There is a lot of “meh” in journalism and a lot of “yuck” too.
But occasionally, you run across a good, old-fashioned bulldog of a journalist who blows you away.
Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon is one of those. In just 2 1/2 years of reporting, the 27-year-old journalist has broken onto the scene by breaking important news stories. He hasn’t just developed a big profile in the vast world of journalism, but he has managed to elevate the standing of his scrappy publication, The Washington Free Beacon.
That’s a pretty amazing accomplishment, especially in a media market flooded with “personalities” like Taylor Lorenz, but fewer and fewer journalists who long to get the story. As The Washington Post implodes, the Free Beacon is rising, and Sibarium is one of the reasons why.
I started noticing Sibarium because his work kept popping up in my research, particularly on what might be called “culture war” issues. Unlike me, he isn’t a bloviator out to share his opinions and while the Free Beacon definitely leans rightward, its reporting is solid.
Solid enough that POLITICO did a glowing profile on Sibarium, partly because people from across the political spectrum had noticed his work. While the liberal tilt of the outlet shone through in a few places (I winced more than once), the profile was quite glowing.
Aaron Sibarium, a Gen Z investigative reporter, is the right’s new media darling. Except he’s not really a conservative.https://t.co/lOhdcRVKQE
— POLITICO (@politico) November 25, 2023
Frankly, it took guts for Sibarium to cooperate with the profile; it’s not often a Right-leaning journalist gets fair treatment in a left-leaning publication. Back when I was a minor conservative celebrity in Minnesota–the dark ages–I learned to mistrust the MSM because I had been burned more than once.
It’s not that all MSM journalists are bad, but… Still, Sibarium got a fair shake from POLITICO.
“Everyone on the right wants to write essays and have their grand theories about political economy and the American Right taken very seriously from the time they’re young,” he says, “and the problem is that A) when you’re 22, you don’t really know anything and B) there’s a surplus of that writing already.”
What he values, he says, is something different from the conservative hot take-machine: real investigations, seeking out scoops, digging for data. As he sees it, he’s providing a rare service, occupying a narrow journalistic niche: old-school, shoe-leather reporting from a conservative point of view.
Undoubtedly, you have noticed that a disproportionate number of conservative journalists are commentators, and there is a reason for that. It’s not JUST that we like to bloviate. Rather, structural factors in the journalism world make doing conservative journalism extremely difficult to pull off.
Even the biggest news outlets don’t have journalists everywhere or even on call to travel to where the news is happening at a moment’s notice. The news ecosystem depends on a collective system where local reporters and the Associated Press do most of the shoeleather reporting, and then the facts get disseminated around the country and the world.
The AP is the lynchpin of the system, which is why I have written about its decline several times. When the AP censors, slants, or spins stories, it cripples the entire ecosystem. Even stories in the biggest news outlets in the country, which the reporters often spin at THOSE places, are often based on Associated Press or local reporting, rewritten or expanded by the big guys.
There is no parallel system in the conservative world, although Fox tries to present itself as such. Fox does its own work at times–Bill Melugin has been exceptional in covering the crisis at the border.
But the current ecosystem of the news world has been built up over a century, with billions and billions of dollars invested into creating and sustaining it. It can’t be easily duplicated or duplicated at all without similar investments and time.
So Sibarium’s dedication to shoe-leather reporting is impressive and necessary. When he drops a major story, I hop on to read it ASAP.
He is that good.
The irony is that Sibarium isn’t exactly conservative himself. He is more in the mold of the liberal dissenters who have been popping up in journalism lately.
Sibarium is a “liberal but,” in the words of fellow conservative journalist Charles Fain Lehman (as in “I’m a liberal, but … ”). He’s “reluctantly pro-choice,” somehow “not dogmatically opposed to affirmative action,” an unmarried, secular Jew who lives in a dense metro area with proximity to fast casual, who voted for Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden — a kind of rogue liberal who ended up in the trenches of conservative journalism after being disturbed by what he viewed as woke excess on and off campus.
He was raised on the outskirts of D.C., in ritzy Chevy Chase, Md., by his mother, a homemaker who once worked as a psychiatric nurse for patients of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and a father who is an antitrust lawyer. The house Sibarium grew up in was left-leaning, pro-choice, loyally Democratic and pro-gay marriage before it was popular.
Whatever his personal politics, his journalistic output is first-rate. And that is how journalism should be. I really don’t care about the politics of the writer as long as they have curiosity, integrity, and an ambition to shed light on reality. I subscribe on Substack to several writers who vote differently than I would, but I find their work incredibly valuable.
I could even enjoy an intellectual discussion with them, because we wouldn’t wind up repeating cant at each other. How refreshing is that?
The easiest way to keep up with Sibarium is to follow him on Twitter, although you shouldn’t restrict your Free Beacon reading to his work. They really do a great job.