Original Link: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71099.html
By BEN SMITH
Impressed by the effectiveness of the liberal Center for American Progress, a group of conservative
journalists and operatives are preparing to engage in their own sincerest form
of flattery — launching an advocacy group with a similar name and mission but
very different target.
Part assault on CAP and part homage, the Center for American Freedom’s goal
is to wage a well-funded assault on the Obama White House and the liberal
domination of partisan online media.
Based in Washington, it will have an annual budget of “several million
dollars,” according to its chairman, Michael
Goldfarb, and will house a new conservative online news outlet, the
Washington Free Beacon, edited by former Weekly Standard writer Matthew
Continetti. It will also include a campaign-style war room led by two former
chiefs of the Republican National Committee’s vaunted research operation, and a
media-monitoring shop that aims to do to MSNBC what Media Matters has done to
Fox News.
“This is a fairly modest start-up that really hopes to combat the Center for
American Progress and create something that in the not-so-distant future can be
competitive,” said Goldfarb, 31, a former Weekly Standard writer who is now a
partner in the lobbying firm Orion Strategies, where his clients include Charles and David Koch —
liberal bugaboos and dominant funders of a range of conservative causes and
politicians.
A spokesman for Koch Industries said the company had no connection, financial
or otherwise, to the new Center for American Freedom. But the group’s birth is
the latest chapter of an ongoing battle the Kochs and other wealthy
conservatives have been engaged in for a generation. It was their money and
encouragement that helped build a vital conserative infrastructure in the 1970s
that CAP was somewhat belatedly founded to counter three decades later.
But while conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage
Foundation remain important sources of conservative policy and strategy,
they have struggled to mix it up in the new online media sphere. CAF’s founding
marks a recognition of the success of the Democratic online infrastructure and
its spectrum of successful partisan media operations, which have blended
journalistic values of speed and accuracy with ideological and partisan goals to
great impact.
“It’s very impressive what they’ve done,” Goldfarb said. “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.”
A test run for CAF, Goldfarb said, was the Emergency Committee for Israel,
which he also advised, and which waged a relentless guerrilla media campaign
against the efforts of J Street — a national membership organization with a
sizable Washington staff — to create a liberal counterweight in American Middle
East policy.
“That showed that you can have a less well-funded organization but you can
present a pretty devastating asymmetric counterweight to something much larger
and more established on the other side if you go about it in an effective way,”
Goldfarb said.
Another model may be Liz Cheney’s Keep America Safe, a tiny group with
similar leadership — Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol, Goldfarb’s mentor, is
on the board of all three groups. The Center for American Freedom’s president,
Aaron Harison, 30, was the executive director of Keep America Safe, which ran a
2009 campaign against Obama administration lawyers who had represented alleged
terrorists before joining the administration. It labeled them “The Al Qaeda
Seven.”
The real inspiration for the Center for American Freedom, though, is the
Center for American Progress — the new group’s mission statement, for instance,
appears at points to be literally copied and pasted from CAP’s, with the word
“freedom” substituted for “progress” — as well as other unabashedly liberal
websites.
“Our models are the Center for American Progress /Think Progress, TPM, and
Huffington Post politics,” Continetti said in an email.“These outlets have been
at the cutting edge of ideological journalism for years, and it is time for the
right to emulate their success.”
Continetti, 30, is the author most recently of a sympathetic account of Sarah
Palin’s career, “The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to
Bring Down a Rising Star.” He’s not, however a pure partisan, and is also known
for a slashing long-form take-down of the Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff. He
and Goldfarb said the Beacon had been promised editorial independence.
And Continetti has already 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.
The Beacon won’t cover the Republican presidential campaign currently
consuming much of the nation’s media attention, Goldfarb said.
“We want to break news, we want to do investigative reporting, and that’s a
big reason why we’re investing so heavily in the research component of this
thing,” he said. “I suspect most of the press is going to be pretty suspicious
of this. I think they should have been more suspicious of places like the Center
for Public Integrity and Pro Publica” — new, independent, not-for-profit media
organizations — “but this has become a new and legitimate model and we’re hoping
to create something on the right that will hopefully challenge those
organizations on the left.”
“If we break news and our work is of quality, people will necessarily have to
treat it as legitimate,” he said.
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.
“We’ve really modeled ourselves on the CAP Action Fund, which has set a
rather arbitrary position, but it’s a position we’ll adhere to, which is that as
long as you’re not engaged in paid media, there really shouldn’t be an issue as
to transparency and who’s funding it,” he said.
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.
And like the Center for American Progress, which had its start opposing the
policies of President George W. Bush, the new operation will be defined by its
opposition to the White House, its leaders said.
“Our original reporting and commentary will hold the left to the same
standards to which ThinkProgress, TPM and Huffington Post hold the right.
Liberals in journalism excel at portraying the GOP and conservatives as
hypocritical self-dealers and lunatics,” said Continetti. “But it is only the
activist press’s ideological and partisan biases which prevent it from seeing
the Obama administration, Democrats in Congress and the broader progressive
movement through exactly the same lens.”
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