Eliana Johnson on Left Wing Media, DC Corruption, and the Downfall of College Campuses | KMP Ep.30

0:00There's a tremendous amount of groupthink in mainstream media newsrooms. And one of my takeaways from covering the White House at a mainstream organization was that they're really motivated to cover the president or lawmakers when it's a Republican. They don't quite feel the same motivation when it's a Democrat because largely they're sympathetic to these people when they're Democrats in a way that they don't feel when the president's a Republican, particularly when it's President Trump.

0:24Katie Miller:Where do you think the future of media and journalism goes? does social media kill off a lot of the legacy news publications and give rise to more of some of the independent outlets where people are? I think we're seeing like a much more fractured media environment where, you know, somebody like you, Katie, can say, I'm going to start up a podcast and give people an offering and where people can really curate media according to their taste. You know, as a conservative, this is what drives us crazy is that at The Beacon, we say we're conservative. We love freedom. Our beef is that at The New York Times, they're pretending they're down the middle.

0:57We make fun of ourselves. We make fun of other journalists because like, this isn't, we're not doing brain surgery.

1:11Katie Miller:Hi everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of the Katie Miller podcast. We're so excited to be in Washington DC today, joined by Eliana Johnson of the Washington Free Beacon. Nice to have you. Thanks for having me. So tell the audience a bit about yourself. How long have you been at the Free Beacon, and how did you get to be editor-in-chief of what I'm going to consider a major news publication? Thank you. That's generous of you. And so I have been in journalism for about the past 20 years, maybe 15 years, and I've been at the Beacon for six years. Prior to that, I covered the White House at Politico for a few years.

1:47But before that, I really grew up in conservative journalism, both in television and in print. I worked at Fox News as a writer for Sean Hannity and then went into print where I did reporting at National Review. I started out in New York and moved down to D.C. covering the 2016 election from here. And from there, I ended up at Politico and spent some time in the mainstream and as a political analyst at CNN. And Politico is actually in the same building as the Washington Free Beacon. I'd known those guys forever and would often ride the elevator up to the beacon and talk to them. And so when my predecessor, Matt Continetti, who is now a columnist at the Wall Street Journal, was moving on, we started talking about kind of what the possibilities might be.

2:40And I just switched offices within the building from Politico to the beacon.

2:45Katie Miller:So working at a legacy news publication, what were some of the incentives there for what gets covered versus what doesn't? I was there during the first Trump administration. And what I found at Politico, and Politico is a particular type of publication, was that, and I should say I had a wonderful experience there, learned a lot. It's a privilege to cover a president where you travel on Air Force One with these people, you are a front row witness to history. That being said, there's a tremendous amount of groupthink in mainstream media newsrooms. And one of my takeaways from covering the White House at a mainstream organization was that there's a lot of, you know, the White House press corps travels as a pack.

3:33You travel on these foreign trips together, you're in the White House briefing room together, and people talk alike, think alike. They're covering the same stories. And while these people should be fierce competitors, and they are for micro scoops, people aren't really holding each other accountable when they make mistakes. And there really is a tendency toward groupthink. And all of the incentives sort of push in the same direction for book contracts and television contracts. And in the first Trump administration, obviously there was, as there should be, there should be hard, negative coverage of a president, but we don't see that as much when it's of Democrats.

4:11And I use this Jewish term where reporters, I think, feel it in their kishkes, like they're really motivated to cover the president or lawmakers when it's a Republican. They don't quite feel the same motivation when it's a Democrat because largely they're sympathetic to these people when they're Democrats in a way that they don't feel when the president's a Republican, particularly when it's President Trump, who's made a big political issue of taking on the press, the bias in the press, and of attacking individual reporters because there's nothing more that conservatives love than hearing people talk about media bias.

4:46I think he recognized that and has used it to his advantage.

4:50Katie Miller:Where do you think the future of media and journalism goes? Does social media kill off a lot of the legacy news publications and give rise to more of some of the independent outlets where people are? Do you think that they're sick and tired of that same leftist group think, as you kind of alluded to? I think we're seeing like a much more fractured media environment where, you know, somebody like you, Katie, can say, I'm going to start up a podcast and give people an offering and where people can really curate media according to their taste. And what the beacon has really strived to do is to say that I think we've recognized that on the right in conservative media, it's been over-indexed towards opinion.

