The Words of the Selle Family

The New York City Tribune Praised by Conservative Leaders

Robert Selle
May 20, 1988


Roy Innis of CORE urges the crowd of over 800 people to support the New York City Tribune.

The New York City Tribune, which began publishing on the last day of 1976, was, in a very real sense, a gift from Father to New York City. It was a gift of media diversity and therefore of press freedom -- something which had been missing since the death of the New York Herald Tribune in 1966. In the interim, New York City had been under the control of the liberal media establishment.

On the evening of May 20, 1988, New Yorkers finally said "thank you" through a special meeting honoring the City Tribune, sponsored by the East Side Conservative Club, the most powerful conservative political club in New York. The meeting was held at the New York Hilton Hotel.

"It seems that Rev. Moon cares more for the United States than does the United States, including Wall Street and all the Republicans put together," Russian writer and intellectual Lev Navrozov told a crowd of more than 800 New Yorkers. He was interrupted by applause as he was making this statement.

"The New York City Tribune is... absolutely a must for anyone who wants to know what's going on in the world, particularly for knowing what's going on in the conservative movement," said Thomas A. Bolan, chairman of the Club and a personal friend of President Reagan. Unlike The New York Times with its liberal spin, Mr. Bolan said, the City Tribune gives "both sides."

"The City Tribune is a beacon of truth in this city," said Dr. Herbert I. London, dean of the Gallatin Division at New York University.

The mayor of New York City, Edward I. Koch, sent a letter expressing his best wishes, thanking the paper for "strengthening our city's reputation as a center of publishing and communications," and for helping "to assure that all points of view are represented on the city's newsstands."

In addition, Vice President George Bush and Arnaud de Borchgrave, editor of The Washington Times, sent messages of support for the City Tribune.


Dignitaries at the May 20 meeting. Left to right: Thomas Bolan, Robert Morton, Mrs. Robert Morton, Lev Navrozov, and Jin Soo Kyung, executive assistant to the City Tribune's president, Chung Hwan Kwak.

We Need to Reach Out

The audience then heard from Roy Innis, chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a nationwide civil rights organization based in Brooklyn. "Censorship" by the liberal media, Mr. Innis said, is the central evil facing America in the last two decades of the 20th century. "If we're not able to break this censorship," he said, "America has one place to go, and that is down."

"We have one rare hope," he continued. "We have one bit of light in the tunnel, and that's the New York City Tribune, and its sister paper, The Washington Times."

"We need to reach out and support this paper!" the civil rights leader exclaimed. "We need to reach out and encourage our associates to subscribe to it!"

The City Tribune's international security editor, Professor Albert Weeks of New York University, suggested that the Geraldine Ferraro "scoop" of 1984 [in which City Tribune investigative reporters discovered that the vice-presidential candidate's husband was involved in questionable business dealings] might well have influenced the outcome of the 1984 election.

The editor-in-chief of the City Tribune, Robert Morton, also gave a brief address, in which he thanked Unificationist businessmen for their support and declared that "unlike many in my profession, I believe in God."

"And above all," he said, "I am grateful to and deeply respectful of Rev. Sun Myung Moon for the courage of his convictions."

He urged the audience to "forget what you have read" about Rev. Moon, asking them whether they believed all the lurid allegations published about such conservative heroes as Raymond Donovan, former labor secretary in the Reagan administration; Edwin Meese III, the U.S. attorney general; former President Richard M. Nixon; and Roy Cohn, the late New York trial lawyer and former counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Far More Freedom

Contrary to what some expect from the church connection, Mr. Morton said, "Arnaud de Borchgrave and I have far more freedom of the press than Max Frankel at The New York Times." Mr. Frankel is executive editor of that publication, which is known to be beholden to a great web of political and business interests.

When Mr. Navrozov gave his talk, the evening's main event, about the threat to Western civilization posed by the Soviet Union, he used part of his time to boost Father and the City Tribune. "I call on you," he urged potential subscribers and investors, "to step in and join Rev. Moon in that pro-defense revolution of media which is long overdue, which many pro-defense Americans have in vain been expecting for a long time, and without which Western civilization and, hence, freedom in this world will go under as a foregone conclusion."

He asked the listeners to invest in the City Tribune because it is "the most cost- effective newspaper."

"Perhaps there is money in the survival of Western civilization, and not only in its destruction," he said. 

Table of Contents

Tparents Home

Moon Family Page

Unification Library