The Press Box - Brian Stelter Leaves CNN, Plus Would You Pay $8 Billion for Big Ten Football?

Episode Date: August 22, 2022

Bryan and David break down the news that CNN canceled Brian Stelter’s show, ‘Reliable Sources,’ and he has left the network. They discuss what this means for Stelter’s career, how reporters should handle political coverage in today’s media, and what the new CNN could look like (0:41). Later, they weigh in on the $8 billion TV deal that involved CBS, FOX, and NBC purchasing rights to the Big Ten, and then touch on the content viewers may deserve from their streaming services (23:21). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello, media consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, and producer Erica Servantes here. David, on Thursday, we had the kind of juicy cable news bloodletting that would pique the interest of Brian Stelter. Except it involved Brian Stelter. CNN canceled Stelter show reliable sources, and with that, Stelter left the network he has been at since 2013. Now, for people who haven't followed Stelter's reporting career, he's basically the Adam Schaefter and Adrian Wojnerowski of TV scoops.

Or, and here's me leading you into our discussion, Stelter was that before assuming a new identity during the Trump era. What's your take on CNN's Helter Stelter? Well, I don't know. I'm interested to have the conversation. I think that probably what's stuck out the most to me was that this was not projected as just like a regular fire. I mean, right, there's like there's a new boss in town, right? With the Time Warner discovery merger, we, you know, I think there are everybody under the Time Warner umbrella umbrella has been living in fear, at least.

somewhat reasonable concern that changes would be coming. Like anybody with a, you know, public facing presence has to be concerned when the people that brought you under their employee or kept you under their employee are no longer in charge. I mean, that sort of thing can happen. But this didn't, this wasn't projected as a simple, like, he's not our kind of guy or never, you know, it's time to part our ways. We just have a better idea for the time slot sort of move. It was, it was, it seemed to be really.

received and unrefuted to be a sort of symbolic move, right, of a sort of new era of CNN for which Stelter is the sort of figurehead for, you know, the kind of CNN they're moving past, which is sort of bonkers because you would think that even if you take all of the, and we'll get into the details of all of the conservative critique of Brian Seltor as fact, which one should not do, but even if you did, like why? it's a very specific sort of, it's a very specific sort of ideology that would paint Stelter

as the public enemy number one or just the symbol of what's wrong with the network, right? I mean, like I said, if you were to say, not my cup of tea, you know, we'd like another media guy or we don't want to just a media critic on like a regular, on a daily show, whatever. But it was obviously a bigger,

it was something deeper than that and it's kind of mind-boggling. CNN, the new CNN, seems to see him as a resistance hero. Right. Or someone who is at least resistance adjacent. And it is funny because, as I mentioned, he was like, Wojian Schefter, founds his blog when he's in college, TV Newser, and he goes to the New York Times, and then he goes to CNN.

and he seemed to be exactly the kind of down the middle, just the facts, breaking news reporter type that CNN wanted. Guy who replaced Howard Kurtz on reliable sources. It was a figure of old CNN. But then what happens, David? Donald Trump gets elected president. And all of a sudden, every Donald Trump political story is also kind of a media story at the same time.

He's threatening the media. The people at Fox or a lot of the people at Fox are instruments of Trump or vice versa. He's tweeting all the time. His Twitter account is a story. And there was this choice to be made if you're a Brian Stelter type of reporter, which is do I try to maintain my aura as down the middle? I'm just calling him as I see him guy. Or do I get my hands a little dirty here?

Do I pick aside, and we can talk about what picking aside actually means when you're writing about the media in Trump in a second, but do I pick aside with the risk that I am going to get cast as resistance guy? And that hits me kind of hard because I remember when he did that reading, you know, reading his reliable sources newsletter. And you and I just so happen to be hosting a fairly column as we see a media podcast at the time. And I think consciously or subconsciously, I thought, okay, well, I guess this is now the way we're all going to do this. Yeah. And I remember we'd have an episode and you'd ask me like, wait, are we a media podcast or are we a political podcast? Mm-hmm. And I'd say, I don't know, Trump did thing.

shouldn't we just talk about the thing? Do we need the media overlay of this? Do we need the media angle? Right. And are we just, and if Trump did a certain thing, aren't we just going to say what we think about this? Yeah.

And yeah, and if you look at the Reddit stuff, there are people like, uh-oh, you know, Shoemaker and Curtis, need jerk liberals. That's when I pieced out on the press box.

Stelter just seems to me like a much much, much bigger example of that, only it's not necessarily the audience that went out. It's his own bosses. Yeah. Who decided they didn't like that approach. Yeah. And it'll be interesting to see if we get more details about that sort of new regime, the ideology of the new regime in the coming days and weeks.

Although, I don't know, everything that's been leaked or implied so far doesn't give you too much reason for comfort. You know, CNN has always had this sort of rap. The knock on CNN has always been the sort of like both sides e-to-a-fault sort of place, right? I mean, you think about John Stewart going on Crossfire 500 years ago. You know, I mean, it's both sides at the expense of truth or honesty or balance. And, you know, a lot of news outlets have fallen victim to that, especially in the Trump era. but certainly in the, you know, in the Fox News era, I think, more broadly. But it seems like, you know, the new CNN is going to be doubling down on that, right?