5:36So conservative media has had enormous success. Like Fox News has been enormously successful, and they're pretty much indexed towards opinion. They're prime times filled with opinion programming. Conservatives have been hugely successful in talk radio. And now they're quite successful in podcasting and elsewhere, where conservatives have not been as successful is competing with the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. I would have said the Washington Post, but they seem to be, you know, self-defeating in the realm of hard news. And we believe that reporting and hard news moves the needle, that it matters.

6:15And so what we're trying to do with the beacon is to actually train right of center, conservative, right wing young people in the skills, traditions, and the ways of reporting how to do it, how to write a story, how to talk to sources, how to cultivate sources, and to report on stories that simply aren't being reported by the mainstream media. So the media landscape is changing, but we're actually at the beacon doing something quite traditional that we think is important and impactful. And we are still seeing it move the needle. For everybody else, I think it's like, you know, people are creating their own buffets.

6:59There's so many options out there that you can put together something that is suited for your particular tastes and interests. You can get your sports podcast here and your cooking app there. And you don't have to tune in to the, you know, CBS Evening News at 7 p.m.

7:16Katie Miller:Are you finding that there's less young people who want to be in conservative journalism now? Or should I just say what used to be mainstream journalism, you know, this right down the middle sense of journalism? And now they're all kind of left leaning since, you know, the first Trump administration has really, I think, turned the tide of journalism. I actually, on the right, I don't think there's been a turning of the tide. I think there's a more systematic problem. And I compare our sort of the issues we face to the success on the right of the Federalist Society, where I think that there were institutions on the right built to cultivate conservative lawyers.

7:58And now we see a flourishing all the way up to the Supreme Court of conservative lawyers that started in law schools and that's gone through law school into law firms that's recruited and cultivated talent and shown people that you can have a thriving and successful career in law as a conservative. What I don't think that the right has done as well is to recruit, cultivate and retain people and show them come be a reporter. You can have a thriving, long career on the right as a reporter. And that's partly because the institutions don't really exist. Sure, there's the Washington Free Beacon. We've got 25 or 30 people.

8:45But there aren't that many other institutions that are devoted to reporting. I mentioned a lot of other institutions, like tons of people want to go work at Fox News that are devoted to opinionating. And so we see and I should mention the great success of The Daily Wire, which is in entertainment and also opinion and is building out reporting. But there are just fewer institutions, I think, devoted to competing against the major cultural institutions of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal when it comes to hard news reporting.

9:18Katie Miller:What's your case for why more conservative outlets should compete in breaking news and investigative work and not just, as you mentioned, sticking in this like opinion, you know, opinion space? I think the world we live in, everything we're talking about, whether it's podcasts or television or, you know, anything else is a war of information. And the thing that really moves the needle is new information. and time and again in, you know, in, be it in political elections or day to day, like it is news stories that are driving the day. And what actually motivated me to go from Fox News, where I was working for Sean Hannity and writing scripts, which was, I had a blast doing that.

10:04And the reach of Fox, you know, it's a privilege to work at a place that has such an enormous platform was actually that when I was writing scripts, I saw like, you know, it's actually print news and like news stories that I'm cultivating, that I'm pulling every day. And it'd be a lot of fun to actually be breaking those and writing those and impacting what gets on these big opinion shows. And that's my case. Like these news stories are impactful. And there There are politicians, governors, potential presidential candidates who simply aren't being scrutinized because the prevailing political opinions of the vast majority of reporters all flow in one direction.

10:50So the scrutiny that President Trump gets and that he should get, he's the president of the United States, is simply not the same as what the previous president got. We didn't hear a lot of people asking questions about his senility because the prevailing political opinion of the White House press corps was one way. We see governors. The Free Beacon has just done a series of stories on Governor Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland. You know, where was The Washington Post on these stories? Scrutinizing his public statements. You know, it is because the political opinion are, you know, they are one way.

11:27And these newsrooms could use political diversity or we could use more outlets like the Beacon. It's important.

