Plain English with Derek Thompson - Media Report Card! Biden Blues, Omicron Fears, Chris Cuomo, and a Celebrity Profile for the Ages

Episode Date: December 10, 2021

Bryan Curtis from The Ringer’s ‘The Press Box’ podcast joins Derek to hand out grades to the news media for its coverage of Biden, the pandemic, and more.  Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Bryan Curtis Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today I want to talk about the media. We're going to play a little game, media report card, on the press coverage of Joe Biden, Amicron Fears, Chris Cuomo, and a celebrity profile for the ages. I want media criticism to be a part of this show. I think it's important to hold my fellow journalists to account, just as I hope they hold me to account. But first, I want to do a quick spiel on the media.

The most common question that I guess, get as a journalist is some variation of why is the media so X, so liberal, so boring, so just, ugh, negative. And I want to tell them all, the media does not exist. I'm not trying to be weird here. This isn't a conspiracy theory. I'm not saying you're like in the matrix. I'm saying the media as a singular noun is not a thing. The media is 100,000 different newspapers, magazines, websites, TV shows, YouTube shows, podcasts, Twitter accounts, newsletters. For every New York Times, there's a Fox News.

And for every traditional Brooklyn journalist, there is a YouTube conspiracy theorist out there. And if you describe all these things with one adjective, you are going to say something extremely wrong. Like, I sometimes compare it to treating food as a singular. Imagine if someone told you, hey, man, you know, food is too spicy.

You're like, what? What kind of? No, dude, right. food is too spicy. You're like, are Mexican, Thai? No, dude, food is too spicy. This is obviously an absurd conversation, but it's no more absurd than the conversation

that I have with non-journalists about the world of media. The media singular is not a thing. In fact, if you want to understand the media ecosystem, like really understand all of its problems and all of its riotous diversity, the word you need to keep top of mind

is competition. There is so, so much stuff out there, and it's all fighting for the same finite amount of attention. So the media is a gaggle of people and institutions, scrapping not just for clicks, not just for audience, but for an identity, an identity that says, they're all wrong and come to me for the truth. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English.

Today's guest is Brian Curtis. Brian is the co-host of the press box in the Ringer Podcast Network. It is an honor to have him stop by. Brian, welcome to the podcast. How are you, Derek? I'm great. It's so wonderful to have you on the show. So today, we are inaugurating a new feature on plain English.

It's called the Media Report Card. This is where media people engage in a vanishingly rare activity. That is, talk about the media. And I am here with the expert of that subject. I have learned so much from your show, The Press Box. I've studied at your feet. And now jokes aside, I'm just really so excited to have you on the show. It's a real honor.

You're very nice. There is a little bit of a Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man element to all-Media report card and to you and I talking to each other here, but we'll just go through with it. I think it's a good idea. Okay. So the rules of media report card are, number one, we're going to be as specific as possible. The media as a singular does not exist. It's a riotous combination of institutions and individuals,

many of whom hate each other, so don't try to describe the whole thing in one adjective, because we will fail. And number two, this is a pass-fail system. The goal is to determine whether the media, as we define it, is passing or failing its test, to inform the public and report the truth. Brian, I have my red pen and professorial cardigan ready. Shall we begin? Let's do it.

Issue one, is the center-to-center-left media being too mean to Joe Biden? So recently, Dana Milbank, a Washington Post reporter, published an instantly viral op-ed. The headline was, the media treats Biden as badly as or worse than Trump. Here's proof. He writes, quote, my colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy. After a honeymoon of slightly positive coverage in the first three months of the year, Biden's press for the past four months has been about as bad and for a time worse than the coverage Trump received for the same four months of 2020. And this analysis is served up alongside what's called a sentiment analysis that's basically an algorithm, an AI that processes a bunch of news articles, gives weights to

certain words to determine how bad the article is so that the analysis has sort of the imprimatur of AI science. Brian, what is your take here? I think Dana Milbank is totally wrong. And without even looking at his data analytics, let's do what you say and sort of try to figure out, not talk about media, but talk about specific parts of the media. Let's look at the New York Times and the Washington Post. You and I at least look at those two publications every day. And I think if you looked at them last year, they were treating Donald Trump as a very unique threat to democracy for almost all of the last year.

