The Press Box - And the Oscar Doesn’t Go to ... | The Press Box (Ep. 578)

Episode Date: February 26, 2019

Discussing the best media subplots from the Oscars (02:00), CNN hiring a Jeff Sessions flack to help guide its 2020 election coverage (20:15), and the Zion Williamson think pieces (30:45). Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Thanks again for your help. David, at Sunday's Oscars, Samuel L. Jackson updated Spike Lee on the Nix score before handing out one of the awards for best screenwriting. What I want to know is if Jackson were speaking directly to you, what would you want him to update you on? Oh, man. Well, thankfully, there were no wrestling pay-per-views on last night. Yeah.

Do we have to pick from the ESPN bottom line? It's one of those soccer transactions you and I don't understand? The best one would have been if he just told me what happened at the end of True Detective season three. Yeah. I think that would have saved me an hour. Although, I mean, it was a great episode. But yeah, they solved that who done it, I guess. And the real mystery was separate from the crime, as one might expect.

When there was somebody at the Oscars who knew the result, you can just go ask What twists are we in store for tonight? We are the push notification of media podcast. This is the press box, a part of the Ringer podcast network. The Press Box is the media podcast where you're always allowed to dunk on Tucker Carlson. We are Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer. Here again with three topics for your pleasure and amusement.

First, a final word on the Oscars and Best Picture Winner Green Book. Where were the best media subplots from Sunday night? Second, CNN has hired a Jeff Sessions flack to help guide its 2020 election coverage. Should Politicos be able to take the TSA pre-check lane straight into journalism? And finally, a brief word on Zion Williamson, the Duke basketball star, who hurt his knee and launched a thousand think pieces. Did anything really change with the NCAA and amateurism? Plus the weekly notebook dump and, of course, the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But David, let's start with the Oscars.

three hours into a surprisingly crisp Academy Award ceremony Julia Roberts came to the podium and gave everyone the bad news And the Oscar goes to Green Book Ah It's like a horror movie in there It was like Jordan Peel movie Oh my gosh, a little bit over the top of that reaction

But yeah I mean it's, do you think everyone had just convinced themselves it wasn't going to happen? I think so We can get into that I think, yeah, I think that was kind of a kind of a yell of shock. My operating theory is this. The Green Book Win is sort of like what Van Jones of CNN famously called the White Lash after Trump's 2016 victory. That is a segment of America that was not on board with the future being more diverse,

with the future moving us forward, et cetera, et cetera, and said, I'm out, right? The funny thing is this, the academy is a. a group of seemingly liberal to liberalish people mostly, right? Who these are people essentially saying, I'm woke, right? I'm with the future. I just don't want to be told how to do it, right? I want to be told that, you know, if I'm going to make a movie that's about race in America, I want to be able to make it a certain way.

I don't want to be, I don't want to be told I have to make it in a certain way. this is Brooks Barnes in the New York Times, quoting one of those ubiquitous anonymous academy voters, said one voter, a studio executive in his 50s, admitted that his support for Green Book was rooted in rage. He said he was tired of being told what movies to like and not like. What do you, David, ascribe the Green Book win to? Yeah, I don't know if it's, I don't know if I would say woke, because to me that conveys, I mean, I know what you were trying to say, but that conveys a certain, like, of the moment. you know like like a like a kind of currency in that on that whatever the scale of liberalism we're

working off of here i think that the the the the sort of old guard proud to be a liberal voters um we're are not necessarily um interested in the sort of liberal active a brand of liberal activism that that was sort of steering the conversation and i think that's sort of what you're seeing the reaction to, right? I mean, it is, I think that the, the Van Jones correlation was, was dead on. I mean, and because it does leave this open question, just like with Trump's election as to whether or not this is sort of a last gasp of a diminishing, you know, bygone generation, or is this a silent majority that is, you know, found a calling. I think it's, you know, it is particularly, you know, and a very interesting question, interesting argument coming on the heels of, you know, the Academy diversifying its voting body recently.

