The Contrarian

14 January 2025, updated 27 January 2025

I am excited to learn about the new blog, The Contrarian, and encourage you to subscribe. Note: I am just recommending this blog - I have no connection with it!

Jennifer Rubin, former columnist for the Washington Post (she just resigned) and Norm Eisen, political commentator, former United States Ambassador to the Czech Republic and board chair of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington created this Substack blog. It is free but there is more content if you are a subscriber (I paid $70 for one year).

CNN described its founding:

The startup’s tagline, “Not owned by anybody,” 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.

“Our goal is to combat, with every fiber of our being, the authoritarian threat that we face,” Rubin told CNN in an interview ahead of the publication’s introduction.

Rather than anti-Trump, the founders describe their venture as pro-democracy. They 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.

“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.” More

From Jennifer Rubin, in the first daily “issue”:

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.”

The Post’s downfall is hardly unique. ABC, Mark Zuckerberg's Meta and corporate-owned cable TV networks (which have scrambled to enlist Trump-friendly voices) are catering to powerful interests, and have profound corporate conflicts. Instead of guarding their independence, they join financial leaders, politicians and other public figures currying favor with Trump and his orbit. Through classic anticipatory obedience—a dangerous but all too familiar pattern—they normalize the authoritarian menace. If Trump has taken “attacks on the press to an entirely new level, softening the ground for an erosion of robust press freedom,” as The Post reported, it is because he finds insufficient resistance. Instead, owners whose outlets he targets quite literally rewarded him.

I will likely quote from The Contrarian but I urge you to get a free subscription and if possible, become a paid subscriber. For the immediate future, every week (if not every day) will present new threats to democracy. We must support pro-democracy forces, including these types of newsletters, the Democratic Party [even if you don’t agree with everything they stand for] and oppose or even boycott pro-authoritarian forces (Trump, the Republican Party, Fox News [even if you like the sports they sponsor] and other publications of Rupert Murdoch. We must make sacrifices if democracy is going to survive. Let’s start today by funding pro-democracy forces and not supporting Trump, the Republican Party and its major funders.

---

The index to my prior essays (mostly post 5 November 2024) is here.

I have another blog on Cancer and Medicine.

You can also follow me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/nat-pernick-8967765/ (LinkedIn), npernickmich (Threads and Instagram), natpernick.bsky.social (Bluesky) or @nat385440b (Tribel).

Email me at Nat@PathologyOutlines.com.

I also publish Notes at https://substack.com/note. Subscribers will automatically see my notes.