A Late-Afternoon Chat with Vox’s Ezra Klein

Interview by Grace Portelance and Sam Klein | Photo by Zeke Saucedo

WUPR invited Ezra Klein, editor-in-chief of Vox, to address the Wash U community last month before the debate on our campus. Before his speech in Graham Chapel, editors-in-chief Grace Portelance and Sam Klein (no relation) sat down with Mr. Klein for an interview on pol­itics, the modern media landscape, and a bit of career advice. The following is a transcript of that conversation that has been edited for clar­ity and length.

Grace Portelance: Because this is such an election-focused season, are there any big po­litical issues that are important to you that are being overshadowed by the election?

Ezra Klein: So, everything is being overshad­owed by the election. I think about a relative of this question a lot, which is, when people write a history of this era, from 2075, what will they write about? I don’t think they’re going to write about the things we’re talking about. Building a wall, for instance, is not going to be a major piece of it. So there are bunch of things I think about, but I don’t think they’re anywhere near the political agenda. It’s not like I think the era is going to be defined by whether or not we’re able to come to a deal on repatriating overseas corporate tax income. What is within the zone of the possible doesn’t seem to me like the most important things right now. But I think there are really big things happening. We are developing the capacity to do genuine gene editing with CRISPR. I think that it’s possible when people write the history of this era, that’s what they’re going to write about. Driverless cars are emer­gent. I think how quickly those get adopted and under which regulatory scheme they get adopt­ed is important.

I think we have a tendency to get very trapped in the problems of the Middle East in a way that makes it a little more difficult to think about some of the other major international trends, primarily among those what looks to me like a genuinely existential crisis for the European project. I worry that we are very far from having the right issue set in our politics.

Sam Klein: One thing that historians do try to look at is legacy of presidents, of congresses. Apart from being the first black president, do you think Obamacare will be the President’s legacy issue, assuming it holds? Or is there something else you think could be a legacy for him?

I think he’s going to have no surfeit of legacy. As you say, he’s the first black president. He steered the US without the Federal Reserve— with some policy that came out of the George W. Bush administration—but substantially helped steer the US through the most serious recession since the Great Depression. It’s pretty clear now that against international benchmarks, and against how bad it could’ve been, this went better than one might have feared. He brought the Iraq and Afghanistan wars more or less to a close, passed a massive set of financial regu­lations, passed Obamacare. We’re currently in the longest sustained run of private-sector job growth the country’s ever seen.

We have a tendency in this country to like pres­idents a lot better a few years after they leave office. George W. Bush left basically a loathed figure, and is now a basically liked, if not revered, one. I think it’s pretty likely that Obama ends up quite highly ranked, ten, fifteen years from now. I didn’t mention there the Iran nuclear deal, which, assuming it works, is a very big deal, and the Paris climate agreements. He has gotten a lot done. And getting a lot done blazing the po­litical trail he has—there is a lot that historians are going to be able to work with as they assess his presidency. Whether you like Obama or hate him, one thing you can’t deny is that he’s been tremendously consequential. I think this is go­ing to go down as one of those presidencies that was a bit of a pivot point in American history.

GP: One of the things that strikes me about the Obama presidency is that it seems like it was the first celebrity presidency. I feel like Obama was in front of the media a lot more than previ­ous presidents. What do you see in the future of this “media presidency,” and do you think that this election is different in that respect?

I think that the media is changing more than the presidency is changing. I think people have been talking about notions of that at least going back to Kennedy. There were FDR’s fireside chats. I think you’re feeling that there’s an omnipres­ence to media that is beyond anything we’ve ever experienced as a species, and Obama has, depending on how you think about it, benefit­ted or suffered from that. I think that will con­tinue, just because the underlying trends like having a smartphone in your pocket, are going to continue.

I’m not sure how much it changes his presiden­cy. He is out there, but he’s not that accessible. Members of the media do not consider Obama to be an especially accessible president. There were presidents before him who did many more press conferences, who did many more inter­views. He is not unusually open.

One thing that has been interesting that [the Obama administration] has not necessarily pi­oneered, but that they have emphasized more heavily is using non-political forms of media in semi-political ways. They’ve been very aggres­sive about things like “Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis” and appearing in a lot of mag­azines that have nothing to do with politics, try­ing to reach people where their political defens­es aren’t already up.

SK: Would you say people are consuming me­dia in smaller increments now, and how can or­ganizations adapt?

I guess in the sense that smaller increments are now available. They’re sure consuming a lot of media. It’s true that they don’t consume it all in a singular bundle in the way they used to. The amount of time people spend on Facebook is astounding, and the amount of media they see in a day on Facebook is astounding. The quantity of that kind of information people are absorbing might be higher than ever even as it is more fractured than ever.

