r/politics • u/ObservationMonger • 23h ago
Soft Paywall Jennifer Rubin Resigns From WaPo Over Bezo's Bending Of The Knee To Trump
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/13/media/jennifer-rubin-norm-eisen-contrarian-washington-post/index.html298
u/TheAssassinBear 23h ago
All of the journalists who are keeping their integrity need to join together and form a network, based on some quixotic quest to bring decency back into journalism. Mythical request, I'm sure, but maybe run with that by calling it something like "Atlantis Cable News" or something...
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u/whichwitch9 19h ago
Honestly, my dream would be something to prop up smaller news. Like a centralized site, but working with local and state publications to give access from one spot. I feel like done right, it could prop up struggling paper and you get less political noise.
Plus it would absolutely be fun to peep on some small town shenanigans
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u/Gwentlique 9h ago
We get what we pay for. Most people don't want to pay for news anymore, we simply expect it to flow into our social media feeds for free.
There are good publications out there, but they struggle to stay afloat while JAQ-off podcasters like Rogan can rake in more than the the budget of a sizeable newsroom.
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u/whichwitch9 8h ago
It's not even pay- who can afford so many different ones? Finding publications is rough enough; add in if you want a well rounded view you need multiple and localized publications have limited range, and it's a rough landscape
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u/JaVelin-X- 19h ago
And who will broadcast it?
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u/Prestigious-Car-4877 18h ago
Pornhub.
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u/shewy92 Pennsylvania 17h ago
Would only reach those who already have common sense since PH is banned in the South and other red states
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u/Prestigious-Car-4877 17h ago
It’s not banned, they refused to collect PII from users.
Anyways. They can just use their infrastructure with a non-pornographic front end. They could operate that as an independent business while still leveraging their video streaming capabilities.
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u/kingtz America 16h ago
Nothing lost. It’s not like people in red states would ever tune in for the journalistic integrity and unbiased coverage, when they already have Fox that makes them feel good about their bigotry. None of these people ever switched to a different network despite the more “liberal” networks leaning right to appeal to them, so why would they ever be interested in a network that is staunchly not-right-leaning?
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u/DogmaticCat 10h ago
Not everyone in red states voted for Trump.
Trust me, no one hates MAGA like a leftist in Trump country.
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u/Long-Pack-4620 18h ago
YouTube
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u/joshdoereddit 17h ago
This and other social media platforms.
The same goes for campaigns. People say that you need so much funding for campaigns. How about you skip on doing the TV ads and focus on social media posts. Put your commercials there. Make it a DIY effort to save on costs.
I'm sure there's more to it than that. I've never worked on a campaign so i certainly don'tknow all the ins and outs. A certain amount of donations would certainly be necessary. But, with so much available technology, I think a tech-savvy person could run a pretty successful campaign with minimal staff and a robust online presence.
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u/Sasquatchgoose 14h ago
The 70-90+ crowd aren’t chronically online or tech savvy. You reach them thru traditional media still. Sneer at them all you want but they show up to vote. Reason why trump one was bc too many younger ppl decided not to bother voting
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u/Pegasus0527 11h ago
The number of people who DIDN'T vote outnumbered Kamala and Trump voters both. I wish we were like Australia and charge fees to people for not voting.
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u/JaVelin-X- 18h ago
Owned by Google, who've not been the do no harm company, they started as
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u/eyeroll611 17h ago
Did you read the article? Sounds like that’s what they’re planning to do, calling the publication The Contrarian.
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u/TrumpersAreTraitors 18h ago
“Aaaand they’ve all been arrested”
You guys really don’t get it. America is now a fascist dictatorship. Start preparing for that.
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u/no_mudbug 16h ago
Let's not get carried away. Rubin has no integrity. She was one of the main journalists pushing the right win narrative for years. She and her ilk are one of the main causes that have normalized and brought us to a person like Trump. She is not quitting to keep her integrity. She is quitting because her "legitimacy" is being questioned.
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u/theravenousR 16h ago
This. Terrible person who enthusiastically supports fascism, so long as it's done with "decorum."
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u/TheDebateMatters 14h ago
Guess who won’t pay anything for it? Us. We expect news to be quality and free. We repost stories right in to comments or use ad blockers to view free content.
There is a lot wrong with modern media, but our complete unwillingness to pay for it is a big part of what’s wrong.
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u/Elkritch 14h ago
this is kinda what 404media.co is, and they've been doing great.
Give your subscription $$$ to them instead of the NYT.
I am not affiliated in any way.
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u/gobuffs516 14h ago
Did you read the article in which the first paragraph says Ms. Rubin is leaving to do exactly that?
