Communications, a media company owned and subsidized by the Unification Church of Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

In 2004, News World Communications closed the print magazine and hired Jeffrey T. Kuhner to run it as a stand-alone website. Under Kuhner, Insight eschews bylines, in what Kuhner describes as an effort to "encourage contributions from reporters who do not want to reveal their names". About Insight's policy, Kuhner has said:

“Reporters in Washington know a whole lot of what is going on and feel themselves shackled and prevented from reporting what they know is going on. Insight is almost like an outlet, an escape valve where they can come out with this information.”

Print magazine era

David Brock

David Brock worked as a reporter for the print version of Insight during the late 1980s. After leaving Insight Brock wrote "Blinded by the Right: Conscience of an Ex-Conservative", and now runs Media Matters for America, an organization that describes itself as "a web-based, not-for-profit, progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media."

Arlington National Cemetery

In 1997 Insight reported that the administration of President Bill Clinton gave political donors rights to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. This charge was widely repeated on talk radio and other conservative outlets; but was later denied by the United States Army, which has charge over Arlington Cemetery. Nevertheless, the "Arlington Controversy" was born, and took on a life of it's own.

Spurred on by Insight's report, a subsequent flurry of media investigations turned up the burial of Larry Lawrence, a former United States Ambassador to Switzerland at Arlington, which in turn sparked a congressional investigation. Republican Party members of congress searched military records and found no evidence that Lawrence was ever in the Merchant Marine. As a result Lawrence's body was disinterred in 1997 at taxpayer expense and brought to California. Richard Holbrooke, an assistant secretary of state, had helped attain the rights to bury Lawrence at Arlington, and had written a letter to the White House praising Lawrence and saying that he deserved burial at the National Cemetery.

Paula Jones

In 1998 CNN reported that Insight "created a stir" when Paula Jones, who had filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against President Clinton, was its guest at the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner, where Clinton spoke.

Internet magazine era

Insight identified as source of "anonymous smears"

See also: Barack Obama presidential campaign, 2008 § False claims concerning Obama's religious background

In January 2007, Insight said that presidential candidate Senator Hillary Clinton's campaign team were planning to attack rival candidate Senator Barack Obama for concealing that he was educated in an Islamic religious school (madrassa) during his youth in Indonesia.

Insight's story was mentioned on Fox News Channel television broadcasts, and elsewhere.

Soon after, CNN reporter John Vause visited the school, where each child received two hours of religious instruction per week in his or her own faith, and was told, "This is a public school. We don't focus on religion." The CNN story also quoted a spokesperson for Clinton, who dismissed the allegation as "an obvious right-wing hit job" on both candidates. Insight responded that, "To simply take the word of a deputy headmaster about what was the religious curriculum of a school 35 years ago does not satisfy our standards for aggressive investigative reporting", and said that "Although we are not able to send correspondents to places like Jakarta to check out every fact in a story, we harness our resources for what we do best—providing our readers with political intelligence.".

A January 29 story in The New York Times quoted Insight editor Jeffrey T. Kuhner as saying he considered the article is "solid as solid can be", but said of Kuhner:

"Jeffrey T. Kuhner, whose Web site published the first anonymous smear of the 2008 presidential race, is hardly the only editor who will not reveal his reporters’ sources. What sets him apart is that he will not even disclose the names of his reporters."

During the Times interview, Kuhner stated that he "meant to focus on the thinking of the Clinton campaign", and declined to say whether he knew the identity of his unnamed reporter’s sources. The Times commented "perhaps only that reporter knows the origin of the article’s anonymous quotes and assertions. Its assertions about Mr. Obama resemble rumors passed on without evidence in e-mail messages..."

On January 31 Kuhner responded to the Times story, suggesting that it's expose of Insight was an attempt to "obscure the real issue", which he asserted was the intentions of Hillary Clinton.

Soon after, Mediaweek described the report as a "double splatter", and reported "The lies, amplified not only by Fox but by Headline News' Glenn Beck, originated with a Web site blandly called Insight. Allegedly owned by the Moonies, the Web site purportedly was once part of the ostensibly right-wing Washington Times which is reportedly also owned by (some say—though off the record—and only in the sense of "proprietorship") the Moonies."

John Moody, a senior vice president at Fox News, said Fox had erred in mentioning the Insight allegations, stating that Fox had "reported information from a publication whose accuracy we didn’t know."[2]

Colombia Journalism Review used the Insight example as "A lesson in how easy it is — even for publications with no history of credibility — to start a scandal."

"So the main question is, after all this, why should we take seriously anything that this online rag has to say? Every news organization gets things wrong, but Insight seems to have developed a business model out of concocting fables."

SANE Project

In June of 2007, Insight reported on an undercover investigation of the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center, located in Falls Church, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C., by the group Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE). David Gaubatz, a spokesperson for the group, said:

“The ultimate goal for those at Dar Al-Hijrah is to instill Sharia law in the U.S. and have America adhere to the Islamic faith. They want America to be an Islamic state.”

Insight's story was denounced by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

In February 2007 SANE had released a policy paper stating that the objective of SANE is to banish Islam from the US by making "adherence to Islam" ("defined as any act, including any written or oral declaration, in support of Shari’a or in furtherance of the imposition of Shari’a within any territory of the United States of America.") punishable by 20 years in prison.

External links

• Official website