CONSIGNED TO MALIGN

I'd gotten a text message from a friend telling me I should listen to this podcast from someone named Ezra Klein. I didn't know the podcast but had just finished listening to another with him as a guest. I explained to my friend that I'd spent an hour listening to this man demonstrate to the world that he operates in bad faith and is the kind of person happy to knowingly misrepresent the views of others as well as basic facts about the world. I offered that even the man's tone felt like a gaping window into his wayward mind. But I couldn’t make such a bold statement without offering the link to the podcast I'd heard. I did so with the caveat that the exchange was almost unlistenable, likely one of the worst interactions in the history of the podcast medium. Soon after, my friend and I had dinner. She noted the podcast and explained she didn't listen to the whole thing, highlighting a lack of sufficient context. I offered that if she even listened to just the first five minutes, she likely had all the information she needed. No, it's not good entertainment or easy listening; but it is a fantastic mirror of the culture, our present inability to communicate, and the impassable chasm between folks who are interested in uncovering what may be true and those who are, well, otherwise motivated.

The podcast opens with the host explaining that he did not want to do the podcast. So publicly slandered by Klein and in such a relentless and deceptive manner, there seemed little or no chance for a productive dialogue. He explains that the podcast was taking place because of the feedback of tens of thousands of their followers who wanted to hear an exchange of ideas between these two. From there, the host shares their agreed upon ground rules: that when complete both men would offer the exchange to the world unadulterated. After spelling that out, the host insists on providing at least some critical context for many listeners who would likely be arriving at the episode with only partial details of their months of back-and-forth that got them to this place. There had been a whole year of op eds published by Klein and others about the host, requisite tweets, a long private email exchange between the two, and more that conspired in this podcast exchange. Amazingly, Klein vehemently objects to providing any context or explanation. The host insists there really are essential details, both public and private, that folks need just to make sense of what they’re talking about and why. More, he says he’s keen to be as concise as possible and is just as eager to hear, and for the audience to hear, any of Klein's amendments to his own understanding of the chronology of events or facts on the table. Klein doubles down, reiterating his contention that no one needs or wants such context. He argues that when he hosts this recording on his own online platforms he will provide all the information and framing he wishes his audience to have. Amazing.

After that, for me, the rest of the podcast is irrelevant. Neither I nor anyone else really needs to hear more of what this fellow has to offer. Though I did listen to the whole excruciating episode, everything that comes after is contained in this opening exchange. One of these men comes intending to give the other the benefit of the doubt, the opportunity to present their version of events, space to air their strongest argument and to respond to any criticism; the other is fundamentally opposed to anything approximating honesty or transparency, insisting on manufacturing whatever comforting false premise he sees fit and then populating that space with all the hastily crafted strawmen he will. Just imagine what you would have to have done, and still seek to do, to actively reject any public agreement with your interlocutor about the basic facts that brought you both to this conversation. And then imagine the ill-intent needed to reject the opportunity to make any real-time, person-to-person corrections you deem necessary, preferring instead to contextualize and frame the other’s words, intentions, and beliefs in their absence.

Sadly, I went and looked and found that Klein did go on to publish his own version of events, one in which he pretends to offer an accurate portrayal of their complete exchange. To start, he delivers an entire page of set-up (four paragraphs, hundreds of words) full of bald misrepresentations about both the dialogue that occurred and the facts being discussed. Of course, these errors are the same ones Klein insisted on offering in previous publications and also in the podcast and that the host was forced to repeatedly and agonizingly correct with an abundance of reasons and examples. Klein pretends none of that happened.

In the main body of the article Klein leads his audience to believe he is presenting them with a verbatim transcript of the podcast. He mysteriously leaves out the opening two minutes of the recording as well as a critical early moment, five minutes in, where he cuts off the host and doubles down, just one more time, to express his discomfort with fairness and accuracy. (With these careful excisions, he doesn’t even do the minimal ethical and journalistic requirement of adding an ellipses to the text, indicating a deliberate and justifiable omission, but is instead stealthy and fraudulent.) Paired with this, Klein also prefaces his “unedited” audio of their podcast exchange the same way, with similar misrepresentations to those he writes. Naturally, he does so while implying that he’s being perfectly transparent and honest, so scrupulous in fact that he doesn’t want say or do anything to influence his audience’s opinion of the episode but, of course, preferring to let them decide for themselves. He says this only after surgically removing the same bits in the audio as in the written transcript, and again without acknowledging as much.

All this to say that the two criticisms my friend had about the episode (that it was terrible and lacking in context) were, as I see it, only due to Ezra Klein's professional-grade eagerness to manipulate and deceive. And from this brief encounter, I would argue that Klein makes it explicit that he, more of a sneaky child than a serious adult, is unwilling and unable to deal with reality and shouldn't, in his current iteration, ever be taken seriously.