No Compromise, No Co-Opt, No Giving Out Or Giving Up Or Giving In

One day a few weeks ago I was walking past the Commonwealth clothing boutique that’s beneath my gym and I saw a t-shirt that had the words NO SELLOUT printed across the chest. As it happened, that night I was going out to celebrate my friend Ezra Klein’s hiring at the Washington Post. I thought the shirt would make a funny gift and so I bought it for him.

No need. If anyone needed any proof that going to a mainstream media publication wouldn’t silence or change Ezra or get him to pull his punches, it came today. He was breathtakingly candid and impressively bold in denouncing his newspaper’s aborted effort at shaking down lobbyists for access with the Obama administration, Congress and its own newsroom. He criticized his employers’ plan as "appalling" a few hours after the story broke. Then he addressed it again in a livechat. And then, characteristically, he used it to launch a policy discussion. If you follow Ezra’s Twitter, he’s been tweeting against the pay-for-play salons, too.

Remember that this is a guy who represents a risk for the Post — a DFH blogger, a very young man with no mainstream-media experience, in a new position at the paper. He could have easily decided that discretion was the better part of valor. After all, how many of us, really, are going to publicly criticize the people who sign our paychecks when they make decisions that jeopardize our integrity? We all tell ourselves that we will, but we never really know until we’re in that extremely uncomfortable position. Well, no one needs to wonder how Ezra Klein would behave in that situation, because he proved what he’s made of today.