 | |
| Type | Online news site |
|---|---|
| Format | Website |
| Editor-in-chief | Eliana Johnson |
| Managing editor | Sonny Bunch, Victorino Matus, Stephanie Wang |
| Founded | 2012 |
| Political alignment | Conservative |
| Language | English |
| Headquarters | Washington, D.C. |
| Website | freebeacon |
| This article is part of a series on |
| Conservatism in the United States |
|---|
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The Washington Free Beacon is an American conservative political journalism website launched in 2012. [1] [2]
The Free Beacon was founded by Michael Goldfarb, Aaron Harrison, and Matthew Continetti. It launched on February 7, 2012, as a project of the Center for American Freedom, a conservative advocacy group modeled on the liberal Center for American Progress. [3] The website is financially backed by Paul Singer, an American billionaire hedge fund manager and Republican donor. [4]
The site is known for its conservative reporting, with the intention of publicizing stories and influencing the coverage of the mainstream media, and modeled after liberal counterparts in the media such as Think Progress and Talking Points Memo . [3] [5] [6] The site has roots in the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party. [7]
In 2019, Politico journalist Eliana Johnson, described by Ben Smith as "a leading political reporter" assumed the editor-in-chief position from the WFB's founding editor Matthew Continetti. At the time, the outlet had a staff of 24. [8]
Jack Hunter, a staff member of Senator Rand Paul's office, resigned in 2013 after a Free Beacon report detailing his past as a pro-secessionist radio shock jock known as the "Southern Avenger". [5]
The publication also broke several stories about Hillary Clinton's successful 1975 legal defense of an accused child rapist that attracted national media attention. [9]
From October 2015 to May 2016, the Washington Free Beacon hired Fusion GPS to conduct opposition research on "multiple candidates" during the 2016 presidential election, including Donald Trump. The Free Beacon stopped funding this research when Donald Trump had clinched the Republican nomination. [10] Fusion GPS would later hire former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and produce the Steele dossier that alleged links between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Paul Singer, a billionaire and hedge fund manager, who is a major donor to the Free Beacon, said he was unaware of this dossier until it was published by BuzzFeed News in January 2017. [11] On October 27, 2017, the Free Beacon publicly disclosed that it had hired Fusion GPS, and stated that it "had no knowledge of or connection to the Steele dossier, did not pay for the dossier, and never had contact with, knowledge of, or provided payment for any work performed by Christopher Steele." [12]
The Free Beacon came under criticism for its reporting on Fusion GPS. Three days before it was revealed that it was the Free Beacon that had funded the work by Fusion GPS, the Free Beacon wrote that the firm's work "was funded by an unknown GOP client while the primary was still going on." [13] The Free Beacon has published pieces that have sought to portray the work by Fusion GPS as unreliable "without noting that it considered Fusion GPS reliable enough to pay for its services." [13] In an editor's note, Continetti said "the reason for this omission is that the authors of these articles, and the particular editors who reviewed them, were unaware of this relationship," and that the outlet was reviewing its editorial process to avoid similar issues in the future. [14]
In 2022, a Free Beacon article by Patrick Hauf accused the administration of President Joe Biden of planning to use federal dollars to fund safe smoking kits that included crack pipes, as part of a harm reduction initiative; [15] this prompted outrage among Republicans in Congress, some of whom proposed a bill to ban the federal government from funding drug paraphernalia. [16] The Washington Post later reported that, according to a United States Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson, "Hauf jumped to a conclusion that was not warranted" because, while the safe smoking kits were meant to reduce risk in smoking "any illicit substance", the agency funding the program "d[id] not specify the kits' elements, only the parameters"; thus, although such smoking kits often include crack pipes and (according to a Drug Policy Alliance spokesman interviewed for the Washington Post article) some of the groups planning to apply for the funding had assumed that its kits would also include them, it was not clear that the agency had intended to include them. [16]
Bill Gertz, a senior editor until October 2019, took 100,000 US dollars from Guo Wengui, a conspiracy theorist, without disclosure, [17] wrote stories citing him and introduced him to Steve Bannon. [18] Gertz was subsequently fired, [19] with a disclaimer appended to his affected stories. [17]
