Combat Journalism: The New Washington Beacon Promises Political Jiu-Jitsu

I have no idea whether or not Matthew Continetti’s new Washington Beacon will ultimately succeed, but he kicks it off with one helluva manifesto, which promises a little political jiu-jitsu. “What would happen,” Continetti asks, “if a website covered the left in the same way that the left covers the right?”

After hours listening to the drone of Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer, or Scott Pelley, one might conclude that America is a one-party state ruled by the GOP. But in fact the Republicans have controlled just one chamber of Congress for just one year, have been outspent by Democrats in the two most recent election cycles and are likely to be outspent in the current cycle, have drawn the ire and opposition of the 10 richest zip codes in the country, and have been so inept at shaping public opinion that one of America’s premier anti-cancer organizations had to backtrack when it decided to part ways with the country’s largest abortion provider.

Meanwhile, rather than tease out the connections between the big banks, unions, alternative energy companies, entrenched market incumbents, institutions such as the Center for American Progress and its Action Fund, and the policy apparatus of the Democratic Party, the press is far happier to mock Republicans as rubes and incompetents and to cover with relish Mitt Romney’s latest gaffe.

What would happen, though, if a website covered the left in the same way that the left covers the right? What picture of the world would one have in mind if the morning paper read like the New York Times—but with the subjects of the stories and the assumptions built into the text changed to reflect a conservative, not liberal, worldview? What would happen if the media wolf pack suddenly had to worry about an aerial hunting operation?

You are about to find out. The Washington Free Beacon is here to enter the arena of combat journalism. Our talented staff will add to the chorus of enterprising conservative reporters, publishing original stories, seeking out scoops, and focusing on the myriad connections between money and power in the progressive movement and Obama’s Washington. Our research and war room divisions will supplement that reporting with context, additional materials, and breaking video. At the Beacon, you will find 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.

Hey remember all that hypocritical BS a year ago by an MSM railing against war and gun-related imagery? I think Continetti just told the MSM to shove it all up their lavalier mics.

And the timing of his new Website couldn’t be better, as an otherwise unrelated post by Peter Robinson makes clear today at Ricochet:

As recently as this past Friday, I would still have said that the single, overriding issue in this election year would be the economy.  Yet in the past 100 hours, Planned Parenthood and its pro-choice supporters in the press have savaged the Komen Foundation; the Obama administration, which might easily have backed down from its regulations forcing Catholic health care institutions to provide contraceptives in direct violation of Catholic teaching, has instead mounted a public relations offensive to insist upon its position; and the Ninth Circuit has ruled unconstitutional California’s Proposition 8, issuing its decision in language so self-righteous and so bald that it could only have been intended to insult the millions of Californians who supported the ballot measure.

As Peter writes, “Already the highest in a generation, the stakes in this election have just risen.” It would nice if the right had anything approaching parity with old media and the establishment left. Perhaps a more pugilistic tone might be a good first start.

Related: “And what is true of liberal politics is also true of liberal public policy, Jonah Goldberg writes in USA Today. “As the Obama administration has made clear to the Catholic Church, there is no neutrality, no safe harbor from liberalism’s moral vision. You’re either with us, or against us — which means we shall be against you.”