Yep. In recent years. But I think it's not, I mean, you wouldn't assume that it's the diversification of the academy that's really got under anybody's skin, but just sort of the rankling against the feeling that people were telling them what to do. And that gets back to what you were saying. And I think that, you know, to see the conversation, I mean, I have to project here, but to, but to, you know, have this, you know, touted honor of being an academy voter, but to see the conversation about who you should or shouldn't vote for being steered completely separately from your outside of your control. Yeah, I can, I can imagine one wanting to react to that. Yeah, it's sort of, I guess, let's set woke aside. It's more like Stephen Root and get out, you know, where he says he would have voted for Obama three times if he'd be allowed to, right?

That's the Academy voter, right? That's the media voter here. I'm amazed, and whether this is a credit to marketing or, you know, however they did it. But Green Book survived a whole lot of really damaging journalism in the last couple months. I refer you to the piece in the cut about how director Peter Farrelly used to expose. himself to people, including Cameron Diaz, as a kind of joke, not so funny anymore. Don Shirley, who is, of course, the subject of the film, his family members coming forward and criticizing the movie on various grounds.

You had one of the, was it a screenwriter who had apologized for an anti-Muslim tweet? And you had the, you know, this, in fact, what came out last night after the movie one was producer Charles Wessler, who was that guy at the very end of the ceremony who was throwing in that random shoutout to Carrie Fisher. He was sending chiding or angry emails to various critics about their

anti-green book pieces, including our old friend Austin Collins. Like, what? And yet it survived all those things, right? Yeah. I mean, we're hearing about the 10-year anniversary of saving private Ryan getting felled by the smear campaign that only the first 20 minutes were good. But look how many

devastating stories of where about Green Book and it's still won. Yeah, I just don't think much of that had, you know, I mean, it had much of an effect. I don't even think it was the backlash. I just don't know how much of, I mean, listen, this is a voting body that gets DVDs delivered to their homes. You know, I mean, it's not going out into the world

and experiencing these films with, you know, the broader culture is not what they're known for. I also, I mean, speaking of the broader culture, I mean, this has always been, I mean, the search for best picture is, you know, kind of goes hand in hand with a sort of search for monoculture. And, you know, I think with the exception of Black Panther, which has its own set of, you know, detractors in the academy, I'm sure. There's nothing else on the list that really, I mean, it's not like there's a specific movie that got screwed on Sunday night, right? I mean, there's no one's, I mean, people had their, had their personal preferences. It's not like an overwhelming favorite. Right.

It wasn't like this was just, there was no Hillary Clinton of the 2019 Oscar ceremony, you know, I mean, it was, it was. So, Roma was not Hillary Clinton in this. No, I don't think Roma was Hillary Clinton. Did you, by the way, as you started from media Twitter last night, did you feel there were like two hurricanes on a collision course? One was, we want all the deserving movies and actors to win the awards. and the other one was, we are secretly hoping that the deserving movies

and actors get screwed so that we have something to write about. It's actually more fun as a journalist to be mad at the academy. And if the academy is, and the Oscars are constantly failing either to give the right awards to people or to make a good show,

you actually have much more stuff to write about in a way. And I feel being mad at the Oscars is just kind of now just a take that has floated like three generations of entertainment writers. You'll never go broke being mad at the Oscars or being dissatisfied with the Oscars.

And I feel that's like as much as you want Roma to get that best picture. And I certainly like I'm not, I do not want Green Book to win awards or Bohemian Rhapsody and all that stuff. But like as much as you don't want that to happen, that's what drives interest, right, is that the Academy will actually get this stuff wrong. Well, and maybe that's part of why the various issues with Green Book, didn't actually stick because there was a lot of space, a lot of headspace and airspace and everything else, airtime being given to the complaints about the Oscars broadcast itself,

you know, whether it was the host or which awards were going to be on the main broadcast and which weren't. I mean, there was so much, so much time and energy was spent, trying to, you know, dunk on the academy leading up to the Oscars that it didn't, maybe it didn't leave enough room for like an actual discourse about what, films we were judging.

A couple of my favorite media rituals of Oscar time. One is, as I referred to a minute ago, the anonymous honest Oscar ballot. Yes, amazing. Where the entertainment writer says, okay, just tell me what you actually think about the awards and I'll protect your identity. This is like entertainment journalism's answer to the Trump Safari where he just kind of like, he didn't like Roma because it's too long. Yeah. But what's funny to me is you do read these things.