In 2023 and 2024, The New York Times credited the Free Beacon with breaking, together with Chris Rufo, [20] and subsequently expanding, reportage on the plagiarism accusations against Harvard President Claudine Gay, [21] who resigned shortly thereafter. [22] The Washington Post called Gay's resignation "a major win" for the Free Beacon, which it described as "the rare conservative media outlet that does significant reporting of its own." [23]
Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times described the reporting style of the Free Beacon as "gleeful evisceration". [24] The Atlantic 's Conor Friedersdorf called the Free Beacon's mission "decadent and unethical". [25]
Ben Howe wrote in The Daily Beast that The Washington Free Beacon established "itself as a credible source of conservative journalism with deep investigative dives and exposes on money in politics", but after Trump's election it was "producing less actual reporting" and moved "more towards the path of least resistance: spending their time criticizing the left and the media, along with healthy doses of opinion writing". [26] McKay Coppins in the Columbia Journalism Review wrote in September 2018 that while the website contains "a fair amount of trolling… it has also earned a reputation for real-deal journalism… If a partisan press really is the future, we could do worse than the Free Beacon". [27]
Jeet Heer wrote in The New Republic : "Much of the conservative press is terrible but the Free Beacon is far superior to propagandist fare like The Daily Caller . Unlike other comparable conservative websites, the Free Beacon makes an effort to do original reporting. Its commitment to journalism should be welcomed by liberals". [28] In 2015, Mother Jones wrote positively of the Free Beacon, commenting that it is far better than contemporary conservative outlets such as The Daily Caller. [29] Mother Jones however said that "the Beacon hasn't always steered clear of stories that please the base but don't really stand up", and that it tends towards inflammatory pieces that "push conservatives' buttons". [29] That same year, the Washingtonian wrote that "The Beacon's emphasis on newsgathering sets it apart among right-facing publications". [30]
Ben Smith wrote in BuzzFeed News that the Free Beacon was "[a]lternately parodic and wire-service serious", and had "broken major political news, mostly negative" (although its focus was mainly directed against Democrats). Smith continued that the Free Beacon's hard news reporting differentiated it from other conservative outlets which were either opinion focused or did not produce journalism which met mainstream standards. [8]
Andrew James Breitbart was an American conservative journalist and political commentator who was the founder of Breitbart News and a co-founder of HuffPost.
The Washington Examiner is a U.S. conservative news outlet based in Washington, D.C., that consists principally of a website and a weekly printed magazine. It is owned by Philip Anschutz through MediaDC, a subsidiary of Clarity Media Group.
Matthew Joseph Continetti is an American journalist and Director of Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
Breitbart News Network is an American far-right syndicated news, opinion, and commentary website founded in mid-2007 by American conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart. Its content has been described as misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist by academics and journalists. The site has published a number of conspiracy theories and intentionally misleading stories. Posts originating from the Breitbart News Facebook page are among the most widely shared political content on Facebook.
Benjamin Eli Smith is an American journalist who is the co-founder of Semafor, a global news organization he formed with Justin Smith in early 2022. He was previously a media columnist at The New York Times from 2020 to 2022. From 2011 to 2020, he was the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News.
BuzzFeed, Inc. is an American Internet media, news and entertainment company with a focus on digital media. Based in New York City, BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 by Jonah Peretti and John S. Johnson III to focus on tracking viral content. Kenneth Lerer, co-founder and chairman of The Huffington Post, started as a co-founder and investor in BuzzFeed and is now the executive chairman.
One America News Network (OANN), also known as One America News (OAN), is a far-right, pro-Trump cable news and political opinion commentary channel founded by Robert Herring Sr. and owned by Herring Networks, Inc., that launched on July 4, 2013. The network is headquartered in San Diego, California, and operates news bureaus in Washington, D.C., and New York City.
The Independent Journal Review (IJR) is a conservative American news and opinion website based in Alexandria, Virginia. The publication was founded in 2012 by Alex Skatell. Skatell serves as its CEO, with Camden Stuebe as President and Shushanna Walshe, former political director at ABC News as the Editor-At-Large. The site covers general interest topics including politics, culture, entertainment, and viral news content.