Buried in that newspaper ease was, this is a bad, bad thing going on here, folks. There is a big, big crisis happening in America. Now, if we pick up those papers today and read what they are writing about Joe Biden, They might be reporting about Joe Biden. They might be revealing things that Joe Biden doesn't want them to reveal. But the tone is not the same. And they are not saying things that are worse, quote, unquote, about Joe Biden or treating him worse, quote, unquote, than they were treating Donald Trump.

And I just don't quite understand the argument. I think the analysis exists somewhere between dubious and completely bullshit. Like, sentiment analysis just isn't very good. AI doesn't have ears. It can't determine the exact difference between certain sentences that actually are completely opposite. So here are two sentences that I just sort of picked or wrote at random. Number one, Joe Biden has failed to stop the spread of Delta despite his best efforts. Number two, Donald Trump has failed to uphold basic standards of human decency.

Okay, both of those sentences have the word fail in them. So if you're a dumb AI and you read both sentences and you are trained to just pick up verbs, you're like, wow, both these sentences have the same main verb. But they're not the same sentence. Like the first accused Joe Biden of reacting in a suboptimal way to a global pandemic and the second accused Donald Trump of being something close to subhuman, those aren't the same idea. Like, where I do give the press a failing grade, and I'm interested in your opinion of this,

is that I think we do treat presidents as if they control everything in a world in which they don't. Like, people are furious about gas prices, and I get that. But Biden doesn't set gas prices. He doesn't have a remote control for gas prices. And the media should probably do a better job of saying, like, hey, gas prices, those are actually set by global markets of supply and demand over which the president has limited control. So Biden is overseeing, presiding over an economy in which gas prices are going up, but it's not his fault.

They could do a better job, I think, of disentangling what is happening. versus what Biden can control. But this idea that Joe Biden is being treated the same as Donald Trump across the Washington Post and New York Times, even the Politico's, which have been somewhat mean to the Biden White House, I just don't buy it at all. Yeah, and I think if you had a complaint about the media, quote, unquote, or maybe even the newspapers or Politico,

it's a little bit different, or at least mine would be a little bit different. It's that, okay, you treated Donald Trump as a unique threat to democracy. The media learned things about politics. politics. Maybe marginally, maybe learned it here and there, but they sort of learned things about how politics works. Then Joe Biden becomes president, and for me to read it now, it reads like you're covering him totally like a normal president. You've actually gone back to the old ways of covering presidents, which can be good, but it can also be really, really trivial, right? We've been reading lots of articles about Kamala Harris's staff for the last week. Some of them are probably important.

Some of them probably aren't. So the whole notion of me is actually that you are treating them completely differently, right? And you are not, you haven't learned the lessons of the Trump era. I would also say this, and interested in your thoughts on this, if the media thought that the biggest story of the end of the Trump regime was threats to democracy, that's still a big story, right? As Trump's allies try to take over the machinery in the states, I saw David Purdue, who's running for governor of Georgia in 2022 saying, I wouldn't have certified the election, which was fair and legal, in 2020. So you could probably say, well, shouldn't you be elevating those stories over more banal intrigues of the Biden White House?

Shouldn't you just stay with that story, which they've done in many, many cases again, it's easy to complain. But so maybe that's the critique here that Dana Milbank's trying to get at? I think it's a very, very fair point. I want to put what I think is the sensible version of the Dana Millbank critique alongside what I just said, which is that I think his actual analysis is probably wrong. I think that journalism is in a strong. moment because we are forced to assess the performance of two presidents, one of whom is

completely within the realm of historical normalcy. And the other is completely outside of that realm. So it's a little bit hard to use the same instruments to assess the Trump presidency versus the Biden presidency. And I think a lot of people are still trying to figure out how do we like hold the powerful to account in the Biden White House while at the same time making clear that there is an external threat possibly to the democratic system that's coming from someone who currently holds no presidential power, who's Donald Trump, and his power is sort of you know, almost Fengali power that he has over the Republican Party. I think it's very, very difficult to do, and I'm not sure that we're doing a perfect job of it. In fact, I think

