Jill Abramson, a former executive editor of The New York Times, teaches journalism at Northeastern University and is a contributing Globe Opinion writer.
The Washington Free Beacon has been called a “conservative clarion,” but it’s become more than that — a potentially lethal weapon aimed at elite universities, their law reviews, medical schools, and anything that smacks of wokeism. It’s not just that the Beacon is conservative; it’s that it seems to be on a jihad, publishing scoops that have left blood on the floor at Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, Duke, and other prestigious corners of academia. In 2012, one of the political journalism website’s cofounders, Matthew Continetti, promised: “The Washington Free Beacon is here to enter the arena of combat journalism.”
A right-wing nonprofit, the Center for American Freedom, initially funded the Free Beacon. The website’s biggest donor was billionaire Paul Singer, who is also a big GOP donor. One of its cofounders was a strategist for the Koch brothers.
So far, its prize victim is former Harvard president Claudine Gay, whose plagiarism was first exposed by Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium and Christopher Rufo, a fierce opponent of critical race theory.
The Free Beacon recently broke the story about a letter the House Committee on Education and the Workforce sent to Columbia University inquiring about text messages that Claire Shipman, Columbia’s interim president, sent to university leaders in 2023 and 2024, when she was cochair of the board of trustees. In separate emails, she wrote that Columbia needed to swiftly add an “Arab” board member and remove a Jewish member whom she sharply criticized. Shipman apologized quickly, but the damage was done.
Sibarium, 29, is the former opinion editor of the Yale Daily News, where his ideological bent tipped to the right. He grew up in a liberal household in Chevy Chase, Md. He has taken aim at a host of prestigious universities and law reviews, including at Duke, Stanford, UCLA, and the University of Illinois. In an interview July 8, Sibarium described his work as “old-fashioned, shoe-leather investigative reporting from a center-conservative perspective.”
Appearing on a 2022 podcast, Sibarium confessed that at liberal Yale, once he had “tasted the thrill of pissing people off,” there was no stopping him.
Sibarium insists the Free Beacon is transparent about its agenda as well as the documents he collects in his reporting. “The conservatism influences the choice of targets,” he told me.
Combat journalism is really nothing new. When Bill Clinton entered the White House in 1992, the conservative magazine The American Spectator was lying in wait. Funded by a wealthy conservative, the late Richard Mellon Scaife, the Spectator pelted Clinton with salacious stories. The Sibarium of the Spectator was David Brock, who wrote articles about Clinton’s sexual escapades (one of his stories provoked Paula Jones to sue Clinton, a lawsuit that ultimately got him disbarred for lying). Brock later disowned some of his own stories.
What’s different now is how large and influential conservative media have become. There is no equivalent on the left, although President Trump says the entire mainstream media has a liberal bias. Sibarium’s stories have impact, in part because they are picked up by the mainstream press almost immediately. His stories sometimes trigger federal investigations.
The Free Beacon is also influencing how mainstream media hires its staff. In February, the publisher of The Washington Post met with the editor of the Free Beacon reportedly to ask for pointers on recruiting conservative journalists, a once unthinkable pairing.
Besides helping to bring down Claudine Gay, the Free Beacon bedeviled the Harvard Law Review in May by publishing insider documents leaked by a whistleblower on its staff. The documents showed that the law review used race-based factors in its selection of articles and editors, favoring student submissions and editorial candidates from underrepresented backgrounds. The Law Review issued a statement that it “does not consider race, ethnicity, gender, or any other protected characteristic as a basis for recommending or selecting a piece for publication.”
In June, it was Duke Law School’s turn. Sibarium got hold of a packet sent to the law school’s affinity groups that instructed people of color to highlight their race and gender in their personal statements. They would get extra points in the competition to get onto the law journal.
UCLA’s Medical School also crossed Sibarium’s radar. His stories quoted a former admissions official who said that the school was still using race-based admissions, which had turned UCLA into a “failed medical school.” Sibarium got hold of written correspondence between UCLA officials and internal data on student performance as well as conducted interviews with professors at the medical school. The school was subsequently sued by Students For Fair Admissions, which won a lawsuit against Harvard several years ago. The complaint by Students For Fair Admissions relied heavily on the whistleblowers quoted in the Free Beacon. Affirmative action has been banned in California since 1996.
The Department of Justice threatened to sue the state of Illinois after the Free Beacon published stories about a state scholarship reserved for people of color that provided financial aid to complete a master’s or doctoral degree. The state suspended the scholarship program.
Many universities are worried about lawsuits that could come from the Trump administration, which has made abolishing DEI, race-based preferences, and critical race theory top priorities.
Sibarium now has a source in a very high place: the White House. Soon before Sibarium’s stories about the Harvard Law Review were published, Daniel Wasserman, who was outed as the whistleblower, received a plum job in the Trump White House. The former Harvard Law Review editor is working for deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, a zealous opponent of DEI and racial preferences. When federal investigations of the law review were launched by the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Justice Department, Wasserman’s former colleagues on the law review pressed him to return the internal documents. No documents were returned.
Stories about the tussle were, unsurprisingly, broken by the Free Beacon.