Posted by Kenneth Anderson: Is Wonk-Snark the New Genre? Unkind Thoughts About Ezra Klein http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_07_19-2009_07_25.shtml#1248232825
I guess [1]Ezra Klein's latest column - post? - whatever, wherein he deems himself up to [2]taking on Greg Mankiw, is the right time for a question that has popped up whenever I have considered the trajectory of young Ezra. Would Klein be a better writer/thinker/pundit/blogger/wonk/whatever if he had actually done some of the "reporting" stuff, factual reporting stuff, basic beat reporting stuff, that, as I sort of remember, was how in the old days of journalism, one clawed one's way up to the lofty heights that Klein has scaled in a couple of years of pure opinionating? Was there some value to having to labor, so to speak, in the plains of fact-gathering before getting a perch to express one's many views? Klein's career has consisted entirely, so far as I can tell, of delivering himself of many opinions. In an age in which (a) the front pages of newspapers increasingly consist of precisely that and (b) the internet emerged as a forum for disseminating oneself individually and one's opinions as a career option, he has Done Well. Or as well as one can do by shoehorning oneself on the strength of one's own internet brand into the ... money-losing, dinosaur-media, Kaplan-supported Washington Post. I imagine Klein will milk it until that franchise is no longer valuable enough and then move on to colonize some other medium - I see forms of communication that require less writing and more talking, more visual stuff, in his future. Or wherever the money is in offering opinions. My suggestion? Subcontract the book; you're more a short-form kind of writer. But I find it hard to believe that his older journalistic peers at the Post and in the profession do not think privately to themselves that, although his political progressivism makes him not really attackable, just as a career figure, they must think to themselves that he might be improved had he done something besides go directly from junior high school to internet "public policy" columnist. He and I both graduated from UCLA - I didn't know they had a major in pontification. Do they hand out diplomas from the college of "Generic Expert"? B.E., Bachelor of Expert degrees? It is, of course, not outside the realm of possibility that Ezra, Young Turk, is possessed of a keener analytic mind than Greg Mankiw; I'm not opining here on substance, but only on the seemliness of career track. It's the realm of possibility, however, in which Spock has a goatee. The problem, however, is that his is a career track that thrives on high level, refined, abstract bickering among experts and talking heads. Pick a fight with Greg Mankiw and hope that he responds so that you can show your general worldly relevance and audience connection. That's the currency you're selling to the WaPo, at the end of the day, the heat, not the light. Including the snidification I'm producing here - how do we put it on the internet, "Don't feed the trolls"? Ezra Klein could, I emphasize, be right as to the substance of every position he takes. That's not what fascinates me about him. It's instead the business model from which he springs, full grown, as it were, skipping over working in and thereby learning something directly about the world in its myriad ways, and going directly to opining about it. And free of any disciplinary restraint, unless one really thinks of generic "policy" as a discipline or a constraint. References 1. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/07/the_unbearable_lightness_of_gr.html 2. http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/07/whatever.html _______________________________________________ Volokh mailing list Volokh@lists.powerblogs.com http://lists.powerblogs.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
