The Washington Times was founded in 1982 by Unification Church founder and leader Sun Myung Moon. Bo Hi Pak, Moon's chief aide, was the founding president and the founding chairman of the board. In 1996 Moon discussed his reasons for founding the Times in an address to a Unification Church leadership conference, saying "That is why Father has been combining and organizing scholars from all over the world, and also newspaper organizations, in order to make propaganda." In 2002 Moon said: "The Washington Times is responsible to let the American people know about God" and "The Washington Times will become the instrument in spreading the truth about God to the world."

At the time of the Times' founding Washington had only one major newspaper, the Washington Post. Massimo Introvigne, in his 2000 book The Unification Church, said that the Post had been "the most anti-Unificationist paper in the United States."

The Washington Times has lost money every year that it has been in business. By 2002, the Unification Church had spent about $1.7 billion subsidizing its operation of the Times. In 2003, The New Yorker reported that a billion dollars had been spent since the paper's inception, as Moon himself had noted in a 1991 speech, "Literally nine hundred million to one billion dollars has been spent to activate and run the Washington Times". In 2002, Columbia Journalism Review suggested Moon had spent nearly $2 billion on the Times. In 2008, Thomas F. Roeser of the Chicago Daily Observer mentioned competition from the Times as a factor moving the Washington Post to the right, and said that Moon had "announced he will spend as many future billions as is needed to keep the paper competitive."

The Times was founded the year after the Washington Star, the previous "second paper" of D.C., went out of business, after operating for over 100 years. A large percentage of the staff came from the Washington Star. When the Times began, it was unusual among American broadsheets in publishing a full color front page, along with full color front pages in all its sections and color elements throughout. Although USA Today used color in the same way, it took several years for the Washington Post, New York Times and others to do the same. The Times originally published its editorials and opinion columns in a physically separate "Commentary" section, rather than at the end of its front news section as is common practice in U.S. newspapers. It ran television commercials highlighting this fact. Later, this practice was abandoned (except on Sundays, when many other newspapers, including the Post, also do it). The Washington Times also used ink that it advertised as being less likely to come off on the reader's hands than the Post's. This design and its editorial content attracted "real influence" in Washington. When the Times began it had 125 reporters, 25% of them Unification Church members.

Former speechwriter for President George W. Bush David Frum, in his 2000 book How We Got Here: The '70s, wrote that Moon had granted the Times editorial independence. But insiders, including the newspaper's first editor and publisher, James R. Whelan, have insisted that the paper was under Moon's control from the beginning. Whelan, whose contract guaranteed editorial autonomy, left the paper when the owners refused to renew the contract, asserting that "I have blood on my hands" for helping Moon acquire legitimacy. Three years later editorial page editor William P. Cheshire and four of his staff resigned, charging that then-editor Arnaud de Borchgrave had stifled editorial criticism of political repression in South Korea at the explicit direction of Sang Kook Han, a top official of the Unification Church.

The Times circulation has always been much less than the Washington Post. In 1992 the New York Times reported the Times had only one-eighth the circulation of the Post (100,000 to 800,000) and that two-thirds of its subscribers also subscribed to the Post. In 1994, the Times introduced a weekly national edition, especially targeted to conservative readers nationwide.

In 1997, the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (which is critical of United States and Israeli policies), praised the Times and its sister publication The Middle East Times for their objective and informative coverage of Islam and the Middle East, while criticizing the Times generally pro-Israel editorial policy. In 1998 the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram wrote that the Times' editorial policy was "rabidly anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and pro-Israel."

In 2002, Post veteran Ben Bradlee said, "I see them get some local stories that I think the Post doesn’t have and should have had." Dante Chinni wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review:

In addition to giving voice to stories that, as Pruden says, “others miss,” the Times plays an important role in Washington’s journalistic farm system. The paper has been a springboard for young reporters to jobs at The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, even the Post. Lorraine Woellert, who worked at the Times from 1992 to 1998, says her experience there allowed her to jump directly to her current job at Business Week. “I got a lot of opportunities very quickly. They appreciated and rewarded talent and, frankly, there was a lot of turnover.”

In 2004 the Washington Post reported dissention between some of the Times staff and ownership over the paper's stance on international issues, including support for the United Nations.