There was one of the Hollywood Reporter, another one in the York Times that I read. And you really do get a sense of how people actually vote. Here's some quotes. This is from the Hollywood reporter about Roma. To me, it's a very slow and rather indulgent film, the most expensive home movie ever made. I've spoken to several of my peers who watched it at home and they were out after 20 minutes. Another one says there's a joke. general feeling that some people have it all,

are talking about actors, and you don't want to give them more, and that is going to affect Bradley Cooper for a long time, just like it affected Leo DiCaprio. So essentially the person is saying, just because Bradley Cooper is a movie star. We won't not be giving him any more awards. That's okay. Yeah, there's another one.

I thought that they wanted to give away. I think the point was to award movie stars. Maybe that's more of a Golden Gloves phenomenon. This is from the New York Times. One vinegory old voter compared superhero films to quote, the stuff that oozes out of dumpsters behind fast food restaurants, close quote. Then he confessed that he hadn't yet seen Black Panther. So that's a good one.

Thank you. Thank you for your vote. You vinegary old voter you. Another thing I thought was fascinating as a sort of bea-subplot is, and this was in a Hollywood reporter piece about the way a star is born sort of faded. You might remember the high point of a star is born. If you're a fate of the ringer, you certainly do, right? And then by the time awards season he came around, it wasn't actually winning awards.

The writer of this piece, Scott Feinberger, says, on September 27th, the New York Times ran a long piece titled Bradley Cooper is not really into this profile, which left the distinct impression that the amiable hunk, dot, dot, dot, during the course of transitioning to prestige projects had begun to take himself too seriously. So in this telling, Bradley Cooper was undone by a celebrity profile. Well, I don't know that he was undone by a celebrity profile, although I'm sure that, you know, that feels like. like the sort of thing that a lot of academy voters would have read. But there was a sort of feeling that, you know, pervasive feeling that the, that the people behind a star is born weren't playing the game. And you can obviously listen to our boss, Sean Finnessy's podcast, the big picture to get a lot more and read his many pieces on the ringer.com to get a better idea of this. But that, especially in the Golden Globes, I mean, during the Golden Globes lead up, you know,

that's a much smaller voting body. And, you know, people, it's, It's, it's, you know, there are certain tried and true tactics to getting your film the, the awards exposure that you wanted to have. And, you know, Bohemian Rhapsody famously, you know, went all in this year and just, you know, was just having lunches and get-togethers and receptions and everything just to kind of court that voting block. And then, you know, this, it kind of, that carries on to the Oscars. If you're perceived and not really care about playing the game, I'm sure that does have some. effect. And then of course, after that, there was a sort of just a laughable media campaign where

Cooper and Lady Gaga were out there trying, it was almost like a celebrity couple insisting that they're not about to get divorced when everybody knows they are or something. I mean, there was just this like, they were just trotting them out in front of everywhere to try to put on this weird show and try to make up for lost time. And, and

you know, in a sort of weird sort of inverted parallel of the whole Oscar's hosting fiasco, they seem to just find ways to, you know, make matters worse with every attempt at fixing the situation. Yeah. So you're saying if

Bradley Cooper had been willing to do carpool karaoke right out of the right out of the gate. He would have had a better chance. By the way, one of those anonymous voters said, I've now spent more time with Rami Malik than I have with my dog

talking about the Bohemian Rhapsody campaign, which I thought was funny. The other thing I want to to bring to your attention, David, was this New York Times piece about the Vanity Fair Oscar party. Oh, yes. One of those great traditions that one hears about being so far away from Hollywood, it seems so glamorous.

Well, according to the New York Times, it is not glamorous anymore. And sort of has become kind of a lower ranking party in the whole firmament of Hollywood parties and also kind of a nice place to send the advertisers. They published this piece, and then Vanity Fair disinvited the New York. times from their Oscar party after the piece. And this is one of those, don't you agree, one of those things where the reaction to the piece was so much more damaging than the actual piece. Because as soon as they disinvited them, the New York Times, our old pal Corey Sica could go, ah, look, the piece drew so much blood, but these guys won't let us come to the Oscar party.

