The Free Press' Passage Into the Dark Side
The publication has lost its way and is radicalizing the more sophisticated right
When Bari Weiss resigned from The New York Times in 2020, she wrote an open letter to her boss, A.G. Sulzberger, explaining why she felt compelled to quit. Citing bullying from liberal colleagues for her “wrongthink,” and depicting the culture of the paper as one of self-censorship and ideological conformity, Weiss also previewed her next project. As “once-great journalistic institutions betray their standards and lose sight of their principles,” she wrote, “Americans still hunger for news that is accurate, opinions that are vital, and debate that is sincere.” Six months later, Weiss started Common Sense, a newsletter that subsequently became The Free Press, one of the largest and fastest growing digital media outlets today.
The Free Press’ mission statement reads like an updated version of Weiss’ open letter, and it describes the publication as a recovery of the journalistic virtues of “honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence”—this last quality arguably being the site’s main selling point. “We don’t allow ideology to stand in the way of searching for the truth,” Weiss said.
But The Free Press’ insistence that ideological considerations don’t affect its journalism is at odds with its track record. In fact, The Free Press embodies the very ideological captivity that Weiss’ open letter railed against—just in the opposite direction. Weiss’ instinct that many American news consumers were looking for something different was correct. But the publication, which was valued at $100 million last September, has found success not because it singularly embodies Weiss’ high-minded description of what once made journalism great. Rather, The Free Press has amassed a huge following by being a more artful and less shrill version of the anti-woke alarmism that permeates the right-wing media ecosystem.
The publication has always had a clear editorial slant: opposition to the woke left. No matter how bad the right gets, the site’s editorial stance remains firm: the left is worse. While The Free Press occasionally publishes articles critical of Donald Trump and the right more broadly, its overarching message is that the MAGA movement isn’t as bad as the lying liberal media would have you believe—and that the errors of Trumpism are largely a reaction to the much more serious sins of the left.
When The Free Press hit 1 million subscribers in December of 2024, Weiss wrote in her personal reflection on the milestone: “From day one, we’ve had a single guiding principle: Pursue the truth and tell it plainly. No shortcuts. No exceptions.” But a closer look reveals that, even as it rails against the pervasive bias of the mainstream media, The Free Press’ work often strains to reach its predetermined slant, inevitably compromising the quality of its journalism.
The Anti-Anti-Trump Publication
One reason for The Free Press’ popularity is that it offers intellectual reassurance to legions of anti-anti-Trump readers—sophisticated conservatives who may be uneasy about Trumpism, yet want to believe that wokeness and other left-wing excesses are the primary threats to Western civilization. Trump’s trade war and the ensuing market meltdown might give them some pause, but they’re desperate for intellectual ammunition to convince themselves and others that the administration’s crusade against “wokeness”—and associated initiatives like DEI—was necessary even if it meant trampling our democratic institutions.
Ideologically sympathetic outlets like The Free Press convince a wider swath of Americans that the Trump administration’s culture-war agenda is justified. Precisely because it pretends to be governed by journalistic values like objectivity and fairness, The Free Press helps sustain the society-wide hysteria over wokeness while downplaying the country’s descent into authoritarianism.
Consider just one headline after Trump issued his directive purging executive agencies of alleged DEI hires: “EXCLUSIVE: Inside the U.S. Mint’s Scramble to Conceal DEI Personnel.” The article highlights a “whistleblower” who busted his colleagues at the U.S. Mint for what he described as a “sloppy attempt to hide their behavior,” such as removing references to DEI in job descriptions so that they’d be “rehomed” elsewhere. The Free Press listed the names, titles, and combined salaries of “five former DEI staffers” at the Mint, in case the Trump administration needed any help finding and firing them. The Free Press apparently believes that this effort by scared and hapless federal employees to hang onto their jobs is a bombshell scandal, demonstrating that the publication is happy to support the Trump administration’s initiatives when doing so suits its purposes—even as it accuses the mainstream media of serving Democratic administrations. The far bigger scandal—certainly the one that a publication committed to free speech and free thought should find more troubling—is that the Trump administration’s anti-DEI campaign has been a vindictive and scattershot effort to create an ideologically compliant federal workforce that smacks of contemporary McCarthyism.
