The Press Box - A Sportswriter Introduces Himself to Caitlin Clark, the Trump Trial Isn’t on TV, and NPR-mageddon With Derek Thompson

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

Hello media consumers! Bryan welcomes a fellow Ringer podcast host, Derek Thompson of ‘Plain English,’ to discuss the following: Donald Trump’s trial not being televised (1:58) A sportswriter “introducing” himself to Caitlin Clark (11:28) Reactions to Uri Berliner’s essay, which details why he can't work for NPR (16:51) Derek's podcast about how boring the 2024 election is (35:45) Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Derek Thompson Producers: Eduardo Ocampo and Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And don't forget to follow the ringer NFL on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X at ringer NFL. Hello, media and consumers. Welcome to Press Box. Brian Curtis of the ringer here along with producers Brian Waters and Eduardo Ocampo. coming up on the podcast, Donald Trump's first criminal trial will not be televised. A sports writer introduces himself to Caitlin Clark, NPR McGidden, and how the media can get readers to care about an election they don't seem to care about. All of this with our guest host today, he is Derek Thompson, staff writer at the Atlantic where he writes about everything,

including recently The Dip in Church Going and the American Embrace of Chaos. He is the host of his very own podcast here at the Ringer, plain English. Derek, welcome to the press box. It is such an honor to be here. It is so infrequently said, long-time listener, first-time co-host. I mean, what a privilege. But that is my situation right now, and I am so excited for this. So thanks for having me on.

Oh, my gosh. So excited to have you here. Let's briefly talk about the Donald Trump trial. Donald Trump's on trial in New York City charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. This is all related to the Stormy Daniels Hush payment scheme from 2016. Seems newsy, Derek, but if you want to see the trial, you have to rely on courtroom sketches because the trial is not on TV. Paul Farhey, former Washington Post reporter, tweets, still amazing that the primary visual record of the first criminal trial of a former U.S.

president will be produced by methods employed in the 15th or 16th, centuries, what happens do you think if the first trial of Donald Trump is not on TV? It is interesting because Donald Trump is such a figure of television and not a figure of the illuminated manuscript. I don't know exactly what technology Paul is referring to, but 13th century manuscript illuminations is essentially what we're going with, except they're happening on tablets rather than on parchment. The decision to televise a trial seems to depend on a variety of factors, the profile of the case, the discretion of the judge, the degree to which it's a federal or state case. To me, the most interesting question that this ladders up to is whether exposure

to Trump on television helps or hurts him. This is a question that I've been back and forth on a lot. I think it's actually a much harder question to answer than a lot of people think. You would think that Trump, who is the ultimate television performer, would be automatically helped by the presence of cameras. I think it's a matter of generally understood conventional wisdom that his ubiquity on cable news in 2015 helped as a sentencing in the GOP primary that year. And it's, you know, clearly his ability to blot out the sun is a part of what makes him so powerful in the GOP. But one thing I'm really interested in is like, look what happens when people watch him talk. He seems to get less popular when people, I should say, when independence and sort of possible Biden to Trump-leaning voters

can see what he has to say. He's been leading Biden in the polls in the last few months, while he's been banned from Twitter, while there's been, and we're going to talk about this a little bit, less interest in the 2024 sequel to the 2020 election, there's a lot of Biden to Trump leaning voters who seem disconnected from politics right now.

So in a way, Trump seems most strongest, seems strongest among people who are disengaged from the whole plotline of this election. So there's a way in which I think a lot of liberals are saying, wait, the more we can get Trump on camera saying crazy stuff, the more moderates are reminded of his craziness, in which case him being on camera doesn't help him at all. So I don't know. I'm a little bit torn on the degree to which being on camera or being in illuminated

manuscripts, you know, illustrations is the thing that helps him here either in the election or in the case itself. think. I'm torn like you are and I'm amazed at the way this argument has now come full circle. From 2016, let's show the entire Trump rally to let's show none of the Trump rally or a very edited fact check portion of the Trump rally to now people like your colleague McKay Cobbins at the Atlantic saying, no, no, no, you don't understand what Trump is saying at these rallies anymore. People, people have, as you say, have unplugged and don't see the degree of crazy there. So now we've almost come all the way around to we must explore this, if not put it on television unfiltered.