Meanwhile, like, you know, how many people had actually read that piece and actually had actually changed their minds about the Vanity Fair Oscar party. So that was some great PR strategy there. Yeah, I certainly didn't hear about it until after, until the backlash. I get the piece, right? It felt like a very corey scecha piece. Like, I understand, and I mean that as a compliment. Like, I'm glad this piece was written. It's an interesting look, although the narrative, I mean, the arc seemed a little bit

straightforward, right? I mean, it's just like, this restaurant used to be the hottest ticket in town and now it's all tourists, you know, or something. Like, it's, it seemed like a pretty, I mean, I wasn't too shocked by any of the conclusions. But the reaction, yeah, was just, I mean, I think we're still getting in the bottom of of, you know, who made that call. But it was, I mean, just such a weird decision to make, especially in the, in the,

I mean, I hate to bring this background to politics again, but in the Trump era, in the, in the era of banning, banning reporters from the press pool. It's just a really bad look, I feel like, on the part of Vanity Fair. All right, David, it's time for the overworked Twitter joke of the week, where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. I made a command decision, David, not to do any Bobcraft jokes. Wow. Okay. It's a bold move, but I think I agree with that. I think we need to talk about Bobcraft next week.

I think that needs to be a whole segment. And without ha-haz, or at least funny Twitter ha-haz. So let's start with something else. On Wednesday night, Duke played North Carolina, and Super Prospect Zion Williamson lasted all of 33 seconds before one of his Nike shoes exploded. And he suffered a grade one knee sprain. and we wrote about a thousand think pieces about the fate of amateur athletics.

A lot of material from that. Seth Somerfeld self-reports a tweet that he wished had become overworked, which was for sale, Zion shoes barely worn. Should have had more traction. I agree.

Oh, that was great. A lot of clips showing Levar Ball doing his signature walk and saying Levar walking into the hospital to talk with Zion about getting down with Big Baller brand. It was also an overwork Twitter joke to say it's got to be the shoes, which is a good excuse to play sound from the vintage Nike commercials with Academy Award winner, Spike Lee. Yeah.

Yo, Mars Blackman here with my main man, Michael Jordan. Yo, Mike, what makes you the best player in the universe? Is it a vicious stumps? No, Mars. Is it a haircut? No, Mars. Is it the shoes? No, Ma'am.

Is it an extra long shorts? No, Mars. It's a shoes in, right? Nah. Is it the short socks? No, Mars. Money's got to be the shoes. Shoes, shoes, shoes.

You sure it's not the shoes? I'm sure, Mars. What about the shoes? No, Mars. Money's got to be the shoes. What a treasure, Spike Lee is. Thanks to Chris Almeida and a racquetball for those. This one, David, comes to us from snarky ginger.

There was a Donald Trump tweet. Ha, ha, ha. Hold your applause. That's the last week that said, hold the date. We will be having one of the biggest gatherings in the history of Washington, in D.C. on July 4th. It will be called a salute to America and will be held at the Lincoln Memorial. So one of the biggest gatherings in the history of Washington, D.C. on July 4th.

It was an overword Twitter joke to say, major announcement, Obama is speaking at the Lincoln Memorial on July 4th. That's great. Thanks to Starkey Ginger. All right, David, from the Oscars after the shock of Green Books victory. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write, can we double check the envelope? Some good la la la and humor there. And finally, this was my favorite. from Alan Corridor and Zizi

news last Thursday that Reggie Fields Amay the president of Nintendo of America had announced his retirement, okay? And he's being replaced as president of Nintendo

by an actual person named Doug Bowser. It was an ever word Twitter joke to say Bowser is the ultimate story of perseverance after 30 plus years of being denied by Mario

he's finally ascended to the top. If you held down the B button while you ran to make that joke, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. That's amazing. All right, David, topic number two is CNN.

