The Press Box - Biden Is Crushing Trump, a Washington Post Controversy, and Listener Mail

Episode Date: June 25, 2020

A New York Times/Siena poll out Wednesday shows that Biden is ahead of Trump nationally. Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss how the presidential race could unfold (1:20) and break down the strange story behind a Washington Post piece about a two-year-old blackface incident that got a non-famous woman fired (23:40). Then they answer the question “What do we think now about the Bubba Wallace NASCAR situation?" during Listener Mail (37:10). Plus: The Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week, and David Guesses the Strained Pun Headline.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. I'm Liz Kelly. Make sure to subscribe to the ringer's YouTube channel to watch the newest episode of Slow Newsday with Kevin Clark, featuring NFL MVP Lamar Jackson. And in anticipation of the NBA's return in late July, NBA desktop with Jason Concepcion is back to posting weekly episodes. Also up on our YouTube channel are the best clips taken from this week's Bill Simmons podcast, rewatchables, and higher learning with Rachel Lindsay and Van Lathen. You can find all these videos at YouTube.com slash The Ringer. Hello, media consumers. This is the press box. Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of The Ringer here. We got a lot of stuff for you today. We'll talk about the strange story behind a Washington Post story about a two-year-old blackface incident that got a non-famous woman fired. What happened at the post?

We'll answer your listener mail, including the question. So what do we think now about the? the whole Bubba Wallace NASCAR situation. All that plus David guesses a strain pun headline in the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But David let us begin with the presidential race because Joe Biden is, and I pick my verb carefully here, crushing Donald Trump right now. A New York Times Sienna poll that was out Wednesday shows Biden ahead of Trump nationally by 14 points, 50 to 36. Now, if Biden's sitting right on the 50 mark worries you, 538's Jeffrey Skelly tweets this,

Biden's the only candidate besides Nixon in 1972 and Reagan in 1984 to average above 50% at this point. Now, you also might say, but, but, but national polls don't matter. It's only state polls. Okay. Well, the same pollster shows Biden leading among registered voters in six swing states.

In Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, those are the states, of course, that Trump picked off in 2016. Biden's lead is double digits. He's also ahead in Florida, North Carolina, Arizona. In October of last year, Biden was ahead cumulatively, David, across those six swing states by just two points. Now he's ahead by nine. Wow. You know, I think that there's a big part of me that thinks we should just like, you know, go ahead and, established that we're either jinxing or reverse jinxing the Biden campaign by even covering

this at this point, it's a valid subject. As comfortable as I am normally with like the 538, you know, copy style and that of certainly of all the other newspapers, I do feel like, I do feel like throwing my hands up in the air, or just like I'm just desperately in search of someone admitting that we don't know anything anymore, even as we look at these numbers that seem to have such, I mean, that seem to, you know, be so confident. But yeah, I mean, this is a sort of remarkable situation to be in, especially to find ourselves in, especially considering we don't really have a campaign on either side, at least not in the shape that we expected them to be it. Yeah. There's this whole

but 2016 feeling that hangs over like everything in politics right now. And you, You've seen various people on Twitter pushing back at it, right? It's very natural for people who went into November 2016, absolutely convinced Hillary Clinton was going to be the next president of the United States. And then, whoops, it's Donald Trump. I will say if you look at this particular poll, one thing that stands out is how logical the reactions are in a way. I mean, America thinks that Donald Trump has been an especially terrible president over the last.

few months, which matches with yours and my idea of reality, right? This is from the poll. 62% of voters disapprove of the way the president is handling the protests after the death of George Floyd. 61% disapprove of his handling of race relations. 58% disapprove of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Well, that's basically American life since March. And you find very, very big majorities of people saying,

Donald Trump has done a terrible job. Well, you know, I mean, one of the, I'm not holding any, any, you know, polling details in front of me. One of the narratives that came out of the last campaign, the last presidential campaign, 2016, was that it was kind of this notion that there were Trump voters that never admitted to being Trump voters, even in exit polls. If those people still exist, it makes a little bit of sense that they would be particularly vocally anti-Trump in moments of great racial tension in America or even offhandedly when it comes. to the handling of the coronavirus pandemic. And still, that might not sway them when they get into the ballot box in November. That said, yeah, this does mirror reality. And for as much as we, as much as many people try to disqualify Trump along the way or sort of, you know,

you know, rub it in about him hiring the very best people when he couldn't hire anybody, you know, all the things that he said, all the promises that he made that he didn't live up to, at the end of the day, you know, every presidential election ends up being about the economy. And I think if you pull back even a little bit further than that, these issues, I mean, these elections really are about leadership and the presidency broadly defined. And if Trump is doing like a real shitty job at that right before our eyes and on TV every day, that has to have a real significant effect, much more so than any kind of gotcha thing that, that, you know, someone on Twitter might try to pull on it.

Yeah, I mean, the economy right particularly hurts them. because it was pretty clear at the beginning of this year that he was going to run a campaign that essentially said, hey, Republicans, hey, narrow majority of the electoral college, you may hate everything about the way I present myself. But look at the economy that's happening that I'm delivering for you for certain people, right, at least as interpreted through the stock market in various ways. Sure. Look at unemployment. Look at those kind of things. Well, that was wiped out by the coronavirus, right? That's not happening anymore.

