The New York Times’ Ezra Klein problem

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.

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.

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.

The paper has put aside some of its discomfort to embrace a growing reliance on its stars, and is cooperating with New York magazine for a glossy upcoming profile of Klein.

But Klein and his bosses declined to talk to me. (Boo!!!)

“Ezra is doing amazing work across an impressively broad array of topics,” publisher AG Sulzberger said in an email, declining to comment further.

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.”

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.

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.”