We must see it in some way or another. And McKay's point, which I think is so intelligent, is that by not seeing more of Trump in these performances, it's not just that people don't have the ability to make up their mind about him. I think a lot of people have had plenty of time to make up their mind about Donald Trump. It's that you don't actually understand what this phenomenon is right now. what this phenomenon feels like. He's talked a lot about Mrs. McKay, Coppins,

as Stafford at the Atlantic, about how Trump rallies now have this almost religious feel to them that Trump has, maybe in ways there are somewhat implicit, implicit, I'm not sure he's making this point explicitly, as someone who is besieged, who is under threat by the powers that be in Washington, is representing himself to his followers as something like a Jesus figure.

a religious figure whose death strengthened his legacy rather than meant the end of the message. And so I think McKay is a very interesting point here that when we see less of Trump, we see less of the power he has over the MAGA right, but we also see less of the power he has over people that might be persuaded in the middle. And I'm of the opinion that we should see a little bit more about what this phenomenon actually looks like. Two very funny moments from the untelvised Trump trial. Maggie Haberman, reporter, of course, with the New York Times, reported that Trump pulled a Mike Francesa and fell asleep, or as she said, appeared to knot off a few times during the trial. She reported that news during a break.

And then when they came back, Trump glared at her in court. This was how Haberman described that glare. said that he was glaring at you for several seconds. You had reported shortly before that during a break that he appeared to be falling asleep at one point as the proceedings were getting kind of tedious. Did you notice that? I mean, yes, I noticed it. He made a pretty specific stare at me

and walked out of the room. I've been on the receiving end of said glares. I know you have. I have two. I reported earlier that he had appeared to fall. asleep. Now, we had seen him, and I want to be clear that lots of, I've seen lots of people fall asleep in courtrooms. I've seen jurors fall asleep. I've seen judges fall asleep. If, if anyone falls asleep who's a criminal defendant, in a case, we're going to report on it. But he doesn't like when such things are reported, and I'm guessing, I don't know that

that's what this was about. I always love when newspaper caution creeps into a phrase like that, Derek, a pretty specific stare. I wouldn't want to characterize the stare any more than that. Then there was another moment that I saw you tweeting about, which is Donald Trump claimed that the judge wouldn't let him have a day off the trial to watch his son Barron graduate from high school. And because there was no clip of Juan Machon saying that, then that gets sucked into the right-wing spin machine. Brian, I'm sure you're familiar with Plato's Allegory of the Cave. But just in case some listeners are not familiar with Plato's Allegory of the Cave, what's happening is there's a reality. in sunlight, and then there's a cave, and there are people that are chained behind a rock in the cave, and they're looking at shadows on the wall from figures behind the rock that they are sitting

in front of using puppets that are illuminated by a fire burning behind the puppets. So people are seeing not reality, but something that's three degrees away of reality, a shadow of a fiction. This is what Trumpism has become on the right. It is a lot of people following what is essentially the shadow of a fiction. So what does that have to do with the Trump trial? There was a request made by the Trump team to have a day off the trial so that Trump could attend his son Barron's graduation. And the judge's response to this was essentially, sure, it's totally plausible that we could

have that day off, but I'm not going to rule on it yet and guarantee. the day off because we don't know how the trial is going to proceed. Trump then walks in front of a camera and says, the judge just prohibited me, prohibited me from attending my own son's graduation. This is what the bloodthirsty left is all about. And then, of course, all of these right-wing people on Twitter took the lie and ran with it and made a bunch of extrapolations. So Trump isn't even engaging with reality, right? Reality is the sunlight. Trump is a different puppet show of fiction, and people are responding to the shadows of the puppet show rather than being able to see the actual event of the trial themselves.

And this is another place where it's not entirely clear to me whether televising the trial or who televised in the trial helps or hurts. I think it's totally possible that if everyone could see the raw footage of the judge saying, I'll rule on that later, but it's certainly possible that you could have the day off, that we could, you know, juxtapose the Trump television product with the original television product. But we can't do that. We have to juxtapose like a Yahoo report from the trial with the image of Trump lying

about it on camera. I think this makes it very hard for maybe a lot of people who get their news selectively to figure out exactly what's going on when this outrage sausage is manufactured for them in the media. Totally agree. And by the way, thank you for assuming that I remembered the allegory of Plato's Cave and was not one of those benighted listeners who needed a quick update. Kind of courtesy we have here at the Ringer, host to host.

We had a little bit of a sports writer moment, Derek, yesterday. It involved Caitlin Clark, one of the best basketball players in the world. She's drafted number one overall by the Indiana fever. 2.5 million people watch the WNBA draft if we need another data point to talk about how popular women's basketball and Caitlin Clark in particular are. then Clark has her introductory press conference in Indianapolis. And Greg Doyle, who is a columnist for the Indy Star, gets the microphone. He introduces himself by making a heart shape with his hands, which I'm doing to you in the Zoom right now.

