The Press Box - Biden’s First Week and RIP Larry King, With Charlotte Alter and Jason Gay

Episode Date: January 25, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker are joined by Time senior correspondent Charlotte Alter to discuss President Joe Biden's agenda and the era of misinformation (3:30). Later, Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Gay joins to pay tribute to and remember legendary talk show host Larry King (31:05). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guests: Charlotte Alter and Jason Gay Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, NBC's Peacock streaming service just basically absorbed world wrestling entertainment, or at least all of the stuff that world wrestling entertainment shows. What I want to know is, is the future of content professional wrestling? All right, so they just bought the WWE Network. You know, WW saw shows on broadcast television on, well, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on USA, which is owned by NBC Universal, but also on Fox. Obviously, they got a huge contract from Fox not long ago. But they also had this over-the-top network, and they were one of the first of the game

and having a standalone over-the-top service. Yeah. And for a while, we're getting a whole lot of looks from people trying to buy the company because they were so impressed with the service itself, with the software. And nothing really ever materialized. just in a weird spot where their stock value goes up and down a whole lot, depending on fluctuations in the programming and how much money they're making and everything else. And there are times when it looks like Vince is the richest man on earth,

Vince McMahon, the owner, and then he will never sell in times where it looks like he really just wants to see, like he almost seems like he would be willing to sell the company just to have a check in his hand for $100 billion or whatever it would be. Now, NBC Universal just paid a billion dollars to absorb the network, is a lot of money. It's one of those things where if this were an athlete's contract, you know, well, Scott Boris in the old days would have been the one that negotiated it, but you'd probably be looking for the loopholes and how the, you know, team can get away without paying the quarterback that much money or whatever. But it's a billion dollars. And now my household is

the happiest place on earth because we just stopped having the office on Netflix. And now without even having to think about whether or not we were going to pay for the peacock, now we are, and we are obligated by my profession to subscribe to the peacock. So, Peacock, here we come. It's great news for everybody. One line from the press release that Peacock sent out jumped out at me. NBC Universal has a longstanding relationship with WWE that began nearly 30 years ago with Monday Night Raw on USA. Excuse me.

This is Dick Ebersall erasure. This is Saturday night's main event erasure. This NBC and wrestling goes back to the 80s. It goes back to when we were, when Saturday Night Live would be hijacked and millions of people would be steady at TV. It's like, why am I watching Hulk Hogan right now? Come on. You think this is at Brian Gertes-Lin.

You'd say everybody would show up to school on Monday morning and they'd be really mad that there was no SNL to talk about. And you and I would be like high-fiving in the hallway or whatever. Absolutely. We were coming up on today's podcast. We talked Joe Biden misinformation with Time Magazine's Charlotte Alter. Then Jason Gay stops by to help us say goodbye. to Eternal TV host Larry King.

All that more on the press box, a part of the Ringer podcast network. Hello, media consumers. Brian Curtis and David Schumacher here. David, let us begin by welcoming a special guest. She is Charlotte Alter, a senior correspondent for Time. She's got a new piece in the new issue of the magazine

that, by the way, has a very cool post-apocalyptic oval office on the cover. Alter is also the author of the book, The ones we've been waiting for how a new generation of leaders will transform America. Charlotte, thanks for coming on the press box. Thanks so much for having me, you guys. I'm really excited to be here.

So your new piece is about Joe Biden and unity, which is something David and I have been discussing here. Let us start with this. What does unity mean to Joe Biden? That's such a great question, because it's one of the things that covering him has been so weirdly difficult to cover because unity is so boring.

to talk about. And his speeches during the campaign were just unity, unity, unity, unity. And typically during the campaign, what Biden meant when he said unity was basically bipartisanship. What he means is he will use his soft legislative touch to reach across the aisle and get Republican support for things that he wants and, you know, get, you know, get, you know, pursue policies that are kind of like common sense policies that all Americans can get behind. That's sort of what he means by unity. And I think decency is a really big part of that too, because he's always talking about kind of just restoring a sense of decency to the Oval Office. So in Joe Biden's mind, he kind of thinks, if I'm a great guy and I reach across the aisle

Republicans and I pursue sane middle of the road policies, everyone will get behind it. And I'm not so sure that that's totally the case, but that's what Joe Biden thinks, seems to think. Yeah. So there's legislative unity of the kind that he sort of grew up with in the Senate in the 70s and 80s, or at least more legislative unity than we have in our hyper-partisan age now. And then there's this whole idea of national unity, like putting America back together. Do you get the sense from listening to him talk that he thinks he can accomplish that, at least on some limited scale? So I think that you've just hit the nail right on the head. There's legislative unity and there's a sort of broader sense of unity. He said three words in his inauguration speech that

I think are the really important, most important words here, which the words are enough of us. And I'm forgetting the exact quote, but the point he was making was that it's not like a 100% of Americans all have to be on board with any one thing. He just has to get enough of Americans to occupy a shared reality to, you know, kind of move together as one towards a shared goal. And even that, I think, is going to be really difficult for him, given the state of the Republican Party right now and given how many Americans have built their identity. around opposition to everything he's talking about, if not necessarily opposition to him in particular.

