WASHINGTON — The two conservative Washington D.C. newspapers, the Washington Times and the Washington Examiner, have recently ramped up their “War on Porn” articles and editorials, following a yearlong escalation of pro-censorship content that coincided with religious group Exodus Cry’s “Traffickinghub” campaign.
In fact, the Washington Examiner has platformed Exodus Cry’s mouthpiece Laila Mickelwait as a regular opinion columnist, downplaying the religious motivation of her anti-porn organization, an offshoot of controversial Missouri ministry International House of Prayer (IHoP).
And Sunday, the Washington Times published a column by religious conservative columnist Robert Knight — who also serves as a writer for “God-inspired” investment fund Timothy Partners, Ltd., one of Exodus Cry’s partners — ridiculing fair reporting on sex work issues by NBC and complaining about a laughably non-existent pro-porn bias in the mainstream press.
This is not accidental: both the Washington Examiner and the Washington Times have religiously inspired, adamantly anti-porn owners: conservative Christian donor Philip Anschutz and the family of Reverend Sun Myung Moon, respectively.
Mocking Sympathetic Coverage of Sex Workers
Robert Knight’s Sunday editorial, entitled “Agree With Liberals, or You're Racist, Xenophobic and Dangerous,” followed a complaint about NBC’s reporting on seven anti-abortion “hate groups” (as defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center) with an attack on the network’s atypically balanced coverage of the “war on porn.”
Knight blamed NBC for singling out the anti-abortion groups, which he reclassified as “pro-life, pro-religious liberty, defend[ing] marriage and oppos[ing] obliterating the fact that God created two sexes — male and female. “
“Three days later,” Knight continued, “NBC ran a story sympathetic to ‘sex workers’ who fear a ‘war on porn’ after Visa, Mastercard and Discover cut off Pornhub, the world’s largest smut site.”
“‘Thousands of people have turned to this type of online sex work to feed their families, and this move is affecting those moms who just want to buy diapers and milk,’ said a ‘veteran porn star,’” Knight mocked.
Knight then praised “New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who reported that Pornhub was ‘infested’ with thousands of images and videos of child sex abuse, rape, torture and revenge porn.”
Knight’s editorial was picked up by pro-Trump news network One News Now (ONN) today, which retitled it “When Actions Speak Louder Than Words.”
'Biblically Inspired' Investing in Anti-Porn Groups
As XBIZ reported back in October, Knight both writes columns for the Washington Times and other religious conservative outlets (like Christian Broadcasting News) and also writes copy for Timothy Partners, Ltd. and Timothy Plan Funds, “Biblically inspired” financial backers of Exodus Cry and Traffickinghub.
Knight admitted that “after some Timothy Plan employees approached the firm’s president, Art Ally, with their concerns over Pornhub, [Ally] authorized double-matching by the company of employees’ contributions to the Traffickinghub.com campaign.”
“Pornography has much greater power to do harm than many people realize,” Ally wrote in August when the strategic partnership with Mickelwait’s group was announced. “Because of its addictive nature, it poses great risk to the consumer. More importantly, it’s an ugly regression in the progress we had made to end exploitation and mistreatment of women. Biblically speaking, protecting the innocence and beauty of God’s creation is a clear commandment, so filtering out pornography is a must if we’re to be truly a biblically sound investment product.”
The investment fund’s “Our Story” section — headlined “Arthur Ally and His Vision for Biblically Reponsible Investing” — explains that Ally was told by God to switch his investing portfolio to the fight against “central issues such as abortion and pornography.”
Timothy Plan now boasts of being “a leader in the 'Biblically Responsible Investing' arena.”
A Platform for Laila Mickelwait
Back in October, months before Nicholas Kristof’s exploitative New York Times editorial “The Children of Pornhub” brought Exodus cry’s anti-porn agenda into the mainstream, Knight admitted that “the Traffickinghub.com campaign was launched on February 9, 2020 with an article in the Washington Examiner, 'Time to Shut Pornhub Down,' penned by Exodus Cry’s Director of Abolition, Laila Mickelwait.”
He also bragged that the Exodus Cry campaign “has also attracted backers on Capitol Hill,” and singled out Republican Senator Ben Sasse’s letter to Attorney General William P. Barr demanding a federal investigation into Pornhub. This was months before Sasse reached across the aisle to convince Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) to draft the SISEA bill denounced by many sex workers and adult industry figures.
