Ezra Klein Hired by Washington Post

My very good friend Ezra Klein has been hired by The Washington Post to do a blog for their website, as reported by Mike Calderone. So first off, congratulations to everyone—good for Ezra, great hire for the Post, etc. And beyond this specific move, I think the Washington Post Company has been making a lot of pretty awesome visionary new media decisions lately in terms of The Root.com, the new Foreign Policy.com, Greg Sargent’s thing, etc. All awesome.

That said, to be perfectly honest I do have some concerns about this. After all, one thing all decent progressive blogs do is point out semi-regularly that the Washington Post opinion section is a pretty rotten operation. You have liars like Charles Krauthammer and George Will penning regular columns, alongside less-egregious but still pretty pernicious stuff like David Ignatius’ apologia for war crimes and so forth. There are also good people working there, of course, like E.J. Dionne and Harold Meyerson. But while both of those guys write a lot of great stuff on a lot of important topics, you don’t see them ever writing great stuff on the important topic of how grossly irresponsible it is for an influential entity that wants to be taken seriously as a purveyor of information to be publishing the likes of Krauthammer and Will. That, of course, is the world we live in. People don’t go after their bosses with hatchets. So while hiring Ezra makes the Post less hatchet-worthy, it also means that we’re down a hatchet-wielder. That’s the dark lining in my silver cloud.

Last, let me put in a good word for The American Prospect, which continues to do a great job of developing new journalistic talent and launching it into the universe.