He鈥檚 Back: Robert Stacy McCain and the Washington Times
Robert Stacy McCain, a former key Washington Times editor who has suggested that "perfectly rational people" react with "altogether natural revulsion" to interracial marriage, apparently has returned as a free-lancer to the newspaper he left in January 2008. In a 鈥淪pecial to The Washington Times鈥� , McCain covers a congressional race in upstate New York involving a candidate with connections to the Tea Party movement.
A casualty of the housecleaning that occurred at the Times three years ago, McCain the paper on his own accord after managing editor Fran Coombs, with whom he was close, was terminated (Coombs had his own ).
Once identified as a , McCain鈥檚 reporting while at the Times was always controversial. As editor of the 鈥淐ulture Briefs鈥� section of the paper, McCain used excerpts from racist publications including magazine and the . In fact, McCain may be the only mainstream newspaper reporter to have covered four American Renaissance conferences. Twice, he offered no description at all of the group he was covering, which is devoted to race science. Once, he said it was "critical of liberal positions on race and immigration." Only in 2004 did he note that some viewed it as racist.
Breaching journalist ethics by reporting on causes he was personally involved in, McCain in his stories. In 2005, stories freelanced by McCain to the website of the conservative newspaper Human Events were scrubbed after that publication鈥檚 editor, Thomas Winter, was given information by the Southern Poverty Law Center鈥檚 Intelligence Report about McCain鈥檚 racism.
It is unclear if McCain鈥檚 return is related in any way to the resignation last year of John Solomon, the longtime Associated Press reporter who was brought in as the Times鈥� executive editor in 2008 after the dismissal of Coombs and others. Solomon鈥檚 hire was widely seen as the Times鈥� effort to clean up a reputation that was badly soiled by its overt partisanship.
Since leaving the Times, McCain has run a rather prolific and bombastic about politics and culture. An E-mail seeking comment today from McCain about the nature of his rekindled relationship with the Times was not immediately answered.
