And in a sense, why should editors continue the charade? Nonetheless, when John Solomon took over as the Times' editor he claimed, much like Fox News does today, that sure, it's opinion leaned right, but its news whole was legit.

I don't think anybody actually buys it, considering on the complete lack of standards that guide the partisan newspaper on a daily basis.

Now here in a new Washington Independent article about the roll out of the daily's right-wing hub, TheConservatives.com, the editor of the WashTimes goes on and on about how wants to plug the newspaper into the right-wing conservative political movement. Note I didn't say the WashTimes opinion page editor, I said the editor, like the guy who oversees the newspaper news coverage [emphasis added]:

Solomon sold the new site as a way to bring the energy and distributed reporting of conservative activists into the Washington mainstream. “We're not trying to supplant or replace RedState or Townhall,” he said. “We love those sites–they play valuable, valuable roles every day. We want to create a new medium where things from Townhall and RedState and Twitter and Facebook are all aggregating up, and the most interesting ideas from grassroots, from the meritocracy of ideas, bubble up, using technology. And then we use our relationship with The Washington Times to marry the grassroots to the leadership every day.”

...

In his pitch at the Heritage Foundation, Solomon made all of this explicit. The Times, he explained, played an important role in pushing stories that the White House didn't like. "Before Andrew Breitbart did the ACORN series," he said, “we did 47 stories about ACORN.” He explained how TheConservatives.com could run the news cycle by arguing that its “Right People” aggregator, which collects tweets and news from a small group of influential conservatives, changed the debate over Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Again, this naked cheerleading by the WashTimes news editor surprises nobody. I'm just glad Solomon is no longer even pretending the Moonie newspaper aspires to anything more than being another player in the conservative echo chamber.

And oh yeah, the punchline: WashTimes claims its working on a similar site called TheProgressives.com. I'm sure Solomon, at this very minute, is taking meetings with MoveOn.org and Daily Kos, explaining how the right-wing daily desperately wants to marry far-left grassroots to the “leadership of every day.”