It's going to be finding a new depth of both sides, both siderivism, you know. And certainly when you have someone like Seltor who's, well, who's covering the news from a certain angle, which gives him a certain amount of cover, but also, I mean, a certain amount of, it's a certain sort of position of morality, I guess, right? It's, it's, it's, hey, I'm not picking aside. I'm choosing truth. That becomes an incredibly partisan issue in the modern era,

and that's really, that's the problem, right? I mean, that became, I think, when you talk about him being a resistance fighter, I mean, his farewell to CNN didn't do anything to quash that notion, but it was about truth and lying, right? And not allowing liars to get away with what they're doing. And if that becomes your cause, it certainly could be your entire life's work in this era. And if that's what it is, then, yeah, there's going to be a bunch of people that have a problem with that,

even though it's ridiculous. He said on his farewell, it's not partisan to stand up to demagogues. Meaning if somebody's threatening the press, my position is, don't do that. Does that make me a liberal guy? Or if my position is, hey, Fox News has this very, very weird relationship with Trump that no news organization has ever had with a sitting president. And I'm writing about it. Does that make me the liberal guy? Yeah, I mean, and Trump did everything.

So, you know, out in front of everybody else that, like, you could very easily, without conducting a single interview, you could very easily, like, write a feature story about the ways that, about all the instances in which Fox News was cowed by Trump, right? By all the times where he said, why are you doing this on TV? And then they fixed the reverse course or they fixed what it was going on. I mean, these things were happening around there in front of everybody. So the media angle is sound, you know, I mean, it's true. It's true, and there's also this, and as I was saying to get to the choice a minute ago,

it's like if the risk is that I'm going to get lumped in with quote-unquote liberals on TV, is that just the price to pay, the price I'm absolutely willing to pay to say the things we're talking about? Yeah, I mean, I think that whenever someone writes the history, I think one of the most damning things about the Trump era is how few, quote, unquote, quote conservatives, how few people on the right found, like, you don't have to be an anti-Trumper to find, like, just principled reasons, points of disagreement with the man, with his presentation, with his ideology, with everything else, right? And there's not that many people out there. I mean, we talked about Fox News. I mean, Laura Ingraham may have said more like,

it may have had more like, you know, moral or political, you know, political disagreements with Trump than anybody else in a public role from the right, you know? And she's like one of the most diehard people out there. It's just so rare that anybody would like, if you're sitting in a seat like stelters, it's, why was it so rare over the past five years for someone to be just like, I have, I'm just coming at this from a really specific angle. and from that angle, the president is utterly in the wrong right now, you know, and how does that become...

Constantly and in many different ways in the wrong. I mean, it's like if you were a public, if, if, I mean, listen, it's kind of, it's, it's always going to be interesting that there's like a media show on a network, right? I mean, there's, it's, it's, it's, it's probably a little bit of an anomaly, at least for the amount of the platform that he got. I think so.

know, but like, you know, there would never be like a daily hour long, like, a linguistics show on CNN. But if there were, it would be totally within, it would be totally within reason for them to be just like, the president is mangling the English language every day. This is my beat. Let me talk about it. Right? That wouldn't necessarily be partisan. I don't know. It just, it seems like, like, I don't know.

It's just really disappointing, you know. And like I said, for it to be such a symbolic thing, you know, I mean, to be so cowed by by this just silly and sad and scary part of our country's history that you would, I don't know, that you'd make a move like that. It's just ridiculous. It's silly that they would punish somebody, penalize them, in this case, get rid of them, potentially for standing up to Donald Trump. But also, if you look at the right.

of Brian Stelter, he's not like one of the crooked media guys. I'm a come on. No, but that's what makes him such a problematic figure for so many people on the right, is that he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he has the, the, claims of neutrality, which is, which I think are largely justifiable, uh, but, you know, that's the sort of, that's sort of, you know, referee position. is going to make some people just apoplectic because it's harder to wave off.

You talked about the new direction of CNN. Ben Mullen in the New York Times quotes John Malone, influential Warner Brothers Discovery shareholder, saying he wants CNN to, quote, evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with. So this isn't Tucker Carlson, Paul Begala, crossfire. This is Mike Kinsley, Bob Novak, crossfire. This is Bernie Shaw, Gulf War, Judy Woodruff, CNN, they're talking about. Now,

I think there's a really good piece or segment to be done about whether 80s and 90s CNN was really what people remember it as. The answer is always no. Not on CNN, but of everything. But go ahead. We had Nick Charles and Fred Hickman doing sports and you had Larry King doing the Larry King show in prime time, which was not always Ross Perot. It was like a psychic guy he's interviewing John Edward. So there's that. But I don't think this is going to work.