we're often doing an imperfect job of it. But I think that's very, very different than saying that the quality of coverage of Joe Biden is more negative than it is of President Donald Trump. That just completely fails the sniff test to me. I agree. And it's almost a whiplash, isn't it? Just the way the two different presidencies

and then seeing the media in the context of the two different presidencies. Yeah, absolutely. Like, the media always has a negativity bias. This is not a new idea. If it bleeds, it leads, right? And so I saw a lot of people sort of blaming the media's negativity bias for Biden's decline in approval, which has been fairly dramatic over the last few months.

But my response to that is, like, blaming Joe Biden's approval decline on media negativity bias is like saying, I tripped and fell and cracked my tooth because of gravity. Like, you're blaming the universal constant for an acute phenomenon. The media is always negative. The media is always attacking the president because it knows. knows that attacks on people in power tend to get a lot of coverage. That is a long-term, that's just a way the media is. And I think it's probably better for the media to, you know,

afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted rather than the opposite. But I can see how, to be slightly nice to the Dana-Milbeg point, I can see how it can be difficult to scrutinize the Biden White House while at the same time paying equal attention to the fear of Trump. To further step into the Fun House here, you'll remember, too, that the conservative critique or conservative media critique was that reporters were going to lay up once Biden got into the White House. That's right.

Remember that coronavirus was going to end. They were going to stop covering, which, as you say, misunderstands everything about the incentives reporters have at major publications to get ahead and get promoted in. stay on really big beats. They want to break news. They want to report critically. Yes. So it is a really, really weird situation we find ourselves in. Yes. So if I'm giving a pass-fail grade to the Dana Milbank piece, I'm giving the Dana Milbank piece a fail. And if I'm giving a pass-fail grade to general media coverage of the Biden presidency, I'm giving it essentially a push, something in the middle. I think that, I think the press

has over-attributed the problems of the economy and the problems of Delta to Biden. But at the same time, I want a media ecosystem that is scrutinizing people in power rather than saying there's some other threat that's worse than what people in the White House are doing. And so I'm going to I'm going to sandbag it a little bit. How do you feel? Yeah. It's like when the teacher passes you, but sends a note home to your parents. There is. I have some concerns. I have a passing grade, but I have a few concerns. That's where I am. Obviously a pro here because you're even better at the past fail, schick than I am. Okay. Issue number two, COVID and Amacron. The Amacron news is so interesting because it's a very clear case where I think readers and viewers and listeners

are overloaded with information and underserved with meaning. It's like a zillion factoid's and not a lot of so what. And you had Dan Diamond, great reporter for The Washington Post on your podcast last week to talk about his approach to Amicom coverage and how he thinks the media is doing. how do you think the media that you consume is doing with the Omicron variant? It's really complicated, right? Because the media in this case, and again, talking very broadly, doesn't have the answer to the money question we want at this moment. You know, we have news about Pfizer today. We have clues about Amicron, but we don't have the answer to the big question, which is,

so how bad is Ammocrine going to be? And in what way, what particular way is it going to be bad? So it's a really weird story to cover. I saw Charlie Worsel compared this to a tropical depression the other day, which is, you know, on cable news where everybody puts the rain slickers on and gets on the beach and goes, it's coming. It's coming. We don't know if it's going to be the worst hurricane ever. We don't even know it's going to be a hurricane at all, but it's coming that thing over there. Yes.

We can see it. And when I read the coverage, I think that's a perfect metaphor because everybody is and the responsible news outlets are straining to say, yes, but. But yes, but we think this, we don't know that. So it is hard to find something very clear cut. But I wonder, is that just where we are with Omicron? And that's not a failure among reporters. I think, first of all, I love the Charlie metaphor. I think that's great.

Charlie writes a newsletter for the Atlantic. I think it's especially great because, you know, when that guy is standing on the beach and point of the sky, the sky is always dark. It's a little bit windy and it's raining. And that can be a prelude to a category one, a category zero, or a category five. And to a certain extent, that's where we were with Amicron, especially a week ago. I think it goes even like a level deeper toward how people think about journalism.