Well, yeah, so there have so many questions. The enough of us line I thought was really important. And then it goes to everything that you've been talking about because in a sense, Biden's, it seems to me from reading yourself, Biden's main goal right now is not so much like moving the goalposts is like bringing the goalpost back onto the field where they normally go, right? like to use a language, like a vocabulary we can all agree on. And because the enough of us thing was poignant, but it was also just like,

just a straightforward statement of fact, right? We don't need 100% of the country to agree on everything, you know? But there is a reality in, you wrote about your road trip across the country and there were, you know, the Trump voters that were obsessed with what you called unlogic, which I thought was a really smart way of looking at it. But then there were a lot of people who, were pro-Trump for very conventional reasons. This is from your piece.

He lowered their taxes. He appointed anti-abortion judges, presided over a soaring stock market. What did Trump do to actually make the Republican messaging stick for once? And what can Biden learn from that, do you think? That's a really great question. So one of the things that I think has been so corrosive about the last four years.

And one of the reasons why I think Biden's got his work really cut out for him is that, you know, there's a significant portion of the Republican Party. I don't know. I can't quantify at this point how much it is because I think it's grown significantly since my road trip. But there's a significant portion of the Republican Party that is like enthralled to conspiracy theories. and believes in QAnon or believes in COVID hoax or is sort of off the deep end. But what is particularly alarming is that even the sort of, even many of the sane Republicans,

the people who were voting for Trump for these conventional reasons that I described, for the reasons that people have been voting for Republicans for generations, they are conservatives. There are some people who are just conservative. that's their political ideology. What is, what was especially alarming to me is that even those people who were not like Q people, Trump had given, you know, Trump had created this kind of inoculation against truth and fact, where even if those people didn't necessarily believe in the crazy conspiracy theories on the

internet about Q and the shaman and the storm and whatever, they didn't believe a lot of what the media was saying about Trump and COVID, which was true. So I heard from a lot of people who were, again, not crazy people, but they would be like, I like Trump because he lowered my taxes and I don't believe what everybody says about him. I like Trump because I I like the anti-abortion judges, and I don't believe that COVID is as big a deal as they say. I like Trump because I think he's done well on foreign policy, and I don't believe that phone call to Ukraine was a big deal. So, you know, again, not in the realm of conspiracy theory and yet sort of dangerously disassociated from from what I think has shown to be a fact pattern in the in the Trump presidency, if that makes

sense. Yeah, it's gradations of misinformation, isn't it? From the grand, everyone's going to Guantanamo on January 21st, the first thing to, you know, Trump didn't say that thing about those soldiers. Now, that was not true. Or Trump didn't lose the election, right? And it only takes a tiny one to have a very destabilized. effect on American democracy.

Right. And I think that what, because I think what's happened is that there has been this weird Trump kind of people identified with Trump in a way that has almost never happened in recent memory in Republican politics at least. And so people perceived an attack on Trump or or a criticism of Trump to be an attack on them. And so they were incentivized, even if they weren't off the deep end in these conspiracy theories, they were incentivized to minimize or dismiss

or ignore or invalidate any kind of factual criticism of Trump or any evidence that Trump had lied or any of any of the sort of criticisms of the way he handled COVID, for example, would sort of like roll right off him because they had sort of inoculate, they had been inoculated in some way

against these sort of, against reality. That's how I began to think of it. It was like talking to people who you could bring up a fact and they would just say, no, I don't believe it. Yeah, it's the permission to just sort of wave your hand, you know, just sort of dismiss everything that comes up. So, so are those, is that, is that subset of people kind of, I don't want to be too dismissive, but are they in the other, are they in whatever the other column is from enough of us?

Or is there, or does the Biden White House have a goal, I mean, have plans to try to reclaim some of that, to sort of bring some of that group of America back into the fold of reality, I should say. Yeah. So I think this is a really good question. And it's, I think, where the rubber meets the road for Biden. Because most of these voters are basic pocketbook small business voters. So the reason, you know, part of the reason they don't care about Trump saying this or that

outrageous thing is because it doesn't affect their life. They're like, who cares what he said about? sold, you know, they don't care about what Trump says. They care about what they believe Trump did for them in their business, which has cut their taxes, oversee what was a really large economic growth until the pandemic. So I think those people are reachable for Biden if he can pull off a material change in circumstances for them. If over the next year, their business that was like on the brink of going out of business comes back, you know, know, into the black. If their kids go back to school, if they, you know, their family can get

vaccinated. If I think that there are, these are people who, um, if Biden can actually pull this off and can actually say, hey, listen, this wasn't just a rhetorical thing about unity. Like, in the year that I've been president, your life has gotten better. And here's how. I think that those people could be reachable. Again, it also depends on the other side of that is also true, because these are also people who I was talking to, you know, after the COVID pandemic had been going on for six months and their lives had gotten undeniably worse and they didn't blame Trump for it. So I think, you know, people are very good at twisting their reality to conform to what they want to believe.