News last week that CNN hired Sarah Isgur Flores as an editor of its 2020 campaign coverage. Flores, we learned, cut a pretty conventional path through Republican politics. She worked with the Romney and Ted Cruz campaigns. She was nominally a never-Trump person while working for Carly Fiorina in 2016. And then she became a spokesman for Jeff. Sessions, a job which required her to go to the Oval Office and profess her fealty to Trump, as the Washington Post reported. After joining CNN, one of the staffers told Maxwell Tanny of the Daily Beast, it's

extremely demoralizing for everyone here. This is where we open our drawer and pull out the now familiar list of Politicos who became journalist, Tim Russert, right, Diane Sawyer, George Stephanopoulos, and maybe most comparably, in this case, Pete Williams, who is a Pentagon spokesman and Cheney aide and is now a Justice Department reporter for NBC. A couple of issues that came out of this. Number one, is there an amount of time that needs to elapse before someone goes from Politico to journalist, right?

I don't think anybody thinks no one can do this, right? But there were people who said, it's too soon. You know, this is too direct. What if she just waited a little while? I guess I don't know if gone to a think tank. I don't know what she was going to do in the meantime. Yeah. I did look this up.

So in George Stephanopoulos' case, Bill Clinton wins re-election in November of 1996, and a month later, George Stephanoplas is working for ABC News. So, you know, and it's weird, right? Because if you're hiring somebody from politics, they're at their maximum value the moment they leave politics. Sure. So I don't quite get the argument that there should be some mandatory waiting period. They should have to go play college basketball for a year before they can. It's been their mandatory year at due.

Duke. Yeah, it is an interesting argument. And I think that, you know, it's easy to look at these sort of case by case, and certainly other cases where you can, you can fairly easily justify it, right? I mean, George Stephanopoulos was, I mean, I was, what, in college at the time? I mean, I feel like, but I even remember then being such sort of an oddball situation where he was way more in demand than I could really. comprehend. Like I didn't really

understand the like the allure of him. And even when he was, you know, when he turned up on Good Morning America or whatever, I'm still just sort of like, what is George Stephanopoulos contributing to this? But, you know, he's had a healthy career and it's sort of hard to argue with success. Then you kind of get to the

the rest of the list. I mean, there's certainly people that, I don't think you mentioned Chris Matthews, but you can put Matthews and Russ certain this in the similar in a kind of similar category where no matter what you think about them I bet either one of them would tell you or would have told you that that they're sort of they see a direct line as a sort of continuance of the service right and between job a like it's a public service and the other's a public service yeah a weird way of calling yes

that they're calling people out like of sort of helping narrate from their experience you know with the help of their experience on the inside and then Pete Williams I think is another good when just because, I mean, you know, talk about the value being at its maximum at the peak. I mean, his connections are only going to get worse over the years if he doesn't, if he's not actively reporting, right? I mean, and he's, and he's, you know, I've never seen him on TV and thought for a second that he was compromised by politics in any sort of way. But there does seem to be a distinction when you hire someone to kind of be the architect of your election coverage who's come directly from inside one of the two campaigns, right?

Yeah. I mean, there is a slight correction here, which is she as an architect. It was originally reported that she was going to run the whole thing or implied that she was going to run the whole thing. Right. She is just a coordinator of coverage within CNN. Anyway, continue. No, that's all I was going to say. Just that there does seem to be a distinction there.

I don't know. Like if she had been a pundit or a writer or something like that. Sure. And those people abound and we don't seem to have, I mean, no one seems to have much of problem with it. I mean, my mind immediately went to, though, with the internal turmoil that this is caused, my mind went to Kevin Williamson. And we talked about several months ago, you know, was hired at the Atlantic and sort of summarily shown the door after a staff revolt. I mean, it doesn't seem like the staff is fully revolting here, but there does seem to be a sort of moral

political, you know, problem with this hire as seen from the inside. Yeah, I mean, to me, and when we talk about directing the coverage with in my you know experience for whatever it's worth writing about TV it's that somebody in those jobs can often just be sitting in meetings right and can be kind of a resource for who should we get on to talk about Trump okay we're going to you know we're going to do our republican convention coverage in 2020 um you know who can we ask for the internet can you call people to make sure we can get these people on our air right that CNN isn't going to get left out of all the kind of, you know, big name conservatives, that kind of thing. You know, how should, how should we cover, how should we understand or give our reporters

sort of guidance on this revelation about Trump or this revelation about, you know, whomever's left in his administration, that kind of stuff. So I don't know that it necessarily involves like this person is making decisions about what is getting on CNN's air and what isn't. I just think there's enough wiggle room right in that. I do think there's an interesting question of if you work for the Trump administration, you know, not just another Republican, but you work for the Trump administration that is, you know, basically trying to, you know, gain power from repeatedly denouncing the media as the enemy of the American people. do you then get to go from that to the media? Do you get to benefit and participate in, however indirectly?