The Free Press does throw in an occasional thoughtful essay willing to scrutinize Trump, such as Yuval Levin’s “You Can’t Run Government Through Retribution.” But the publication relies on such articles to grant license for its steady stream of anti-anti-Trump commentary, such as Eli Lake’s contention that a bunch of young software engineers gaining access to some of the most sensitive systems and data in the U.S. government is not so worrisome in historical context. In “The Boys of DOGE,” Lake writes: “[B]efore you reach for the Valium, it’s worth considering that this is by no means the first time twentysomethings have helped lead a revolution inside the nation’s capital.” According to Lake, the DOGE takeover of the federal government is reminiscent of Ronald Reagan relying on young speechwriters, as if the relevant issue was age alone and not the potentially illegal and unconstitutional actions of Musk and his youth brigade. Instead of emphasizing the unilateral destruction of entire agencies by a bunch of interns at Musk’s companies, The Free Press trumpets “Two Cheers for DOGE” and declares that “this White House, in the course of six weeks, has done the seemingly impossible: They have found the waste, the fraud, and the abuse.”
The publication’s soft-pedaling of Trumpism isn’t confined to its DOGE coverage. In November, Vinay Prasad authored an article about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that promised to “take a look at some of his most controversial opinions” but ended up sane-washing him. Remarkably, Prasad failed to mention Kennedy’s insistence that Wi-Fi causes cancer; tap water may be turning kids gay; Jews had more freedom during the Holocaust than the unvaccinated had during the Covid-19 pandemic; and HHS (the agency Trump chose him to run) helped to orchestrate a coup during the pandemic that destroyed the Constitution and turned the U.S. into a totalitarian surveillance state. Instead, Prasad discussed a few of Kennedy’s more defensible positions—such as the idea that the Covid lockdowns went too far—and argued that Kennedy’s “hand-wringing” detractors were treating him “unfairly.” Though Prasad mentioned RFK Jr.’s belief that childhood vaccines cause autism—the axis around which his “public health” advocacy has rotated for many years—he doesn’t think this is disqualifying for an HHS secretary.
The Free Press later ran an article critical of RFK Jr. by Jeffrey S. Flier. But publishing the first (much more popular) piece that provided a completely distorted picture of RFK Jr.’s beliefs, while omitting the most salient and objectionable ones, is tantamount to journalistic malpractice. This is true even if one overlooks the deeply irresponsible editorial decision to “both-sides” an antivax crank who was being considered for the role of the nation’s top public health official.
The Personal Ideological Journey Formula
If there was a Free Press pitchbot, it could hardly come up with a better headline than the one affixed to columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon’s article last week: “I Used to Hate Trump. Now I’m a MAGA Lefty.” The headline gives the impression to an unfamiliar reader that Ungar-Sargon’s conversion is something new, when she has been a dependable Trump cheerleader for years. Most recently, she’s been claiming that Trump’s tariffs will reverse not just America’s manufacturing but also, preposterously, its masculinity crisis. In her MAGA conversion piece, she describes Trump as “socially moderate, anti-interventionist, and committed to America’s blue-collar workers.”
The “socially moderate” Trump has pushed countless baseless panics originating from the extremes of right-wing discourse and chose a radical ideologue as his number two. The “anti-interventionist” Trump wants to seize control of the Panama Canal and annex Greenland, and he just bombed Yemen. The president “committed to America’s blue-collar workers” imposed by fiat a sweeping tariff agenda that would be devastating to the working and middle classes (he only backed down when the self-inflicted market crisis threatened to spiral out of control). Ungar-Sargon writes: “Democrats also support censorship, while the GOP now touts free speech.” Trump is waging war on the media through lawsuits designed to suppress dissent. He has expelled major media outlets from the Pentagon, inserted ideologically sympathetic outlets into the White House press pool, and limited access by major agencies like the Associated Press. ICE agents are arresting legal residents for writing op-eds and expressing opinions the administration doesn’t like.
Ungar-Sargon’s piece followed a template that The Free Press is particularly fond of: “I used to be an X, and X is not okay.” (See, for example, “I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published” or “I’m a Doctor. You Shouldn’t Always Trust Us.”) These essays rely on a pat formula, notes historian of conservative thought, Joshua Tait. They are accounts written by disaffected insiders that blame the suffocating nature of progressive orthodoxies or the complacency and greed of an unthinking establishment for their institutions going bad. While there is nothing inherently suspect about first-person accounts—they can be done in a journalistically responsible way—a publication looking to arrive at a predetermined ideological conclusion would find, in the first-person template, a readily exploitable formula for circumventing the regular journalistic process for scrutinizing the organizations in question.