So also, I mean, as far as the but-2016 thing goes, I know I might end up looking stupid in a few months, but... Mark this tape. Here we go. You know, we thought that Hillary Clinton's lead was insurmountable at around this time in the last cycle. But Biden's lead is, according to 538, Nathaniel Rakech pointed this out, more than double that. Like, you know, Hillary's lead was about 4% nationally, and that was with... did like an average like polling error of being wrong, which I guess it was or something. But, you know, Biden's ahead by 9.6 points, which is a lot more. So I mean, you know, there might be a tendency to say the numbers don't mean anything,

but I don't know if that's true. No. And it's it's this idea that any Democrat who is ahead of Trump is eventually going to lose to Trump in some way, right? That's the psychosis here. But as you point out, this is a gigantic lead, at least at this point in the summer. Yeah. I mean, just to reiterate what I said before, you know, the purple state Trump voters in my life,

and I do have them. I was just speaking to one not long ago. And he very, I mean, literally said to me, I wish I could vote for anybody else, but Trump's the incumbent and voting Republican is the only way to go right. And the only way out of this mess we're in. And so, you know, I am tempted to believe these polls, but, you know, I don't want to be victim to my own temptations here. It's certainly true that what you were saying, Brian, before about the economy. I mean, and again, the economy doesn't look like it's going to be trending up, but there have been, you know, there's indicators in different directions and anything could happen with the economy.

So I don't even want to get too comfortable on that, you know, on that metric. But when you look at him, when we talked about his speech last time, when you, when you look at. at him out there speaking, when you start slicing the pie pieces of his very, you know, the people he's sort of trying to come on to in this speech, when you start slicing it up and you take out the economy pie piece and replace that with a little bit more jingoism or racism or whatever else, it really does skew. I mean, it really, it really does just, you know, pull back the curtain on this entire like mound of bullshit he's running on. So I do think that there's, it's a little bit harder to hold your nose and vote when you look at the economy, when you look at coronavirus,

and when you look at, you know, everything that's happened since George Floyd was killed. And before, since Breonna Taylor was killed, I mean, his handling of all race relations issues in our country. It's interesting to drill down a little bit into the data behind these polls. Nate Silver tweets that almost all of Biden's gains relative to Clinton and the battlegrounds are because of white voters, both college and non-college whites. Interesting in the context of the protests and Trump's appeal to white identity. from the New York Times as Nate Cohn, aka the other Nate who likes polls,

may be more surprising virtually zero change among non-white voters, despite all the attention on racial issues over the last couple of weeks. Alex Burns in the New York Times pulls this out. College-educated white women, all right? 2016, Hillary Clinton won that group by seven points. Right now, Joe Biden is winning college-educated white women by 39 points. Wow. So that's, you know, those are some of the places you see,

where he's been able to pull this, pull away a little bit. Again, with all of the, with all the things about 26 being baked in there. I wanted to ask you about this, David, because I find this interesting. I think every liberal, including perhaps the two hosts of this podcast, has been waiting to write the Joe Biden is screwing this up piece. Right. Well, Jonathan Chate wrote this piece in New York Magazine where he basically asked, What if Joe Biden is actually not screwing this up? What if through some combination of luck and perhaps some campaign skill that Joe Biden picked the right lane to beat Donald Trump in 2020?

Well, first of all, I'm really excited to be taking on a Jonathan Chate piece at face value on the press box. This is fantastic. I think it's a really good question, and it's really well-timed. I think that we talked a little bit last time about how Trump's attacks on Biden sort of fell flat, right? Biden is going to be a pawn of the far anarchic left, right? It doesn't work for a variety of reasons, one because it's sort of specious, but more specifically because as much as we are, as much as the American electorate has been moving towards this model. of, you know, new is better than old, sort of, you know, like we want, we, you know, we, you know, we want candidates without a big track record. We want candidates like Trump that

are totally out of the mainstream. Um, there's one real big advantage to having been in public life, in public office for as long as Joe Biden has, which is like, it's really hard to paint somebody as a, as a crank when they've been operating in front of you, in front of us when they've been in a public role for so long and have not, you know, burnt any flags on national television, not that there should be anything wrong with that or, you know, anything. I mean, we, there's a certain amount of comfort that comes with the length of time he's been in public life. And I think Chay touches on this.

As much as we would joke, someone on Twitter might joke, and certainly Trump will talk shit about Biden's sort of basement. campaign, you know, I mean, there's a really good way to describe the way he's campaigning right now, which is conservative, right? I mean, he's just sort of holding back doing the bare minimum and literally not leaving us. I mean, you know, campaigning from his house. It's a very conservative approach of this campaign. And I think that there's a, I mean, you look at those numbers amongst college educated educated white women. There's a bunch of nominally conservative voters out there that I think probably appreciate or, you know, find some comfort.

in the conservatism, albeit defined slightly differently, of the way that he's campaigning right now. Absolutely. I mean, he's playing this right, like the football team that's up a couple of touchdowns at the beginning of the fourth quarter, right? He's trying not to screw this up. He does not want to go out there and give Trump any fodder.

There's a New York Times piece about this the other day, how frustrating it is for team Trump, not to have Biden gaffs, right, that they could then weaponize and turn this election into Donald Trump versus Joe Biden, as opposed to this is an election about Donald Trump's record as president of the United States, right? They want the farmer. They do not want the latter.

They are losing the ladder badly. To your point about Biden being defined, it's kind of funny, right? Hillary Clinton's problem was that she was such a defined personality and had such a long track record, right? Right. Back to the Iraq war and before. But the thing about Biden is he's just much more, much more popular politician. And again, if you look at this Times poll, it's fascinating. There's not a huge amount of Biden enthusiasm, but his very unfavorable rating is only 27%.

Right. So there's like 27% of voters that just cannot stand Joe Biden. That's a very low number. So that, and that helps, I think, balance out the enthusiasm problem that he has. That's about what Bernie was polling, right? Yeah. I'm just kidding. But yeah, I totally, I completely agree.