I think the primary way [the media] is adapt­ing to that is by pumping out more volume. Past technologies constrained how much we could do—you only had so many pages in a newspa­per or magazine, there’s only so many hours of news on the network. Now there’s the endless expanse of the internet. It puts less focus on individual units of content and more focus on just blasting a lot out. I don’t think just doing as much as you can is a strategy for success, but doing more and trying to hit more groups and appeal to more digital constituencies is part of what folks are doing.

The other thing that is changing is that now it’s pretty cheap to make good videos and pretty seamless to distribute them through Youtube, through Facebook, through Snapchat. Video di­visions are becoming a more central part of our

identity.

GP: How do you cut through the bullshit? What is your vision for the future of Vox within this endless landscape?

I think the abundance of bullshit actually creates a lot of opportunity. People are overwhelmed by the amount of information coming at them, so if you have the ability to rationalize that, to slow it down, to give people a certain amount of em­powerment around the news space they’re in, there’s a lot of hunger for that.

We are providing a service that a pretty over­whelmed group of folks needed or found useful. Explainer journalism at its core is taking things that you’re hearing about and you’re curious about and then giving you the contextual in­formation necessary to understand them. The problem that we’re trying to solve is that by the time most of us are made aware of a sto­ry, that story has already been going on for days, weeks, months, maybe even years. And a lot of the foundational information necessary for un­derstanding the latest twists and turns has al­ready been distributed, and so we missed it. We are developing a lot of different formats that are able to give you that information and provide a grounding so that you’re able to catch up. It’s a thing I think people need more than ever.

SK: If you were moderating a presidential de­bate, and you had to ask both of the candidates the same question, what would you ask them?

I probably would give it more thought than to think of it on the spot. But with that disclaim­er said, I’ve interviewed a bunch of politicians, and I like asking politicians questions that force them to articulate their theories and not their plans. I think they go on autopilot when they talk about plans, and so what you want to try to get to is more fundamental questions of how they think the underlying problems work. So let’s say the question was on the economy. A question I would like to hear both of them answer is, “why do you think labor force participation rates have fallen all through the developed world?”

Because what I’m trying to find is how they think the thing is working, not just what their poli­cy advisor has said to do about it. Similarly on health care, I would like to hear why they think prices for surgeries, drugs, doctor’s visits, nights in a hospital are multiples higher in the US than in Germany, in the UK, in Canada, in Japan, and if they think we’re getting enough for our mon­ey. Questions like that I think can be pretty re­vealing because they help you understand why the politician is coming up with their answer or if they even have an underlying framework for the answers they’re coming up with. I’m not cer­tain that all the candidates currently running for president do. The one thing I would not ask at all about is anything that’s in current events.

GP: No emails?

I think it would be very interesting to ask them both about their underlying views on govern­ment communications. I think it is beyond doubt that Hillary Clinton screwed up having a pri­vate email server. But there’s also an interest­ing question of whether emails should be seen as informal or formal. And that is only getting more severe as we have this profusion of digi­tal communication. There’s a real issue around whether we want to drive communications of government officials into less technologically in­tense mediums because they are afraid of see­ing everything they say off-the-cuff show up in a congressional hearing some day. That doesn’t absolve Hillary Clinton of anything, but it is a very real question. It is interesting to me that somehow all the people interested in this don’t seem interested in making the laws around re­cordkeeping any more sensible or clear or useful. Sometimes I wonder if people care about email management at all. [laughter] Maybe there’s another reason they’re so fascinated by this. And the f—ing classification system. Say what you will about Hillary Clinton, but there is a real issue of over-classification in the government that is a really bad thing, and it would be great to have a real conversation about that.

GP: Whose responsibility is it then to push for this additional transparency, to realign what these candidates are talking about?

The media is responsible!

GP: Is that something people agree on that the media has been unsuccessful at?

I think I have idiosyncratic opinions about how the media should work.

SK: If you were sitting across from your 20-year-old self, and you had to give one piece of career advice, what would you give?

I don’t think I’d want to screw anything up! The career advice went OK.

SK: What career advice would you give us?

For journalists, the best is to trade prestige for opportunity. It’s better to be at a place that maybe is not as well-known where you actu­ally get to write or edit or do photojournalism or whatever it is you want to do than to be at a place where it’s better-known but all you do is get coffee. I think a lot of people are fighting for the prestige of the résumé line as opposed to the experience of actually getting to do the work. For me it was useful because I was in the early days of blogging, and it was just my blog. I definitely needed to be writing on it, so I got a lot of writing experience. I think sometimes people are going for the stuff that sounds good rather than the stuff that’s good for them.

SK: Well thank you so much!

GP: Thank you for taking the time to talk with us.