Like, I sometimes hear people say, the media should just report the truth. Why don't you guys just report the truth? And they'll sometimes use this metaphor of like, when it's raining, say it's raining. And when it's sunny, say it's sunny. And like, look, a lot of media sources really are total pieces of shit, very ideological team-picking. if my enemies say it, then it's wrong. They're outrage mongers. A lot of them are bad.

But so much of the time, reasonable journalists get things wrong, not because the world has like a clear, because the world doesn't have a clear window looking out into the sunlight and the rain. Like most of the time the truth requires us to be like a person who's in a dark cell looking up at the tiny window at the top of the wall, like just straining our necks and trying to see an incomplete picture out of that little tiny, you know, plate of glass.

So, like, here's a fun fact about Amicron. Not a fun fact, just a fact. Amicron's... Bringing fun about to Amicron. It's a little bit hopeful. So Amicron seems to be associated with less severe illness and fewer ICU admissions in South Africa.

And that is absolutely reason for hope. We did not know this the first day we all heard about it. It's reason for hope. But does it mean Ammocron is less severe? Does it mean that elderly vaccinated Americans have nothing to worry about? No, we just don't know. So this idea people have about like, look out the window, tell me if it's raining. Sorry, that's not how the world works. It doesn't

appear to us as rain or sunshine. Can I ask you a question, and this is fascinated me, do you prefer to read about something like Amacron in the form of an old-fashioned news article or in a more newfangled newsletterie explainer? Unpack what you mean my old-fashioned article and And newsletterie explainer just for people who don't get the distinction. So we mentioned Dan Diamond of the Washington Post when they did their first major article about Amicron the other day. It was paragraph after paragraph quoting experts, going over the evidence so far. I made fun of Dan because his money quote was actually in the 31st paragraph of the article.

Right. We are being as responsible as humanly possible to present the information in a little bit of a drier form. No offense to anybody. But this is, again, it's, you know, fact, fact. fact, fact, fact, rather than a more personalized explainer in a newsletter like David Leonhardt's writing for The New York Times, where you say, hey, buddy, grabbing you by a little pales, here's the news, here's what it means to you. Which of those do you like better?

I'm going to offer a pathetic, squishy synthesis. I like sandwiches. I like giving me the upshot up top if I have five seconds, giving me a longer upshot at the bottom if I have 30 seconds, and giving me the full context in the middle, right? Executive summary, long, detailed nitty-gritty analysis, final upshot, right? So the nitty-gritty, the complexity, the data, the evidence, the raw data without interpretation, that's the stuffing in my Oreo that I want, right? And sometimes I'll want that. Sometimes I'll have time for the stuffing, but a lot of times, like,

I just have five minutes, or excuse me, I just have five seconds. And this is true of a lot of people. Like, in my own writing, I try to be very sensitive to the fact that people have a wide diversity of time and interest in my subject. When I wrote a book, I joked that books have to pass the broken elevator test. And that means you need to be able to explain the book in five seconds in an elevator pitch. But if the elevator breaks and you're stuck in there for seven hours, the book needs to be entertaining for seven hours. That's like the length of a book on tape. So the book has to pass the

broken elevator test. And I think that complicated articles have to pass a certain broken elevator test as well. What do you think? What's your preference? Well, I think one thing that it came up in the conversation with Dan is that is Omicron and the coronavirus generally the best subject to explainer away. Now, we've got to do some of it. You're doing it going to do some of your podcast. David and I'll do a lesser extent on our podcast. There'll be newsletters. But have we reached a subject that if somebody is not as conversant, let's say, with public health, that that's really the best way to understand it. Yeah.

Or is it complicated enough and changing enough and bewildering enough, even to public health officials, that there is a limit to the whole explainer way of viewing the world? So this is extremely apropos. About 35 seconds ago, I now see, my article went up at the Atlantic called Here's Everything I Think I Know about Amicron. And position heal themselves. And I try to do a sandwich.