And I think the big, and I said, I mean, to reiterate what I said, the big distinction between Biden and Hillary is that her unfavorables were very high, personal unfavorables. And there's a big difference between saying, and obviously this is broad strokes, between saying don't vote for Hillary, she's terrible. And don't vote for Joe Biden. He is a tool of the anarchic left. Like that one of those things is just like demonstrably false, right?

It requires an extra jump. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. No, that's absolutely. And Alex Burns tweets this. too, and I thought this is right. Biden isn't ahead by double digits because of his own runaway popularity. It's because he's broadly acceptable as an alternative to a strongly disliked incumbent. Now, the question of whether Biden's secret genius, right, then it comes up was, was Biden being

generic, broadly acceptable Democrat a stroke of, you know, campaign tactics? Or was that is just what Joe Biden is faded to be? And that's what turned out to help him win the Democratic. nomination and then may help him be the exact right path to be Donald Trump in November. I don't know. I don't know either. Both is probably the answer. I'm not sure Joe Biden was capable of being anything other than fairly generic Democrat. That's his lane, right?

You know, who has a lot of favorable qualities that people like. On the other hand, he did reject a lot of policy stuff, right? There's a lot of pressure on Joe Biden. You got to be a lot more progressive, right? You've got to have a much bigger. We're going to lose the election. If you don't have a much more progressive policy vision, which he rejected. Now, again, he didn't see the coronavirus coming.

He didn't see the Black Lives Matter. So, again, there's a lot of luck baked in there, too. There is a lot of luck baked in there. But what we're seeing is in so much as this is driven by Trump's pull numbers going down. And again, you know, current events, national news, all those things have a huge bearing on it. But, you know, the argument for the Biden campaign from the beginning was that, like, he would be there. to pick up the pieces when Trump fell apart, sort of. You know, I mean, he was like the safe bet.

The same, he wasn't necessarily the, like the, like the strongest bet, although by a lot of not polling he was, but he was like the safest bet. And, uh, that's really borne out to be true in a lot of ways, right? I mean, like the positive spin of that is, is what we're seeing right in front of us right now. Biden doesn't have to, he just goes on, you know, Zoom once a week and talks to somebody and he's, and he's like, and he's like, it's like us. Yeah, I know.

He's running the press box campaign, and somehow he's up with like, with like historical numbers right now. Now, I mean, I mean, like as much as this is, I mean,

again, not to pour cold water on it, but like the fact that all this is like so clearly weighted by national protests, by police murders, by coronavirus, you know, these are,

that's, that is somewhat more transitory than the long term strength of the stock market, even though that's not very strong, right? I mean, that's more transitory now, too. So, I mean, we've got a little ways to go. Are we sure the coronavirus is transitory, though? No, no, no, no, no. I think it's here to stay.

I'm just saying that, like, that is a, it is feasible that that magically goes away, not magically, but you know what I mean. You sound like Donald Trump two weeks ago. If they would just stop testing, we'd be in a whole different situation. No, I mean, and honestly, there are a lot of you know there are a lot of kind of like tweaking your nose

at Trump sort of like I feel like Twitter tweets like we could be throwing at him right now but there is an aspect of his iron fist sort of personality the way he likes to rule the way he likes to preside over the country that are just being shown

to be ridiculous right now and it's not just his inability to lead in some of these really important moments but it's also things like you know, red states like Arizona, Florida, Texas that are just having to like find really inartful ways to walk back like the pro-Trump coronavirus is a hoax bullshit that they've been touting for so long. That makes them look weak. That makes Trump look weak because we all know they were they were just carrying water for him. And it's, I think there's a, you know,

I think that the likelihood is that it's going to trend badly for him going forward, even though I think that, you know, there's a lot of room for variance. Can I ask you one last important question about the New York Times-Cena College poll? Please. How often do you think of Sienna College when it's not in the name of a political poll? And question two, do you think of it more or less than Quinnipiac, Monmouth, and Marist universities? Discuss. Quinnipiac really suffers from the fact that it's just Quinnipiac is all we ever say.

We don't say university or college afterwards. I'm not sure that they're like, you know, application numbers are really going up right now. I don't know where any of those schools are. I'm not too proud to say. So, yeah, this is probably the first time I've thought about Siena in any aspect outside of polling for a long time. Quinnipiac University is in beautiful Hamden, Connecticut. And if you think I learned that two seconds before the press. went on air. You're right.

Well, I have one more question for you, a resident historian. Okay. Not really. But the one, we talked about all these, you know, the coronavirus, all these other sort of, well, pretend they were, they would have called them X factors several months ago. And we see how they're affecting the race.

But we still have these like important moments in the campaign that are still to come. how much weight do you think we should plan on putting in on the results of the debates? I saw actually some people suggest that Biden shouldn't even debate, but presuming we have presidential debates, those are still going to be huge moments, right? The moment that Biden picks his vice president is going to be a huge moment, right? And especially, you know, given the sort of on-air machinations, you know, we saw Amy Klobuchar, you know, formally drop out the other day and say that he should. he had to choose a woman of color, basically.

These are going to be big moments in the campaign that I don't think we can write off as just like another trend. I mean, the trend will necessarily continue unaffected. Do you think that's true? What do you think the other big moments are that we should be watching out for? Well, I think it's a good question. And again, cue up the tape here in November, if we're completely wrong. But this reminds me a lot of 2008,

where the fundamentals were so strong that a, Democrat was going to win the election, right? And yet it was still important that Barack Obama and Joe Biden do well in the debates, right? Was it absolutely necessary that they mopped the floor in the debates as they mostly did? Probably not, right? Was it absolutely necessary that Obama make the perfect VEEP choice? And he made, I think, a very good one with Biden, probably not.