I think this is a stupid idea. I think these guys are taking people at face value when they say, you know what I want? I want BBC-style news in America. I want unopinionated cases. news. I don't think people want that. I think they might say they want that, but I don't believe they really want that. I don't think there's any evidence unless you have a massive news story. Like, you know, today is the day that Russia invaded Ukraine. And all the cable news stations go to,

here are reports from the front, here is the news. Unless you have situations like that, I don't think on a just Tuesday in August, people want cable news to be like that. Well, I think that your first, I think that your original point, your point you made on the way to this point is the, is the real salient one. I don't think anybody, when you say we wanted to be like the old CNN, you know, like I said, it works in every genre. When I can't SNL be like the old SNL,

well, like, how many of those episodes did you watch start to finish, right? You know, like, I'm guessing you're not referring to the blackface. You know, there's a lot of problem. The old S&L was not the was not the SNL that you probably remember it as. You remember the highlight reel. And this is even more sort of insidious because I think people are saying they want to go back to the old CNN. They're not talking about the content as it relates to partisanship. They're talking about this.

It's like, it's like, I want things to go back to the good old America, right? They're like deifying, like glorifying the 50s Americana. It's like, I want to go back to a point in time where people didn't complain about the news, right? Where people, where the news didn't offend anybody. It wasn't what the news was doing back then that didn't offend anybody. But no one had made news a partisan issue, right? Also, there was no Twitter to complain about the news. Yeah.

People wouldn't have complained about the Fort Worth Star Telegram if they had a Twitter account? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And listen, that's not necessarily, that's all good and bad. I mean, Chuck Todd trends about every Sunday, right? And it's because of whatever, his failure to follow up a question that he doesn't get an answer to or whoever he, but that would have never happened. You're right. And it's good that some of that stuff happen. But it's good that a lot of it happens now. But you're right. I mean, it's it's, it's, it's, you can't go, you can't put the genie back in the bottle, right? You can't go back in time to an era that you're not. even engaging with in a real way because you want to like change the way that people engage with the news. Well, I mean, what are you going to do? Lock everybody inside and take away their phones. Like you're going to a Dave Chappelle concert. Like, just watch this and promise not to get Matt and try not to get Matt. I mean, it's not, it's, it's, it'll never be that way again. It has nothing to do with the ideology or lack thereof of the people on TV. It has to do with

the way that we engage with television. And that's done. Absolutely. Absolutely right. And think about what we're talking about. CNN. CNN of Jake Tapper, John King, Dana Bash, Anderson Cooper. This is the CNN that its new overlords are apparently

looking at and being like, man, we needed to drum the opinion and partisan nonsense out of this place. Really? That's the takeaway? But looking at the cast of reporters and anchors that CNN has? That's your takeaway?

I find that, and again, I don't, just from a pure watchability perspective, I don't think there's a market for that. I really don't. It might be a nice world if there was a market for that. Occasionally when I'm driving around, I'm turn on my serious radio and listen to the BBC World Service so I can get the news from all over the world.

I love doing that. I don't do that very much. Yeah. I really don't in this media age. I wish I were a better person and did it? No, but what there is a, I think that the gambit is what there is a market for is, is, man, maybe you're right. Maybe there's not a market.

But I think that the market that they're seeking out are people that are like Fox News viewers who are exhausted by Fox News, right? Isn't that it? Or people who want to feel good about not being so partisan in their viewership habits? And that's not specific to Fox News, right? I think those people just aren't going to watch TV anymore. rather than seek out another cable news network, if that person even exists.

Right. There's 200 other channels on the dial. They don't need to be finding a different news. There's Facebook or whatever they want to do. I just don't think, I don't think we're at that point in history anymore. But I think in a very general, I mean, we'll see what happens. Certainly anything could happen. I think it's, without knowing what the plan is,

I think it would be pretty easy, obviously, to just do whatever the hell you wanted to do with your new network, CNN, and just do it under the veil of, we're taking it back to the roots, right? I mean, that's, you could turn it into a, you know, 24 hours of cartoons about clowns, you know? I mean, but if you're just saying,

we're taking it back to the roots, then, like, people, then at least you have the plausible deniability. It's just like, you know, a lot of people say clown cartoons is their favorite part of the old CNN. I mean, it's so silly. I think 24 hours of clown cartoons

was actually USA Network in the 80s. You're getting confused here. You're right. You're right. Different accurate, different three letters, yeah. A couple other notes before we get out of here. Jeffrey Tubin also left CNN. Did you hear about that one? Yes, I saw that it happened.

I didn't read about it. Always kind of a weird comeback. Like you're out of the New Yorker, but you can come back to CNN. he did that semi comfortably for a number of months now he is out on CNN and also after canceling reliable sources CNN rebooted its Sunday lineup which will now include the show with the best title on cable news David who's talking to Chris Wallace it's back for CNN plus it's back oh my gosh who's talking to Chris Wallace. Coming soon to a Sunday morning cable channel near you.

