Two-time Hack Madness champion, walking cartoon, fake conservative, and Washington Post columnist Jen Rubin quit the paper on Monday to launch an absurdly named site called The Contrarian with former Obama official Norm Eisen, which CNN’s Brian Stelter gushed wouldn’t simply be “anti-Trump” but “pro-democracy.”
Rubin, a rich, Northern Virginia-based white woman, left The Post on a bitter note as the new catchphrase for The Contrarian will be “not owned by anybody,” which Stelter said “is a pointed reference to billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and other moguls who, in Rubin’s view, have ‘bent the knee’ to President-elect Donald Trump.”
The logo is even sillier with a blue statue of liberty holding a pencil instead of a torch. Despite their insistence of ideological diversity being “fact-based” and “independent”, a press release painted the far-left-dominated Blue Sky as its main social media platform and, in a thumb of its nose at Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, declared it would “not be on X or Threads.”
How they offer anything that’s not already offered in The Bulwark or Daily Beast in terms of a blog, The New Yorker or even The Nation in print, or CNN, MSNBC, or even PBS on the TV side is beyond us.
“[Eisen and Rubin] said they have already enlisted about two dozen contributors, including people who played prominent roles in debunking 2020 election denialism and investigating the January 6, 2021, attack at the US Capitol,” Stelter added.
He said Eisen told him these contributors “are diverse across parties and generations,” but “connected by the shared belief that we need an unshackled media in order to meet this moment, as we face an existential threat to American democracy.”
However, the most cringe part of the launch was this short video, in which they promised articles, columns, and podcast, but also posts about pets, “a humor column.” and “even a cooking column, but we’re going to sprinkle in a little bit of democracy flavor”:
Jennifer Rubin has resigned from the Washington Post and she’s launching a publication with Norm Eisen. pic.twitter.com/8P1rSXUIhl
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) January 13, 2025
The Washington Free Beacon’s Andrew Stiles posted on X a screenshot of their initial contributors. Spoiler alert, it read like a who’s who of beloved far-left CNN and MSNBC contributors, anti-free speech authoritarians, and a former CNN legal analyst-turned-famous defense lawyer:
Jennifer Rubin's new website lists Luigi Mangione's defense attorney as a contributor pic.twitter.com/Oa3jdVpej5
— Andrew Stiles (@AndrewStilesUSA) January 13, 2025
Rubin’s first post read like it was penned by The Babylon Bee as a cri de cour from an aggrieved, wealthy white woman.
Here’s some excerpts, including her reasoning for quitting The Post as the latest in a growing line of intolerant, petulant children who want to be out and out partisan journalists instead of simply honest reporters (click “expand”):
Corporate and billionaire owners of major media outlets have betrayed their audiences’ loyalty and sabotaged journalism’s sacred mission — defending, protecting and advancing democracy. The Washington Post’s billionaire owner and enlisted management are among the offenders. They have undercut the values central to The Post’s mission and that of all journalism: integrity, courage, and independence. I cannot justify remaining at The Post. Jeff Bezos and his fellow billionaires accommodate and enable the most acute threat to American democracy—Donald Trump—at a time when a vibrant free press is more essential than ever to our democracy’s survival and capacity to thrive.
I therefore have resigned from The Post, effective today. In doing so, I join a throng of veteran journalists so distressed over The Post’s management they felt compelled to resign.
The decay and compromised principles of corporate and billionaire-owned media underscore the urgent need for alternatives. Americans are eager for innovative and independent journalism that offers lively, unflinching coverage free from cant, conflicts of interest and moral equivocation.
(....)
The need for upstart outlets has never been more acute. The contradiction between, on the one hand, the journalistic obligation to hold the powerful accountable and, on the other, the financial interests of billionaire moguls and corporate conglomerates could not be starker. The Post’s own headline last month warned: “Trump signals plans to use all levers of power against the media; Press freedom advocates say they fear that the second Trump administration will ramp up pressure on journalists, in keeping with the president-elect’s combative rhetoric.” And yet The Post’s owner quashed a presidential endorsement for Trump’s opponent, forked over $1M for Trump’s inauguration through Amazon, and publicly lauded Trump’s agenda.
None of us could imagine Katharine Graham sending LBJ or Nixon a $1M check. It would have been, as it is now, a fundamental betrayal of a great American newspaper. Defense of the First Amendment is incompatible with funding or cheerleading for the very person who seeks to “drastically undermine the institutions tasked with reporting on his coming administration.”