But I think if we get to, you know, a place in the fall where the coronavirus isn't contain where the economy still stinks, where Trump's disapproval numbers on all these issues are so high. I think it's, I think those, I think those events will be less important in terms of who wins the presidency. Yes. All right. That's where I'd stand. All right, David, 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. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received. Uh, it's time to think about baseball. again. It's coming back next month. Yeah. And here's a news item. Miami mayor Carlos Jimenez

will consider allowing fans at Marlins Park starting next month, but the Marlins must first submit a plan to the country showing how fans can socially distance. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write. It's a longstanding policy at Marlins Park to have at least 50 empty seats between attendees. Thanks to Paul Middilkoff. Missed this one a couple of weeks ago, David, our NASCAR discussion. NASCAR, you remember, banned the Confederate flag at racetracks. That was a big,

fairly surprising statement. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write NASCAR turns left. Very overworked Twitter joke, I should add. And finally, David, this headline ran in the Fresno B hot off the presses,

quote, Congressman Devin Nunes can't sue Twitter over statements by fake cow judge rules. You remember the whole Devin Nunes cow Twitter account, which now has over

700,000 followers. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write Bovine Retribution. Oh, can we hire the cow? Can the cow come on the press box? Do a regular segment. I'm willing to consider it. If you remember that Devin Nunes was someone who can be

dragged during any era of American life, Congrats. You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, in the notebook dump. There was a piece in New York magazine by Olivia Nuzzi and Josh Barrow about a very, very strange story that ran in the Washington Post. I'm going to crib from Nuzzie and Barrow's story, which I encourage you to read. I put it up on the press box feed earlier today. But the relevance here, and you'll see in a minute why I am underlining the term relevance, is that this speaks to the moment we're living in,

journalistically and otherwise. Here's the play-by-play and stop me if you get confused or wonder why we're talking about this at all. In 2018, Washington Post cartoonist Tom Tolls had a Halloween party. Yeah. Graphic designer named Sue Schaefer went to the party dressed as Megan Kelly,

the talking TV person, or I guess now internet talking person. Megan Kelly, you'll remember, had just been fired for musing that maybe blackface really wasn't that offensive. So Sue Schaefer, this guest at the party thinks, aha, I'll dress as Megan Kelly in blackface, which is, we quickly add an absolutely terrible idea for a Halloween costume and extremely offensive at the same time. It resulted in some embarrassment at the party.

There was at least one social media post about it, but that was that. Two years later, despite the fact that Sue Schaefer is not famous, the Washington Post decided to write a story about this incident. Not just a story either, David, a fairly long feature that ran on the front page of the styles section by Mark Fisher and Sydney Trent. That story came out on June 17th. It landed like with a giant thud on Twitter. people, even people at the post, seemed to wonder why the paper had run it at all. Nuzi and Barrow write, quote, a total of four post employees,

four, this is at a giant newspaper, shared the article on Twitter shortly after its publication. One of those employees admitted to not having read it in full before tweeting it, the authors of the piece did not share it on Twitter or Facebook at all. A writer at the post tells New York, magazine. No one I've spoken with that the Post can figure out why

we publish this story. We blew up this woman's life for no reason. This is where we should add that Sue Schaefer was fired from her job when these revelations came to light. What do you make of all this? First of all, this is a fantastic piece.

I really encourage everybody listening to go read it, not just for the lovely prose, but because this is like, this is one of those pieces that you read and you're like, this is why, this is why the internet exists. You know, I mean, it's like a really good behind the scene or behind the curtain,

whatever other phrase, inside baseball, look at the way that a story like this can be created, can be produced, can be released into the world. And all of the sort of like ancillary, if vague, positions of power within a, within a, you know, grand old,

and often, more often than not correct outlet like the Washington Post. It's really, really interesting. Even the insinuations, and I should say, most of the insinuations are, you know, artful in the sense that what they're insinuating is 99.9% true.

All of the conclusions that they're, all of the raised eyebrows are pointing in a pretty clear direction, and it's, you know, it's not exactly a mystery story, but it's really well written and really well researched, and it goes into every, even the politics of it appearing in the style section,

which by writers who are not associated with the style section and even though and it explains how the you know the borders are a little bit looser than they used to be in the internet era and everything else but this piece really explained i mean really it really you learn a lot about the public about the newspaper publishing world by reading it now the specifics of the story are galling i mean just like like there is very i mean like what in the living fuck, I think is my formal statement on it. And I don't know that much more needs to be said. But I will continue.

This is a, it is clear, what they basically uncovered is that two people who attended the party who were offended and rightfully offended by the costume were, had contacted the post in recent

days, or recent weeks, I should say, sort of investing, following up on it and wondering why there hadn't been any sort of story on it and the implication in the piece is that they were shopping it around to other outlets as well and that there was some perceived pressure

inside the Washington Post, especially among, I mean, because they've been getting some other bad press of late to cover the story themselves so that no one else could cover it. Like they were so worried about a, whatever, a New York Post hit piece, you know, in one column

that they wrote a 3,000 word feature story story that resulted in a non-public figure getting fired for a costume they wore to their cartoonist Halloween party two years ago. And can we just drill down on that for a second? Because that is, that seems to me, if one has to guess, it's pretty clear that that's the reason the Post decided to report this, right? This very tangentially involved Washington Post employees, right? It was Tom Tolls's Halloween party.