This is how I welcome all guests to the press box. And I'm going back to you. Thank you very much, Derek. And then Greg Doyle says this. Hi. Caitlin, Greg Doyle, Indy Star. Real quick. Let me do this.

You like that? I like that you're here. I like that you're here. I do that at my family after every game, so it's pretty cool. Start doing it to me and we'll be able to get along just fine. So question is, what did you make of that exchange? My toes curled in absolute deathly embarrassment on behalf of every single person in that room, including myself, not even in that room. I mean, just, look, I think a lot.

I know that this is one of your bugaboos, so I'm going to give you the floor in just a second. I think most of these press conferences are one shitty question after another. I'm not exactly sure why the institution of the press conference, and certainly the halftime interview, still exists the way it exists. But certainly, Mr. Doyle is not doing anything positive to resuscitate the reputation of this institution because this was an embarrassment from top to bottom. And I'm embarrassed for him. toes are still curled.

I'm something of a connoisseur, as you mentioned, of these particular exchanges. I've never seen anything like this. Nothing exactly like that. And you're right. There is a just endemic level of shittiness, but we've gone up the power rankings of shittiness here. We really have reached a new thing because somebody texted me this yesterday and said, usually when there's an awkward sports press conference moment or at any press conference,

it's because you're trying to get it in an uncomfortable truth. You're asking a question. that maybe the person doesn't want to answer, you assume they don't want to answer. Greg Doyle was introducing himself. This is not even asking a question. He's saying hello and is unable to say hello without completely tripping over his question

and just falling down face first in front of America. Reminder, he knew that this was televised. Is it interesting to think that journalism is the struggle to reach uncomfortable truths. And in this case, Mr. Doyle did an amazing journalism because he arrived at the uncomfortable truth that he has a crush on Caitlin Clark and revealed it in the most horrifyingly embarrassing way.

Once again, look, I think sports journalism is absolutely fantastic, but this institution is not the way to do it. I don't know why we were asking questions of people in exactly this way. And certainly, if it's just going to be a bunch of middle-aged male journalists, finding obscure ways to tell younger elite female athletes that they have crushes on them,

we need to do away with the enterprise entirely. One more uncomfortable truth revealed, which I think is slightly different than what we're talking about, but perhaps related in a way, when you hear the phraseology there, start doing it to me, meaning the heart, hand gesture, and we'll be able to get along just fine. Boy, that is the whiff of you're the new athlete in town, but I'm the big. big dog columnist here at the Indy Star. And during your career here in Indianapolis, you and I are going to have to find a way to get along, or I'm going to have to tell my readers of the Indy Star some uncomfortable stuff about

you. Folks, that was perhaps the case with powerful sports newspaper columnists of your of 1984, 1974, we could go back a bit. That's not the case now. That's a great point. And maybe I need to go back and look at the clip because when I first saw it, I thought it felt uncomfortably familiar in the way that you know I'm getting at. But you're right. Maybe the better way to see it is as some kind of weird attempt to make a joking power play. You're the new kid in town. I'm the established sports reporter at the local newspaper.

as long as you essentially give me the gestural bribe of throwing me a couple hand-hearts, then I'll write nice things about you. Maybe that's what he was trying to do is sort of demonstrate some kind of powerplay over Caitlin Clark. But look, it was obviously an absurd fail. I think by the time you and the producer sent me the tweet, the post, whatever it's called, it had been seen 35 million times on Twitter itself. I mean, just an epic face flag.

It was doing Caitlin Clark numbers, but on Twitter. Yeah. And let's not be too charitable about accepting my interpretation there because all of these things can be true. I'm not in the mood to be charitable right now on this story. Here's something I wanted to talk to you about all week. The NPR story, NPR McGinn, if you will. People have not caught up on this. Yuri Berliner is, now was, a senior editor on the business.

desk at NPR, writes a big essay for the free press, which is a website populated in large part by people like Uri Berliner who say, hey, that mainstream institution, it's not for me anymore, right? Its values are out of step with my values of what journalism should be. Yuri Berliner writes, it's true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activists, or scolding. In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different,

the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population. As evidence for that, he would cite NPR's overcoverage, what he said was overcoverage of Trump's alleged election collusion with Russia, the Hunter Biden laptop story, which he said NPR muffed on and on. We can get into some of the examples if you want. What did you make of that essay and of his, argument. I was incredibly compelled by this new cycle for many different reasons.

First off, I have appeared on NPR just about every Monday on their afternoon news show here and now for about a decade. I've had an absolutely fabulous relationship with the producers and the journalists with that program here and now. I think Uri Berliner is right in a way. I think that objectively speaking, NPR overall, since the Trump phenomenon, and especially since 2000, maybe especially since 2020, has become more progressive. It's become more progressive in its coverage of a bunch of different issues, race, economics, Trump himself. I think that some of this movement has been progress, not just progressivism, but actual progress.