So I think it remains to be seen whether that contingent of Republicans will give Biden credit for pulling us out of the pandemic. I think, I bet they won't, but maybe some of them will. David mentioned this road trip you took. This was last September. You had just recovered from COVID yourself when you're setting out on the road. How did you find people to talk to as you're going through the Midwest? Yeah.

It's a great question. So yeah, so I drove across the three states that gave Trump the presidency last time. So I drove from Wisconsin through Michigan, through Pennsylvania. And the point of the trip was to get kind of, you know, so many reporters during COVID had been totally grounded, right? They couldn't go anywhere. There were no rallies. And you really do get a sense of what, going to happen, or not what's going to happen, you get a sense of what voters are thinking by talking to them. You know, polls are really inadequate for getting at the psychology of why voters believe what they believe and what's resonating with them and what's not. And so, and frankly, focus groups, I mean, I'm also not a professional pollster. Professional pollsters who do focus groups, they do a great job. But oftentimes if you were to ask like the Democratic Party or the Republican Party of a particular state to get you an arrangement of voters to talk to, that would be a highly curated kind of like performative thing. So I like to just literally stand in a parking lot of a grocery store and go up to every single

person that comes out of the grocery store and ask if they'll talk to me. And it's exhausting. and sometimes people get mad at me. And I mean, listen, if they say they don't want to talk to me, they don't have to. I can't make them. But, you know, you also have to make sure that you get your, you like cover all your bases with your brands. So you, you know, if you're standing in front of a Walmart, you're going to get different voters. And if you're standing in front of a Trader Joe's, you're going to get different voters in front of a nail salon, then you would in front of a dollar tree. Like, so I tried to basically drive a.

around looking for parking lots that looked full. And then I would park my car there and get out and stand there until people came back to their cars and stop them and ask if they would talk with me. And this is through a mask. Through a mask. Through a mask. And I'm also curious in this, how does Time magazine play out there in America when you say, hi, I'm from time.

Do you have a second? What do people, how do people react to that? It's so interesting. sometimes they're like, sometimes they're like, wow, you work for time. And I take that a little bit as a compliment because I sort of think that what they mean is that I look really young.

I'm not that young. I'm 31. But I think that they're like, they expect like an old white-haired man to be working at time. Jack Germant to have, you know, appeared in front of them. Right.

I don't think that I look like, like their idea of what Time Magazine is. Sometimes people say, oh, like my grandfather used to read that or something, and I'm like, great. Sometimes people say, you know, interestingly, sometimes people think I've said the New York Times, and they sometimes will be like, ooh, like fake news. And then I say, no, it's Time Magazine, and they relax a little bit. I think that there's a often like a right-wing media sort of frenzy whipped up about the New York Times.

So then when they see that I'm from a different outlet than the New York Times, they actually like respond a little bit better. But yeah, I have a lot of people saying like, oh, I used to subscribe. But then I also have a lot of people saying that they, you know, they read a lot of our stuff online and they like our covers and stuff. So I get it. I get it all. Sometimes people say lying press, fake news. And I say, great, have a nice day. I have another question about time. I mean, Time Magazine is, as you just said, it's like legacy media in a way, it evokes something about, you know, history of journalism, about, you know, political writing. It is legacy in a way that a few other magazine certainly can lay claim to.

Do you feel that, what do you think the general feeling around time or just your opinion about how the media is going to have to reclaim some of their footing over the next four years. Like, what is the, like, do you think that there's any, that you have to actively pursue the people who think it's fake news? Or do you think that'll all kind of come back around given an opportunity? It's tricky because I think that the last four years have put the media in an almost impossible position because until recently, until really, not just the last four years, I would say maybe more like the last 10 years, because I think that some of this was happening in the Bush

administration also, so maybe 15 years. But is that I think, you know, it used to be that fairness and accuracy were seen as synonyms for each other. because both sides were rooted in, rooting their political arguments in the realm of established fact. So it was like there was a shared set of facts and the two parties would present their differing perspectives on the right solutions for those facts. And so to, you know, so good journalism was journalism that could be both fair and accurate because it could say here are the facts. Republicans are saying, here's what Democrats are saying, done. Over the last 15 years, fairness and accuracy have not have drifted away from each other.

They're no longer synonyms. And I think for a while, as Trump was on the rise and even in the first little while of his presidency, I think that the media really did kind of try to emphasize fairness over accuracy. And one of the artist Molly Crabapple once said this to me, and it stuck with me, it stuck with me forever. But she said, if one person says the moon is made of rocks and minerals and another person says the moon is made of cheese, the truth is not that the moon is made of half cheese. So at a certain point when you have one side of the political spectrum that has shown a blatant disregard for. facts and in fact recently an intentional undermining of facts. Fairness and accuracy are almost now in tension with each other.