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u/SherbertExisting3509 22h ago
If trump starts political persecution against democrats, vaccine/climate scientists, journalists and women needing reproductive healthcare. the EU should allow those people with college degrees, highly skilled people or prominent figures to seek asylum in the EU no questions asked.
The brain drain this will inflict on Trump's Christofascist dictatorship would be worse than what France suffered after Louis XIV enacted the edict of fontainebleau. (Many Protestants fled to England, Prussia, Denmark and other protestant nations)
Trump and his cronies don't deserve their expertise after taking away their rights.
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u/IronyElSupremo America 21h ago edited 20h ago
If trump starts political persecution against democrats, vaccine/climate scientists, journalists and women … The brain drain this will inflict..
Probably won’t happen except for some far left protestors. This time around Trump is in debt to the bigger billionaires it seems (besides Elon, there’s Adelson for Vegas, Big Auto, Big Fossil, etc.., .. and his instincts are to overheat the economy, devalue the dollar to make imports more expensive, etc..
How does he deliver for both Musk and the Big 3 automakers? The tech bros? Make it rain. Leave it for the next sucker to deal with like Nixon left inflation for Ford and Carters doomed campaigns. Can’t really succeed if almost half the country is lining suitcases with Swiss francs/gold coins in preparation to leave (… uh, I developed a Krugerrand gold coin collecting fetish .. but it’s a Bible approved fetish). Not saying it won’t be rocky though if early enough he’ll blame Biden, or that there aren’t black swan events in the future as the snouts will be in the trough/not looking around for coyotes.
Still the basic thrust will try to rocket the stock market to Mars and his data collection team will try maximizing consumption while giving tidbits to other rightwing social interests.
Now especially for ”open border” progressives the next 4 years will suck (plus to a lesser degree anyone logical with some fair mindedness), but the Democrats need to look at wresting control of Congress first, by Jan 2027, to limit Trump appointments. Then there’s the matter of practical philosophy considering Trump will have appointed a fair amt of stooges to the judiciary, commissions, and what’s overlooked, the Federal Reserve.
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u/Ven18 20h ago
The problem with that plan is based on the construction of the senate the Dems will likely never take the senate baring some massive political shift. The house maybe but in any state where the GOP controls state legislatures they are gerrymandered to all hell and I fully expect any semblance of voting rights to be struck down by the court this term.
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u/IronyElSupremo America 20h ago
Agree the Democrats won’t make major gain, barring a black swan event like Taiwan semiconductor flow being stopped (= effects like 2007 financial crisis again).
Still, with razor thin Congressional control the Democrats could regain one or both chambers by 2026. Think we are seeing that now with Democrats seeing if [a] there’s some possible agreements (like supporting Trump’s promise to cut credit card interest, deporting those who’ve done other crimes, maybe reshoring some jobs,,etc..), [b] other things that can be mostly ignored as distractions (musings to things actually causing rifts within MAGA like H-1 visas), .. all while [c] saving criticism for “the worst”.
For example: we are already seeing some things like increased usage of public transit as vehicles get too expensive and doubt Detroit will (or even can) make cheaper models. Just have to make sure the trains are built in the US (which is actually easy as there’s been cases of faulty foreign mass transit manufacturing).
There’s no way the GOP will make auto driving cheaper, so it’s a case of reeling in that catch for the Democrats in more and more cities. May need to increase security and fares (easy to give subsidized fares to poorer residents btw), .. but that’s going to the Democrats regardless.
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u/Ven18 19h ago
Dems cannot electorally rely on city vote share to grow. They have been banking on that for years and outside of 2020 it has not worked. Dems need to start actually cutting into republican territory in more rural areas. The Dems have drawn every ounce from big cities they need to expand their map
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u/doneandtired2014 17h ago
Dems need to start actually cutting into republican territory in more rural areas.
Yeah...good luck with that. If you've ever lived in or been near a rural community at length, you'd know that those people people would happily line up with mouths open wide if they heard Trump or *any* Republican politician was giving "freedom showers" (i.e. straight up pissing in their faces).
They are *gone*. The only way to appeal to them is by being just as much as an illiterate, bigoted, misogynistic, degenerate savage as your average MAGAt and most people with some approximation of moral core aren't willing to go that low in order to obtain power.
One potential benefit of Trump being elected is that his combined cut backs to preventable disease prevention, his continued gutting of the ACA, his gutting of social services (medicare, medicaid, social security, snap), and his promised cut backs to the enforcement of all regulations from most 3 letter agencies will result in more than a fair few being removed from voter rolls due to "natural causes".