I think that the way, for example, that the news talks about race represents a kind of enlightenment about historical inequalities that we were not enlightened by five, 10, 15 years ago overall. But any time the center of gravity of news moves in one direction, whether it's left or right, you tend to have both more, you tend to have more coverage at the extreme of that movement. If the entire news cycle, for example, moves left on the issue of racial justice, you're going to have more people talking about, for example, the concept of abolishing the police, which is an idea that emerges from a lot of care for racial justice, but is also a policy idea that I think is absolutely crazy. I think the abolition of the police would be horrendous for Americans and

and probably for racial justice itself. But those are the kind of ideas that sometimes you get when an institution moves left, and you get the same thing if an institution moved to the right. Uriberlinner was right, I think, to talk about the fact that an organization that moves in one direction is going to have more of these extreme phenomena. That said, I thought this essay did a really bad job making an airtight case for his point. if you are going to go behind your organizations back, not talk to your head of communications,

not talk to your bosses, not talk to your CEO, go behind your organizations back, find an ideological enemy of your news organization and dump them all the shit that has been marinating inside of you about your colleagues. By God, you better get the details right. You better fucking nail that thing.

And he didn't. Like, he complains about NPR and using the term Latinx too much. And then his colleague, the great stevensky, pointed out that in a search at npr.org in the previous 90 days, he found 400 uses of Latino and Latina compared to nine uses of Latinx, most of which were used by a guest,

which aren't going to be edited. If a guest says Latinx, you're not going to say, right now, I just said it twice. You're not going to say, Derek, please, let's re-record. So you can just say Latina or Latina. People are just going to use the word and you have to accept it.

He made a bunch of these mistakes. He complained the key NPR journalists don't reflect the Israeli point. view, Innski pointed out that right after the October 7th attack, his first interview, it was with a member of the Israeli War Cabinet. He interviewed Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. He had points to make that were valid points. And I think the way he went about it was somewhat execrable. And it really agitated me the way that he did it. So that's sort of my, that my, you know, bias information dumped to you. How did you feel about it? Yeah, I felt the same way. It's very hard.

to do one of these big sweeping critiques of a news organization, especially like NPR, because there's just so much out there in those examples you cite, right? You can cherry pick and link to three things in that sentence. And then somebody like Steve Inske can come along, but actually here are 90 counter examples to your point. And I read a piece that Alicia Montgomery wrote in Slate. Alicia Montgomery, a longtime NPR person who's been in and out of NPR for a period of decades. She was very critical of NPR in different ways, but it was a much more nuanced take. She had a sentence I like where she says, NPR's problem is an abundance of caution that often crossed the border to cowardice. NPR culture encouraged an editorial fixation on finding the

exact middle point of the elite political and social thought, planning a flag there and calling it objectivity. And then has lots of interesting examples from our own time there to make that point and to push back on some of the things Berlin said, but I thought was interesting. I did want to ask you about one piece of evidence, but a thing he cites here is he says between, 2011 and 2023, a larger percentage of NPR's audience describe themselves as liberal. This is how he's saying we've lost, you know, large parts of America. To what could we attribute that difference or that change in the audience, or at least how the audience describes themselves at NPR?

It's a wonderful question. I'm not sure of the right answer, but here's a couple of thoughts. Trump's ascension in politics was an unbelievably polarizing moment that did a couple different things. One thing is that it did make a lot of center-left news organizations, a lot of de facto, let's say, de facto center-left news organizations, New York Times and PR. It made them more liberal. They crouched into a defensive stance against Trump, and that defensive stance became, I think, even more left-leaning in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. So I think that it's absolutely true that lots of news organizations have, in some objective ways,

moved to the left over the last few years. But also, I think, the rise of alternative media has given the right many more opportunities to reach the audience of Republicans and conservatives. You can do it on podcasts. You can do it on newsletters. You can certainly do it through things like Fox News. but I really think you've had an explosion of news entrepreneurship on the right, which has made politics and political news in particular just more polarized than it once was.

And maybe it's just an acceleration of a very, very old trend. You know, I'm sure that the 90s were people in the 90s said that their news was more politically polarized in the 80s. Maybe in the 80s they said it was more polarized in the 50s. All of that can be true. This can be a long, structural, decades-long story of news. in a way going back to the late 19th century. I forget if you and I talked about this,

but my sort of general theory of the last 150 years of news is that before you had the monopolies of the radio companies and the television companies, the 1930s, 1950s, news was riotously ideological. The newspapers of the late 19th century were incredibly ideologically specific, you know, the socialist Catholic newspaper versus the capitalist Catholic newspaper in New York City

and the socialist Catholics from Brooklyn hitting the, you know, capitalist Catholic, Brooklyn, it was very, very ideological in that age. And it was a technological revolution that created the news monopolies that we had. In the 1960s, there were only three television channels, and so they had to appeal to a huge broad middle.

