Former Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin joined MSNBC on Saturday and lambasted her former employer, accusing the Washington Post of trying to “ingratiate” themselves with President Donald Trump.
“They seem to think that their own press outlet should be muzzled, should be quieted, should not upset Donald Trump so much. And so you see, for example, the refusal to endorse Donald Trump, which was the editorial position of both the Los Angeles Times, owned by another billionaire, and the Washington Post,” she said.
Rubin, a former conservative writer who announced during Trump’s first administration that she was no longer a conservative, recently quit the paper after its owner, Jeff Bezos, stopped the editorial board from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.
“You also see these billionaires giving money to the President of the United States. And yucking it up there on the dais. That is not how an independent free press behaves. Their obligation is to the public, not to themselves, to advance their own businesses, and certainly not to ingratiate themselves with Donald Trump,” Rubin added.
Rubin said Paul Krugman, a former New York Times columnist, spoke to the Columbia Journalism Review about why he left the paper in 2024, and said that he was being muzzled at the Times.
“Paul Krugman just had an interview with the Columbia journalism review, explaining that he was told to write less, that he was being more heavily edited. This is Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner and a phenomenal voice on economics, was essentially being muzzled. And if journalists allow this to happen, if they allow owners and large conglomerations to repress and suppress what they have to say, they are also enabling the authoritarian regime,” she said.
Krugman alleged during the interview that he was being treated very differently than he was in the past at the NYT.
Rubin joined several high-profile staffers that also announced departures for other outlets, including reporters Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, Tyler Page and Leigh Ann Caldwell, columnist Charles Lane, health and science editor Stephen Smith and veteran editor, Matea Gold.
Rubin announced a new media outlet that she formed with Norm Eisen, a CNN legal analyst, which she vowed was “overtly pro-democracy,” during the MSNBC interview.
In a statement about her decision to leave the post, Rubin said the paper had gone from bad to worse.
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