So I think it remains to be seen what's going to happen. I think a lot depends on what happens with the Republican Party and whether the Trump fever kind of burns itself out and a new more like. And a newer kind of more intellectually honest cohort rises up, but I don't have a lot of faith for that right now. After the seizure of the Capitol on January 6th, did you think back to anything you'd heard on the road back in September? Did any of that resonate in a new way? Yeah, there was this guy that I talked to. Well, first of all, I saw a lot of Trump, you know, often when buying.

Biden would go somewhere. First of all, the Biden campaign almost never publicized their events because they purposely did not want a crowd for COVID reasons. So there were very few, like, people out with Biden signs being really excited about Joe Biden. But there almost always were Trump people protesting the Biden events, often with guns, almost never with masks, very, very angry about Biden running for president. And I talked to this one guy who said that if Democrats won, this was before, this was even before Trump was laying the groundwork for, you know, casting doubt on the election results and before stop, the steel and all this stuff. But I talked to a guy who said that if Democrats won, quote, we will eliminate them. And I was like, what does that mean?

He said, bare hand, you know, we will go in there and take them out of office with our bare hand. And again, you know, I think what is, you know, he sounded like a crazy person to me. And I, but then all these other people around him were like, like on the same page. And so it's what's, it's tricky as a reporter because you don't want to necessarily just print the insane rantings of somebody who's maybe mentally ill. but then, you know, it turns out that actually a lot of people are feeling and thinking this way enough that thousands of them stormed the Capitol and, you know, threatened to assassinate some of our country's leaders. So maybe he wasn't so unhinged. Maybe it was actually hinting at a deeper thing that's brewing. And just, you know, not to step on you here, David, but you didn't actually print that quote in the first go round of this article and was part of that because it just seemed so far on that side of the spectrum that it didn't even really necessarily belong. long in the article. Yeah, I mean, I thought it was, you know, those quotes of we're going to go

rip them out of office with our bare hands. I wasn't hearing those in September as often as I was hearing COVID to hoax, Q and on, you know, they're lying about Trump, lying the fake news media's out to get him. I maybe only heard quotes like that, you know, a handful of times. And so I didn't put it in the original because again, I thought it was maybe just a random unhinged person. Shifting gears just a little bit to the craft, more broadly speaking. We've talked about this a lot, Brian and I on the show. There's going to be a huge pivot in just the way that people consume news in a Biden presidency. Certainly, like the countdown clock on the bottom corner of every news channel is probably going to go away for a little while. Is it going to affect

the way that you think people will cover the presidency and the government in general to not have, well, to not have a president tweeting all the time? Yeah, I think there's going to be somewhat of a return to normalcy. But I also think there's been almost a cottage industry in the media of like Trump outrage. And I don't know really what those people are going to do. One of the things that I think has been an unfortunate trend of the Trump. presidency. And it actually kind of predated the Trump presidency a little bit, but then it got turbocharged during the Trump presidency is a whole kind of cohort of journalists who do a lot of

opining about why what's wrong with this? What's wrong with that? Why this is horrible? Why this is offensive? Why this is racist? Which are all valid arguments and which are often really well argued and really well thought out. But I am always more interested in stories that are about how ordinary people's lives are affected by whatever's happening in Washington. The way I think about it is a little bit like there's a lot of people in D.C. covering how the sausage is made

and there are not enough people in the country covering how the sausage tastes. And so I hope this could be an opportunity for, you know, now that it's not so much like, you know, a fire hose of drama every single day, I hope that it gives some people in the news media some more room to do kind of more thoughtful, more creative, you know, more investigations, more stories that are about how Americans are living through this totally bizarre and unprecedented moment in our history and less about what, you know, crazy palace intrigue is happening in the White House. Frankly, the Biden White House is like really also buttoned up. Like they're not going to get

a lot of the same leaks that the media is not going to get the same types of leaks out of the Biden White House that they got out of the Trump White House because a lot of Trump's aides hated him and hated each other and would leak to the press and order as part of their parlor game. And the Biden team doesn't really work that way. I said that to David. I said, I think you can be just as good a White House correspondent, just as talented, work just as hard under Biden as you did under Trump. And the vividness of the material will just be completely different.

Yeah. That scene of, you know, somebody standing in the. Oval Office that we get like 10 minutes later after it happened. We've just, we've taken that so much for granted almost because it's become so commonplace over the last four years. You can read Charlotte Alter in time. Her book is the ones we've been waiting for how a new generation of leaders will transform America.

Charlotte, thanks again for coming on the press box. Thanks so much for having me. All right, David, it is 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 post. Fox Pod where they are always gratefully received. We should take a moment, I think, to nod at the

Bernie Sanders memes, which really, behind, like, the conference championship games in the NFL have basically been America's top content opportunity for the last 48 hours. I think my favorite of all the many, many, many

tweets was the one that had Bernie at the Capitol in his oversized mittens and said, this could have been an email. Thanks to Corey for that one. Speaking of the NFL, David, 43-year-old quarterback Tom Brady has the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the Super Bowl,

where they will face off with 25-year-old quarterback Patrick Mahomes. 43-year-old Brady, 25-year-old Mahomes. It was an overwork Twitter joke to put a picture of Yoda from the Empire Strikes back next to a picture of baby Yoda from the Mandalorian. Thanks to Andrew Johnson for that one. And finally, David, there was a much mocked New York Times headline about Joe Biden's Peloton bike. Is it Peloton or Peloton? Peloton.

