Outside the Beltway

The Ezra Klein Phenomenon

From Juiceboxer to arguably the most important media figure on the left.

James Joyner · Tuesday, August 20, 2024 · 10 comments

SEMAFOR media editor Max Tani reports on “The New York Times’ Ezra Klein problem,” the essence of which is unclear from the piece. Given how often Steven I and recommend and/or dissect Klein’s podcast episodes, it’s nonetheless an interesting look.

When Ezra Klein visited 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. early this year for a series of off-the-record meetings with top officials, President Joe Biden’s cautious inner circle assumed that the New York Times opinion writer and podcaster would remind Democrats of Biden’s successes heading into the final year of his first term.

The president had pushed through a huge climate package and a series of housing and economic policies that a generation of liberals like Klein had championed. Klein’s stature as the liberal media’s top policy wonk, a man who could see the administration’s substantive achievements through the bad political optics, made him a natural messenger.

Then, in February, White House officials were stunned by the result of Klein’s trip: a series of in-depth opinion pieces calling on the president not to seek reelection, advocating for an open convention, explaining to the Times audience how a situation like that would play out, and laying out which prominent Democrats might replace Biden.

That bold and prescient move cemented Klein’s stature as a breakout media star of the 2024 election cycle, and as perhaps the most influential Democratic media figure, a place occupied over the decades by Times luminaries from Scotty Reston to Anthony Lewis.

Having followed Klein’s career since he was an undergrad at UCLA blogging for free two decades ago, I don’t see his rise as all that sudden or surprising. He’s been hugely influential in Democratic policy circles since at least the early days of the Obama administration. Certainly, his podcast has taken off under the auspices of the New York Times, but it was already significant when he was doing it at Vox.

While Klein’s call for Biden to step aside was loudly criticized in February by liberal Biden supporters, his show quickly became appointment listening for Democrats during the month between Biden’s disastrous debate performance and his decision to drop out of the race. The numbers showed it: The Ezra Klein Show wasn’t among the top 10 podcasts on Apple Podcasts last year or in Spotify’s top 25; currently, Klein’s show is No. 8 overall on Apple, and hovering in the high 20s on Spotify.

Now “Ezra” is a first-name-only figure in liberal family group chats. His show is popular among Democratic staffers and the media and Hollywood elite. NBA commissioner Adam Silver is a fan; he and Klein were spotted chatting when ESPN cut to them during the broadcast of a WNBA game. Podcast godfather Ira Glass, the creator of This American Life, is a fan too, telling audiences onstage at Hot Pod Summit earlier this year that The Ezra Klein Show was his favorite new podcast.

My opinion matters much less than Glass’s, much less Silver’s, but Klein’s is easily the best podcast in the politics space. He occasionally delves into topics in which I’m only marginally interested but there’s not a more prepared, thoughtful interviewer out there. (Oddly, the closest competition in that regard is Reason‘s Nick Gillespie.) While he makes no bones about his personal political and policy preferences, he comes across as genuinely interested in learning from his guests and his non-confrontational style and the show’s extended format allow deep dives into the topic at hand. (On rare occasion, the interview demonstrates the interlocutor to be a hack who simply hasn’t thought about the subject as deeply as the host, despite having written a book on the topic. But that seems to be a disappointing outcome for the host, rather than the intention.)

The former HBO executive Richard Plepler, who first met Klein when he was running Vox, briefly interrupted his summer vacation in the south of France to heap praise on Klein when Semafor asked about his podcast’s increasing popularity among liberal figures in the entertainment industry.

“He writes and thinks like [Roger] Federer swings,” Plepler told me. “There’s a kind of precision and effortlessness to the quality of his intellect and the way he expresses himself.”

Klein, like his friend and fellow Vox co-founder Matt Yglesias, is obviously quite bright. While both have a deep work ethic by any reasonable standard, though, Klein is just shockingly well read. That he manages to do two shows a week with the level of preparation that clearly goes into them is just incredible. (Again, Gillespie, who holds a doctorate in English literature, is similar in this regard, weaving in obscure-to-me philosophical, literary, and pop culture references into his questioning in a way that seems effortless.)

His show is also becoming a crucial part of the liberal communications ecosystem. Democrats looking to get their message out to their own party are also increasingly seeing Klein’s podcast as an important part of any media tour. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz used his appearance on the show to introduce himself to Democratic voters and expand upon his messaging about Trump; several days later, Kamala Harris asked Walz if he’d join her ticket. Nancy Pelosi, a longtime fan of Klein’s policy writing, made news about her feelings about Walz and Biden’s stumbles during an appearance on his show promoting her book.

I listened to both interviews and the degree to which the guests were more open than they would be with ordinary journalists is interesting. That Klein is on the team is surely part of it. But a 45-to-60-minute dialogue is simply a different animal than the sound-byte-driven interviews to which politicians are subject. It essentially requires being forthcoming, lest one be exposed as shallow. (Which, to be clear, neither Pelosi nor Walz are.)

Klein’s Times podcast has been an extraordinary success at a moment when it’s difficult for podcasts to grow and break through. It has redefined and further elevated Klein, already one of the most well-known personalities in mainstream digital news media. (Indeed, one of the only well-known people in mainstream digital news media).

Klein came up in the early internet era as one of a handful of earnest liberal bloggers known as the “juicebox mafia” for their relative youth. They were defined by a swing away from the careful triangulation of the Clinton years, toward a more confidently progressive politics that would take human form in candidate Barack Obama. (Other members of that loose, mostly male circle of young bloggers included Matthew Yglesias, now a star of independent journalism; Semafor’s Dave Weigel; and Crooked Media’s Brian Beutler. They were, The Times wrote in 2011, “Washington’s new Brat Pack.”)