I try to explain up top what I'm doing, have an upshot at the bottom, and work through the nitty-gritty in the middle. And the reason, again, I think it's really important to offer people quick upshots that are oversimplifications, right? All simplifications are oversimplifications. But the reason I think it's important to do that is that, like, people need to make decisions now. They are, whether or not they read David or Dan or you or me, they're going to make decisions about travel and school and weddings and funerals and holidays, and they're making those decisions in the face of imperfect information. So if we don't give any kind of upshot, if we don't give any kind of simplified synthesis of what the informed opinion is of the writer who spent all this time in the

minds of Amicron information, I think we're underserving our readership because we're, we're We're not doing that last bit of service of essentially like acting as a friend. If a friend asked me, should I go see my grandmother? I'd probably give advice. So why would I give advice to a friend and not to readers? I don't understand that distinction. So that's why in my work, even when I'm uncertain, I do my best to come to a conclusion. Yeah, even in the face of the most bewildering possible news story, which this actually might be, or at least on the metal stand.

Yeah. So, I mean, I'm going to give the media that I consume Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, Atlantic, which I think, frankly, not the Atlantic, but a lot of the others who have done a scattershot job of coverage during the pandemic. I'm going to give us a rare pass on Omicron. I think the level of caution has been appropriate. I think the level of gisting has been appropriate. The level of constrained hope is a little bit appropriate for people who are vaccinated and for people who have boosters. Because to give my own upshot, the data on severe illness for people who are vaccinated and especially people who are boosted

is a lot more hopeful than we thought it would be, I think, a week ago. And that's important. It's still critical that we vaccinate the rest of the world, but a lot of people reading me have two shots in them, maybe even three, and that's an important thing to share. So are you pass, fail, or push on the media coverage that you've confronted? Also, passing grade on this,

and I think most of the people, even the people reporting on it, would agree that they've gotten better and better at writing about this over the course of the last now. almost two years. So it's one of, it's the media coverage. It's not only passing, but I think it's improving probably with every month or two. I agree with that. Yeah, we're developing muscle memory about dealing with uncertainty and dealing with epidemiological uncertainty. And that's a good point. All right, issue three, Chris Cuomo. The most watched anchor on CNN was fired last weekend by CNN head Jeff Zucker. Cuomo had survived several mini scandals. He had physical altercations. There were some

accusations of unwelcome physical behavior. And obviously there were questions about his relationship with brother, former New York governor, Anthony Cuomo, as the latter Cuomo was being forced out of office for multiple accusations of sexual harassment. Then finally, all hell breaks loose. I'm reading now a summary from Variety. Quote, New York State Attorney General, Letitia James, released documents showing Cuomo took an active hand in helping his brother while the politician was accused of sexual harassment. After all that, CNN felt its anchor had used up the proverbial nine lives. Brian, say more about what you see as the journalistic sins Cuomo committed here and why they're so egregious. Well, there's so many, to begin with,

from advising your brother while you're playing a journalist on TV. But I would say the one that really got to me was the stuff in the AG's report that you referred to. He was using journalistic techniques. He was running down leads. He was helping his brother shape statements, or at least the office shape statements that would then go out to the public. This is what journalists do. We write things down and we say them and they go out to the public. But he was doing it not for his viewers. He was doing it on behalf of the person in power. Bingo. I mean, that is just mind-blowing that that was happening. And again, I think you, I don't think Andrew Cuomo or excuse me, Chris Cuomo, should have come back after we found out what we found out in the spring, which he was advising

his brother. I think he should have been gone right then. But certainly now when you see journalistic power used in that very, very strange way. I promise. Listeners, we did not exchange notes about this issue. But what I have written down here in my notes is, quote, Chris Cuomo was being an investigative reporter for his brother while not being an investigative reporter for CNN on his brother. And that is just, That's just a fatal flaw. And it's a fatal flaw that, like, I think you mentioned this in your pod. A lot of people right after this news came out said, truth be told, gun on my head,

