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Washington Post Admits Jennifer Rubin Isn’t Conservative

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The Washington Post is no longer describing its “conservative” blogger as conservative.

Jennifer Rubin, The Post’s “Right Turn” blog author and an MSNBC contributor, is now “offering reported opinion from a center-right perspective,” the Post’s website states.

Editors changed Rubin’s description to “better represent her views,” a spokesperson for The Post, Azhar AlFadl Miranda, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

An earlier version of this story noted Rubin’s bio was changed on April 17 to say she was presenting a “center perspective.” After this story was published, The Post changed Rubin’s page again — this time to say she is “center-right.” The original change erroneously listed Rubin’s views as “center,” Miranda said.

“In the process of updating her bio, the word ‘right’ was inadvertently left out of ‘center-right,'” he said. The error appears to have been left uncorrected for nine days.

Since hiring Rubin in 2010, The Post had claimed Rubin offered a “conservative perspective” — a characterization that became harder and harder to defend as she became defined by her oppose-at-any-costs approach to President Donald Trump.

In October 2017, Rubin called on Congress to ban generals from serving in the White House in a civilian capacity. The discriminatory legislation was justified by Rubin’s complaints about White House chief of staff John Kelly, she said.

National Review editor Charles C.W. Cooke slammed Rubin as a fraud and hypocrite in a December 2017 column, “Jennifer Rubin Is Everything She Hates about Trump Worshippers.”

Rubin had flip-flopped on several issues, including the Paris Climate deal and recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, since Trump took office, Cooke pointed out. In each instance, Rubin abandoned her previously held position to oppose Trump.

“The descriptions above Rubin’s byline have come to seem tragically misleading. Contrary to popular myth, she is not in fact writing from a ‘conservative perspective’ but as just one more voice among a host of Trump-obsessed zealots who add nothing to our discourse,” Cooke wrote. “In so doing, she does conservatism a sincere disservice.”

As of April 16, internet archives show, the Post was still passing Rubin off as a conservative. The Post began describing her as a centrist the next day. On Thursday, nine days later, the Post changed Rubin’s author page again, this time to say she was “center-right.”

This story has been updated to reflect the Post’s statement. 

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