Right Web

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The right-wing advocacy group Center for American Freedom (CAF) and its online journal the Washington Free Beacon were founded in 2012 to serve as counterweights to the purported liberal domination of online media.[1]

CAF’s founding chairman is Michael Goldfarb, a lobbyist and activist associated with several neoconservative groups, including the Emergency Committee for Israel, the Liz Cheney-led Keep America Safe, and the now-defunct Project for the New American Century. The editor of the Washington Free Beaconis Matthew Continetti, a contributor to the neocon Weekly Standard. Aaron Harison, the former executive director of Keep America Safe, is the group’s president.[2]

Board members include the ubiquitous William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and a supporter of a passel of neoconservative pressure groups, as well as Weekly Standard contributors Jaime Sneider and Mary Katharine Ham, who is also conservative radio host and Fox News commentator.[iii]

CAF’s website describes the group’s purpose thusly: “The Center For American Freedom is a conservative not-for-profit organization dedicated to improving the lives of Americans through education, ideas, and action. We are creating a long-term, conservative vision for America—a vision that policy makers, thought-leaders, and activists can use to shape the national debate and pass laws that make a difference. Our mission is to transform conservative ideas into policy through rapid response communications, legislative action, organizing and advocacy, and partnerships with other conservative leaders throughout the country and the world.”[4]

In an expose about the group for Politico, Ben Smith wrote that CAF was inspired by its liberal counterpart, the Center for American Progress (CAP) and its blog, ThinkProgress. Said Continetti, “Our models are the Center for American Progress/Think Progress, [Talking Points Memo], and Huffington Post politics. These outlets have been at the cutting edge of ideological journalism for years, and it is time for the right to emulate their success.” Added Goldfarb: “It’s very impressive what they’ve done. Obviously, I think they’re misguided and they have some horrible policy views and they’ve done some things I wouldn’t do, but the premise of it is extremely impressive.”[5]

Reflecting on what he apparently regards as the novelty of a conservative news site, Continetti described the Washington Free Beacon as an attempt to present “the other half of the story, the half that the elite media have taken such pains to ignore: the inside deals, cronyism cloaked in the public interest, and far-out nostrums of contemporary progressivism and the Democratic Party. At the Beacon, all friends of freedom will find an alternative to the hackneyed spin, routine misstatements, paranoid hyperbole, and insipid folderol of Democratic officials and the liberal gasbags on MSNBC and talk radio. At the Beacon, we follow only one commandment: Do unto them.” Continetti summed up the journal’s work as “combat journalism.”[6]

Early Beacon publications appeared to primarily be concerned with Democratic Party fundraising and related stories, but other entries by reporter Adam Kredo highlighted right-wing charges of anti-semitism leveled at groups like the Center for American Progress (or “the Center for American Prejudice”) and Media Matters for America,[7] as well as Iran’s hostility toward Israel.[8]

To compete with other online media outlets, CAF put together what one conservative blogger characterized as a “murderer’s row of talent.”[9] According to Ben Smith, Continetti “hired a staff on a scale that will make an immediate impact on the Washington media scene. They include Bill Gertz, a veteran Washington Times defense national security writer, and the Washington Jewish Week’s Adam Kredo, a well-sourced beat reporter with a reputation for neutrality. The Beacon has also poached Andrew Stiles from National Review online; CJ Ciaramella from The Daily Caller; Patrick Howley from the American Spectator; and Sonny Bunch, a former Weekly Standard and Washington Times writer now at the lobbying and corporate public relations firm Berman & Co.”[10]

Describing the group’s offices and support staff, Smith wrote: “The group’s new offices, at 1600 K St., have at their physical heart a campaign-style war room and wall of televisions, where Drew Florio, who ran Meg Whitman’s campaign war room when she ran for governor of California and did opposition research for Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign, will lead a team of junior staffers. The research department, meanwhile, is led by Tim Killeen, a former acting RNC research director; former RNC research director Shawn Reinschmidt is a consultant to the group.”[11]

Although he declined to reveal the group’s donors, Goldfarb told Smith that CAF would have an annual budget of “several million dollars.” Reported Politico in early 2012: “The group is currently structured as a 501(c)(4) advocacy group, Goldfarb said, mimicking CAP’s more combative media and research arm, the Center for American Progress Action Fund; it may add a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit, like CAP, for less overtly partisan work, he said. Goldfarb said he’s borrowing another position from the liberal think tank, which was founded in 2003 to buttress the Democratic opposition to a Republican president. Like CAP, his group won’t disclose its donors. CAP has justified that stance by saying that, unlike the anonymously financed campaign groups it criticizes for secrecy, it doesn’t run TV ads.”[12]

Please note: IPS Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.