It was Dana Milbank, who's a conference. was apparently at the Halloween party, but had nothing to do with this and said, you see, see this. Dressed as Brett Kavanaugh with a beer helmet on. It feels like its own article, but okay. Not offensive, but just, but just bad. Go ahead. Bad Halloween costume, Dana.

So you can see in the minds of the Washington Post two things. One is, do we have some sort of responsibility here to report this, out even if this makes us look bad by association, right? That's kind of one thing. And number two is, do we have a fear that if this story goes to another outlet, there's going to be some mashup headline that reads Washington Post slash blackface incident that winds up hurting us much worse than our own piece about this would hurt us, right? That's something that the authors of the York piece imply.

And to me, both of those are absolutely mixed in here somewhere, are they not? Yeah, I mean, that's it. I mean, that's the... I mean, I have not been inside newsrooms the way you have, the way a lot of people listening to this have. But I've had jobs, you know, I've worked inside of publishing entities in many different forms. There is, it's really hard to imagine a chain of events here

that don't involve someone way up the totem pole, freaking out and insisting that this, that this story be reported and run. I just can't imagine any other chain of events that would lead to this. Yeah. And we should also note that when this tip went to the post, there was at least wondering out loud within the tip of, this was Tolls' Halloween party.

So was this a post employee of some sort who wore this offensive costume, right? Which is certainly something if you're the Washington Post, you want to check out, right? we want to make sure that that is not our person who is doing that. And by the way, the first time I read the story, I mistakenly thought that it was a post employee. I thought it was like a junior level graphic designer at the post who had done it. And even still, it would be an incredibly just ignorant piece to publish.

I mean, maybe I'm biased because I, you know, govern the graphic design department here at the Ringer. But like, that is not a public facing role, even if it's a job at the Washington Post, right? This is not a person who is necessarily subject to public scrutiny, especially if there's no sequence of, I mean, there's no repetition of such, like, you know, offensive acts in their life.

So as Nuzzi and Barrow note, the post-editorial standards declare that, quote, fairness includes relevance. Yes. And then the big question is, is it relevant to readers of the post, to society at large, that this woman wore a hideously offensive Halloween

costume to a party two years ago. It's certainly incredibly offensive. It certainly would be incredibly offensive to the people at the party, right? Or people that, you know, we're around at the time. I totally understand that. But then does it rise to being a story that should be in the paper if the result is just going to be that this woman loses her job? I think that I just find it, obviously there are many times where people investigate

story. I mean, do the work of reporting and the peace doesn't. run. And certainly when this sort of tip comes in, when it first was floated that it might be a post employee, you're right. That's a thing that post would want to look into. Even further than that, there are certainly other things that Post might want to look into just to sort of report out the whole story, but you would think they would do that without a commitment to run it. And then at the end, when someone has actually lost their job over this, I mean, that's the whole point of the relevance discussion, right, of the pledge of relevance, is that you don't put people in this

situation just to cover your own ass, right? I mean, that's, they, they, they, they, they wrecked somebody's life because they were, because they had gotten a little bit of Twitter flack that week and didn't want another tweet. I mean, obviously they opened up a whole different can of worms, but still, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's sort of reprehensible. So now the piece is out there, right? And we get to the question of what happens now. And to me, this is where real world, normal human relations bump up against how a newspaper works. Because if this story were factually wrong, the post would say, let's do a correction, right?

We blew it. We messed up. But the story is not factually wrong as far as we know. So there's not really a button where the paper pushes and says, you know what? This story was right, but we shouldn't have run it. Like that's not in the newspaper, Mad Libs, responses. to problematic stories. Right.

So instead, you get this sort of defensiveness from the post, oh, well, this is, you know, going on. And nothing the spokesperson said in that New York Magazine piece was convincing to me at all. No, I mean, and they certainly weren't convinced of it either. I think Barrow tweeted later that he was just sort of aghast at the post, not only, I mean, after everything that he was aghast about, that they then put their PR department in the position of having to defend a story

that the post itself wasn't even interested in defending, right? I mean, the post was like, well, do you want to talk about the photos in the story? I mean, the story was published with lead photos of... The two women who were at the party and had encountered this woman in the costume, and then a photo of the woman in costume at the party. Ran later in the story, right? Like in the body of the story. Both of those photos, I think at different times, had been disappeared now, right?

I mean, they're no longer attached to the story. and it's part of the Washington Post editorial code or guidelines, whatever, that if they change a photo or alter a photo, then there was a disclaimer on the piece that explains that, right? And that has not been the case with this one. So they're already violating their own standards.

It's just the degree to which, you're right, they don't have, there's not a cut and paste response to like, fuck, we shouldn't have run that piece, but they've done everything else to say that, to imply that, and they still send their PR department out there to defend it. It's just sort of, it's just, it's wild. Can I leave you with one quote from the PR person. This is Chris Karate, who I know a little bit, because she used to be our PR person at Slate, too, when I was back there. I guess one of the reporters had been muttering when he was talking to people

for the story that he didn't necessarily understand the newsworthiness of this story, but his editor, editors were forcing him to write him. Okay. So New York Magazine got that and they went back to Washington Post PR. This was a response from Washington Post PR. Our editors don't force people to write stories. Three Pinocchio's. Oh, no, no, no. Oh, I'm sorry. Is the Washington Post some magical land of journalism where editors don't force writers to write stories? Oh, my God. What? Oh, my God. What? Take me to this magical place where the writers pick all their assignments. And if they don't like something, they go, you know, I'm going to pass on that today. At a newspaper? Are you kidding me? All those writers sitting in the bullpen saying, I'm just going to wait for that.

