Washington Free Beacon: Troublemakers at Work
By Michael Lovito, October 3, 2022
Earlier this year, Congressional Republicans accused the Department of Health and Human Services of providing “crack pipes” to people enrolled in addiction treatment programs and drafted legislation to prevent what they called the federal funding of drug paraphernalia. The claims were misleading – HHS had set up a grant program for harm reduction organizations, which do occasionally provide “safe smoking kits” to enrollees. The ensuing controversy received plenty of coverage from mainstream outlets like the New York Times. But the story, red meat for the right, wasn’t broken by Fox, The Federalist, or National Review. Instead, it was the work of a modest, small staffed outlet called the Washington Free Beacon.
In an era when conservative websites like Breitbart and The Daily Caller have cut back on their original reporting in favor of click-baiting aggregation and hot take opinion columns, the Washington Free Beacon stands out as one of the center-right’s last bastion of boots on the ground journalism, digging up dirt on everyone from Democratic congressional candidates to liberal college professors. The Free Beacon may wear its partisan loyalties on its sleeve, but even the most hardened Democratic loyalist has to tip their cap at its dogged pursuit of scandalous stories and its ability to shape the public discourse. Like it or not, the rabblerousers at the Free Beacon do the work, and they get results.
Founded in 2012 with the backing of conservative think tank the Center for American Freedom, the mission of the Washington Free Beacon, in the words of former editor-in-chief Matthew Continentti, is to cover “the left in the same way that the left covers the right,” by reporting controversial stories with the goal of embarrassing liberals and the Democratic Party. This strategy of fighting what the right considers biased journalism with a different kind of biased journalism is controversial – upon its launch, libertarian commentator Conor Friedersdorf wrote that the Free Beacon had “The Worst Mission Statement in the History of D.C. Journalism” – but the site’s commitment to actual reporting has been praised by left-leaning outlets like The New Republic and Mother Jones. Their investigations have even caused headaches for conservatives like Jack Hunter, a Rand Paul staffer who was forced to resign after a Free Beacon investigation revealed that he secretly hosted a neo-secessionist radio show.
A Boss with a Mission
Continetti left the Free Beacon in 2019 and was replaced by Eliana Johnson, 38, an experienced political reporter who got her start at conservative outlets like the New York Sun, Fox News (where she was a writer for “Hannity”), and National Review. In 2016, she moved to Politico, where she spent nearly three years covering the Trump Administration and made occasional appearances on CNN. Already friendly with some of the Free Beacon staff (the website shares an office building with Politico), Johnson jumped at the chance to take a management role and help mold the next generation of conservative journalists.
“I grew up watching Fox News as a high school student, and for a lot of people in my generation, our icons of the right were the Charles Krauthammers, the George Wills of the world, people who occupied a bit more of the opinion space,” she says. “I found that young people, what they didn’t understand about the opinionators was that a lot of them had been reporters. They think you can be 23 and go have an opinion column at a magazine. I am not sold on that. I really, really came to believe that you have to spend time reporting and developing sources before you can go have an opinion that anybody’s going to care about.”
Impact Over Pageviews
One reason the Free Beacon, which is financially supported by Republican donor Paul Singer, is able to focus on unflashy reporting is the relatively low emphasis Johnson puts on pageviews (it ranked as the 14th most trafficked right wing website in August, per TheRighting’s research). Instead, she wants her roughly 20 person staff to focus on “impact” and break news that has the potential to get picked up by mainstream outlets and take on a life of its own.
“We’re not a hugely traffic driven outlet,” Johnson says. “I want [our writers] to do good reporting and to make an impact. I would say the emphasis is on quality as opposed to quantity, to the extent that there’s a tradeoff between the two.”
The Free Beacon made waves at the end of last year for their coverage of disciplinary action Yale Law School took against a student who used the phrase “trap house” in a party invite, a story that brought new scrutiny to the school’s treatment of conservative students. Last week, U.S. Circuit Judge James Ho announced he would no longer hire law clerks from Yale, a commitment that Johnson believes he would not have made if it weren’t for the Free Beacon.
“I couldn’t tell you how many clicks the story got, but it drove a tremendous amount of national coverage and the fallout is still happening,” says Johnson. “We’re 18 months removed from the original story, but now there’s a federal judge saying he won’t hire from Yale anymore. That stuff never could have never seen the light of day if not for an enterprising young reporter at the Beacon.”
In addition to the ongoing midterm elections, academia has become something of a pet subject for the Free Beacon. Since April, the site has published eight stories on Princeton alone, the most recent of which was reported and written by a current student. According to Johnson, the future of the Free Beacon, which also publishes book reviews and satire, is dependent on cultivating this kind of “troublemaking” instinct in young conservatives.
“We’re definitely looking for clean writers and people who enjoy making trouble,” she says. “People who share our impishness and sense of humor are going to be a good fit here.”
Michael Lovito is a Brooklyn-based reporter and critic whose work has appeared in Salon, Brooklyn Magazine, Pavement Pieces, and The District. He also serves as editor-in-chief of the politics and pop culture website The Postrider. @MLovito
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Chief pot-stirrer Eliana Johnson. The editor in chief since 2019, Johnson oversees the Free Beacon’s push for boots-on-the-ground journalism that produces scoops and ruffles feathers on the left.