BuzzFeed News is an American news website published by BuzzFeed beginning in 2011. It ceased posting new hard news content in May 2023. It published a number of high-profile scoops, including the Steele dossier, for which it was strongly criticized, and the FinCEN Files. It won the George Polk Award, The Sidney Award, the National Magazine Award, the National Press Foundation award, and the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
The Western Journal, previously known as Western Journalism, is an American conservative news and politics website based in Phoenix, Arizona. It was founded by political consultant Floyd Brown in 2008.
David A. Fahrenthold is an American journalist who writes for The New York Times. Previously he wrote for The Washington Post. He has also served as a political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. In 2017, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his coverage of Donald Trump and his alleged charitable givings, including the 2016 United States presidential election.
Glenn Richard Simpson is an American former journalist who worked for The Wall Street Journal until 2009, and then co-founded the Washington-based research business Fusion GPS. He was also a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center.
Christopher David Steele is a British former intelligence officer with the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) from 1987 until his retirement in 2009. He ran the Russia desk at MI6 headquarters in London between 2006 and 2009. In 2009, he co-founded Orbis Business Intelligence, a London-based private intelligence firm.
The Steele dossier, also known as the Trump–Russia dossier, is a controversial political opposition research report compiled by Christopher Steele that was published without permission as an unfinished 35-page compilation of "unverified, and potentially unverifiable" raw intelligence reports—"not established facts, but a starting point for further investigation". It was written from June to December 2016 and contains allegations of misconduct, conspiracy, and cooperation between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and the government of Russia prior to and during the 2016 election campaign. Several key allegations made in June 2016 about the Russian government's efforts to get Trump elected were later described as "prescient" because they were corroborated six months later in the January 2017 report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Mueller Report, namely that Vladimir Putin favored Trump over Hillary Clinton; that he personally ordered an "influence campaign" to harm Clinton's campaign and to "undermine public faith in the US democratic process"; that he ordered cyberattacks on both parties; and that many Trump campaign officials and associates had numerous secretive contacts with Russian officials and agents.
Fusion GPS is a commercial research and strategic intelligence firm based in Washington, D.C. The company conducts open-source investigations and provides research and strategic advice for businesses, law firms and investors, as well as for political inquiries, such as opposition research. The "GPS" initialism is derived from "Global research, Political analysis, Strategic insight".
Trevor Neil McFadden is an American lawyer who serves as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Previously, he was a deputy assistant attorney general in the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice.
Natalia Vladimirovna Veselnitskaya is a Russian lawyer. Her clients include Pyotr Katsyv, an official in the state-owned Russian Railways, and his son Denis Katsyv, whom she defended against a money laundering charge in New York. On 8 January 2019, Veselnitskaya was indicted in the United States with obstruction of justice charges for allegedly having attempted to thwart the Justice Department investigation into the money laundering charges against Katsyv.
The Nunes memo is a four-page memorandum written for U.S. Representative Devin Nunes by his staff and released to the public by the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee on February 2, 2018. The memo alleges that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) "may have relied on politically motivated or questionable sources" to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant in October 2016 and in three subsequent renewals on Trump adviser Carter Page in the early phases of the FBI's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
Bruce Genesoke Ohr is a former United States Department of Justice official. A former associate deputy attorney general and former director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF), as of February 2018 Ohr was working in the Justice Department's Criminal Division. He is an expert on transnational organized crime and has spent most of his career overseeing gang and racketeering-related prosecutions, including Russian organized crime.
This is a timeline of major events in the second half of 2017 related to the investigations into the many suspicious links between Trump associates and Russian officials and spies relating to the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. It follows the timeline of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections before and after July 2016 up until election day November 8, the post-election transition, and the first half of 2017. The investigations continued in the first and second halves of 2018, the first and second halves of 2019, 2020, and 2021.
began almost immediately after the hearing with a post by Mr. Rufo, who had obtained an anonymous dossier of work published by Dr. Gay in which she had allegedly plagiarized other scholars, as well as a report in the Washington Free Beacon
Additional allegations continued to surface in conservative outlets like The Washington Free Beacon
Dr. Gay's resignation came after the latest plagiarism accusations against her were circulated in an unsigned complaint published on Monday in The Washington Free Beacon