I do this for a family member too. And my response to that, I'm shaking your head. I don't know your response to it too. My response to it is, fine. I love my sister. I love the shit out of her. But, like, if I stopped being a journalist for the Atlantic to be an undercover reporter for my sister to save her career,

I would expect the Atlantic to fire me, right? By choosing my sister over the Atlantic, I would be literally choosing my sister over the Atlantic, and therefore, of course, I should lose my job at the Atlantic. What was your take on sort of the sort of ironic sort of like, you know, Twitter-contrary in defense of Chris Cuomo's behavior? It was a totally a false choice, and Chris Cuomo was the one who wants to lure us into this.

false choice. Hey, do I have to abandon my brother or do not abandon my brother? That's actually not the choice. It's you can go help your brother and leave CNN. You could have done that at any point. You could have said, even if my brother has done something wrong, family is so important to me that I'm going to give up my multimillion dollar job and go help him. I say that I think it's all the time. Whenever I see a journalistic scandal, whenever journalists are behaving this way, they're telling us they don't want to be a journalist anymore. They're coming out and telling us, I don't want to be hemmed in by the rules of journalism. It is up to us, Derek, and to CNN and Jeff Zucker in this case, to listen to the people saying that. Oh, oh, you don't. Okay. Then great. You're out of here.

But sometimes we just don't listen to people that are telling us they don't want to be journalists. And then something like this happens. He gets another six months at CNN. Obviously, the past fail for Chris Cuomo is not a particularly mystie. serious, grade. How do you grade Jeff Zucker and CNN here? How do you think they did? Ludacrously bad, and on the scale I just gave you, because, again, this should have been handled in the spring immediately when it came to light. You should have said, you clearly don't want to be a journalist. Do you want to advise your brother? Goodbye. And they didn't, and now they're paying the price for it. And why do you think Zucker changed his mind? There was some talk about the fact that

some sexual harassment allegations were coming in in the 11th hour at the same time that the Attorney General's report was coming in, which made it a little bit hard to disentangle. Is Cuomo being fired for his journalistic sins, or is he being fired for his professional sexual harassment sins? Both important. I'm not trying to put one over the other. But it does make it hard, I think, to know exactly on what information Zucker was acting. Yeah, and I don't quite have the answer to that, but I will say the particular nature of the last round of journalistic sins. And you're running down leads on accusers of your brother.

You were acting as a journalist to help him fend off these accusations of misconduct. I think CNN didn't have a choice at that point. We're internal agreement here. Fail, fail, fail. Issue number four, I want to ask you about what might be the most talked about celebrity profile in my corner of the world that I can recall. This was The New Yorker on Jeremy Strong, an extremely intense, extremely, talented actor who stars in the show Succession on HBO, which is, I think, in the pantheon

of greatest shows, the 21st century and probably one of the top 10 dramas of all time, in my opinion. I'm obsessed. I was obsessed with this profile. I could go on for an hour about it, but Brian, give me your reaction. It's fascinating. First of all, it's a great piece. I gobbled up every single line of the piece and every single quote, especially every quote from a fellow succession cast member, which just read so differently, has been really interesting to watch the response to this piece on Twitter

because I think a lot of people are like you and I saying, wow, what a fabulous, complicated celebrity profile, which we don't always read these days. But I also see a lot of people that I think their brains have been totally scrambled by it

because we're so used to, on social media and elsewhere, getting just PR from celebrities, this direct, unfiltered feed of the celebrity injected into my veins, they're doing something funny, they're tweeting at their significant other thing, that when we read something like this that is conceived on completely different terms, we're like, what the hell am I looking at? Yes, I thought it was such a fascinating interview, in part in contrast to other celebrity

interviews, in this age of the celebrity interview, where I feel like, and this might be an unfair characterization, so hold me to the fire here. But I feel like so many celebrity interviews these days are about finding heroes and profiling them rather than about finding celebrities and excavating whether or not they're heroes. Right? Like so much of the time, and this is part, in part because I think a lot of media, not all of it, I'll try to be as specific as possible, a lot of glossy magazines, a lot of newspapers, even the New York Times, Washington Post, that this era of celebrity profile is such where the writer will find a celebrity with whom they are topically or even ideologically aligned

and then write about how they are the boss killing it on this issue. So the celebrity profile is almost pre-filtered for criticism, right? Here, it's not pre-filtered for criticism. It's unbelievable all of the sort of barely contained contempt that a lot of people in his career, Aaron Sorkin, a previous director, other actors that he works with,

contempt might not be the right word. Criticism is probably the right word. But they barely contain criticism that they have for his style, which is something called method acting. Daniel DeLuis is famous for doing this. Marlon Brando might have been the famous sort of the celebrity originator of it.