See, I'm a man of the people. So I don't have one of these. Peloton. This was, I guess there's actually a cybersecurity thing about Joe Biden having a Peloton. Can they hack the Peloton or something? But this is the actual subhead of the Times article. It doesn't exactly comport with his regular Joe from Scranton persona. Okay.

So, but because Biden told us he was Joey from Scranton, Pennsylvania, therefore he cannot have a pellet. That is, that is the idea here. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write, but his e-miles. But his e-miles. I did not see that. That's great. If you offered up a preview of the absolute media hell that awaits us, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week.

All right, the notebook dump today, David, is going to function as the obituary. section because we lost Larry King. 87-year-old King was a host of CNN's Larry King Live, an overnight radio host before that. He was doing something on streaming at the end of his life that I didn't quite understand. But the best tribute I could think of to Larry King is for us to take a call today.

So here to talk to us is Wall Street Journal columnist, our pal, Jason Gay. Jason, hello. I'm in a car. I'm in a car. I feel like I've turned into like the Peter Schrager for septuagenarians or octogenarians, you know, like I am here to come aboard when these things happen. But a sad loss, Larry King, media icon.

So many ways to go with this. Guys, can we start with the particular aesthetic of Larry King? How would you describe the way he looked, the way he talked on television? I mean, I feel we say this, you know, every time we lose somebody like a Larry King, but it's true. We will never see his likes again. You know, he was this scrappy Brooklyn guy. He wasn't flashy. He wasn't scholarly.

He wasn't blessed with some sort of dagger-like wit. But he was just around and around and around and around until he was just part of our lives, like the living room furniture. You know, he was like the fabric and the sofa. He was on cable TV forever. He was on radio before that forever. And radio is important to hear because he had that low-key, leisurely style, which is really born in radio. When you're doing radio late at night, especially, you know, those crazy hours, you know,

you can't be especially choosy with your programming, with your guests. And when you get them on, you're not looking to fry them up in a frying pan. You're trying to stretch and extend the time as much as possible. It was like they were smoking even if they weren't smoking, right? and it goes on and on. And, you know, that's what Larry King Live on CNN effectively was. It was radio on TV. And it really worked.

And it's important to note that that cable TV that Larry King Live debuted on is quite a bit different than what it is today. It's something far less produced, far less intense, where a show like that could just sort of slide in and work. Yeah. Certainly if you, it makes a lot more sense. in that context. And I think that what a lot of people, especially even of our generation have trouble doing is sort of putting him in that context. It was, I thought about this while you,

when you're making your point. He was a part of the fabric of our culture and the way that, like, as a kid, he was of that, like, very small vocabulary of famous people who you could just say their name in a joke to another fourth grader or something. It was like, Dolly Parton and Joe Montana and, like, maybe Vanna White and, like, Larry King was there too. I mean, our now former President Trump probably, you know, gained a lot of currency by being one of those people, too. But, I mean, what do you think, what do you think was the peak of Larry King? Like, if you were going to try to explain Larry King to one of your children or to, you know, a 21-year-old bullpen journalist, like, what would you, what YouTube clip would you pull up? I was thinking about this over the last 24 hours.

He sort of gets mega famous in 1992. He's a pretty famous person, thanks to the overnight radio show, thanks to the early years of the CNN show, which starts in 1985. And then in 1992, he starts doing these political interviews with Ross Perrault, first of all,

where he says, what would it take for you to run for president? And Bro says, I don't know, all these people have budgeted people ask me, maybe I'll do it. And then people went out and asked him. And Larry King was seen, you know, this is the place where big things happen. But what's interesting about that is he was almost 60 years old at that point.

Yeah. He wouldn't a spring chicken at that point. And, you know, the everything was there, the oversized glasses, the no sports coat, just suspenders, that very weird pointillist map that was behind him for all those years. It was light bright, yeah. Was it supposed to be a microphone? Was that what it was? Because he had the big microphone icon at the beginning of the show. I don't know if those were supposed to be like light, bright microphone holes or something.

Anyway, I don't know. But I would think 92 when he has Ross Perra on and floats presidency, and then Ross Perrault announces he's going to run for president. And then in the next year, he has like Gore, Al Gore, the then vice president of the United States debating Ross Perrault about NAFTA. That to me is high point Larry King. What do you guys think? I think that's true.

