[4] The local newspaper ceased publication on June 14, 2013, whereupon its content began to focus almost exclusively on national politics from a conservative point of view.

[11] The website DCist wrote in March 2013: "Despite the right-wing tilt of [the Examiner's] editorial pages and sensationalist front-page headlines, it also built a reputation as one of the best local sections in D.C."[12] The newspaper's local coverage also gained attention, including a write-up by The New York Times,[13] for contributing to the arrest of more than 50 fugitives through a feature that each week spotlighted a different person wanted by law enforcement agencies.

A former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court and candidate in the 2017 United States Senate special election in Alabama for the seat left open when Jeff Sessions joined the Trump administration, Moore claimed that the magazine repeatedly wrote "fake news" attacks stemming from allegations that he made unwanted sexual and romantic advances to girls as young as 15 when he was in his late 30s.

But CNN reported that "current and former Examiner employees" said that "Gurdon was aware of Harnden's brutish managing style" long before it became a public issue and did nothing about it.

[19] In June 2020, the Examiner published an op-ed by "Raphael Badani", a fake persona who was part of a broader network pushing propaganda for the United Arab Emirates and against Qatar, Turkey, and Iran.

[12] The publisher also claimed the Examiner's readership is more likely to sign a petition, contact a politician, attend a political rally, or participate in a government advocacy group than those of Roll Call, Politico, or The Hill.

[21] Its publisher claims that the Examiner has a high-earning and highly educated audience, with 26 percent holding a master's or postgraduate degree and a large percentage earning over $500,000 annually, likely to be working in executive or senior management positions.

"[4] According to the Columbia Journalism Review, among the conservative media landscape, the Examiner "is structured more or less like a mainstream newspaper—complete with clear distinctions between news reporting and commentary roles.

According to Editor in Chief Hugo Gurdon, the paper's conservatism on the news side was largely based on story selection, citing The Daily Telegraph as an inspiration.

In April 2019, Quartz reported that White House advisor Stephen Miller had been purposely leaking information on border apprehensions and asylum seekers to the Washington Examiner so that the paper would publish stories with alarming statistics that sometimes criticized DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, which he could then show to Trump to undermine her.

[34][35] Daniel Sarewitz of Arizona State University criticized Barone, writing that Barone and other conservative climate change pundits erroneously "portrayed deviation from scientific certainty and highly idealized notions of 'the scientific method' as evidence against climate change", which he compared to "equally naïve and idealized" presentations on the other side of the debate, such as the film An Inconvenient Truth.

But those two facts are excuses neither for alarmism and reflexive, but ineffective action, nor for sacrificing sovereignty to give politicians a short-term buzz of fake virtue and green guerrillas another weapon with which to ambush democratic policymaking.