The Washington Examiner continues offering Laila Mickelwait a platform to conduct her scorched-earth campaign against all pornography, which she and her Exodus Cry partner, Benjamin Nolot, consider a form of human trafficking.
On January 11, the Washington Examiner published Mickelwait’s latest opinion piece, “The End of Pornhub’s Campaign of Intimidation,” which manages to both sound victorious about the fallout of the Kristof New York Times piece, and the credit card companies’ measures against Pornhub, and also to present the “War on Porn” crusaders as victims of a supposed campaign of intimidation.
“During this period, my family and I have also been threatened, harassed, defamed and doxxed by a group of operatives, many of whom we can connect directly to [adult company] Mindgeek and its consultants,” Mickelwait wrote, without providing any evidence of such thing. “Close family members had their emails, bank accounts and cloud storage hacked. Private family photos were emailed to them in an obvious effort to threaten and intimidate them and myself.”
The column was immediately praised by Kristof, who retweeted it from the Washington Examiner link, even though last year his own paper, the New York Times, had included the Examiner in an article about papers regularly spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation.
A few days later, unbothered by the contradiction, Kristof himself wrote an editorial asking for an end to the kind of right-wing propaganda that the Washington Examiner has been known to peddle.
A Generous Religious Billionaire on a Christian Mission
The Washington Examiner is owned, through his Clarity Media Group, by 81-year-old billionaire Philip Anschutz, a devout Christian and regular donor to conservative political causes.
One of the causes Anschutz has “generously supported” is anti-porn group NCOSE, which the billionaire has been backing since they went by their previous name, Morality in Media, “for its crusades against pornography and obscenity in magazines, movies, television and other outlets,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported in a 2004 profile.
Another is the Family Research Council, a lobby that also serves as a clearing house for political donations to conservative Christian darlings like Senator Josh Hawley.
Anschutz, the Chronicle added, “also lobbied for tighter decency standards through his own business endeavors. His film companies, going by names including Empower, Walden Media and Crusader Entertainment, have championed G- and PG-rated family fare with morality messages.” (Anschutz is also behind those “Pass It On” inspirational billboards.)
Anschutz is a prominent donor to the Navigators, a Colorado Springs-based “international, interdenominational Christian ministry,” a virulently homophobic group that became notorious during the fight for marriage equality for advocating the idea of “sexual brokenness.”
The Anschutz-funded group defined “sexual brokenness” in a 2013 “Sexual Health and Wholeness” document (that has since been hidden from their publicly accessible materials) as “the devastation brought about by behaviors outside of God’s original intent for human sexuality. These behaviors include adultery, promiscuity, masturbation, homosexuality, lesbianism, sexual abuse, molestation, incest, prostitution, pornography, trans-sexuality and transvestitism, etc."
Anschutz also funds the “movie reviews for Christians” website Movieguide, which ranks mainstream films according to their “morality” and chastises them for “worldview problems.”
The award-winning Tom Hanks-Denzel Washington AIDS drama “Philadelphia,” for example, is rated “-3” because “the bottom line of this film, that the homosexual lifestyle is ‘just another lifestyle,’ is wrong and abhorrent to God and moral individuals (See Romans 1:20).” The Kevin Smith comedy “Zach and Miri Make a Porno” (“-4”) is given props for a good script but “the movie’s worldview and content are so terrible that no amount of good production values mean anything.” (Alas, “Boogie Nights” was not reviewed by Movieguide.)
A Consistent Funder of Anti-Porn Groups
In 2004, when he purchased the San Francisco Examiner, Anschutz was described by the San Fransisco Chronicle as a Kansas-born, Denver-base billionaire chairman and owner of Anschutz Co., “a highly diversified firm that owns or has investments in about 100 companies in energy, pipelines, railroads, agriculture, real estate, film production, movie theaters, telecommunications, sports, media and entertainment.”
Anschutz owns a stake in the LA Lakers and, through the Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), he controls a number of notable world-class venues and institutions, such as the Staples Center in Downtown Los Angeles, and the Coachella music festival.
The Chronicle also noted that Anschutz was “a conservative Christian, [who] has long contributed money to political causes and candidates, including former Sen. Bob Dole.” Anschutz also backed the 1992 campaign in Colorado that opposed municipal ordinances that would provide civil rights protections for gays and lesbians.