She had a bunch of tweets about like the Clinton News Network and stuff like that, which is pretty, pretty, you know, pretty run on the mill for a conservative, you know, politico apparatchic. But like, do you get to benefit from that administration and then just go to the media? Is that okay? and I do think that's an interesting question. It's not an absolute no, but it's a little weird, is it not? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it certainly, I mean, just from an outsider's perspective, it's hard to wrap one's mind around why that would be acceptable to anybody in CNN, right? I mean, that, I mean, if it, and if it is, then all of the righteous complaints that have, you know, filled the, the, the case. cable news airwaves for the entirety of the Trump presidency, extolling the virtues of the, of the, you know, fine art of journalism just sort of seem like a bunch of hot air, right? I mean, if it's so easily dismissed. Yeah. To me, the through line here, when people talk about, do you let the, you know, how and when

should these people get into journalism is, it sort of comes down to, do you want to be a journalist, right? do you want to be an ideological water carrier who just who gets, you know, thrown out of politics or bounced out of your old job and this is your next job? Or do you actually want to be a journalist? When you pick some of these people like George Stephanopoulos and Pete Williams and we could dame a whole bunch of others, right? These are people who just kind of committed to the bit at some point. Sure. There's a good tweet from Tom Skokie this week says the reason not to have a party operative as a political analyst on your news program is that they're not here.

They're there to analyze anything. They're there to sell something. It's like hiring a marketing staffer from Keebler to come on and talk about cookies. And I agree with that. There's a small number. And most people who get these jobs just don't care enough about journalism, right? They see this as a gig and then they'll go be work on K Street or do whatever they want to do. But there's a small group of these people who actually do want to be journalists.

And I feel you can tell pretty quick, right? Like who's in this, you know, because it's not like these jobs aren't glamorous for the most part. even the TV job is probably not going to be all that glamorous. And if you really want to do this, that will, you know, you can probably reinvent yourself as a journalist in almost every case. If you don't and you just want to be, you know, continue to be Jeff Sessions as spokeswoman within a cable news network, then that's, you know, obviously just not going to work. Yeah.

I mean, you're absolutely right. We're talking about people being at their highest earning potential, highest level of marketability. If you want that job, go get that job and prove that you are committed to doing it. I mean, this is your, you have an opportunity. You can, you know, should walk forward into it. It's also one of these things where we should probably just talk about why you want to hire people like this is because I think you want a seat at the table of Trump world, right? Yes. Even if CNN is going to be kind of basically anti-Trump in its orientation, you want somebody who can pick up the phone and get a call returned. And, you know, again,

Like you have moments where you want those people on your air, even if it's just to have Jake Tapper yell at Kellyanne Conway for 20 minutes. Like, that is valuable. By the way, we also saw the comedy version of this this week, which is Sean Spicer joining Extra as a correspondent. Yes. He tells the Hollywood reporter, this is the personal, not the politics, not the policy. The idea is to give people a different angle on some of the people they see on cable news channels every day. So even Extra wants a seat at the table. Extra does not want to be left out.

Oh, man. And I believe Spicey's first piece was a piece about, like, it was an exclusive with Mike Pompeo at home. Am I remembering that correctly? Like, had all the journalists been saying, you know, I can get Pompeo at the office or at a press conference setting, but I have never seen his house. Yeah.

Yeah. we do the Trump administration post-mortem and just break it down by what cable news shows they're affiliated with. It's going to be, it's going to be pretty exciting. Yeah, Sean Spicer is the conservative Robin Leach. That just makes my day. I want to, and I'm, I'm ready to consume anything he comes up with. All right, David, topic number three, let's do this one quickly. Zion Williamson, mentioned a minute ago, future number one pick in the NBA draft. Hurts his need 33 seconds to do a much hyped game between Duke and North Carolina. Here's my take on this. I am, I am with the anti- amateurism brigade.