They had to go right down the center. And now news organizations don't have to, and as a result, you have much more ideological polarization in news. So I think that as different news organizations have tried to find their way in this really riotous jungle of news, they've tried to be more politically specific. And I think that can be dangerous for a news organization like the New York Times or NPR to get a reputation for being a certain way. Because

if you have a historical conservative who's been listening to NPR for years and they realize that they can just go listen to Ben Shapiro, who's way more like their politics, that person can do that now in a way that they couldn't necessarily 20 years ago. So broadly speaking, I do think that news abundance is a huge part of why. we're saying more political polarization in the news. Speaking of long-term structural change, one thing Berliner tries to do in this essay is tie NPR's listenership. It's what he said.

It's dwindling. I think dwindling is a word he uses listenership, cultural influence too, perhaps, to its ideology. Which is interesting, too. And something that you and I have heard whenever there's a conservative critique of the mainstream media, it's like, see the reason that newspaper is failing is because it's It's a quote unquote liberal newspaper now. It's changed its character. Whereas we could just as easily say that a big part of this story, right, is what you're

talking about, a rise of audio alternatives. You know, Mr. Thompson and Mr. Curtis both make podcasts, which to a certain extent compete with NPR or at least go after the kind of people who might in another age listen solely to NPR. And that to me seems very, very left out of his critique as well. Absolutely. I think it's a really, really complex dynamic of supply and demand. Here's a story that I'm just making up on the spot, but I think it's the kind of story that you need to consider if you're trying to explain something as complex as why is an enormous institution with a huge

bureaucracy making a change to move one way ideologically. One story is, with the rise of conservative podcasting, more conservatives and center-right radio listeners move to conservative podcasts. As they move away, the remaining NPR listenership was more liberal than it was 10 years earlier. People studying the kind of news consumer most likely to list to NPR realize that they were getting better feedback, more listens, more downloads, more donations and membership pledges from people who self-identified as liberal. Therefore, in response that change in supply, they changed their demand and move a little bit to the left. What does that do to the demand, to the supply dynamic? Well, it creates a scenario where now you're a conservative listening to NPR that is responding to the

fact that it's, or that it's listeners to becoming more liberal. So maybe you are even more likely to move toward Ben Shapiro. And then that cycle turns over and over and over again. That's a totally plausible way in which the broader ecosystem of news is responsible for why certain organizations seem to lean one way or another ideologically. I think it's always overly simplistic to assume that a small number of people in a smoke-filled room are making a decision in a vacuum and saying, we've just decided for some reason that this news organization should move to the left, even though we think that that's probably going to lose us 10% of our audience that are conservative. It's much less likely. It's much more likely that you have an interplay,

I think, between supply and demand here. For Lerner's essay thrust NPR into the political octagon to use a couple of only in journalism words there. There wound up being Catherine Marr, who's the CEO, the newish CEO. People went back and found her tweets before she became CEO of NPR. In one from 2018, she called Trump a racist, quote unquote. Dave Weigel on Twitter pointed out that that was actually the same day Trump made his infamous reference to shithole countries. So perhaps that's what Catherine Marr was referring to.

Another tweet, she was wearing a Biden hat. NPR came back and said, no, no, no, she was a private citizen when she was tweeting this stuff. so this is not something we're too worried about. Another reaction I had to the Berliner essay that was interesting is reading it, reading his bill of particulars. I thought, compared to a lot of essays you and I have read about here is why I can no longer work in good conscience of this institution.

By the way, this is kind of its own genre now. I believe one ran in the Atlantic not that long ago. I read his bill of particulars and I thought, this does not seem incompatible to me with staying at NPR and trying to to affect whatever changes you think should be made from within. It really didn't. And he says in the essay, hey, I tried. I tried to meet with the old CEO.

I kind of got blown off. I raised these things at meetings. Nobody listened to me. But they did not seem to me to be, and he professes over and over again, his love of public radio, his love of the medium. It didn't seem to me to be something that would necessarily cause him to walk away. Well, in, yeah, and the way he which he raised these issues, I think, is a really important part of the story.

