The American Prospect's Ezra Klein, one of the top bloggers on politics and policy, is heading to the Washington Post.
Rumors about Klein's upcoming move spread on Wednesday night during a reception thrown by The Nation magazine in honor of D.C. bureau chief Chris Hayes.
A Post spokesperson confirmed to POLITICO this morning that Klein was hired as a blogger at washingtonpost.com and is expected to start in about a month.
The move continues a regrettable trend started with their hiring of Greg Sargent, who formerly worked for the far left Talking Points Memo, to run a blog at one of the Post's websites. The addition of Sargent, an accomplished hack in his own right, was covered by Tim Graham here at NewsBusters. Tim quickly identified it as yet another example of the revolving door between liberal organizations and the mainstream media:
The revolving door first revolved the other way, with old Post vets like Thomas Edsall being hired by the Huffington Post. Now the revolving is going from partisan to "mainstream."
And, as I'm sure you've all figured out by now, Ezra Klein is about to become the latest to spin his way through that same door. However, Ezra's welcome into the Washington Post is especially distressing given the countless acts of stupidity and vulgarity he has managed to commit in his short time as a prominent blogger.
Take, for example, his affinity for the ideas of the National Socialists:
Nazi Ideas
I'm with Jane Galt on this one: Not everything the Nazis touched was bad. Hitler was a vegetarian. Volkswagen is a perfectly good car company. Universal health care is a perfectly good idea. Indeed, the Nazis actually did a pretty good job increasing economic growth and improving standards of living (they were, many think, the first Keynesians, adopting the strategy even before Keynes had come up with it), pushing Germany out of a depression and back into expansion.
Yea... never mind that much of the Nazi's economic expansion was due to their massive war build up set off by a megalomaniacal ambition to conquer the world. But, hey, at least Ezra finds a sentence to harshly condemn the Nazi's for their horrifying atrocities:
Unfortunately, they also set out to conquer Europe and exterminate the Jews. People shouldn't do that.
Ezra's correct, people shouldn't do that just like they shouldn't marginalize the deaths of millions in order to try, and fail, to make political points.
But if his idiotic defense of Nazis isn't enough to sink Ezra's media aspirations in your mind then I suppose his vulgar attack on the late Tim Russert probably won't change your mind either (content warning):
Sadly, Klein didn't stop there, for according to multiple sources including Unpopular Front and the liberal Wonkette, he later posted on the short-message blogging service called "Twitter,":
f*** tim russert. f*** him with a spiky acid-tipped d***.
And, I suppose, if you still think Ezra deserves a position at any news outlet then the fact that he is the founder of the famed vast left wing conspiracy that is "Journolist" won't turn you off to him either:
But don't worry, this "journolist" is no great cabal of underground left-wing plotters attempting to co-opt the message emanating from the bowls of the Old Media. We know this cuz they told us so!
Move along.... nothing to see here.
Michael Calderone is soon going to find his invites to all the swankiest mau jacket required cocktail parties drying up if he keeps this sort of reporting up.
For the past two years, several hundred left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks and academics have talked stories and compared notes in an off-the-record online meeting space called JournoList.
Proof of a vast liberal media conspiracy?
Not at all, says Ezra Klein, the 24-year-old American Prospect blogging wunderkind who formed JournoList in February 2007. “Basically,” he says, “it’s just a list where journalists and policy wonks can discuss issues freely.”
See, if ol' Ezra says it's cool, then dadgummit, whaterya'all worried about?
But, if you care about integrity in media and unbiased news reporting then you may be more than a little bit concerned about the Washington Post's decision to hire such an undeserving hack. Unfortunately, it looks like the Washington Post is unconcerned with little things like integrity and professionalism.
After all, they've hired both Sargent and Klein without much thought or criticism. Compare that to the way conservative blogger Ben Domenech was received at the Post. Liberal readers where so incensed at the idea of a conservative being given a platform there that they immediately went on a expedition to dig up anything they could on him.
Certainly they turned up legitimate accusations of plagiarism, which Domenech rightfully resigned over, but that is beside the point here. The real lesson is that liberals can't stand any conservative encroachment into their media and they will fight tooth and nail to remove them. If the real issue was plagiarism then liberals would have unearthed Domenech's mistakes long before he made it to the Washington Post.
And the Washington Post is just fine with that. As is made clear by this case they are quick to fire conservatives at the first sign of trouble but, they are more than alright with hiring liberals with a well documented and abundant history of outrages.