In 1994, Anschutz donated to a Colorado group called CHILD, which had gotten an anti-obscenity amendment on the state ballot. The group’s mailer, local alt-weekly Westword reported, railed against "homosexuals, pedophiles, criminal sex offenders and the other users of illegal hard-core pornography."
"He's a very religious man,” Martin Fridson, a Wall Street specialist in the high-yield bond market who researched Anschutz for a book on billionaires told the Chronicle. “It's very important to him.”
In 2017, with his profile raised every year during the traditional Coachella band announcements, Anschutz tried to walk back his clear record of anti-gay rights donations.
“Recent claims published in the media that I am anti-LGBTQ are nothing more than fake news — it is all garbage,” Anschutz wrote. “I unequivocally support the rights of all people without regard to sexual orientation. We are fortunate to employ a wealth of diverse individuals throughout our family of companies, all of whom are important to us — the only criteria on which they are judged is the quality of their job performance; we do not tolerate discrimination in any form.”
In 2004, one of his aides told the San Francisco Chronicle that Anschutz is "a strong Christian, a strong believer in religion," but readers of his publications should not worry about bias because "it is more personal than it is promotional, in the sense that he is not seen (promoting his religious opinions) in the paper or as a religious leader."
But the same profile mentioned that in a 1999 Fortune magazine profile, Christian self-help author Bob Buford — a friend of Anschutz's and a former cable-television executive — had a different take.
"I would say that he has a latent interest in doing something significant in American Christianity," Buford told Fortune. "He is working deliberately and diligently on it."
His staunch support for NCOSE and his condemnation of adult content have been a constant through his public life, and it’s an attitude that is clearly in line with the Washington Examiner’s bias and its unquestioning embrace of Exodus Cry and Laila Mickelwait.
The Thin Line Between 'Religious' and 'Political'
The Washington Times’ motto is “Reliable Reporting. The Right Opinion.” The word “Right” is deliberate, as the news paper has consistently aligned itself as a more conservative alternative to the Washington Post.
The Washington Times was founded in 1982 by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder and “prophet” of the Unification Church, a Korean religious leader who died in 2012 after leading his movement for decades and establishing over 100 Unification Churches around the world.
The newspaper was part of News World Communications, a media group associated with the church, until 2010 and is currently owned by a corporate entity known as Operations Holdings Inc., which is also connected to the late Rev. Moon’s family.
The Unification Church’s mission is “propagating a common religious message under the spiritual guidance of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.”
In legal filings, Operations Holdings is described as “solely and directly owned” by The Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, the full corporate name under which the Rev. Sun Myung Moon registered the Unification Church in the U.S. in 1961 as a California nonprofit corporation before moving headquarters to New York in 1976.
The same filing lists the main mission of the group as the "worship of God and the study, teaching and practical application of Divine Principles,” and among other purposes to acquire” such property, real and personal, as may be necessary or useful to carry out any or all of the purposes and powers" of the corporation.
The properties under the Operations Holdings umbrella include a hotel business in New York City (the 43-story Art Deco landmark the New Yorker Hotel), a fishing company in Seattle and the Washington Times newspaper, all of them listed as “for-profit entities.”
In 1982, the Tax Commission of New York challenged the religious non-profit status of the Unification Church, but an appeals court upheld the church’s contention that they classify “the beliefs and activities which the Tax Commission and the [district court] described as political and economic” as “religious.”
A 2019 ruling extended that privilege to the for-profit businesses under Operations Holdings.
According to its own reports, the Washington Times accumulated losses exceeding $1 billion from 1982 until 2014, and only turned out a profit the following year. At the time, the newspaper claimed 10 million readers monthly online and in print.
The Rev. Moon, unsurprisingly, had a very staunch anti-porn stance, organizing through the church’s youth groups massive protests against Playboy and other adult businesses.
Moon also believed that his union with his wife — whom he married when she was 17 and he was 40 — would produce “sinless children.” But according to an authoritative profile on his widow, Unification Church “True Mother” Hak Ja Han, published by media news site Ozy, their firstborn son, Hyo-jin, was disgraced "when his ex-wife published a book in 1998 painting him as a coke and porn addict.”
A background which may explain why the Moon family-owned paper unwaveringly chooses to back Laila Mickelwait's anti-porn crusade through articles and editorials.
Main Image: Rev. Sun Myung Moon and "True Mother" Hak Ja Han (Publicity Image).