The Washington Free Beacon

The Washington Free Beacon is an American political journalism website launched in 2012. The website identifies as conservative. Eliana Johnson is the website's editor-in-chief.

The Free Beacon has broken stories about states using racial preferences in rationing COVID-19 drugs, exposed Columbia Law School's plans to evade the banning of consideration of race in admissions, and uncovered Yale administrators' bullying of a student, which led to personnel changes at the school. The Free Beacon also reported on plagiarism accusations against Harvard President Claudine Gay, who resigned shortly thereafter. The Washington Post called Gay's resignation "a major win" for the Free Beacon, which it called "the rare conservative media outlet that does significant reporting of its own." The website's reporting on a number of senior administrators at Columbia University exchanging text messages it considers antisemitic led three deans to resign.

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. The website is financially backed by Paul Singer, an American billionaire hedge fund manager and Republican donor.

The site is known for its conservative reporting, with the intention to publicize stories and influence the coverage of the mainstream media, and is modeled after liberal counterparts in the media such as Think Progress and Talking Points Memo. The site has roots in the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party.

In 2019, Politico journalist Eliana Johnson assumed the editor-in-chief position from the WFB's founding editor Matthew Continetti. At the time, the outlet had 24 staffers.

Jack Hunter, a staff member of Senator Rand Paul's office, resigned in 2013 after a Free Beacon report detailed his past as a pro-secessionist radio shock jock known as the "Southern Avenger".

The publication also broke several stories about Hillary Clinton's successful 1975 legal defense of an accused child rapist that attracted national media attention.

From October 2015 to May 2016, The 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 Trump clinched the Republican nomination. Fusion GPS later hired former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and produced the Steele dossier that alleged links between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Paul Singer, a major donor to the Free Beacon, said he was unaware of this dossier until BuzzFeed News published it in January 2017. On October 27, 2017, the Free Beacon publicly disclosed that it had hired Fusion GPS, and said 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".