Do we know yet? Who's talking to Chris Wallace? We don't. We can guess some of the biggest names in politics, sports, entertainment, and beyond. Wait, was he one of the ones that had a book, book, book component? Was there a book club component? Or was that just something we talked about someone else at the same time? Jake Tapper had a book club on CNN Plus.

All right. It was the wrong, unwatched CNN Plus show you're thinking of. But the Jake Tapper Book Club is not coming back to the weekend line or not coming to the weekend lineup? I did not see that note. All right. But it might be. Stay tuned. Anything's possible at the new CNN as long as you don't have an opinion about Donald Trump.

Coming up, David, would you pay $8 billion for Big Ten football and does your streaming service owe it to you to keep certain shows on in perpetuity? But first, let's do 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. I'm going to need you

to cast your eyes on the Google Doc David because somebody tweeted this reconstruction of Greek philosopher Aristotle based on his bust how would you describe this photo of Aristotle?

The receding hairl kind of thick on the sides, beard, full of face, as they say in the New Yorker profile. It looks kind of like Ben Roslisberger, to be honest with you. Would you like some of the best jokes

about reanimated Aristotle? Yeah, please. Reanimated Aristotle looks like a guy who deletes all his tweets every three days. Reanimated Aristotle looks like someone who would call himself a philosopher on Reddit.

Aristotle looks like He's about to ask, but did you read the comics? And to your point, Aristotle looks like the guy who threw 27 interceptions for the Chicago Bears in 2009. You like the look of Aristotle Lessing who did the week before last. Congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right. In the notebook, dumb.

Big story last week in the world of sports that will affect how I spend my Saturdays, my entire Saturdays in the fall. The media rights to the Big Ten were purchased by Fox, CBS, and NBC. You can throw a little peacock in there. The price was $8 plus billion over seven years. Starting in a couple of years, there is going to be a whole Saturday's worth of Big Ten football. A game on Fox at noon Eastern, game on CBS at 330 Eastern,

then an NBC game as a nightcap. Wow. What do we make of the Big Ten's big rights deal? I mean, it's sort of just a distracting amount of money. Yes. Sort of hard to talk about anything else than that. I mean, it makes sense, right? I mean, we're moving towards a two conference reality.

Yeah. You know, they're probably both going to be making double-digit billions over the lifetime of a deal. And certainly to sign a deal now when we're not in that reality yet and when, you know, future bargaining power is uncertain. It's going to be an astronomical amount of money because you're hedging against them being able to get $20 billion in like 18 months, right? I mean, it's going to, it's a, this stuff could all change overnight in both directions, I guess. But I think that we're on a pretty steady march in one. It'll be interesting, you know, it'll be interesting. Like, you know, did we talk about, did we talk about Notre Dame football last week or was just off camera?

I mean, we grew up in this era where Notre Dame football is still, you know, on NBC and kind of had a very specific place in the car. college football firmament. In Texas, in Texas, obviously things are different because especially in our youth, I mean, you watch Texas football,

no matter where you were in the state every Saturday and that was equally as as big a deal or more than one. It is going to be kind of interesting, though, just to see how college sports can be nationalized,

sort of and not nationalized in the sense that the government's taking them over, but, you know, that can't be too far down the road. But, you know, I mean, to sort of, to talk about, I mean, even just to talk about college football, to talk about college football players who may be there for two years and the way that we talk about professional sports is going to be very different. I can to see how those conversations happen.

I mean, I think maybe it's just from where I specifically grew up, we're in North Carolina and Kentucky before I moved to Texas. But I get, I mean, to me, I think back to college basketball in those days. But everybody knew, you know, the top 10 coaches and everybody knew the top. players on Kentucky and Duke and UNLV. And that was basically, I mean, that was a bigger, bigger a deal than the NBA at that point, you know, in terms of just pop culture, you know, pop culture acknowledgement. So, I mean, in that sense, to me, it's going to be, it's an incredibly interesting project.

And also with all the sort of NIL stuff, I mean, I don't even know how it's going to, how it's going to apply, but certainly we're going to end up with some college athletes that are famous on an entirely different level than they would have been without this. And certainly that'll become a big deal. Now, you know, does that mean that there's more potential business opportunities for somebody who's famous on a national level than there would have already been in Ann Arbor, Austin, or wherever else? I mean, maybe not. But, but it, that's, you know, I sort of am excited and totally dreading that conversation being the week in, week out, part of the way we view football, too. I don't know. What do you think? What's your big takeaway? Well, the nationalization thing really,

really is interesting because I'm a big college football fan. You know, I watch a ton of it. But if I'm coming into a game, let's say, Alabama versus Auburn, Iron Bowl, I'd love to personally see how many players I can name on both of those teams when the game starts. somebody who doesn't cover this but watches a lot of it. And I'd love for the people who are not in the SEC footprint, people as you say who are coming at this as here is like my national game of the week to watch, how many players can you name total from those teams? You know the coaches,

you know the schools and their reputation, but you're watching it for kind of an interesting reason. You're watching it because like Alabama versus Auburn. This is awesome. Look at those fans. Look how excited they are. It's funny because our friend Jason Gay texted us this weekend about the NFL preseason games of how you get the local announcers on every game.