I think that he wasn't, you know, somebody of course, course, who had the hot seat. So it wasn't like he was the destination interview for the big breaking news story. But very often he had those people in there. And I think of him in a funny way for as present and famous as he got to be in cable television is almost sort of like, he felt this like middle reliever role for CNN. The guy could just eat innings. You know what I'm saying? Like he just was somebody you could, you know, put there with this very low key, low-fi hour programming right in the middle of the prime time time. And, you know, back in the old days, like cable news, you know, it really, really had to have news to be something that just left

the rail and became a thing. And the show was absurdly simple. You know, Larry and a guest just chit chatting often on the news, but seldom, you know, related to the most, you know, urgent thing. And it became sort of like pleasant background noise. And I think of it in context to what cable television is like now where it is so steroidal and so obsessed with confrontation and absolutely not in the interest interested in being background conversation you know it's so confrontational and larry king was the exact opposite of that you mentioned he was it an innings eater i think you used that phrase or maybe that's just the one that popped into my head but it's true i mean he he he you know had that time that that time slot that he just owned forever and i remember i mean it

When he was kind of getting removed from his show or, you know, separating from CNN, I mean, it was a, it was, you know, a media story that the entire populace of America was aware of, right? I mean, it was like, who's hosting the Tonight Show? It was a really big deal. And obviously, the motivating factor was he wasn't drawing the ratings that he, that he once drew. some of that steroidal material from the other networks of, you know, at MSNBC and Fox had something to do with that. But also, but like no one came after him and reclaimed what he had. It feels like he was pushed out and it was almost just like a bellwether of what was to come, right? I mean, it wasn't he, should they have taken a different lesson than Larry King has done? Well, it's interesting that no one sort of stepped into that.

role, right? I mean, I keep going back to that idea that it was radio on TV. And if it was that sort of like transition, right, that like, you know, there wasn't a place for that anymore. Maybe it was a transition that was more akin to TV replacing radio than like old cable TV being replaced by a new cable TV. I'm not sure. You know, I think that's interesting. You can sort of see traces of Larry King in podcasting now, you know, like where the interviewing style is like largely cordial, right? It's a little long-winded. And, you know, depending on who's on it, you know, it's a little off the cuff and unprepared. You know, it's not exactly journalism, but it's pleasant, right?

And it's easy to listen to it. It feels like sort of decaf coffee next to like terrestrial radio, which is just cuckoo. So I think every time you hear like two podcasts hosts going on some like meaningless 40 minute conversation, there's a little bit of Larry King's DNA in there. I totally agree with that. I think that's right to coin a phrase. And what's interesting about that is that we usually think of Larry King, you know, being shoved off by partisan cable as you're bringing up. Sean Hannity is essentially defeating Larry King or Bill O'Reilly.

I can't remember exactly who was opposite him. But when he comes around in 1985, he is essentially playing the podcast host to Network News. Yeah. Network News is where it's at. And it's buttoned down and it's serious and it's formal and it's Dan rather. And he's this guy, as you say, who's sitting there for an hour just kind of shooting the shit. And that was very different than the network news idea of how you handle an interview, right? And by the way, much more pleasing to the subjects.

We'd much rather sit here with Larry King for an hour than Dan Rather for an hour. That would be dangerous. Sure. And you have these unbelievably asymmetric guest lists. So it could be like Senator John Warner, Elizabeth Taylor, and Art Link Letter on the hour. You know, there would never be, you know, something that exactly made sense, which I think has some resemblance to what we're seeing now at podcast. should we talk a little bit about how Larry King asked questions,

which you just sort of nodded at, Jason? This was the joke of Larry King, was that he was Mr. Softball, right? It was never going to be, it was going to be a nice interview. He was going to, he was going to pitch something underhanded. What did you make of the whole Larry King interrogation style? Well, he was a role model for the unprepared, right? You know, he would like, sometimes he would use, ask these questions that

you know, he would have known the answer to had he read one paragraph of the research material an hour before he went on to the show, you know. But he felt it was perfectly okay to be the uninformed person at the table to sometimes ask a cringe question because he wanted it to feel like a conversation between maybe two strangers like sitting on a train. You know, he didn't feel the need to show off. It wasn't a show that felt terribly driven by ego. You know, there's a quote that gets attributed to Larry King, which, you know, pardon the French if it is, but it was like, the quote was, this was Larry King's secret for TV success. Give a shit, but not really.

And that sounds like terribly glib, but there's some wisdom in it because it's basically saying stylistically to take it down a notch, to take down the temperature, lower the stakes, make it calm, make it feel neighborly. And I think audiences appreciated. I mean, listen, Larry King was the best paid person in cable television for a terribly long time. It was an enormous success. Yeah. And as one of the official question

shamers here in America whenever I see people asking questions on TV like I did yesterday, I always think, you know, there are different styles to get good stuff out of people. Right. But Larry King was way on the end. I mean, the Times Open said he'd never read a book that his guest had written.

And his first question would be, what's this book about? And why did you write it? But it was kind of coming from an authentic place. I mean, as opposed to the sort of like canned question of it, right? Yeah. Of course when I read that, and it's probably told the story on here before, when I wrote my book, it reminded me at the time when I wrote my book and I went on Don I miss his show,

which was just an amazing experience for so many reasons. But his first question to me was, why do we have you on the show? Which I just like, this is, yeah. That probably got a different reaction out of me than, than he would have gotten otherwise. The famous one that I saw actually made its way into several stand-alone news articles this week was when he asked Jerry Seinfeld after Seinfeld it ended, he was like, did you leave on your own or did you get pushed out?