I'm just waiting for that right piece to come along. Just leave me. I'm just perusing the internet till inspiration strikes. All the Pinocchio's, bottomless Pinocchio's. It's like the endless salad at the Olive Garden. All right, David, let's do a little listener mail. We do this on Thursdays. As you might imagine, we got a lot of questions about coverage of the ringer this week,

asking us for our thoughts. We want to say we hear you. David and I agree. Newsroom diversity is a subject that is worth covering it. We will keep covering it. And hopefully we can talk more about it soon. I'll just leave it at that for now. Go sign.

This one, David, is from Gabe Hernandez. What's your take on the reaction to the FBI's findings in the case of the noose in Bubba Wallace's garage in Talladega? Why are so many people gloating and not relieved? So we talked about this a little bit on Monday. Bubba Wallace is a black NASCAR driver. Yeah. Who had been campaigning for NASCAR not to allow Confederate flags or images at the tracks during races, right?

NASCAR somewhat shockingly put out this policy saying no more Confederate flags in the midst of the protests, right? So then they go to Talladega and somebody on Bubba Wallace's team finds a noose in the garage. and goes, oh my God, right? We then everybody goes to battle stations. The FBI is called in. And they find that this noose, and there is a picture of it on on Twitter right now, was a, what is the term here?

A door pull, like a knot that was a door pole that had been in the garage for some months before, I believe since last October. But if you look at this thing on, Twitter today, it is a noose, right? Now, there may be some explanation that does not directly relate to Bubba Walls, and I assume there is, if it was there since last October. But you can understand why everyone was appalled, shocked, and immediately went to this place of, oh my God, a terrible thing has happened. Can you not? Absolutely. I mean,

you asked, or I guess Gabe asked, why so many people are gloating and not relieved, I guarantee there's nobody gloating right now that didn't, I mean, everybody gloating right now did in fact believe that that was a noose that it was hung up for Bubba Wallace and they just didn't feel bad about it when it happened. Like I guarantee, there's nobody gloating

who was like, I told you it was a door pole that was hanging down and happened to be in the shape of a noose, right? The gloating is entirely disingenuous. And it also shows the world that we're living in, right? I mean, like, thank God this news wasn't created specifically as a statement, a counterstatement to Bubba Wallace and his, you know, his own Black Lives Matter statements of recent days. And, you know, his push for NASCAR to ban the Confederate flag.

Thank God this wasn't a direct response to that. But we're still talking about a world in which, like, a noose could just hang there for months and months and months and nobody say anything about it, right? that it would have gone unnoticed, I mean, that it would be so unoffensive to every person that passed by

that it wouldn't have been immediately identified as for what it was when the story broke. Yes. And I just, I'm struggling here a little bit because I'm going to make the less articulate version of a bunch of points, Bomani Jones made on ESPN radio yesterday,

but relief that this was not some horrendous act of racist intimidation. directed at Bubba Wallace to me as my primary emotion, finding out that it was not real. And also, by the way, did you see the plane flying over Talladega, David, with a Confederate flag on it that said defund NASCAR? Yeah. Did you see the protesters going by with Confederate flags on their trucks? And they were mostly trucks, at least the ones I saw? So this idea, and again, that is in direct response to a black NASCAR.

driver saying please don't fly the Confederate flag anymore. And some people's response was, let me get my Confederate flag and drive by the track. I just gloating of any sort seems to be absolutely the wrong way to think about this. Jonah Baleckis has a journalism question about this. Is there anything reporters should do differently for stories that don't turn out the way they appear right away? He also references the NYPD ShakeShack then. So essentially saying, is there a way NASCAR finds this thing, right?

It appears to be terrible. Is there any way we can at least pump the brakes somewhat at that beginning point to say something that looks like this? We don't, we're not sure to allow for this probably admittedly small chance that it turns out to be a door pole. I mean, this is a really specific example. I think no matter what the ethical guidelines you have, no matter how much caution, an outlet, a paper, a magazine, whatever, tries to use in any situation, no matter what the top-down rules are for this sort of thing,

I think it'd be pretty hard to draw any conclusion other than the one that the entire world drew in this situation, right? That this, I mean, that Bubba Wallace had worked behind the scenes to get, Confederate flags band had been outward, I mean, had Black Lives Matter painted on his car and then a noose appeared in his garage. I mean,

I think that, I think you'd be hard pressed to find any skeptic out there. Now, maybe that's not a sufficient answer. But, I mean, I don't know. I think,

I mean, we're not talking about, this isn't, as you pointed out, evidence that the systemic problem doesn't exist, you know? I don't, I find, I think as long as the stories, the original stories are all updated, and as long as, you know, the revisions, I mean, the reportage of the, of the truth of the, you know, the, the end of the investigation are published with the same level of sort of acclaim as the original stories. I don't find a real ethical conundrum here. I don't, do you? I don't think there's much of one, no. I mean, it's one of those things, right? In, in a world where we just take out the specifics here, ideally the press would not amplify a statement that turns out to be less than accurate, right?

Like that I think that's like a principle of journalism. The problem is NASCAR puts out this statement and everybody goes, oh my God, right? Collectively, you know, NASCAR was pretty unambiguous in their initial statement. So, and so then it becomes, you know, are we going to sit here and say, okay, well, NASCAR thinks this. Let's wait a day or two to see what actually happens. happens before we jump to a conclusion. Yeah.