I was watching Browns and Eagles yesterday because I'm in the Philly Market and just sort of laughing about how inside a lot of the discussion was, right? I mean, it's still in some level, a very superficial level, but it's like superficial to like the local sports radio listener level. You know what I mean? You're still talking about fifth stringers in referring to them on a first name same basis and just sort of talking about their likelihood of making the team or how they've been looking at practice or whatever else.

It'll be interesting to see if we get something closer to that with National College Football or the dead opposite of that, which is every single broadcast is you introducing these teams to the viewer anew. Right? Which I want to assume that's the way they're going to go. I do too. The other interesting component of it, though, is going to be how people are watching or what they're watching for, right?

Because the national, I mean, the audience for this is, you know, I mean, there's a college football audience, but just the football audience more broadly, are they more interested in who's going to win between Alabama and Auburn? Or are they going to be interested in seeing what the people that are on the top half of the ringer's NFL mock draft are doing in the game right are they going to be more interested in who do i need to who's name do i need to know for my fantasy football team in three years there's certainly part of that there's certainly part of that and that's an and obviously that and obviously like who's my you know who's my favorite team going to draft next year if my team needs a quarterback

yeah am i going to am i going to watch these quarterbacks there's that kind of stuff and there's also that go ahead no but i but i but i think it is up to the announcers when they do these games to explain who these people are. If you watch the big ESPN game, Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstry on Saturday night, which is usually one of two or three games of the week with the biggest teams, the most popular players, if you listen to them,

it's all storytelling. Yeah. Problematic as that word may be. It's them being like, here's who this person is. Here's where he transferred from. Here is where he is from. Here is his journey as a quarterback.

Like they are just boom, boom, boom, throughout the entire game while they're calling the action. And it's just like it's a whole different component than an NFL game where you come in and you're certainly going to explain a lot about the players and here's their new tight end and here's the guy they drafted and stuff. But you're going to assume the audience knows a lot of NFL players from fandom or fantasy or gambling or whatever. Yeah, it's just totally different.

And I think you're watching it for a different reason. You're watching it for pageantry. you're watching because it seems really cool. You're watching for those shots of the stands because it seems like, wow, this is something that the people watching this are really into. Yeah. It's funny, you know, the point in comparison

that I just thought of, and this is not a commentary on Herb Street or anybody who's engaging in storytelling now. But if you look forward to this sort of national effort introducing people, point of comparison, an interesting point in comparison is the NFL draft where you remember what we talked about last year, probably the year before,

the whole thing is just like, like two minute promo, two minute, you know, video packages of the, of the heartache or whatever, like, you know,

like childhood trauma that every player has gone through as a way of kind of humanizing them or carrying some sort of the emotional connection to them. I mean, that would be an extreme, I guess, but after the, we've seen the draft for the past several years,

would that be shocking if they were doing a lot of that stuff? Yeah. You're talking about the ABC telecast of the draft, which is all the personal, which is really into the personal stories. But it's, it's, it's, it's going to be, it's going to change the way that we, that we watch college football for sure. And, and I don't know, I mean, do you think it's going to change the way, you think it's going to be, end up being a big issue, or it's going to affect the way that the, that the playoffs, the college, the championship has decided? Because certainly what, I mean,

you could certainly imagine a situation in which the Big Ten, having, a have such a larger platform, which have just a lot more momentum or support behind certain teams than every than more deserving teams, Mike? Totally. Totally can. I mean, this is, so there's this great quote people have been resurfacing lately from LSU Chancellor Michael Martin. This is from 2011.

He said, I think we could ultimately end up with two conferences, one called ESPN and one called Fox. Mm-hmm. Meaning the networks would have such an ownership stake in the conferences, that that's how we would know them by the network that is not only showing them, but is pushing them and saying, look how good the football is here. Folks, you've got to tune in because you become a booster of the conference. So now ESPN has the entire SEC and the Fox conference in Michael Martin's formulation is actually the Fox CBS NBC conference. Yeah. So you have three networks.

CBS, this is their game of the week. NBC still has Notre Dame. Fox has other things, but that's going to be their big, that they have the number one Big Ten thing going, Big Ten football, man. It's where it's at. Ohio State, Michigan doesn't get any better than that. Wisconsin, Iowa doesn't get any, I mean, please watch Wisconsin, Iowa.

And that's part of the rub here too, is. and you and I can be Big 12 snobs about this if being a Big 12 snob is actually a pose that one can take but the athletic notes that of the last 16 national championships the Big Ten has won one

the SEC has won 12 in that time there is plenty of unappetizing Big Ten football yeah so now you're not only saying Big Ten game of the week you're saying Big Ten game of the week times three all day long.

And yeah, right? So you're right. It is going to change it. But also there's only so much selling you could do. And if there's a down year for the conference where it's like, okay, Ohio State's really good. Michigan's really good. Beyond that, that actually sort of makes the case for it being like the Fox conference or it would see, you know, whatever.