11:33Katie Miller:How do you balance the Free Beacon's ideological perspective with your commitment to accuracy and sourcing? And how do you uphold standards while still having that center-right perspective where, for example, if I read the Washington Post, I don't take very seriously what they're saying because I know that their sourcing is such a way. It's a great question. And I think that we demonstrate every day at the Beacon that having a point of view does not mean sacrificing accuracy ever. If we make a mistake, we're going to go out and tell you we make a mistake. But our reporting is thorough and scrupulously accurate.

12:16And the difference between the Free Beacon and the New York Times, and I say this a lot, and of course, you know, as a conservative, This is what drives us crazy is that at the Beacon, we say we're conservative. We love freedom. You know, we don't like the mullahs in Iran, whatever it may be. We're open about our ideological priors, but our reporting is scrupulously accurate. Our beef is that at the New York Times, they're pretending they're down the middle. Like we're not doing that at the Beacon. We're totally open about it, but you're going to get accurate information, accurate reporting, and also a dose of fun and a sense of humor.

12:51We don't take ourselves too seriously. Obviously, we're not on Twitter, you know, like the rest of reporters calling on Jeff Bezos to save democracy and lose$100 million a year. Demand that he lose$100 million a year on The Washington Post. And oh, my gosh, it's the end of the world if he, you know, fires some people. Like we make fun of ourselves. We make fun of other journalists because like this isn't we're not doing brain surgery.

13:18Katie Miller:Then how does your bias contribute to your reporting? if you're open and honest about being a biased news source, then how does that bleed into the reporting? I wouldn't say a biased news source. I would say we have ideological priors that inform our reporting, our sense of which targets are important in the same way that the New York Times and the Washington Post and all these other people do, but they're hiding it from you. They are pretending otherwise. And for us, because they are the way they are, because they're going to cover Republicans at an 11 and Democrats at a four, that leaves a tremendous amount of white space for the free beacon of politicians that aren't being scrutinized that we go out and then cover.

14:03So that's how it informs. And let me give you an example. In 2020, 2021, I came to the beacon and 2019, we noticed, and you can go back and search. At one point, I don't have any notes with me today, but I had a list of headlines about Harvard that the New York Times had written at this time in the Wall Street Journal. It was like, Harvard endowment soars to new heights. Harvard professor wins Nobel Prize. You couldn't find a negative story about Harvard or Yale or Princeton. And we started hearing, you know, murmurings of things happening on these Ivy League campus. And we thought, OK, here's an example of a white space.

14:50These elite institutions are not being scrutinized by the major reportorial organizations, newspapers in our country. We had a story in 2021, came to be dubbed Trap Housecape, but we actually had a tape of DEI officials at Yale Law School calling in a student who happened to be Native American, but also a member of the Federalist Society. We had them on tape berating and bullying this student, turned into an enormous scandal at Yale Law School that bled into several other scandals and shed light on what the DEI regimes on these elite campuses were actually like. That later led into our reporting on Harvard University President Claudine Gay's plagiarism.

15:36And we were one of the first outlets to see and report, nobody ever challenged one of the facts, that something was amiss on these elite college campuses, culturally, politically. They were not being scrutinized. And not only that, they didn't understand how to respond to scrutiny because you know what? The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, none of them had ever pressed these leaders about anything. thing.

16:01Katie Miller:What is the story or things you're covering that you're most proud of being an editorial control of a paper? In my tenure at the Beacon over the past six years, it would certainly be our coverage of higher education. I think we really exposed the rot. And again, this preceded the second Trump administration, which has decided to focus on this, but really exposed the intellectual and ideological rot on these university campuses, along with some of our major political stories. And I would point people right now as an example to the reporting that we're doing on Governor Wes Moore of Maryland, blowing up some of the inflated claims he's made about his biography, just as a representation of the type of reporting that the Free Beacon does and the places that we go that other mainstream media outlets simply do not tread.

17:05Katie Miller:Do you think universities have become this microcosm for the larger political battle we're seeing throughout the country? And did they lead the way kind of in what you're saying with DEI, wokeness, gender? It's a great point. And I think what we heard from the left was there was an acknowledgement for many years, like, yeah, things on campus might be a little crazy, but like it's kids, it's kids. And then in 2020, you know, in the wake of George Floyd, we saw a lot of that explode, not only onto the streets of our country, but into the corporate world. And so much of what happened in corporate America led a lot of people to acknowledge that what happens on college campuses doesn't stay on college campuses.

