Washington Examiner

What you're reading

The Washington Examiner is a US conservative political news and commentary outlet based in Washington, DC. Originally launched in 2005 as a free print daily distributed in the DC suburbs (alongside sister papers in Baltimore and San Francisco), it transitioned to a digital-only news site plus a weekly print magazine in 2013. It is owned by Clarity Media Group, the media holding company of billionaire Philip Anschutz.

Coverage centers Washington politics, Congress, the White House, the federal courts and the Supreme Court, and conservative policy and politics broadly. The Beltway Confidential blog and the weekly magazine carry the bulk of the opinion product; the news desk produces wire-style political coverage of Capitol Hill and the executive branch. Audience is concentrated among DC conservatives, conservative congressional staff, and a national conservative readership that uses the Examiner as a Washington-political reading complement to outlets like National Review and The Dispatch.

Ownership & funding

Clarity Media Group (Philip Anschutz). Funded primarily through ad-supported + subscription.

Ad-supported plus subscription under private billionaire ownership through Clarity Media insulates the Examiner from quarterly-earnings pressure and lets it sustain a Washington political-news operation that would be difficult to scale on its own. Anschutz ownership is the standard billionaire-ownership question — it removes commercial pressure but creates a structural concern about owner influence on coverage of energy, sports, and entertainment industries where Anschutz holds major business interests. The weekly print magazine is a long-form opinion product that complements the digital news side.

Where they land on the spectrum

nwsly's editorial team places Washington Examiner at Lean Right with a factuality rating of Mostly Factual.

nwsly places The Washington Examiner at Lean Right because story selection consistently centers issues where conservative policy positions have more to say — immigration enforcement, federal regulation and the administrative state, the Department of Justice and FBI scrutiny under Democratic administrations, Second Amendment, religious-liberty cases, and conservative-judicial-nomination coverage. Sourcing draws on Republican congressional offices, conservative think tanks (Heritage, AEI, Federalist Society), and the conservative legal movement.

The pattern breaks across the news desk’s Capitol Hill coverage, which sources Democrats and Republicans for documentary process reporting and is read by staff in both parties, and across Examiner coverage of Trump-era Republican intra-party disputes, which has at times taken positions critical of the Trump faction (closer to the establishment-conservative or “liberal conservative” tradition consistent with the ideology label). The Mostly Factual rating reflects accurate Capitol Hill reporting on the news side with a corrections policy; the gap to High reflects the opinion-and-blog product (Beltway Confidential, magazine columns) where interpretive claims sometimes outpace the documentary support, which is standard for opinion-heavy political outlets.

Editorial vs news side

The Examiner has a clear news / opinion split. The news desk runs straight political reporting on Congress, the White House, and the courts. Beltway Confidential and the weekly magazine are explicitly opinion products and are written from a conservative perspective. The opinion side is more openly conservative than the news side, but both lean in the same direction, which is why the overall Lean Right rating holds across the masthead rather than splitting. Readers should treat the news desk as straight conservative-leaning political process coverage and the magazine and opinion blog as conservative argument.

Why we include them in nwsly

Washington political news and commentary outlet.

The Washington Examiner earns its slot as one of two main conservative Washington political-news outlets nwsly carries (alongside the Washington Times). In the Lean Right band, nwsly pulls it for federal-government, Capitol Hill, and judicial coverage from a conservative vantage point — story selection and framing that other Lean Right outlets in the lineup don’t produce at the same Washington-political-news depth and daily cadence.

Recent nwsly briefs citing Washington Examiner

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