I forget, which was just, and that got a response, like a legendarily indignant response from Jerry Seinfeld to, you know, to a world that probably had thought he was the nicest guy in the world. they got to see Jerry just be like, are you fucking kidding me right now? Have you heard of me? Which is, yeah, I mean, there is definitely a magic to what he was doing.

But how much of it was magic and how much of it was just like the cultural institution or are those things inseparable? You know, I just think that like, Larry King would have been very out of place in a world where like the aim is to like totally own someone in an interview.

Now it's like, you know, the social media is rife with a, Brian Curtis totally owns David Shoemaker. And like that just was not that was not the ambition of a Larry King Live interview. He'd just rather, you know, have a chat. And I do find myself when I'm feeling like an old person missing the era of generalist TV talk. As Jason said, it has, it is migrated to podcasts. And let's face it, there are a lot more options now.

It's a lot better. We can just fire up your Spotify podcast section. You're going to find better stuff than you would probably. probably fine. But it was really cool when Larry King, Charlie Rose, if we're allowed to say his name out loud now, Tom Snyder and his second iteration on network TV just had to show us we're going to do a little politics. We're going to do a little movies. We're going to do a little sports. And as Jason said, sometimes those were really incongruous and went together like weird pizza toppings. You know, it was weird to have Brando and then Dick Endberg the next day or

whatever it was. But there was something cool about saying you're an educated person. You're a person who wants to learn a little bit about everything. And we're going to have all those people on and I'm going to, through them, I'm going to teach you just a little bit about everything. Bruce Babbit

and Jimmy Breslin for the hour. Followed by Jimmy Brezlin. I'm Larry King Live. I guess if we're going to, if we're going to just, you know, we should mention briefly King's things, can we? just the USA Today column, which has been celebrated as this precursor to Twitter, right?

This was Larry King, you know, saying, you know, Don Johnson needs a new TV vehicle or, you know, I never got to deal with turnips. But in and of itself was a borrow of Herb Keene, who borrowed it from Walt Winchell, who, you know, borrowed it from or who, you know, leased it to to Jimmy Cannon and countless others. that was very much a newspaper form. And it gets sort of held up as like lazy thoughts. But as a newspaper reader, someone who is obsessed with reading newspapers, I always loved columns like that because they just felt like, you know,

biting the top off a cupcake. You know, that was what I wanted. And newspapers, and this is going back to a point you made a moment ago, Brian, I think sometimes in the media we get obsessed with the idea that journalism is one thing. It doesn't have to be one thing. It can be all sorts of kinds of things. It should have standards. It should have ethics and those things are removable. But in terms of the way that it's put together and presented and the kinds of personalities behind it, I think there's room for a lot of different approaches. And so Larry King could make sense in the context of Bernie Shaw and Christian Amipur and Aaron Brown and whoever else who was sharing the hour with him. If you threw him in today, it would look really out of place. But at that time, it made sense. I think to me it all kind of comes down. I mean, the big picture, it's confidence, right? I mean, we have, talking about podcasts,

I can't tell you how many times a podcast is launched and I'm just like, yeah, there's too many basketball podcasts out there. But it's like the confidence to be oblivious to that, that really that will make some people succeed, right? Just to like not know that there are people who are more specialized who were maybe better at knowing the facts, who are maybe better at interviewing than you are. It's that he could just roll, like literally roll up his sleeves

or his shirts might have come with sleeves rolled up sometimes. I don't know. And, and say like, what's this? book about. I mean, it's like that it puts you as a viewer in a sort of comfortable place because you don't feel like you're behind and you just feel like you're in the hands of a master

even when he's just totally you know, playing it by ear. I remember having a conversation with somebody in television around the time that I was writing about it and this was when Larry King was still on television at CNN and, you know, they talked about one thing that made Larry King work

was that he was irretrievably in the demo. He understood who his audience was. He wasn't trying to be too cool for school. And he was somebody who understood that, yeah, sure, you could bring on the cast of the OC, but you will get a much better number and a much better connection with your audience if it's an hour with Newhart. And that's what he did. He was not a verse to the idea of dipping into, you know, a generation of newsmakers who weren't necessarily the shiniest objects of the moment. I want to finish by talking about Larry King's Sex Life, because it's really important.

I'm just, but it is amazing, is it not, how much we knew about Larry King's personal life? Of all the people, we would possibly have that there would be this cottage industry of, I don't know, kind of the sort of B story of their personal life. It was Larry King. What was it? Was it eight marriages or seven marriages? Seven wives, eight marriages. So one got the double dip, yeah.