The Free Press uses subjective first-person reporting to render judgments on institutions that are hard to falsify. Unlike ordinary reporters, these authors don’t have to obtain corroboration from different sources, seek comment from the institutions being investigated, and then adjust the article’s framing if they are offered valid evidence that casts doubt on their working thesis. This genre of journalism can be done well, but The Free Press uses it to convey its twin conceits that establishment voices are not to be trusted, and that The Free Press alone is a trustworthy source that speaks uncomfortable truths that others suppress. And of course, it publishes far more narratives about how institutions have been corrupted by wokeness or some other right-wing bugaboo than those that have been corrupted by, say, the personality cult of Trump (hello, Heritage Foundation).
Ideology Over Truth
This is not a matter of simply disagreeing with The Free Press’ conclusions—the publication’s clear ideological slant, despite claiming not to have one, ends up affecting its journalistic process. As investigative journalist Radley Balko painstakingly documented, this is how The Free Press’ Coleman Hughes wound up making arguments that sounded a lot like the propaganda in the quackumentary, The Fall of Minneapolis. The film made the case that George Floyd’s murderer, Derek Chauvin, was wrongfully convicted due to wokeness and was a victim of a progressive criminal justice system. In other words, it flattered The Free Press’ priors; it told them what they wanted to believe. As a result, both the writer and the outlet failed to adequately investigate the film’s glaringly problematic claims.
This isn’t the only example of the journalistic process taking a backseat to the publication’s ideological biases. A front page dispatch by writer River Page pointed to a separate story published by The Free Press in which the publication’s managing editor, Margi Conklin, sought to remind readers just “how extreme and damaging Biden-era censorship was,” in Page’s words. The only problem? The alleged censorship happened in early 2020, nearly a full year before Biden took office.
When a publication doesn’t consciously acknowledge its ideological starting point, it breeds a kind of uncritical credulousness towards its own side that ultimately undercuts its journalistic standards. As Balko noted, “[A] posture that approaches issues from the standpoint of overturning conventional wisdom and offering edgy takes isn’t any more conducive to truth seeking than what the heterodoxists rail against, which is perhaps why these pieces are so often riddled with errors and misunderstandings.” Tait agreed: “In reality, contrarianism is not inherently more analytically rigorous or discerning. It can just as easily be led to believe claims that flatter its own biases: specifically that the mainstream is—and must be—wrong.”
To be sure, The Free Press isn’t a purely partisan outlet. Deputy managing editor Joe Nocera was refreshingly critical of the Trump DOJ’s decision to suspend bribery and fraud charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. An editorial appropriately challenged Trump’s claim that Ukraine is somehow responsible for the war. The Free Press republished Matthew Yglesias’ informative Slow Boring essay on the trouble with tariffs. But the overwhelming thrust of the outlet’s coverage has been reliably sympathetic to Trump and critical of his political opponents.
This was particularly clear before the election, when the outlet had to make editorial decisions about which candidate to criticize and which to promote. My own analysis of The Free Press’ political coverage in the six months leading up to the election found that it was overwhelmingly tilted in favor of Trump and against the Democrats. Of the articles published in the U.S. Politics section of the site between May 6 and Nov. 5, 70 were supportive of Trump or critical of Democrats, while just 14 were supportive of the Democratic candidate (Harris or Biden) or critical of Trump.
But those rough estimates don’t capture the full picture. The Free Press’ selection of issues to cover—such as the destructiveness of pro-Palestine campus protests and the excesses of “trans ideology”—was overwhelmingly right-wing coded. Even weakly anti-Trump or pro-Democratic articles were crammed with caveats about how the mainstream media is biased in favor of the Democrats, the left is problematic as well, and so on. Articles that criticized Trump did so from the standpoint of sympathy toward him and hostility toward his Democratic opponents. The framing went something like this: Why is Trump making mistakes x, y, and z when Harris is such a disaster who is unfit to serve? Why is the right indulging nativism, which is just like the identity politics on the left?
