If the paper aims to rebuild the image it had before the past decade, it will likely benefit by saying farewell to Rubin.

I leave to others a review of Jennifer Rubin’s record as a columnist and the prospects for her new media venture. Let’s talk about what her departure means for the Washington Post.

Rubin says that she chose, voluntarily, to leave the Post after she publicly blasted its decision to forgo making an endorsement in the presidential race. Even assuming that the Post didn’t let her go amidst 100 layoffs, we can’t know from the outside whether the paper’s management tried to keep her or was happy to see her go. In the immediate term, it’s a loss for the capital’s newspaper of record. Rubin has a startling capacity to produce large numbers of letters formed into words at speed. Couple this with the most polarizing possible emotional pitch to everything she writes and with her complete conviction on every issue under the sun, even when she flatly contradicts years of her own writings, and you have the recipe for a ton of web traffic and a loyal audience that is apt to consider the rest of the Post‘s writers to be poor substitutes. So, expect the Post website to take a hit to its traffic and subscriptions in the short term.

Indeed, the Post has lost a lot of contributors and readers. More than 200,000 people canceled their subscriptions when Jeff Bezos announced that the paper was not endorsing a candidate in the presidential race. Robert Kagan and Michele Norris quit in the immediate aftermath of the non-endorsement. A third of the editorial board left their posts, and some of them left the paper. Others followed: “In December, Matea Gold, the Post’s managing editor, shared she was leaving the Post for The New York Times. Last week, The Atlantic poached political reporters Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, the Times scooped up White House reporter Tyler Pager, the Wall Street Journal nabbed investigative politics reporter Josh Dawsey, and Puck poached veteran journalist Leigh Ann Caldwell. And, on Friday, Ann Telnaes, the Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, very publicly resigned from the outlet after the newspaper refused to publish a satirical cartoon depicting Bezos bending the knee before Trump.”

The original idea of hiring Rubin was to create a two-sided blog at the Post, with Rubin representing the conservative side and Greg Sargent (sometimes supplemented by Paul Waldman) taking the side of Democratic partisans and the activist left. Rubin veered so far to the left that the pretense was eventually dropped; Waldman left for MSNBC in 2023, and Sargent decamped last year to what remains of the New Republic. The paper also shuttered “Made by History,” a part of the op-ed page that was supposed to provide learned historical context for today’s controversies but largely descended into an intersection of woke progressivism and anti-Trump Resistance — just like Rubin’s, Sargent’s, and Waldman’s writings.

There’s an audience for that, but does it make sense for the Post to limit itself to that audience and keep losing the audience for news? Clearly, Bezos thinks it’s a dead end that costs the Post in credibility and business opportunities. D.C. is a company town, and the federal government is that company. The competitive advantage that the Post has long enjoyed, even over the New York Times, is that its simple geographic proximity in reporting and in readership to the corridors of power allows it to play host to the news-gathering and debates of the highest levels of government. Rubin’s brand of reactive ranting and denunciation of anyone who doesn’t man the barricades against Trump doesn’t need that perch, and detracts from the image of the Post as a liberal-leaning but fundamentally two-sided paper that listens to those in power even when they are Republicans. The op-ed page still has no shortage of columnists who range from liberals to shrill leftists, including Ruth Marcus, Dana Milbank, Max Boot, Jonathan Capehart, E. J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson, and Perry Bacon. But a number of those people are columnists, not nonstop faucets of blogging and social media. That allows the paper a bit more editorial control and discretion.

There is, of course, room in the media world for rhetorical bomb-throwers, but, in the long run, if the Post aims to rebuild the image it had before the past decade — as the institutional voice of sober reportage on the nation’s capital — it is likely to benefit by saying farewell to Rubin.