That's just very difficult. It may be more difficult in this news environment, but I think that would be difficult in any news environment, right? And obviously all of these newspapers have a real vested interest in like being out front of the story, right? I mean, being reporting early, getting those clicks. I mean, it's really hard to be cautious in a competitive marketplace. I mean, but then there's, you know, the other example of recent days is this, the story about

shake shack, about shake shack feeding bleach to the New York police department, which turned to not be true. It's a little bit easier to look back in the, look in the roof of mirror and just be like, wow, you were just like helping somebody like amplify a conspiracy theory, right? I mean, that's just it.

So there are varying degrees. You know, there's different versions of this. But I think you're right. I mean, you don't want to be seen as just like, just amplifying a statement. But I just think in the Bubba Wallace, I mean, in the NASCAR situation, in the NASCAR situation,

I honestly feel like and the abundance of caution argument that one would use, I mean, the abundance of caution is turning a light on this real problem in NASCAR, right? And protecting a person.

Yeah, right? Yeah. Protecting Bubba Wallace. And not potentially protecting whoever worked in that garage, you know, whoever the culprit might have been or the reality that it might not have been

the truth. Protect, yeah. I mean, the caution that you exert doesn't always have, I mean, isn't always an easy to find source, but, you know, but, but I think that that was a, that, they, they used actually the

appropriate kind of caution in reporting the story. Yeah, I think Bumani again pointed this out in the radio yesterday, but this was not a case where the media was saying, there, here is the name of the person who did this. Yeah. And the person turned out to be innocent, right? So somebody, the, the media said, this was found. We have no idea who put it there and then went from there. This one, David's from Aaron Schaefer. Should reporters reveal names of players who test positive? for COVID. In the National Women's Soccer League this week, five players tested positive for COVID after going to a bar

causing the entire Orlando Pride to drop out of a tournament. How should Jernos handle revealing player names, clearly newsworthy? Well, I think the bar is sort of the interesting part or the newsworthy part of that story. I am, every time I see even from the beginning

of the pandemic, every time I would just see like a news, well, Jay Glazer was the first one that did it, right? that identified an NFL player who had tested positive. And it was big, you know, presented as big news at the time. It's always felt a little bit, meaning, empty, unnecessary, and not just for like, not exploitative necessary, necessarily, although I'm sure there is an exploitive tune to it to some people,

but it just seems like unless someone is actually ill or unless someone is actively presenting a medical risk to people, them or their illness is the result of someone else's recklessness, you know, the surrounding story is what's newsworthy to me. And again, the person's health, if someone, you know, goes to the gas station and gets infected by the clerk and comes home and then, you know, goes through a relatively minor illness in their house over the next week or two, I'm not sure what the newsworthiness of that is at all, unless that person.

wants to out themselves in the name of, you know, prevention of spread for other people. Yeah. I mean, the weird example of this was Ezekiel Elliott running back at the Cowboys. Oh, yeah. Reports came out that he had contracted COVID-19. His agent confirmed it. And then he got on Twitter and was mad that the reports had come out as if they were a violation of his privacy in some way. I mean, it's one of these, such an interesting thing, right?

Because athletes give up a lot of their privacy medically. right this is part of being an athlete well he can't play well what what's wrong with him why has he hurt and all the journalists then are racing to figure out what's wrong with he or she and why can't he or she play sports this week yeah and covid 19 in a very weird way has become part of that injury report chad orzel asks us this question david where does new bob dillon album fall in the old guys still got it power rang listeners this podcast when know that one of our favorite journalistic templates is when an older artist, movie director, TV showrunner, and in this case, musician does something.

The press loves to write the old guys still got it. So where does Dylan rank? By the way, we should say that Neil Young released an album on the same day. So this is sort of an old guy's still got a template, although Neil Young's album was a I believe a release of a lost album from the 70s, an album that he recorded but never released. So it's like there's this sort of tension between old guy still has it or old guys still got it and old guy used to got it. And now we got it. But yeah, now we appreciate that he's got enough whatever to give us what he used to got. But but yeah, I think that the Bob Dylan,

Bob Dylan album is, is pretty significant. Bob Dylan is as an old guy still got its story. As an old guy still got his story. It's a powerful one. It's a powerful one. It's a powerful one because I think in a lot of ways Dylan, and I say this as a fan, but not a diehard. Bob Dylan is, you know, a sort of walking metaphor for many, many different things. And at this point, at this point in his career exists almost entirely as an old guy still got it, right? I mean, the Rolling Thunder Review documentary that was on Netflix not long, or they debuted not long, I think not too long ago, was fantastic stuff that was looking into the past. but there is sort of this like, I mean, every time that he had does something new, it's, we get to harken back to the past and, and really look at the, you know, his continued

potency. This is, it's probably top, it's top three, I would think. Yeah. When you're saying words like significant top three, I just want to make sure you're, you're saying, you're ranking this as a story genre because we don't allow rock criticism here at the press box. No, no, no, no. I'm out. When this becomes like two dudes talking about rock, I'm out. I got that's, we're, we're too old to be talking about rock anyway. We would, we would have already transitioned to restaurant reviewers if we had been rock reviewers. This one's from Ben. Has the Writers with kids without kids dynamic changed at all since the beginning of quarantine?