But this is basically a way of getting deep, deep, deep into character and staying in character even when you're having the cold cuts between shots. what did you make of the method-acti side of this? I have an acting background. I have a whole thing I'm going to do on this in just a sec, but were you surprised by his behavior and how incredibly deep he gets into roles, even when they're sort of like B, C, D-Roles in a movie or show? I was surprised by the forms it took. Because, again, having been a student of celebrity profiles and journalism more generally, I think when you read these, you see the little leaked story or

photo from the sets like, oh, he's even pretending to be the character between takes. You know, he was, he was in character the whole time. Like, that's what counts. Here, we find him, you know, doing all kinds of things, right? Including his own kind of worship fanboy, whatever you want to call it, of certain actors like Daniel Day Lewis and Al Pacino. And what I think was so, and what, if I can, if I can just, like, crawl out on a limb for a second, I think what was so interesting about when you talk about going to find the boss

man and the way we write about celebrities now, he was kind of doing that as a professional role model himself, right? He was picking actors and being like, not only do I want to be like you, I want to be in your presence, right? I want to have this relic of this letter that Daniel Day Lewis sent me one time that I will not tell you what it is, but it contains all these things I think about the world. And that was just so fascinating to me to read about because I think it's the way a lot of people interact with famous people and with the world. And I think a lot of people don't want to admit that. So it's interesting to see it here.

I thought, so before I was a journalist, I was an actor. I did Shakespeare in musical theaters in D.C. At a bunch of professional theaters around D.C. Before and just after I went to college. The thing, I was not a method actor, that's for sure. The thing about method acting that I think is so interesting about this profile is that typically method acting is done as a kind of pay-on or compliment to the actor.

Oh, Dedo de Louis was so great in Lincoln because he acted like Lincoln while taking a piss. You know, like that's the way those celebrity profiles are written. It's like he was so committed to the role that he studied the way that like 19th century people like walked to and used the bathroom.

Isn't that astonishing? That's why the performance has so much verisimilitude. But dealing with method actors is really fucking annoying. It's really annoying. Other actors don't like it. So I have to read from the article here, quote, when I ask, this is the New Yorker writer, when I asked Brian Cox, who plays Logan, the patriarch of succession, to describe Jeremy Strong's

process, he struck a note of fatherly concern, quote, the result that Jeremy gets is always pretty tremendous. I just worry about what he does to himself. I worry about the crises he puts himself through in order to prepare. Cox, a classically trained British actor, has a, quote, turn it on, turn it off approach to acting. And his relationship. relationship with Strong recalls a famous story about Lawrence Olivier, famous middle of the 20th century Shakespearean actor, working with Dustin Hoffman on the 1976 film Marathon Man. On learning that Hoffman had stayed up partying for three nights before a scene in which he had to appear sleep deprived, Olivier said, my dear boy, why don't you try acting? And like that, what I love about that,

it's an amazing section, and they're just so many little nuggets. They're just like that. What I love about that is just like the tiny little window that it gives into the theater community, or at least my sliver of the theater community, which was that in every show, in every project, there's that guy or that woman who is taking things a little bit too seriously and not always getting superior results from it. And it is excruciating to live alongside. Like there might be sort of analogs for, I don't know, for journalism, people that like get on a high horse about, like, like the pursuit of truth, but they're not actually like that good at reporting out the news, or maybe people just have someone like this in their own life. But this discrepancy that exists sometimes between, like, the absolute solemnity with which some people take their jobs and the quality in which they actually perform those jobs is often cavernous. In this case, Jeremy Strong happens to be an extremely fucking talented actor.