To sort of changing the name. The big tin obviously is. has a huge amount of name recognition and value, and that's what, I mean, they're invested in it for a very specific reason. But like, when I was a kid, or before I was a kid, I mean, really, you know, pro wrestling, before the WWF, pro wrestling was all just these little territories, right?

So like the pro wrestling show you'd watch in Florida, it was different than the one you're watching Memphis, that when you watch in D.C. or New York, whatever. But they would all sort of, there was the NWA, so there was like a national champion. But week to week you're watching it. They all sort of had to pretend like there was, There's no world outside of where they were.

And you believed it, right? You're like, your local champ was your favorite wrestler. This is the world champion right here. Yes, exactly. And so one, I mean, it sort of makes the case for, for, you know, Foxwood ever, just changing the broadcast to like, this is college football. These are the college football championships, you know, whatever. I just leave it vague enough for the uninformed viewer to be just like, this is the only one

that matters. All right. It's just like it doesn't really matter if, you know, whoever, if Nebraska is getting squashed week after week. But if they can have an, if they can have like what happens next week matters for the end of the season, you know, if like if they're, if, if, if an underdog can change the course of the season or whatever, then that becomes all that really matters, right? Ohio State is going to Lincoln.

Mm-hmm. They're undefeated. Yeah. It's crappy as Nebraska's been. Are they going to, you know, change the course of this entire college football? football season. Sure. And by the way, that's what you're saying is exactly what these networks, I almost said conferences, networks are going to do it week to week. Watch my game of the week instead of the other game of the week. This is college football. When is it? College football lives here,

right, to use the TV phrase. I don't know if you saw it, but CBS, that really cool song that they play, have been playing now for years under their SEC game of the week. Do do do do do do. They just put it up on Twitter with a reel of Big Ten football after the deal was closed. Oh, that song that in your mind says Auburn, Alabama, Florida, LSU. By the way, now, now, now it says Wisconsin, Ohio State, Michigan. The part of this that's also interesting is going it alone without ESPN. Because I know whenever, not to bring it back to the Big 12, but whenever there was a rights deal, it was always like, look, you have to be in with ESPN, at least. Yeah. part of your rights because there's sports center, there's ESPN radio, there's the website,

there's just so much that ESPN will invest in you and promote you, as we're talking about, if they have a stake in it. Yeah. Big Ten is going without ESPN. Now, here's my question to you. That still matters to some extent, but is it matter less in a world of shrinking cable bundle subscribers, ESPN's place in the media universe still huge but smaller than it was.

So your question is, does it matter less in a world where people are getting their sports news from Twitter gifts than they are from SportsCenter? Yeah. Yeah, it certainly matters less. You know, it's also going to be interesting to see,

I mean, listen, it was a big deal for the UFC when they had their deal, you know, when they signed their deal with ESPN because suddenly UFC highlights are on SportsC every night. Now, it's also a big deal for ESPN plus. Yeah. No, no, I'm saying, but from strictly one-sided point of view, I mean, yeah, it cuts both ways, right? I mean, we talk, ESPN pays for Monday night football in part because they, you know, it comes with the highlight rights, you know, they could do whatever they want to with the NFL for all the rest of the games.

And that's important because they wouldn't avoid the rest of the NFL games just because they're not on ESPN, right? I mean, even if they lost it, they'd probably still be covering it as best they lost Monday night football. They'd still be covering it as best they could. at some point it becomes an institutional thing where you can't just not cover it and I think that it's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy with the Big Ten. This is a multi-billion dollar rights deal

airing across multiple networks. It would be impossible, I think, for them to not cover it, even if it's... Oh. So, I mean, that's a separate question than when you asked. But yeah, does it... To go it without ESPN, does it matter less? Yeah, it matters less.

I think there's a lot of people. There are probably, probably a lot of people, there are probably a lot of singular voices on Twitter that can shift the, the tone of the discourse around college football more than anything they could do on SportsCenter. Well, I saw the question ask, will game day still go to a Big Ten game of the week if ESPN has no stake in the Big Ten? The answer to that question to me is, obviously they will because they don't want to throw away the credibility of the show. They've done it for many years. You know, we're going to go to the site of game that's being televised on another network because we have to go where the game of the week is.

Yeah. And if we don't, we throw away the, we flush the credibility of the show. The show is about all of college football. I agree with you. And I do think, though, that's a really good question in terms of just a very specific, a very narrow way to look at how they're treating it. I mean, obviously, there's going to be judgment calls or judgment calls even now on the game of the week schedule.

So if it's a coin flip and it's a big 10 game. that's very similar to an SEC game or a big 12 game that they have the rights to. Pack 12 game, do you, does the coin flip go one way or the other? I don't know. That's where it gets interesting.

It is, and you can definitely see, you could definitely imagine the internal conversation. It's just like, well, it's a coin flip. And guess what? We haven't been to Lincoln yet this season. So, there you go. A different backdrop.