Klein’s influential Washington Post blog, which he wrote from 2009 to 2014, helped shape the Obama agenda in crucial areas like what became the Affordable Care Act. He then founded Vox Media, where he hosted a podcast but ran up against the limits of how much his wonkish brand of journalism could scale. He left in 2020 amid an exodus of digital media to hone his own voice.

Given our geographic proximity, the communitarian vibe of the early blogging era, and the fact we were all single, I got to know all of the “juiceboxers” (plus Julian Sanchez and Radley Balko, whom I consider part of that group) save, for whatever reason, Beutler, a little bit circa 2003-2006. While I fully get the resentment that traditional journos who had paid their dues that these guys leaped ahead of them into big platforms, they were all worthy of it then. And it’s a little silly now to still think of them as young upstarts. (Even though, weirdly, Klein is only a little older now than I was way back then.)

Klein wasn’t the only person advocating for Biden to step aside in February. But his reputation as a serious, earnest commentator on policy and his complimentary tone towards the president, coupled with his high-profile position at the Times, gave his words significant weight.

“Ezra’s piece was the first crack in the dam on which I was trying to shine light, one which began shifting the mindset of the chattering class,” Rep. Dean Phillips, who mounted a failed challenge to Biden in the Democratic primary, told Semafor.

While I found the shows interesting—and agreed with the central premise that Biden had declined to the point where, even if he could do the basic job of governing, he was no longer up to the job of campaigning—I thought the notion of an open convention an amusing fantasy. It just seemed logistically impossible, even though it would have been really interesting.

This is as close as the piece gets to the titular “problem”:

The show is a commercial home run for the New York Times as well, which has cemented itself as one of the biggest players in audio, producing three of Apple’s top 10 podcasts.

Whether the paper will admit that The Ezra Klein Show is a success, however, is less clear.

The show’s growth comes just as the Times is engaged in intense internal conversations about how to distance itself from the movement progressive politics of 2020, and how to avoid being seen as a mouthpiece of the Democratic Party. The clearest indication of that is the gradual abandonment of voice-of-God unsigned editorials that used to read like memos to Democratic leaders, and are now nearly entirely gone: Last week, the paper announced that it would stop endorsing candidates in races in New York state.

But Klein’s own missives to Democrats are now as influential as those unsigned editorials ever were. His outsized profile at the Times and his role inside Democratic politics make it hard to argue that the organization stands above the electoral fray; he beat the paper’s editorial board to its own realization about Biden some months later, following the debate. And so, in recent months, the Times masthead has carefully enforced the editorial boundaries between The Ezra Klein Show and the newsroom, keeping some of the paper’s journalists off of the show.

This just doesn’t strike me as a big deal. Klein is rather clearly an opinion journalist with a deep wonky streak rather than a reporter. There’s no pretense that he’s “objective.” And, ironically, he’s arguably more objective—in the sense of simply looking for answers to complex questions—than many on the reporting side.

And reporters have been appearing on opinion-driven shows as long as I can remember. That’s a tricky path to navigate, to be sure, but Klein has the savvy to navigate that. Shows with reporters as guests simply have to be aimed at connecting the dots of the day-to-day reporting into a larger narrative. Skillfully done, that doesn’t have to devolve into advocacy.

When I asked Yglesias, Klein’s longtime friend and former podcast co-host, in February whether he’d noticed that Klein’s podcast seemed to be breaking through, Yglesias said Klein’s aversion to a more conflictual journalism style, coupled with his new perch at the Times, had helped elevate him beyond his blogger/MSNBC days.

“Ezra is a very thoughtful, very deliberate person who doesn’t shoot from the hip or troll or say things just to stir the pot. I sometimes think he tries too hard to avoid being contentious,” Yglesias said. “But that means that when he does say something provocative, people take notice. That’s even more true now that he’s at the Times than it was at Vox or back in the day at Wonkblog.”

As I’ve noted many times over the years, Yglesias was the bigger star in the early days but he’s long since been surpassed by Klein. That’s not a knock by any means; hell, they’re both considerably more influential than I am despite being close to 20 years younger. Yglesias, like me, has more-or-less stayed in the generalist opinion space while Klein early on established himself in the entrepreneurial space. He’s simply more ambitious and has the discipline to be more cautious.

To people in Biden’s orbit, Klein remains a bit of a sore subject. A few people close to the White House and the campaign were quick to point out to me that no podcast episode has had any bearing on Biden’s decision-making process, and that the Democratic Party ultimately didn’t follow Klein’s suggestion to decide on a replacement at the convention this week in Chicago, instead coalescing around now-nominee Vice President Kamala Harris immediately after Biden stepped back from the race.

In fairness, even Pelosi was calling for some sort of mini-primary. The lateness of the exit, the exigencies of campaign finance law, and Biden’s endorsement rendered that moot.

Critics of Klein’s initial piece don’t necessarily feel that they owe him an apology, either.

Joan Walsh wrote in the Nation in February that Klein was “deeply wrong” to suggest that Biden drop out and the Democrats pick a new nominee at the convention. Asked how she felt about that argument today, Walsh told me in an email that while Klein does “some great work,” she stood by her piece.

“The idea that Biden would step aside and we’d be heading to Chicago for some kind of open convention next week was always ludicrous. That’s especially clear today, but it was clear to me at the time. And like most pundits, he underestimated Kamala Harris’ popularity and charisma,” she said. “But he was sadly right that Biden was not going to be up to the rigors of the long campaign.”

Most of us underestimated Harris. That’s not surprising, given her poor showing in 2019 and her relatively obscurity as Veep. But, yes, he deserves credit for being one of the first to publicly declare what would eventually be obvious: Biden simply wasn’t up to campaigning for President.