At POLITICO, Marc Novicoff profiles Aaron Sibarium staff writer at the Washington Free Beacon
“It’s rare to see someone who will cover something like, say, race-based treatment of Covid drugs … who also is like not a crank and has an IQ above 120,” Sibarium says, cracking half a smile.
This quip is effectively Sibarium’s Statement of Purpose. In the 2½ years since he became a reporter, he’s snared some major scoops: There was his piece exploring how states, advised by the FDA to do so, used racial preferences in rationing scarce Covid-19 drugs, giving preference to young people of color over older white people. (Some of the states stopped the practice soon after he reported on them.) He broke a story that exposed the Columbia Law School’s plans to require video statements from applicants, presumably to evade the Supreme Court decision banning the consideration of race in admissions. (Columbia abandoned that plan, insisting it was a mistake, when Sibarium asked them about it.) And he uncovered Yale administrators’ bullying of a non-Black student who called his apartment a “trap house” in a party invitation, a scandal that brought personnel changes to the school.
The article quotes his editor, Eliana Johnson:
For her, the point of the Free Beacon is to do reporting, where the right has lagged, rather than opinion, where the right has excelled. “I believe strongly that the right has always outperformed the left in the realm of opinion,” Johnson says, “so, Fox News crushes MSNBC and CNN and the ratings and in talk radio.” This opinion domination didn’t even help the right, she argues: “What did the right get for all of this success in opinion? Not that much. It’s new information that really moves the needle, not opinion, and the real service you can provide to the public is putting out new information.”