The Free Press’ right-wing bias doesn’t just call its endless assertions of “independence” into question—it leads to bad analysis. As Trump defies court orders and demands the impeachment of judges who issue rulings he disagrees with, Jed Rubenfeld assures us that “Trump has expressly said he will obey the courts.” Never mind that he once demanded the “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” in his quest to overthrow an American election and now says, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
The rewards for MAGA-sympathetic commentary are clear: audience, influence, and access. The Free Press prints token criticism of the Trump administration, but it also knows how to remain in good standing in MAGA world. In a recent puff piece about Usha Vance, the “most impressive person in the job since Abigail Adams,” Peter Savodnik writes:
Usha does have a way of softening things, making him [Vice President JD Vance] less of an attack dog—case in point: last month’s trip to Greenland. As Trump was making noises about taking over the Danish-controlled territory, Vance traveled there with Usha. She sported sunglasses, and the two of them wore matching Army-green parkas, and she somehow made the whole affair seem just a little less threatening.
In reality, the government in Greenland didn’t want the Vances in their country. The vice president’s team had to scrap a visit to Nuuk, the capital, because of planned protests. Usha Vance was supposed to attend a dogsled race and see some local landmarks, but protesters planned to line the road from the airport into town. The entire visit was confined to the Pituffik Space Base, where the vice president and the second lady could hide from the Greenlanders who intended to make it clear that the Americans were unwelcome. The absence of inconvenient details like these probably explains why Savodnik could announce that The Free Press had published the “first and, so far, only interview” with the second lady.
Just Another Right-Wing Voice
The Free Press has been bringing on board some center-left and libertarian contributors lately. But its star contributors—like Douglas Murray and Niall Ferguson—tend to come from the right. Consider Ferguson’s inaugural column, “We’re All Soviets Now,” which Weiss personally recommended as emblematic of the publication’s quality. It describes Trump’s conviction by a New York jury as “Soviet justice” and pushes a melodramatic thesis that the left is turning the United States into the Soviet Union, which will hand victory to China in a “new Cold War.”
Not to be outdone, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ferguson’s wife, proffered her own grand theory about the “subversion” of Western societies by the left. As evidence, she, too, cited the conviction of Trump on 34 counts in the hush money case. She didn’t mention Trump’s years-long attacks on the American legal system or his effort to overthrow the election in 2020. Shouldn’t a publication dedicated to the lofty ideals of balance and truth-seeking allow some discussion of Trump’s serial attacks on democracy in an essay about the erosion of democracy?
In a pre-election editorial, The Free Press declared: “Given our mission of not telling readers what to think, but rather giving them the information necessary to make their own decisions, we will not endorse a candidate.” It boasted that its “editorial staff is mixed” and that staffers are split three ways between Trump, Harris, and abstention, and then served up the standard lecture about how The Free Press is the only truly independent outlet. The editorial noted that even though papers like The New York Times and The Washington Post are supposed to “tell you about the world in all its complications and contradictions,” they actually “have the same view about almost every important issue in American life.” But readers of The Free Press, the editorial flattered, don’t want to be told what to think: “You are here because you are independent minds and independent spirits.”
But the reality is that Weiss has assembled a dependable stable of writers ever eager to prove that the left is a far greater threat than MAGA authoritarianism. Independence, for The Free Press, is synonymous with being anti-anti-Trump. This would be unexceptional if the publication were open and honest about it—if it simply acknowledged its political tilt and gave up the pretense that it alone hovers above the distorting effects of ideology. As it is, the endless assurances of “independence,” “honesty,” and “objectivity” only serve to make the site’s Trump apologetics more pernicious than the rank partisanship of outlets like The Daily Wire or Fox News.
In Weiss’ New York Times resignation letter, she sarcastically wrote: “Why edit something challenging to our readers … when we can assure ourselves of job security (and clicks) by publishing our 4,000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world?” If Weiss really cared about challenging her own readers, she wouldn’t have published 4,000 op-eds about the horrors of the woke left when a would-be autocrat was effectively weaponizing those very issues in an effort to destroy American democracy.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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You probably shouldn't judge a publication like The Free Press by its commentors... but. Anytime I click on "read more" comments on a Free Press article, I think "well, this is a mistake," especially if the article is the least bit Anti-Trump, in which case it's a full-blown conniption fit poop-show. This is who The FP has attracted, at least when it comes to those over-sharing their thoughts. Like me. Now.
The FP has, however, been useful to me to be exposed to articulate thoughts I wouldn't have otherwise read and to understand why things are turning out the way they are... insights I don't get from other media like NPR / WaPo. It might not be balanced, but it balances... and even if I don't agree, I understand more.
The Free Press is basically the WSJ editorial on steroids. A few sane pro-free market and rules of law articles then an avalanche of criticism on the left’s excesses and sins. Bari Weiss is nothing but a procuress of stories that satisfies the egos of right winged intellects.