I think that two things can be true here. Number one, a conversation can and should be had about the appropriate ideological leanings of a news organization whose member stations rely on public funding, which is, which arises from government, right? what should that ideological lien be? That's a really interesting, rich conversation that I don't have a very clear answer to right now. We have free speech in this country.

So, technically, I'm kind of of the opinion that you want to say it, you can say it, and public funding of these member stations has been a huge part of thriving radio in American history. On an individual level, in terms of Uri Berliner's essay, and his ultimate, not firing, but resignation from NPR, he was suspended, it's important to say before he resigned.

It is really difficult to think of a more flagrant way to try to get suspended than someone going behind all of their bosses back and writing an essay about how much their company sucks at a competitor that is ideologically opposed to your organization's ideological leanings, and then doing media hit after media hit throwing your colleagues under a bus. I mean, if I, I joked about this with a friend, if I wanted to make a really, really rich side business as a cancellation consultant, I'd be happy to go around and tell famous established journalists to stop talking to their bosses. And if they had any problem with their news organization, go write an essay in the free press. Don't tell anybody about it. Give a bunch of free

interviews and then wait to see what happens. And then you will very quickly be able to merchandise the fruits of your impending cancellation. This is a pretty straightforward formula here, and it makes me a little bit concerned that the formula is so obvious. I would like there to be not institutional arsonists in important institutions, but institutional problem solvers.

I would love to know more about people who have a problem with their institution and work hard to change it from within rather than go this alternative route that seems inevitably to resolve in suspension, resignation, and maybe even like further polarization as people inside are like, oh, well, it's only people at the free press who think the NPR is doing a bad thing. I really don't like the way it was handled, even as, again, substantively, I think that there's a lot

to this conversation. Speaking the way it was handled, it's very funny to see this big thorny, you know, nuclear political issue then reduced to. Berliner has been suspended because he wrote a freelance piece without permission. Well, there's a union, as I understand it. And so you do have to frame some of these things in a legally safe manner. Which makes sense. But just like one of the oldest, you know, tiki-tag, you work for the news organization rules we've ever seen.

By the way, before we leave this topic, I'd love to say a word about David Fulkinflick, who covers the media for NPR. He has done three stories about this, at least three stories about this and talked about this on the radio as well. He works on the same business desk as Berliner. he says in his stories and his, you know, sort of full disclosures that his work has been edited by Berliner. And when Berliner was suspended, Berliner was the one who showed his suspension to Falcon Flick. NPR would not comment on it. So just think of the gyrations in covering that. He's done a fantastic job on this.

And if you look at any of the pieces that Falcon Flick has filed, they are unbelievably good and unbelievably fair for somebody who was covering this from within the institution. They are in a way a rebuke to some of the points that Berliner is making about NBR's ideological capture, whatever you want to say. It's really good. Just wanted to say a word for David Fulkenflink. Two cheers for David Fulkenflick. He's absolutely fantastic. His work is magnificent, as is the work of so many people at NPR.

And that's why I think the way the essay was done, the way it was published, the way it was talked about, I think did an injustice to the institution that Yuri has served for a long time. And it's sad to see this turn out the way it did because I do think there, I think this, I think the broader conversation he's raising here, I know I'm just repeating myself, so I'll do it quickly for the third time. The question of how to represent reality in an incredibly politically politically polarized world is really, really hard. It's a conversation that journalists have with each other all the time. And to have someone that's been working at this institution for a long time suggests that no one's

having this conversation, it just seems like it wasn't an accurate representation of what was happening at all. It was a frustrated person who had an ideological axe to grind and found the perfect outlet to grind it. Last topic for you, Derek. You had a podcast last week called If the 2024 election is so important, why does it feel so boring? And you have a had Josh Barrow on and did this great dive into all these different issues, inflation, abortion, et cetera, et cetera, and said, here is what Donald Trump is actually proposing. And even if this is what Donald Trump is actually proposing, here is what he might actually do if he regains the White House.

Very, very interesting. But I want to come back to your initial point for just a second, which is this public disengagement, is that a fair word with the 2024 election, at least compared to previous cycles. Is there something, if we can speak for all, have reported them, that we can do, that we should do to try to get the public to engage with this election? Yeah, you cover it. You cover the election. You try your best. I mean, that is the stupid answer to your question, but it's the only one that I can think of. There's no knob that I know of that dials up interest in a news story outside of just covering it.

And obviously, this story is being covered to death. It's being covered a lot. And it simply remains the inviolable fact that a lot of Americans are disengaged by a repeat of 2020 between two very old men that are incredibly overexposed and over-familiar in the public sphere

where there's not a whole lot left to learn about who is Donald Trump really? Who is Joe Biden really? These questions were answered to most people's satisfaction 20 years ago. So there's not a lot of new information I think that people have to learn outside of the policy stakes. And so what Josh and I wanted to do in that episode was to make the policy stakes really clear because ultimately, who serves as president is not a mere issue of entertainment.

