Top Washington Post columnist ditches paper and takes a shot at Jeff Bezos on the way out
The Washington Post lost another long-standing writer as the newspaper has continued to shed staff after billionaire owner Jeff Bezos began injecting himself into editorial decisions.
Former conservative-turned-moderate Jennifer Rubin left the Post's opinion pages to join a new venture with legal expert and former ethics czar Norm Eisen.
According to CNN, the two will join with commentators like Harvard Professor Emeritus Laurence Tribe to write for a new publication dubbed "The Contrarian," which taglines itself as “Not owned by anybody."
She has criticized Bezos and other media moguls, such as Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who Rubin said “bent the knee” to President-elect Donald Trump.
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Rubin's resignation was the first post made on the new publication, which for now is on a Substack page.
"Corporate and billionaire owners of major media outlets have betrayed their audiences’ loyalty and sabotaged journalism’s sacred mission — defending, protecting and advancing democracy," she wrote. "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."
The column goes on to attack Bezos for donating $1 million to Trump's inaugural committee, and blast Facebook parent company Meta and owner Mark Zuckerberg for eliminating fact-checking on all platforms owned by the property.
“Our goal is to combat, with every fiber of our being, the authoritarian threat that we face,” Rubin told CNN.
“The voices we’ll be featuring are diverse across parties and generations,” Eisen said in a statement, “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.”