But I sort of feel we've reached a stalemate on this in the sense that nothing is changing in the near term. And so that, you know, you have something like this come along. He hurts himself. It's obviously terrible. The news is on the front page in the New York Times. I got a press release from the Washington Post that Sally Jenkins had written a column about this.

Is this in the press release zone that this is no, that the amateurism system is no longer going to work? And I just feel like, I don't feel anybody's doing anything wrong, but I feel it's one of those weird journalistic situations where morally, you know, a, let's call it a vast majority of sports writers have pointed out a moral wrong that is taking place. But no action is happening to write the moral wrong. So we are all looking for examples to then repost essentially or rewrite the columns. We've now been writing for a couple of years. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think that it's worth noticing that there has been some evolution on the issue, right?

I mean, we're not that far away from, you know, sports writers and sportscasters being just totally caught off guard and, you know, engaging in various forms of pro clatching when when football players decided to sit out bowl games. Yep. I mean, just one fully optional game. And the night after this happened, um, the morning after this happened, sorry, I popped on ESPN in the morning expecting just to see wall-to-wall, you know,

micro-second breakdowns of the shoes exploding off of Zion's feet. And instead just saw that every single show was talking, I mean, the argument shows I first take and as well, but as well as the more laid-back get-up environs were just consumed with discussing whether or not Zion should ever play for Duke again.

Which was, I thought both, really interesting, like I said, in terms of the sort of evolution of that portion of the argument, but also a little bit just bewildering because, like, you know, to react to a football player affirmatively deciding to sit out a game is one thing, but to sort of like speculate completely baselessly about whether or not a player should or will preemptively end his college career halfway through, it just seems like, I don't know, it was not, it was, it was not, it, it, it, it, it seemed like, I mean, like, like, so much else, just sort of like arguing for sport, you know, I mean, I don't, I don't really know. I don't, and I don't think that, I mean, I think like, going to what you said about the stalemate, I'm not sure there was much disagreement. I think that a lot of people, you know, a lot of people, you know, a lot of people would talk in one direction really strongly and then, you know, he should just do his best or his family. You should do his best, you know, he's got to stop, you know, he's got to stop, you know, he's got to stay. You know, he's got to staylmate is between sports writers and the NCAA, I think. Yeah, exactly. Not between, you know, Max Kellerman and Stephen A. And to talk about it, you know, you know, whether or not things.

are changing. I mean, the NBA did use this opportunity. It seems, you know, deliberately to kind of to trot out their statement that they're going to try to eliminate the age limit, you know, in the next collective bargaining agreement. Right. And that is, that is interesting. And that is a kind of progress. It's something. It is. And I think, I mean, it's, you know, I think that it's, Zion specifically is an interesting case. But then that the broader conversation immediately goes to, you know the broader conversation of paying players which you know is just the most kind of depressing hopeless or you know online argument that we see these days not just online um yeah i mean i don't i don't know that anybody's convincing anyone of anything especially because i mean and i

don't i don't mean to i don't mean to read ill will into you know into any of this but like you know the arguments the pro ncaa arguments never really fully seem to be arguing in good faith, right? So it's sort of hard to imagine many people being swayed from their starting position. All right. Let's do the notebook dump, David. All right. I'm talking about amateurism. I have to start with the clowning of Tucker Carlson. Huge a story this week. Yes. As Justin Charity explains in his ringer piece, which you should read, Dutch historian Rutger Bregman was invited on Carlson's Fox News show in January. Carlson wanted to do this kind of like inside straight where he would try to make common cause with

Bregman about tax avoidance, that seemed to be his strategy. Yes. And Bregman was like, nah, we're talking about higher taxes for millionaires. This was my favorite part of the interview by far. It's true, right? It's true right. That all the, all the anchors on Fox, they're all millionaires. How is this possible?

Well, it's very easy. You're just not talking about certain things. It doesn't play where you are. Well, have you heard of the internet? I can watch things whatever I want. That's my favorite part because Tucker Carlson did not understand how somebody in another country was watching American television. Fox News is in Australia when I was there last year. Like live, not on the internet.