It's an issue of, okay, whose taxes are going up versus going down? What's going to happen to the deficit? What's going to happen to access to abortion pills if Trump changes makes changes at the FDA at the agency level that can ban interstate transmission of medical abortions. These are incredibly important questions, attended millions of people. And I do think that, I guess putting my media critic hat back on, I do think that the media is very good at horse race coverage, that is good at supplying horse race coverage, and not so good at giving people a really clear understanding, and especially clear and entertaining

understanding of what's going to happen if one of these guys wins. Why should we even care in the first place about Biden versus Trump? What's the difference in terms of policy and American life? And that's what we were trying to answer. I will say one more thing about voter apathy, sorry, before I turn things back over to you. The fact that voters don't care isn't just something to observe as if I'm complaining about the fact that my Trump podcast aren't getting enough downloads. The fact of voter apathy is actually a really important plot point in this election. The people who seem to be moving away from Democrats and moving away from Joe Biden tend to be disengaged voters. The people who don't vote in every election, they're less likely

to have voted midterms, much less likely to vote for local elections like governor. That's the group that's moving away with the Democratic Party, and right now, according to the polls, is tipping the November election to Donald Trump. The people who are most disengaged, the people who find this election most boring, might be the people who determine the outcome of the election. And so voter apathy is not just something for me as a journalist to complain about.

It's an important thing for political analysts to look at because the apathetic voter, I think, is so critical in this election. That's a great point. I liked another point you made within this pod where you're talking about Trump and democracy. And what happens is there's a lot of coverage on what will Donald Trump's re-election mean to the future of American democracy, which is an important story, right? The Times is a whole big series about this and tried to sort of plot this out and broke lots of news within that series.

But what happens is that winds up blotting out the sun on everything else. And to some people, by the way, there are liberal media critics who say, this is the issue, right? If you're taking your eye off the ball of the democracy or the future of democracy, then you're missing the story. here, right? All those other things won't matter. And I think that also plays a role in this, right? Like when we talk about how the election's covered and how people think about the election, that there is one big supernova of an issue that then winds up obscuring. And I might be getting my celestial bodies confused, so please, astronomers right in. But that that winds up obscuring everything else. It might. It's interesting because I was disinclined to think that Democrats

talking so much about democracy would be helpful in the 2022 midterms. But without being able to know what exactly was the variable that allowed Democrats to slightly overperform in the midterms, clearly they did better than was expected. And it's possible to talk so much about democracy worked. That's the Democratic Party. That's their messaging. It is, of course, important that Trump denied the results of the last election and therefore poses an interestingly, historically unique threat to democratic processes. It's, of course, important that he's more antagonistic toward press freedoms than most presidents have been. All this is important. But I think that sometimes what happens is, you're exactly right, because democracy and the media

are issues that are so delicious to journalists. For many people, it's why we got into this business, right? Be a journalist to protect freedoms and defend democracy because that's such an, and a attractive and tantalizing issue, sometimes the other bread and butter issues just aren't talked about. Like, here's one question that I've posed over and over again, I've never gotten a satisfying answer. Obviously, one of the reasons why a lot of independents are moving away from Joe Biden is that they're frustrated about inflation. The reason a lot of moderates moving away for the Democratic Party is because they are frustrated about inflation. Inflation is a fact, clearly. It is a statistical, obvious, factual problem with the economy right now. What's Trump

going to do about that? What is Trump? Trump's secret plan to bust inflation. I would say a couple things. Number one, I'm not sure that he shared it. I'm not sure that it exists, like the document that says, my seven-part plan to bust inflation, number one. Number two, two of the policies that he has floated are a 10% tariff on imports and a devaluation of the dollar.

Both of these policies are designed to help American companies export stuff to other countries. But what does that do to the American consumer? A 10% tariff means that if you want to buy a Toyota car, it's now more expensive. And a devaluation of the dollar means that your money doesn't go as far to buy that Toyota car. Trump's policies would raise inflation. I want to like scream it from the rooftop. His stated policies would objectively raise inflation. And so you have this really bizarre moment where it is simultaneously understood by many people that, number one, Joe Biden should be voted out of office because inflation is bad. And number two, I have no idea what Donald Trump would

do to improve inflation. And when you look under the hood, it turns out his policies would almost by macroeconomic inevitability raise inflation. I don't think this stuff is really talked about. It's not talked about enough because I think we're too focused on or a little bit overfocused on the democracy issue and not focused enough on the issue of bread and butter, abortion, economics, prices, how would Donald Trump actually be better than Joe Biden? My only bit of gentle pushback of anything you said on that episode, I encourage people to go listen to it, is that this election is less about issues than previous elections. Because if we go back, we could tell different stories, I mean, about every election.