It's not about the teams. We're going to blame it on, we're going to make this like a set decoration decision, you know, ever. All right, one more topic for you before we go here, David. And you sent this one to me. You may have been speaking in your role as a dad when you did.

But the Washington Post notes that HBO Max has removed almost 200 older episodes of the beloved kid show Sesame Street from its streaming service. This is Samantha Cherry reporting. Platform now offers 456 episodes of Sesame Street. down from the estimated 650. It used to have variety reported. Also, some of the works set to disappear from HBO Max include the teen drama generation, the Sesame Street spin-off, the not-too-late show with Elmo, and the animated series Aquaman King of Atlantis. Your mileage may vary on those. HBO Max did not announce why the TV shows and films were going to be cut from the service,

but the move will help the company save money that would have gone toward paying residuals. So does HBO Max owe it to you, David, as a man, as a podcast host, as a father, to keep all the episodes of Sesame Street? Well, I think it's a bigger conversation than just Sesame Street.

Because HBO Max is in this cost-cutting mode right now as part of the aforementioned discovery time-worn or merger. I'm probably going to botched number here. But the, you know, HBO, the president of HBO, I guess, was charged with finding $4 billion in savings. There was, of Warner was charged with finding like $4 billion for the savings. So they famously like canceled or just, you know, tossed the Batgirl movie into trash after it was deep into post-production, I guess, or whatever, because it's just, that you could

just call it a sunk cost, you could write it off, like whatever the rationale is. You don't have to spend the money promoting it, right? There's a lot of shows that have been, that were in production on HBO. They canceled all of the HBO Max originals, you know, that were in production. And then, but there were a lot of shows that were just sort of finished that were living on HBO Max that are not going to be there anymore because of the residual issue, because of, I'm sure at some point there's hosting fee, hosting costs that that you can start tallying up in large numbers.

I think the bigger question, yeah, is like, what is the, you know, certainly whatever you signed, whatever, when you gave them your $999 or whatever, did not, did not compel them by law to keep this or that, you know, available in the streaming service forever. But it's sort of been the implicit promise of streaming in general, right? Like, you can be, you know, people were at, you know, mad first when like Netflix lost the office or whatever the show was because it went to another streaming platform or whatever movie it was. We can now understand that, right? now can wrap our heads around, well, they only had it for a limited amount of time. But there's a deeper question where it's like the streaming thing, this like,

there shows they live in the cloud, right? There should not be, there should not be like a shelf space issue with streaming broadcasts, with streaming television movies, whatever else. And obviously it's deeper than that, but don't, but isn't the sort of implicit promise that you can get whatever you want any time? And I think the crazier thing about some of these HBO cuts, whatever, Time Warner Cuts, is that these shows are going to be, are just going to be disciplined. appeared, right? There's shows that are that exist that will not be available, you know, in a year

because maybe you can find them on Apple, on iTunes, TV, whatever, and pay for them. But there's going to be shows that we never see again. And that's what I think that more interesting question is, right? It's like, is there this sort of implicit promise that what was there will always be there? And, and, you know, what do these streaming platforms owe to us? Now, practically, it's impossible to police, right? Because mergers like the one were discussed. will change the business model and change the plans for everybody. There's no, you know, there's no user agreement that would stop somebody from buying Netflix and saying, I'm getting rid of everything that's like TVPG because I'm worried about the children,

right? I mean, it's either, anything is, anything is possible. But I don't know. I mean, listen, I, well, to me, to the point of like, any merger as well i mean when when i'll do wrestling again apologies to everybody but when peacock bought wwe a lot of the stuff the wwe or the w w w network a lot of the stuff that was living on there the historical wrestling stuff disappeared some of it now that's still there is really difficult to search but you know there's no there's always going to be this like old historical stuff

that people are got to want to watch that is it's just crazy that we're moving in a direction of less things being available i think that's what it comes down to Is it really less things being available? Well, what if you wanted to do a... What if you, Brian Curtis, we're going to do a prestige podcast about the history of Sesame Street, and suddenly there's 200 episodes...

David, don't give that away, no. And suddenly there's 200 episodes you can't watch. Like, where are you going to go to find? I guess you could probably go find a DVD set or something like that. You'd figure it out. But, you know, if we're talking... What if it's in 50 years from now

and there's no DVD players on the planet? You know, I mean, it's, it's, it's an interesting sort of curatorial question, not, and it's not just a question of, of the user experience. But I do think that, I don't know. I don't know, man. When HBO, like, listen, I can, I can tell you right now, we watch a lot of Sesame Street in this household. Probably will not, but no, we're taking the thing away that your kid wants to watch. Well, we'll not, probably not miss the 200 episodes that are missing, partly because my three-year-old calls the show Elmo, you know, I mean, and anything that predates. is not necessarily on, on, you know, like on the top of the cube.