It was just on. Seems like somebody in another country could really get the gist, you know, pretty quickly. Speaking to Fox News, David, I have another Brit Hume tweet of the week. I hope we can make this a regular segment. Please. On Thursday, Hume opened his copy of the Washington Post, his actual paper copy of the Post, and David Brigham was not happy. He tweets, readers of the print edition of Washington Post this morning,

found out a word about the arrest last night of Justice Smollett because democracy dies in darkness. As multiple people would go on to point out, Jesse Smollett was actually surrendered to police early, the next morning, which is why it was not in the paper that had closed the night before. So great stuff from the Waldorf and Stadler of media critics. What would we do without Brit Hume's

media criticism? I have no idea, man. He's a national treasure. A couple of 2020 notes for you. Eric Erickson was never Trump, and now he has endorsed Trump for 2020. So he was not

never Trump. This is the great time we're talking about like, you know, people in the Trump administration looking for other jobs. This is when every talking head, especially on the, especially in the incumbent party has to reevaluate their career projections here because, you know, you got to see, you got to have a game plan for the next four. Right. You can sit out the first two years of the administration, but you're really going to sit out 2020 and kind of implicitly endorse whoever the Democrats, Kamala Harris. No, right? Tough position to be. That's a tough position. Speaking of tough positions, former Ohio guys,

governor and Trump antagonist John Kasich, who was thinking about running an insurgent campaign against Trump in two years, said of his run for the Republican nomination back in 2016, quote, I won my lane. So he, you know, he was that kind of lovable, centrist, non-Trump. He didn't win. He didn't win anything. But he won his lane. Wow. Well, I guess he can, I guess he can live the rest of his life happy with that fact. Yeah. And Benji Sarlane of NBC said, it's in the rafters at Quicken Lones, arena right now. He went his life.

And finally, David, we did this last week, and I want to let you do it again. Would you like to guess the celebrity profile headline? Oh, God. Okay. Go ahead. Okay.

Last week, for listeners who might have missed last week's exciting episode, David failed to guess correctly that a soul-bearing interview with Laura Dern and Vanity Fair was titled Big Little Truce, big little truce. So now David's going to get a chance to redeem himself. Guess the celebrity profile headline.

All right, David, back with Vanity Fair. Okay? Yes. A piece, a reported piece about Trump confidant Hope Hicks's second career. Oh. A piece about Trump confidant, Hope Hicks's second career. Oh, my gosh. I feel like I read parts this piece.

I don't even know if I remember the headline. Okay, this is, I have the only thing that comes to mind, the only pun that comes to mind actually kind of work. so I'm going to go with hope floats. Oh, very close. It was hope and change, but I think you might have actually written a superior celebrity profile headline.

I thought hope and glory, right? There's a pun on a place called hope. Oh, yeah. You know, a place called hope, how Trump's former communications director is facing the post-Whitehouse future, right? You could massage that into a good celebrity profile headline. Yeah, we should really,

When we're evaluating the future career prospects of these former Trump, and basically anybody that's coming out of any field, but particularly politics, we should really pay more attention to the punability of their names, because that's going to, I think, make a lot of difference in pitch meetings. Yeah. It's like, well, when your name is Hope, right, you have a lot of raw materials. For sure. By the way, also, one other one we mentioned last week,

after she won the Oscar last night, how many times will we see it's good to be Regina King? Now a celebrity profile headline from now into infinity. Everybody enjoy it. All right. That's the press box. Producer Jim Cunningham, researcher Chris Almeida, co-host, Extraordinary, David Shootmaker. I'm Brian Curtis. See you next week. More lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. I'll see you later, Brian.

The enemy of the American people. Mm-hmm. Do you want to be an ideological water carrier? Yeah. It's an interesting look. But it's a little weird, is it not? Yeah. Like, what? I mean, you're absolutely right.

I do think there's an interesting question of, do you then get to go from that to carpal karaoke? Wow. Okay, bold move, but I think I agree with that decision. You vineagery old voter you. Ah! I'm amazed. I won my lane.

Yes. We are the bold orphaned staddler of media critic. It's like a horror movie in there. Jordan Peel movie.