You mentioned Romney Obama 2012, right? We could talk about how that was about defending Obamacare, you know, the legacy of Obamacare. We could also talk about how the Obama team did a really great job in early summer of portraying Romney as a heartless plutocrat who held up the dollar bill in that very famous photograph. And that was curtains for Mitt Romney, who lost, who had a big, big, massive loss in the electoral college, right? We could talk about 2016 being about free trade and the legacy of that and different things. Or we could talk about it as Donald Trump saying crooked Hillary over and over again and talking about Bill Clinton's affairs. You know, there is an interesting story, right?

And I don't necessarily know that either one is wrong, but how we remember other elections being about politics. versus this one is an interesting question to me. It might be me misremembering, but I try to make this point in the podcast where I said, I think previous elections, and I've only really been doing this really closely following presidential elections since I became a journalist in 2008,

but it seems to me that every election had a policy theme. You just ran through a bunch of the policy themes of past elections. This election does not seem to have a policy theme. It has a cultural theme, and this takes us right back to Yuri Berliner, not that I'm sort of holding him up as a true, because I know he's not that at all. But in a way, I think that what's happening is Americans right now don't really want to talk about or aren't really tuning into conversations about material

well-being very much. They're tuning into the culture wars. What moves the dial on ratings and clicks and views and downloads right now in the political sphere seems to be the culture war. People want to talk much more about who are we than how do we build a materially abundant society? I'm very frustrated about this because I'm obsessed with the latter question, and I frankly find the former question much more boring than the average person. But this just seems to be the water in which we swim. And as a result, I think it's been harder for some people to get the policy story on the front burner when people are so much more interested in the question of, is NPR too liberal. All right, Derek Thompson, listen to him

on plain English where other issues will be on the front burner. Read him in the the Atlantic. Derek, thank you so much for coming on the press box. He was a blast. Thank you. David, you've been waiting so patiently while I talked to Derek Thompson. Jeez, that, this box has been very tight that you've kept me in. But you were going to jump in there a few times, offer some media takes. But, hey, you've been waiting for your moment. It's time for the second weekly edition of David Shoemaker, guess is the strain pun headline. Yeah, I should have gotten that on Monday faster.

So I'm here to make amends. Monday's headline about Caitlin Clark and the eclipse was Total Eclipse and the Clark. Today's headline comes to us from listener Charlie Ban. It's from Politico, David. Turns out Norway. Yes, Norway is ramping up defense spending. I don't want to overcomplicate this. So think of Norway spending more on defense and what geographical feature you might

associate with Norway. As you ponder, what was Politico's strained pun? Something with, okay, this is something with the fjords. They can't afford it.

They can, as much as, spending more on defense. Then they can afford. Defend ourselves. We are strong, strong defenders of Norway. We are.

Now, okay, you've got me off, totally off now. I thought it was, uh, It might have been a little too much help. Strong. No one's coming into Norway, baby.

Defense. We are built. Oh, Fjord Tuff. Built Fjord Tuff. Yeah. Some really fine work from Politico there. That's really good. That is the press box.

I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Brian Waters and Eduardo Ocampo. Thank you guys for all your help as always. All right. coming up next week, we have a very special guest host on this podcast. He is Peter Schrager of the NFL network of Good Morning Football. We're going to record the episode two days early on Tuesday, April 23rd, to get those draft takes out there and give them plenty of time to marinate.

By the way, first question for Peter, can we ban the NFL draft term pet cat forever? Because if I see that one more time on Twitter, I'm going to scream. in other news, something else to put on your radar. You've heard me on this podcast talk about the Santa Fe Literary Festival, the Santa Fe International Literary Festival. It's coming up May 17th through 19th in the beautiful state of New Mexico. I'm going to be there again this year interviewing my old Grantland teammate Wausu, author of the memoir, Stay True, and a Pulitzer Prize winner.

And speaking of Pulitzer Prize winners, I'm also going to interview the novelist Anthony Doer, who wrote all the light we cannot see in cloud cuckoo land, if you're going to be in that part of the world by any chance, please drop me a note so that I can say hello. And if not, I'm going to bring back an interview for this here podcast from that festival that you will enjoy. That will come run on this podcast in late May.

Next Monday, Shoemaker returns, as he always does with more lukewarm takes about the media. Have a fantastic weekend.