The Federalist (website)
The Federalist is an American conservative online magazine and podcast that covers politics, policy, culture, and religion, and publishes a newsletter.[1][2][3][4] The site was co-founded by Ben Domenech and Sean Davis and launched in September 2013.[4]
This article is about American conservative online magazine and podcast. For the series of 85 essays arguing in favor of the ratification of the US Constitution, see The Federalist Papers. For other uses, see Federalist (disambiguation).
Type of site
During the COVID-19 pandemic, The Federalist published many pieces that contained false information, pseudoscience, and contradictions or misrepresentations of the recommendations of public health authorities.[5][6][7] While ballots were being counted in the 2020 United States presidential election, The Federalist made false claims that there had been large-scale election fraud.[8][9]
Reception[edit]
According to The New York Times, The Federalist "leans hard into the culture wars", with pieces that question the Me Too movement and characterize recognition of transgender identity as a "war on women".[14]
Writing for Politico in 2014, Reid Cherlin wrote about The Federalist in an article about the rise in right-wing media online, describing the site as "seek[ing] to go deep on the issues and sway the conversation in Washington."[56] Matt K. Lewis wrote in The Week that conservative online media was divided between "staid, august publications" and "a new generation of irreverent sites," and that "sites like The Federalist try to bridge the gap by providing serious commentary that is typically written by young, pop culture–savvy writers."[57] In May 2018, Damon Linker of The Week described The Federalist as "a leading disseminator of pro-Trump conspiracies and up-is-down, funhouse-mirror distortions of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian election meddling and potential Trump involvement."[58]
David Weigel from Bloomberg Politics stated that The Federalist frequently criticizes left-leaning publications, but was founded with the intention of being "a source of original interviews and real-time arguments between conservatives and libertarians."[11] During the 2016 US presidential election, conservative pundit and Trump critic Matt K. Lewis, writing for The Daily Beast, believed there had been a shift in The Federalist's coverage of Donald Trump, first criticizing the presidential candidate, and then, after Trump won the presidency, criticizing Trump's liberal critics in the mainstream establishment media and casting Trump as a victim.[59] In 2020, former employee Robert Tracinski particularly blamed the publication's reputation for inaccuracy on co-founder Davis, who he said had a destructive "always be trolling" mindset.[60]