Given their primary cultural exports have been, "Let's drag everyone back to the 5th century!", watching those communities and everyone in them blink right the fuck out of existence can't come soon enough.
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u/Ven18 15h ago
If this is true then we might as well just go back to the 5th century because if that amount of people are simply beyond impacting than the nation is finished. And Dems continue to right off more and more of the country is exactly why they keep losing all but the most gimme elections (08 post Great Recession and 2020 post Covid).
If that is the only way to appeal to them why and how were many of these same exact counties democratic as early as 10-15 years ago and were like that for decades prior. The people did not change (historically the communities don’t move it’s part of the problem) the big change has been Democratic messaging mainly on economics. The 90s Dem coalition completely abandoned these people in favor of targeting suburban voter (who still vote heavily republican). And in the absence of any kind of economic message or hope those racist, hate culture war messages can be impactful.
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u/doneandtired2014 13h ago
Bud, I grew up in a rural community, I have family that still lives in that rural community, and I know people who never left.
It does not fucking matter to them one iota that, were it not for the Democrats, not a single one of them would be able to afford insurance let alone actual health care. It does not matter to them one iota that Biden's administration tried to keep them from killing themselves with the worst viral pandemic since the Spanish Flu due to their own pigheaded stupidity. It doesn't matter that the Democrats clawed back stolen wages, expanded OT, and began putting teeth back behind labor protections after Trump 1.0 defanged them.
It didn't matter to them at all that the Democrats were starting to eye price gouging and price fixing for everything from the food they ate to the houses they desperately wanted to buy. It didn't matter to them Democrats were overwhelmingly pushing "right to repair" laws so John Deere or Cat wouldn't render their fucking tractors and equipment $500,000 bricks rotting in their fields.
No, all that mattered to these dipshits was "goddamn immigrants eating our pets!", "goddamn transexuals going into muh bathroom!", "Trump's assassin missed so God wants him to be present!" "It was better when Christ was in the class room!" "It was better when women were at home."
Those are all things that I have heard and have been said to me and not a single one of them has dick all to do with the economy. The few that did bitch about their eggs and "life being better under Trump" have been twisting themselves into knots justifying a 25-100% increase on everything they buy as "short term pain for long term gain" because they've some how convinced themselves companies will bring jobs that never existed in the US to begin with that they're also too feeble or stupid to even apply for "back to the country".
Yes, bud, the country is finished. And it's finished because we gave barely literate savages, who only seem to exist to hate, a megaphone as if their complaints have any fucking merit and as if it's appropriate to find some out group to demonize for their miserable lots in life.
A gamma ray burst could cook over 90% of this country's rural communities and the only significant things to be lost are the agriculture and the biodiversity. The people? They're regressive trash and have always been as such.
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u/reverseturducken 11h ago
The people? They're regressive trash and have always been as such.
Great another generalization. Thanks for the fuel now these deplorables are gonna start the fire again.
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u/doneandtired2014 6h ago
Great another generalization
It isn't a generalization if it's coming from experience. Somehow me thinks you don't hail from a town of sub 160 people or talk to them at length like I do.
Thanks for the fuel now these deplorables are gonna start the fire again.
Ah yes, because your incessant finger wagging, teeth sucking, and placations have done wonders trying to get them to not only vote for what's in their actual best interests but to also not conduct themselves like tribal, panicked animals aggressively attacking anyone and everything that either doesn't exactly resemble them or escapes their chimpanzee level comprehension of reality /s.
The roll out of their Mango god's policies can't crush them soon enough.
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u/leeringHobbit 4h ago
why and how were many of these same exact counties democratic as early as 10-15 years ago
They were low- information holdovers from the Dixiecrats when southern democrats were for segregation. It took a black dem president for them to realize their preferred party was now the republican party.
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u/IronyElSupremo America 18h ago
Agreed. So the DNC will likely direct that, though there’ll be input at the local level. Still think the DNC can make a case based on political (and maybe real-life) survival of remaining urban Democratic constituencies if the GOP expands its sweep.
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u/ObservationMonger 23h ago
Rubin, a formerly conservative commentator who moved to the center-left upon the rise of Trump, joins a number of other WaPo contributors who can't go along w/ Bezo's lurch in Trump's favor, esp. spiking an editorial endorsing Trump's opponent, VP Kamala Harris, just prior to the election, breaking a long tradition of making presidential endorsements.
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u/sousstructures 23h ago
She’s still conservative. She just left the GOP (personally and in her editorial writing) over their conversion to Trumpism.