Any updates on the summer phase of the parent plus work combo? If you were listening to us earlier this spring, David and I spent a lot of time talking about what it's like to be parents and balancing the duties of being parents and the joys and pleasures of being parents with work. David, has that changed on your end at all? Great question. I think it has changed. I mean, I heard directly from people at the ringer that they listened to what we said and that they, you know, I think in a lot of ways there are people that maybe took it to heart more than I expected them to or even intended them to. And I think that overall I've heard that from people who work at other places and different fields and everything else. I definitely think we've settled into a place of a little bit more understanding than where we started off.

but but the world continues apace in its obliviousness to the to such issues just today on a and ringer uh parents slack a great twitter rant by deb prelman was circulated about just the sort of lunacy of how the new york public school reopening plans and the reopening new york businesses plans are continuing or working on on parallel but completely divergent tracks right now where they're talking about we're just going to reopen the economy full stop and schools are like we'll take your kids one day a month, you know? And and there's there's no outward tension between these two things, even though the entire, the entire premise of the economy reopened will be completely undermined by the lack of public schooling. There, the world, I do, I do think that people are, that most conscientious human beings have, uh, have awakened to a lot of those things that we were talking about a couple months ago, but the world itself has, has not. Yeah. And I, and I, I do think, will there be school in the fall?

You mentioned this a couple of episodes ago. That is this, you know, one of the singular question in every working parents life right now. And that is, that is an underrated question, right? That's, that's the big one. Nobody knows the answer to this. I saw some stat the other than 96% of school districts had not committed to that question, something like that. I might be, I might be butchering that. But if you're a parent, not only or have you been doing this.

spring kind of doing double duty and triple duty through the spring, you don't know what the fall is going to look like. Yeah. You have no idea, but I'm glad you heard some feedback on that. Well, I think that, and I think just to reiterate the original point from several months ago, talking about the despair, we're really, we're talking about how kind of wheels off the plan for opening the schools in the fall is. And then the part that often goes unstated in that conversation is that there's still like rather widespread expectation that COVID you know version 2.0 is going to hit again this fall and we might be angling towards a world in which our kids haven't been to school for 18 months and that's like that's puts parents in a very wild situation

but it also like think about what our how our kids are going to come out on the other side of that also bad for kids yeah anyway moving on last one for from Jody Canadae. If someone is interested in journalism as a career, what activities or non-J school classes would you suggest they pursue? And I'll just preface this by saying, I think I speak for David here, that David and I have taken a combined zero journalism courses,

college courses anyway, in our lives. You were close. You were on the cusp at one point. Of taking a journalism class? Yeah. I got a journalism scholarship and then I never took any of the class. Yeah. That was what I would recommend to any aspiring students.

Just get the money. I mean, you're a much better person to answer this question than me. Do you have any suggestions? Besides reading journalism and immersing yourself in that world, right? I mean, I just to me, it's like the... I'm going to interrupt you. Amherst yourself in the world, certainly. You know, I mean, but even like when we were starting out,

you could immerse yourself in the world by finding, like, the two people who had anonymous blogs from the... the Times newsroom or whatever and just like get into like where they went for lunch and stuff like that. But like immersing yourself in the world now, like fully immersing yourself in journalism media, journalism social media might not have a net positive effect. I mean, you can get too immersed in that sort of thing. Yeah, I guess I was talking more in like the late 90s ways, which was go, you know, you're reading books by journalists. Yeah. About what it's like to be a journalist and sort of learning and just kind of reading pieces. And I would, I'd love to say I was like

picking them apart, right, and studying them on some level. But I wasn't. I was just like being like, well, this sounds cool, like, or this sounds interesting. Look how this person handled this, right? I was thinking the other day, I was like, I can't remember what book it was, but something, you know, I just like remembered passages from a book that I read in college. And it wasn't a profound journalism tome either. It was just some book, like a collection, right? And you just remember stuff. Yeah. And putting those things in your head, I think just has like, can have an amazing impact down the road. should you be intrepid enough to follow the path of the host of the press box. All right.

It's time for David Shoemaker. Guess is the Strain pun headline. Yeah. Thursday's headline was the ice cream industry is having a meltdown. Yes. We did get a vote for Custards Last Stand. That's very regionally specific, but I love it. Pretty sure it's been out there, but I appreciate it.

Today's headline comes from Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim. who tells us that they created a Twitter account just to send a David Shoemaker guess is the strain pun headline. Oh my God. A rare level of commitment. The headline is from the Charleston, South Carolina Post and Courier, David. It's about J.C. Penny.

And that is, and that is J.C. Penny singular. I used to be really pedantic about this when I was a kid. You know, you have a parent that would say, want to go to J.C. Penny's? And as a young jerk, I would say, you know, it's actually J.C. Penny. And no, I don't.

That's the place I least wanted to go in the 90s. Maybe just ahead of Mervyn's on the power rankings of places you didn't want mom to take you to. Anyway, J.C. Penny announced it will close 136 stores across the country for obvious reasons. Yeah. One store in South Carolina, David, has been spared. Was originally going to close? Now it will stay open at least for the time being. what was the Charleston Post and Courier's strained punn headline.

Is it lucky Penny? Ooh, it is not. Good luck, Penny. That's pretty good, though. Oh, great. Now I've got to think of something else. All right. So Penny has to be the pun.

Mm-hmm. It says, like, find a penny, pick it up. There's a lot of good stuff here. Yeah, Penny, what would it be? Penny. Oh, that's good. Getting there, getting there. Leave a lot simpler than this.

A penny. A penny saved. A penny saved. There you go. Penny saved. That's a good one. That's the right headline. Congratulations, Post and Courier. For the Post and Currier.

Yeah, we're going to get all the other ones and send them to info at postencourier.com just so somebody will know what we did here. That's the press box. He is David Shoemaker on Brian Curtis. Research by Chris Almata Production Magic by Erica Servantes. We're back Monday. In the meantime, put your masks on and have an incredibly safe weekend. So you can join us for more lukewarm takes about the media and other stuff. See you then, David.

See you later, Ryan.