So, I mean, I don't think that's anything more than like Wilt's 100 or Joe Demandum. Maggio is 56, it just, that number just jumps out at you, you know, it's going to live forever. It's, uh, you can't, uh, can't help but be, uh, amazed at it. Is it any more than that? Yeah. I mean, it's also, I think part of the thing that Larry King was just kind of like public property in a way, like every bit of Larry King's life. Like, looking around for pieces yesterday, there's so many good stories, including one

Jason Gay wrote about Larry King. Like there's a Mark Leibovich one from a couple years ago. there's a Mike Wallace Profound 60 Minutes. David Finkel, a great one for Washington Post that starts with Larry King just making up this story about Sandy Cofax and Brooklyn in his childhood that he told for years and Sandy Cofax called the Washington Post

like, that story is not true. And I did not know Larry King as a child. But he's just, he was just available. Wasn't he at some level for inspection and no matter how no matter how snotty the piece was going to be?

I would just say that like the Larry King that you saw on television was very much the Larry King that he gave you in these interviews and these profiles that you read. You know, he was prone to those kinds of statements and funny commentary and stuff. And, you know, there was an innocuousness to what seemed to be a very hectic personal life. I mean, when I think of eight marriages, that just seems extremely a lot of stuff going on. But it never sort of, you know, seemed to square with what the.

a person on television was who was just this enormously placid, copacetic guy. Yeah, I mean, and listen, he's not, the, the, it was said that he had a, you know, face for radio. I don't think that was originally said about him, but it might have been. It was that, that quote is referenced in a couple of his obituaries. We, our national obsession with celebrity was sort of just solidifying during his peak. And it had to, I mean, a lot of our obsession with his sex life had to do with the way he looked. and not just his attractiveness, but is like just his cartoonish glasses, hair, suspenders, like the whole thing.

And it wasn't like, oh, like the beautiful Liz Taylor and her, you know, mini bows or whatever. I mean, he was just such an odd figure that to talk about him and he almost just became like America's id in some way, right? It's like we strip away everything else and we can just be wowed by all his divorces, right? Like the rest of it almost doesn't make sense. but he was just I mean that's I don't know I'm sure he wasn't pleased

that everybody was talking about his love life or his gambling debts or whatever all the time I don't know I thought he was going to say but he probably would have chosen it to have the spotlight that he ended up having right no I would say that I think that it was probably a little bit of a flattering thing for him that Johnny Carson would pick it up as a joke

every so often or Jay Leno after him I mean, this was, you know, he was very much part of the public. But again, it didn't square with this guy who was so mild-mannered on television. And I think that's sort of part of what made Larry King, Larry King. All right. You can read Jason Gay in the Wall Street Journal where he will be searching for his next octogenarian to properly place in their cultural context. Jason, thank you as always for coming on the press. You guys are getting close. You're getting close.

Oh, well. We'll be there sooner or later. We've got faces made for podcast. Just to coin a line for our open. Thank you, Jason. Faces for podcast, bodies for substack. There you go. All right.

All right. It's time for David Shoemaker. Guesses the strained pun headline. Yeah. It's been a while since we did this, and I had to look up that last Monday's headline about a national park in Mozambique introducing a leopard was how this spot got its leopard. How this spot got its leopard.

Today's headline came from literally everybody. I'm going to give credit to Mark Lamster here because it's from his newspaper, the Dallas Morning News. Did you see this Ted Cruz tweet, David, about the Paris Accords, the climate accords, where he said, you know, it's time Joe Biden starts thinking about the people in Pittsburgh, not the people in Paris. Oh, right.

Yeah. A lot of people on Twitter were like, you know what? The Paris Accords are not about the citizens of Paris. In particular, this is not like a local ordinance, right? This is for the whole globe. This is how the Dallas Morning News headline begins. Cruz Scorns Paris Pact is shown blank. Is shown blank.

What was the Dallas Morning News? Strain Punt headline Packed is shown something like someone's shown the door shown is shown

Wait so oh oh oh a cord Is something with a cord since that was left out of the first half of the headline? I'll give you another word Cruz Scorns Paris Pact

is shown no man Oh God, I know what this is. Twitter was showing him no. Mercy. Yes, but, but. Merci. There we go.

There we go. I can't believe shown mercy. I was like hung up on the most basic thing in the world. All right. Getting back in the swing of things in New Year. Cruise. Yeah, that's fantastic. Amazing work by the Dallas Morning News.

he is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic is always by Erica Servantes. David, I think we can go ahead and announce the next special edition of the press box. Let's do it. Well, he did John Crackhauer and End of the Wild. And now on Thursday, February 4th, we have a special show number two. It's going to be about covering the U.S. Senate.

That is the ground zero of American politics right now, with all the Biden confirmation hearings, with impeachment and removal from office about to come out. the Senate is where it's at. So we're going to have a reporter on the show who covers the Senate. And then we're going to have a member, David, of that prestigious body talking about what it's like to be covered. So covering the Senate with reporter and actual U.S. senator coming to this year podcast, February 4th. Nice. We're back Thursday in the meantime with more Luke Wormt takes about the media.

See you then, David. See you later, Brian.