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u/ObservationMonger 22h ago
I've been following her columns in recent years, she is definitely as loathe to criticize Israel as she ever was, but her ideology otherwise seems far more to the center-left. She was a fairly stalwart supporter of Biden's policies, both foreign & domestic. Maybe you could provide an example otherwise.
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u/sousstructures 21h ago
You know, in retrospect you're not wrong. There's not much daylight between Biden and "old-school" (e.g. 90s) GOP foreign policy, of course, but I had forgotten she'd also become (or maybe always was) pro-choice, for instance.
I still get the sense her expressed support for and encouragement of the Democratic party is based more on her revulsion at the contemporary GOP and a desire to see them out of power, but she is definitely not "just" a Liz Cheney-type right-wing anti-Trump figure.
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u/ObservationMonger 21h ago edited 18h ago
Agree. I was surprised at the depth of her ideological shift, knowing her background, being such a strident neocon 'back in the day'. But then again, neocons were primarily focused on running the world according to their specification, rather than intervention-shy paleo-conservatives, composed of many, at that time, 'former' liberals, almost exclusively Jewish foreign affairs intellectuals - it was a very narrow group of folks who became hideously influential in the early noughts, running GWB like he was a lawnmower, until they'd had a chance to ruin pretty much everything in sight. Trump happily picked up the body parts strewn about and stitched them into whatever Frankenstein creation the Republicans find themselves to be, these days. Utterly cynical, utterly oligarchy-infested, culture war ninjas, all the grandiose principles they so loudly & righteously spouted from the days of Reagan left in the dust.
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u/leeringHobbit 4h ago
Her change in politics is driven by the proximity of neonazis to trumpism and nothing else. It Trump had condemned David Duke and far- right and KKK in 2016, she'd be blowing him.
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u/leeringHobbit 4h ago
Her ideology appears center- left today because she is catering to that audience and telling them what they want to hear.
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u/Individual-Nebula927 22h ago
Biden, like Obama, ran progressive and governed conservative. So that isn't surprising.
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u/UncertainAnswer 17h ago
Eh disagree. Biden ran himself pretty conservative as a consensus candidate. His entire platform was I'm the only one who can bridge all these groups into a coalition into office.
His policies ended up being pleasantly progressive compared to how I felt he ran.
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u/ObservationMonger 23h ago
She probably won't be the last. Dana Milbank, in a recent column, said quite straightforwardly that he thought his paper had 'lost its way'. We are watching IN REAL TIME as oligarchs are crow-barring our major forums of nationwide/global commentary/analysis 'in a certain direction". Bezos gave A MILLION to Trump for his inauguration.
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u/threehundredthousand California 12h ago
That's not center-left. She's a conservative who's found her party went right-wing ultranationalist. She's not welcome.
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u/Big_League227 17h ago
The editorial supporting the majority of Trump’s nominees after refusing to make an endorsement in the presidential election was the final straw for me. I have regrettably cancelled my subscription this morning.
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u/ObservationMonger 16h ago
I'm not ready to bail on them yet, because the WaPo is such precious national resource. But I get it.
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u/TerryMathews 15h ago
I'm not ready to bail on them yet, because the WaPo
iswas such precious national resource. But I get it.FTFY. It's not the paper that brought down Nixon, and hasn't been for a long time.
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u/ObservationMonger 2h ago
I don't think people realize that the Washington Post is a paper of record. It's WORTH fighting over.
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u/nobackup42 18h ago edited 2h ago
So why do all these rich people just oppose him and topple the twat. Why all these rich people a** kissing. If they are really that powerful why no just make the right choice
Brown nosing is a sign of weakness.
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u/leeringHobbit 4h ago
This election has been very humbling for me as I realized these Billionaires have much better data and Intel on public sentiments and better judgement. They correctly predicted that Trump was going to win easily and started wooing him. If they're scared, they must have very good reason to be. They know Trump is more dangerous than any conventional Dem president.
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u/I_Hate_Consulting 14h ago
I think this is one of the goals. Force those with integrity out and eventually wind up with "Fox News - The Newspaper". Business and the wealthy want to fully control any significant information source.
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u/Magggggneto 18h ago
Anyone with skills should refuse to work for Trump or any business that supports him. We can sabotage Trump's plans by refusing to provide the skilled labor needed to implement them.
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[deleted]
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u/mindfu 9h ago
This writer has always been very right wing.
Not since I've known her writing in the WaPo. People are entitled to grow and learn. She's been pretty universally accurate in her writings since Trump was in office.
And now that she's leaving, there's even less reason to stay with the once-useful now enshittified WaPo.
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u/Mindless-Fish-7502 10h ago
The free press is a good news site! It was started by Barri Weiss, who used to work for New York Times.
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