“Very interesting day at The Washington Post. Left-wing Ezra Klein is out and the much-respected conservative legal blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, is in,” John Nolte writes at Big Journalism.“ Already the Jeff Bezos era is becoming an interesting one.” John links to this press release from the Washington Post:
The Washington Post today announced a partnership with The Volokh Conspiracy, a blog that covers law, public policy, politics, culture and other topics.
Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA, founded the blog in April 2002, and it quickly became a regular destination for Supreme Court junkies, academics, and anyone interested in law and national issues. Most of the contributors are law professors, and include some of the top legal scholars in the nation.
Their expertise covers free speech, religious freedom, guns, criminal procedure, environmental law, business law, national security law, and much more. Some of the contributors also have extensive records in government service, and in high-profile Supreme Court litigation: they include a former federal judge; one of the chief architects of the challenge to the Affordable Care Act individual mandate; a former general counsel for the NSA and former Assistant Secretary for Policy at DHS; and a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.
“In Brazil, you can always find the Amazon — in America, the Amazon finds you,” Eugene Volokh writes in a terrific headline for his first post at the Post. After noting that he started blogging in April of 2002 (that’s right around when I started, incidentally), “In the course of these years, we’ve tried various experiments:”
We’re now trying what might be the most ambitious experiment yet: a joint venture with the Washington Post. The Post will host our blog, and pass along its content to Post readers (for instance, by occasionally linking to our stories from the online front page). We will continue to write the blog, and Volokh.com will still take you here.
We will also retain full editorial control over what we write. And this full editorial control will be made easy by the facts that we have (1) day jobs, (2) continued ownership of our trademark and the volokh.com domain, and (3) plenty of happy experience blogging on our own, should the need arise to return to that.
The main difference will be that the blog, like the other Washingtonpost.com material, will be placed behind the Post’s rather permeable paywall. We realize that this may cause some inconvenience for some existing readers — we are sorry about that, and we tried to negotiate around it, but that’s the Post’s current approach.
Bolding in original. As John Nolte adds, letting Klein move on and bringing in Volokh “are a huge boost for the Post for a few reasons:”
As much as Ezra Klein was worshipped by others in the elite media, he badly damaged the Post’s credibility as an objective news outlet. It was unconscionable of the Post to frame Klein’s hysterical leftism and Obama water-carrying as objective analysis and reporting. Klein is a wild-eyed Statist, and a wildly dishonest one to boot.
Bringing on the Volokh Conspiracy will not only give the Post the sorely needed voices of legitimate conservatives, but unlike Klein the Volokh Conspiracy won’t attempt to hide their ideology. That is a two-fer for the Post and anyone who believes in objective journalism and a diversity of opinions, worldviews, and backgrounds.
A diversity of opinions — what a novel concept for a newspaper that only a few short and disastrous years ago declared “We Are All Socialists Now.” Congrats to the Volokh Conspiracy to helping add a small amount of diversification to what had threatened to become a real conspiracy.
Incidentally, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who once bizarrely described the Post at its near-monolithically leftwing peak as “so neocon I can hardly read it” won’t like the addition of Volokh one bit. But then, anything that ruins Chris Matthews’ day is usually a good thing for the rest of the nation.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member