But anyway, what's behind the scenes here is method actors can be really ething annoying. Can we track back to the journalism point you made about the ways that celebrity profiles, are written now, and I know there's a long history of that, but for this current crop, to what do you attribute that to? I have a slightly oversimplified and maybe unfair opinion that, for a variety of reasons, too much mainstream media, media at places like the New York Times, The Washington Post, has become extremely team picky. It's become people. who have a set of values, they hold very dear. And sometimes those values are good values in the global picture.

But they have a set of values, and they can sometimes see journalism as a means of advancing those pieces of ideology rather than as a means of simply discovering cool stuff that is true. And if you pursue journalism, I think, through a mode of trying to represent a finite set of favorite values, then your approach to topics like a celebrity interview will not be, let me just look around at interesting people that are doing interesting things,

reach into their mess of a life, and see what I pull up. Instead, you're going to have a certain ideological filter on when you began the celebrity profiling job, and you're going to pick celebrities whose lives have a thesis that is in line with the thesis that you came to that project with.

And that, I think, is an ethos that's become a little bit rampant in this sliver of journalism that I'm talking about. I think it's gotten a little bit worse since Trump, because Trump was such an odious, gargantuan monster in so many ways

that picking teams felt safer in a Trump regime because of the right team felt clearer, making that choice felt clear, but I think that it's made some corners of journalism less interesting, and I think the celebrity profile is one such corner. I agree with a lot of that, and I think also, you know, just the technology, right?

It's like, so you're writing for your audience is not your editor so much as it is people on Twitter. And if you pick a celebrity and say, this celebrity is also awesome in real life, then that profile is going to just track much better on Twitter than if you say this person's really complicated or maybe kind of shitty, right? Like, that just doesn't, that doesn't work. And I'll also, and just to indict both of us before we go here, I think the rise of podcasting is involved in this, by the way, because I think in a way, we've all become Jimmy Fallon. There are some really good, hard, interesting, thoughtful podcast interviews.

You and I hope to do those every week or at least once, maybe twice a week. But a lot of podcast interviews just become like, here is the famous person, aren't they cool. I'm going to talk to them for 45 minutes. and it's never going to get to a place like this with Jeremy Strong. It's never going to get to those kind of places. And so I think, in a way, I just think the whole apparatus has really, really changed the way we sort of process these things. Yeah, I think that's right. And just to give one quick example, look, I think, you know, Alexandria Ocasia Cortez is an extraordinary figure.

But I think that there's like an aOCification of the celebrity profile, if you kind of see what I mean. Like, there are celebrity profiles that are made of certain characters that are clearly, where that character clearly is fitting the ideology of the writer. And then this is just like a further example of why that ideology is right. That's just an example of where I kind of see this going. But look, I think your point is also really well taken. That there's something about social media that flattens the distinction between non-celebrities and celebrities. we all feel like many celebrities when we're performing online

and getting a bunch of likes on a tweet or something and the celebrities have more sort of direct access to the people because they're not coming to them merely through movies or albums,

but they're talking to them directly on Twitter and Instagram and maybe there's something about that flattening between celebrities and the public that has also made the celebrity profile less antagonistic and more like,

hey, I think found a buddy who happens to be famous, who agrees with most things that I think. Here's 5,000 words on that. So we're going to pass Michael Schulman and fail the celebrity profile as a vehicle? That's where we're headed here. I would agree with that. I would agree with that diagnosis with that grading system. I give a hard, hard pass. I get a hard pass. No, hard pass. I was going to say, wait a second. I give a pass with flying, flying colors in A++ and Celebrity Profile in the New Yorker and a mild fail to the ecosystem of celebrity profiles that pre-existed it. Brian, thank you so, so much for helping me negotiate my way through my first media report card,

and I will see you on the pods very soon. Thanks, Derek. Thanks for having me. Plain English with Derek Thompson is produced by Devin Manzi. If you like what you hear, please follow, rate, and review us. New episode drops on Tuesday. Have a great weekend.