Isaac Stanley-Becker joins Washington Post’s politics staff for 2020

Isaac Stanley-Becker is joining the Washington Post’s politics staff as it prepares for its 2020 election coverage.

Stanley-Becker comes to the post after a distinguished stint on Morning Mix, a popular lively Washington Post blog that gives a daily rundown of the latest news.

Stanley-Becker will pioneer a “digital democracy” beat focused on the largely unregulated and increasingly dominant role of the internet in driving U.S. politics.

Working with colleagues on financial and national security, he will track the spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories, expose efforts by outside forces and special interests to influence U.S. politics and monitor the online strategies employed by candidates and their allies to control their messages, undermine their opponents and mobilize their supporters.

A member of the 2016 and 2017 internship classes, he returns to the newsroom from the U.K. after working remotely for the Morning Mix team as he wrapped up a PhD in history at Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar. Before joining Morning Mix, he reported from Berlin and covered elections in the Netherlands, France, Britain and Germany. His stories were invariably newsy and compelling, ranging from dissident artists to terrorism to late-night presidential tweets. He anchored the Post’s early coverage of the terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the mass shooting in Thousand Oaks, Calif. He was also one of the first reporters to throw back the curtain on QAnon and its presence at Trump rallies — a fitting introduction to his new beat.

A dual German-U.S. citizen, he grew up in Chicago and D.C. and graduated from Yale, where he was editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News.