17:54In fact, many of the elite institutions in our country are a leading indicator of what's going to happen elsewhere, both at less elite institutions, at state schools and elsewhere, but also what's going to happen in your workplaces and around the country. And I think it's, you know, it should have been a warning sign for Democrats. You know, what they decided to say, hey, it's just some crazy kids and we're not going to speak up about what the far left is doing. And, you know, we saw Kamala Harris do this in 2024 and be skittish about condemning much of what was happening, both on campuses and in the party's own left flank.

18:35And then voters took a look at it and thought, like, that's weird. And so I do think, like, that's the case for covering. Because I've had a lot of people ask me, like, who cares what happens at Harvard? That's the case for covering scrupulously, like, what's happening at these places and for asking real questions of university leaders.

18:57Katie Miller:Why do you think legacy media outlets shied away so much from covering these universities? For a lot of reasons. I think, number one, they share ideological sympathies with these people. They're all on the left. Number two, they're friendly with many of these people. These are their alma maters. And while, you know, I'm a Yale graduate, so you could say, like, Yale's my alma mater, I look in horror at what's happening on the campus. I think there are, you know, plenty of other grads who don't feel that way. They have a lot of, you know, I have affection for the school and I'm very grateful for the education that I got.

19:35But but I feel a lot more desire for accountability there. But I but I will say the mainstream media followed our coverage on much of this. And I think that's because there were a lot of adults in these newsrooms who saw kids coming out of these schools and coming into their newsrooms and bullying James Bennett out of The New York Times. and throwing a hysterical fit or saying, you know, Tom Cotton, the publication of Tom Cotton's op-ed saying calling the troops endangered their lives. And I think there were people at the Times, not an insignificant amount, who said, this is crazy. These kids are crazy.

20:19What they're learning on campuses is crazy. And there was a contingent of people who began to say, like, we've got to cover this stuff. And they're doing a better job of covering what's happening on these campuses now. But it took like beating them over the head with this. And I think seeing the product that the university was producing comes storming into their newsroom to torture them, you know, to drive home the point.

20:43Katie Miller:Do you think Barry Weiss was also right to leave The New York Times around this time period to start the free press? Who could say Barry Weiss was wrong to go start a$150 million company? I think that was like a real achievement. And I think we talked about the groupthink in the mainstream media. Like she obviously saw that, acknowledged that, went off to start her own thing. And the hysterical resistance that you're seeing to Barry trying to turn around a third place CBS News, which is similar to the hysterical resistance that you're seeing to some of the changes that Jeff Bezos is trying to make of The Washington Post.

21:26hey, maybe we shouldn't be democracy dies in darkness, resistance, because that, you know, didn't work in the Biden administration when we started bleeding subscribers. These people are met with temper tantrums and resistance by the whole, OK, the whole of the mainstream press. It's not people at The Washington Post are complaining and people at CBS News are complaining. It's the entire mainstream press mounts attacks against them because they will not brook any kind of ideological diversity in their midst.

22:01Katie Miller:Why do you say the mainstream media instead of the legacy media? No reason. I had a good reason. I'm happy to refer to it as the legacy media. Because I would argue that like you're more of the mainstream than they are. You know what? I should adopt that and put mainstream media on the mask out of the free I would argue. I mean, they're the dying legacy media and you cover more of what mainstream America actually thinks and feels these days. I think that's I think that's absolutely right. And I think that that it informs why. When the country sees actually what's happening at The New York Times are on these college campuses, the country revolts against that.

22:49Yes.

22:50Katie Miller:As editor in chief, how do you balance creative editorial instincts with the practical realities of running a business? I would say the practical reality that I think about is how do we have, you know, X number of top notch stories to put out every day? Like that's really the practical reality I think about. And and how do I make sure that we have several impactful pieces ready to go? But my sole focus really is on where should we focus our reporting? What will be the most impactful? How do we get it to the level that it needs to be at such that it's essentially bulletproof when we're going after subjects?