[5] The senior Pruden was also president of the Little Rock chapter of the White Citizens' Council,[6][7] a segregationist group that opposed racial integration throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Pruden attended Little Rock Central High School, and simultaneously, as a tenth grade student in 1951, worked nights as a copyboy at the since defunct Arkansas Gazette, where he later became a sportswriter and an assistant state editor.
In 1965, he was assigned to cover the Vietnam War, and served for a decade as a foreign correspondent in Saigon, Hong Kong, Beirut, and London.
[9] Every Saturday, under Pruden's editorship, The Washington Times published a full page of stories on the American Civil War, the only daily newspaper in the United States to do so.
In the article, he expressed the opinion that since President Obama was "sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World, and reared by grandparents in Hawaii," he "has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what [America] is about.
[14][15] In 2013, Pruden returned to The Washington Times as part of a wide-ranging shakeup following the death of Sun Myung Moon, the newspaper's founder.
Columbia Journalism Review quoted an unnamed senior Washington Times official as saying that Pruden's return was "a huge blow to the influence and credibility of the paper.