Looking at the Lighthouse

Columbia’s real conservative newspaper.

By Eli Baum

Illustration by Selin Ho

In April 2025, Columbia was on the verge of signing a deal with the Trump administration. It would have banned all masked protests on campus, restructured the University Senate, and created a committee to oversee University reforms. But at the critical moment when Columbia was about to sign, Harvard publicly stood up to the White House. Columbia decided that it could not capitulate to the Trump administration while another Ivy League school was in the process of fighting back. The night of Harvard’s public letter in response to Trump’s demands, Acting President Claire Shipman sent out an email establishing various red lines that seemed to have previously been on the table in negotiations, and everyone went back to the drawing board.

If you get your news from CNN or the New York Times, you’ve never heard this story. You won’t find it in student journalism either. You can see that something shifty was going on in Shipman’s April emails—that’s when she started talking about restructuring the University Senate—but not much more. To find something like this, you have to go to The Washington Free Beacon. 

The Free Beacon is a far-right news site whose articles range from comedic to horrifying. They publish AI-generated images of Trump hugging Netanyahu for articles titled “We Are Witnessing One of the Greatest Bromances in the History of Mankind,” as well as book-review-tirade-hybrids against the Democratic party titled “With Opponents Like These, Who Needs Elections?” Their banner shows two missiles being fired out of the title, and the subtitle reads: “Covering the enemies of freedom the way the mainstream media won’t.” They straddle the line between doxxing and reporting—when students are arrested in protests, they publish lists of their names “for the sake of transparency.” Their editor-in-chief knew about Minouche Shafik’s resignation before anybody else; in the leadup to the settlement with the Trump Administration they were always the ones with inside information about the negotiations. I count 278 articles about Columbia published in the Free Beacon since the encampment.  

It’s weird that so much exclusive information about what is actually going on at Columbia exists on this site, of all places. The information that lives in the Free Beacon is by no means private, but it rarely penetrates the Columbia student body either. It lives with documents like the Sundial Report and Project Esther in an in-between space where everybody has access to the information but nobody really looks. Even the Columbia equivalent of a political junkie—the kind of person who knows all of their University senators, tunes in to WKCR, reads The Blue and White, and can list fifteen Spec reporters off the top of their head—would only touch the Free Beacon reluctantly. 

When people do end up reading the Free Beacon, they find that the articles exist in a strange epistemic no-man’s-land. That is, they are probably true, and they touch on issues that are high stakes enough to demand our consideration, because they are, at the end of the day on a fringe right-wing media site. What does it mean, for example, that the story of Harvard protecting Columbia by standing up to Trump was only sourced by the Free Beacon? Despite being a critical node for our understanding of the Columbia administration’s behaviour, and for our national understanding of collective resistance against authoritarianism, the story can only semi-exist in the minds of some of the student body. 

And yet, when the Free Beacon’s stories can be independently verified, they do set the record. They broke the “Columbia Administrators Fire Off Hostile and Dismissive Text Messages, Vomit Emojis During Alumni Reunion Panel on Jewish Life” story, for example. Would the New York Times publish over-the-shoulder photographs of Columbia deans’ texts? Doubtful. But they absolutely published a story covering the fallout of the Free Beacon’s coverage of the over-the-shoulder photographs of Columbia deans’ texts, which led to all of them resigning. The Free Beacon can thus act as a bridge between mainstream media and random people who are independently surveilling college administrators outside of any institutional norms.

Regular media sites believe that they can take information from the Free Beacon and sanitize it to make it neutral, as long as the underlying claims can be independently verified. But this is clearly wrong. Stories that begin in the Free Beacon keep their special stamp, even after they’ve been picked up. On July 1, the Free Beacon broke the story that “Columbia President Claire Shipman Privately Said School Needed To Add an 'Arab' Board Member—and Remove a Jewish One.” The Jewish Trustee in question was Shoshana Shendelman, a board member who was known for accusations of securities fraud and manipulated medical data, which led to her being deemed too unethical to work at her own pharmaceutical company (although she remains on Columbia’s Board of Trustees). But when the Free Beacon published their article, they ignored the controversy entirely, and paired the texts expressing frustration over Shendelman with texts in which Shipman had suggested adding a board member of Arab descent. When every other news site wrote about the story, they almost all did the same. 

Nothing intrinsically linked the fact that Shipman had suggested removing Shendelman from the Board and the fact that, later on, in a separate chain of texts, she said that the Board might benefit from the inclusion of a Middle Eastern member. But because the Free Beacon was the first to get their hands on the story, it forever became the tale of an attempt to supplant a Jew with an Arab. Shendelman thus became one of the most insulated members of the Board, and in a letter—amplified, of course, by the Free Beacon—she demanded a second term on the Board of Trustees (in addition to the University’s complete capitulation to Trump’s demands).

But the Free Beacon doesn’t just shape the narrative by fomenting public, right-wing outrage. It appears to have a subtler sway on the inside. On July 17, while Columbia was in the process of negotiating with the Trump administration, a Free Beacon exclusive–the same one that detailed the almost-deal in April—would list the five faculty members of Columbia’s presidential search committee and their alleged ties to DEI. A few hours later, Columbia made an announcement: It was time to officially announce the members of the search committee for the next president of Columbia! And yet, unlike in the Free Beacon article, there were not five professors on the search committee, but six. One professor had been added: Matthew Waxman. This sixth professor was not like the others. He was a Republican who served on Columbia’s Antisemitism Task Force and had been the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs under George Bush. Just a few hours after the Free Beacon had published its article, the University altered the presidential search committee to increase its right-wing bent—a change with the potential to ripple into the creation of an entirely different presidential administration in post-Shipman Columbia. 

There was no conservative backlash that followed the Free Beacon article—at least, not in the open. It did not matter. The Free Beacon changed University politics by writing for a very specific subset of people. It thereby functions as a sort of go-between for congressional Republicans, the Board, the Columbia administration, and anybody else with a take on what Columbia is supposed to be doing. It’s a peculiar, indirect medium through which certain players in the fight over higher education communicate. 

And maybe it also represents what’s gone wrong at our school. The role of the Free Beacon is weird, yes, but it’s also indicative of something larger and more nefarious. The Columbia administration is more receptive to a fringe right-wing media outlet than to its own student body, its faculty, or any actual human being. It wouldn’t be hard to make the case that everything that happened at Columbia in the past two years was simply the result of every side having a better chance of getting their needs met by going to the media than by going directly to the administration. Conflicts that might have played out internally took place in newspapers and on TV channels. Incidentally, the world watched on. And the political vultures realized that they could score easy points by attacking what became one of the most unpopular institutions in the world. It was only a matter of time before they swooped in.