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Home Front: Politix

The Free Beacon: ''No equal on the left''

2025-07-17

[POWERLINEBLOG] Jill Abramson is the former executive editor of the New York Times. She now teaches journalism at Northeastern University and is a contributing opinion columnist for the Boston Globe. Yesterday the Globe carried her column on the Washington Free Beacon under the headline ''The conservative weapon bringing down university presidents and law reviews.'' Subhead: ''The Washington Free Beacon is publishing scoops that have left blood on the floor at Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, Duke, and other prestigious corners of academia.'' The Globe has posted the column behind its paywall, but it can be accessed here on Press Reader. My daughter Eliana is editor-in-chief of the Free Beacon.

Abramson's column reads like a Free Beacon greatest hits collection. It has a lot of them. The hits keep on coming and the column is entertaining. Abramson apparently spoke with Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium, who has written several of the greatest hits, and quotes him in the column.

Abramson is a classic media lefty with self-awareness asymptotically approaching negative territory. The Free Beacon seeks to report on the left and on Democrats like the mainstream press does on Republicans, but, in my opinion, with a higher standard of accuracy and fairness. Searching for analogues, however, the best Abramson can do is David Brock's reporting on the Clintons in days of old at the American Spectator:

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.

This is Abramson on the current media environment:

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.

''There is no equivalent on the left'' is laugh- out-loud material. In the interest of fairness, she cites President Trump with an opinion to the contrary. It won't go far with the Globe's readership. Classic!

The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Star Tribune and its peers in cities around the United States, the Atlantic magazine, every broadcast network and all but one cable news network — the entirety of the ''mainstream media'' seek to take down Republicans and conservatives every day.

Indeed, they seek to do so by means fair or foul with virtually infinite resources and with the support of a huge leftist nonprofit infrastructure. The Free Beacon has no equivalent on the left doing what it does on a skinny budget and a small stuff. However, Abramson's assessment of the media terrain is an unintentionally self-satirizing joke.

Posted by:Fred

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