But, but, you know, it is, it is, there does, I just kind of feel like if it's there, then I don't know. I feel like there's an expectation that it'll be there. HBO bought Sesame Street. They're like, this is our anchor for one of the anchors of our new streaming platform. And this, it'll always be here. It's just, I don't know. It's, it's a, it's not a simple question or.

answer, but I don't know. What do you think? I think it is a really interesting question. It's hard for me as a person from the era of physical media to be that mad because I'm still like, wait a second, I'm paying $9, $1,000, $1,000, whatever it is, to watch all these movies. Yeah. When before it would have been, I can rent three movies from Blockbuster for this price, and they look like shit, and I have to take them back after three days. But what if they... So I'm getting a great deal.

I mean, like, are you kidding me? And I can watch all this, and I can cancel after one month and go to another one. If I'm mad, and if I really want something, I can still go buy a DVD. Well, that's on the way out, too. The old canceling after one month or before you have to pay that,

they're going to find a way to bite back for that in the near future. mark my words, but I mean, but like, listen, if, if, if, if there were like an SEC streaming service in five years that somehow just absorbed all the rights to add the entire history of Texas football and they just decided because of a, because of a rights or, you know, or hosting, a hosting issue just to get rid of all of the, the Texas football games before 2015, you would be like, you know, it's not like you go back and watch these things every day, but you might want to go back and watch the championship game that you are at, you know, every, like, once a year or something.

And that would be, that's, it'd be sort of crazy. And, and, and there's nothing you can really do about it. I agree. I agree. And if it, if it hit, if it was something like that that I think was really personal and hit me, it's not just the office moving from one streaming service to another streaming service or the office, which you can go buy on iTunes or through Amazon or by, by, Blu-rays of it. If you really like the office, that is very easily accessible. It's something that would be very hard to get. Yeah. And that was very personal to me. Yes, I would say, like, this is really nice to have this living in my streaming service, and I would be kind of pissed. Sure. I can imagine. And the Blu-ray point is actually, I think, is important, too, because

our generation, the generation you were defining, you know, we're probably the last generation that would even still have a Blu-ray shelf in our living room, you know, even though we stream things just like anybody else, we still have the sort of institutional memory that requires us to own the physical things that we really hold dear, right? But I think that's what gets at the deeper question. The streaming services, and again, this is a blanket sort of definition, the streaming services have been teaching us that we don't need physical things, right? We, you, like, literally, like, I bet everybody listened to this podcast, as at some point in the past five years, 10 years, moved and decided to get rid of DVDs, well, even VHS tapes, whatever, but like get rid of the

physical things that they don't need to anymore. They're CDs or whatever because platforms like Spotify, just give you the music. They're right there. And if everything suddenly disappears, then it's that promise that's sort of broken, right? And it's not a literal promise, an implicit one. But it's not nothing. But if there's a demand for it, right, there's another streaming service that wants to come along and say, hey, everybody's mad that they got rid of these things, we will buy these things. And we will put them on our streaming service, presumably. Yeah.

We will buy the pre-elmo out now non-canon episodes of Sesame Street and put them on our streamer. Is that possible? I don't know. I think the bigger question becomes piracy, right? So how much is that, how much they're opening the door for piracy to affect their own bottom line? But, you know, you're right.

We'll see. Maybe there'll be an HBO Max Plus that will. have all the shit that was just pulled off of HBO Mets. It's time for David Shoemaker guesses, the Strain Pun headline. Yeah. Wednesday's headline about a couple that loves mini golf was pair for the course.

Listener Ben Al Schuller suggests it should have been till death do us putt. Today's headline comes from the New Yorker. It's from listener Ping 33. The headline sits atop the New Yorker's House of the Dragon recap. Before we go any farther, just let that marinate, let that wash over you, David. The New Yorker's episode by episode recap of House of the Drag. Did you watch the first episode?

I haven't watched it yet because I'm going to watch it with my wife and she was hot last night. Here's some non-sboard. I'm a bad ringer employee. It's okay. I've often been that guy, but I actually watched it last night. Episode one is about some would-be kings who turned out not to be would-be kings. Right. For various reasons, okay?

I think I could probably give you enough, and I'll lead you a little bit. What was the New Yorker's, strain pun headline? Crown. Is it, okay, king, throne, crown. rule person who's going to inherit the throne rain of air uh huh

air air air air air air loss error oh yeah you're getting that oh really air um well air um now these weren't these weren't good airs

they were oh bad air day bad air day that's good that's really good bad air day that's good bad air day that's good bad air day New Yorkers really getting clever with their Game of Thrones recap headlines. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. The pod I did with NBC's Chris Collinsworth is up now.

A couple of people, David, pointed out this clip to me. I did not hear this or did not catch us in real time. Collinsworth and I were talking about how NFL analysts are graded differently now than they were back in the 90s when he started calling an NFL game. see if you hear Chris Collinsworth utter the phrase that pays. I don't think you have to be sort of intentionally aggressive the way that you once did to survive in this business. More analysts are more likely to be graded on how they explain to play, how they predict you to play, how they explain the scheme. Yeah, I think that's right.

I think that's right, Chris Collinsworth playing the David Shoemaker role. I'll have another interview this week and then Shoemaker and I are back Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.