The Press Box - Can Cable News Pivot to Biden? Plus, David Axelrod.

Episode Date: December 18, 2020

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker break down what cable news networks such as MSNBC and CNN could look like after a Trump presidency (2:30) before tackling another round of Listener Mail, where they answer the question, “Who is the best strained-pun headline-creating writer/editor you have ever worked with?" (24:15) Then David Axelrod, a CNN senior political commentator and Barack Obama’s former chief campaign strategist, joins to discuss his career as a journalist (43:40). Plus, The Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, this week, the most amazing newspaper correction of all time appeared. I want to read it to you. In a story on December 15th, 2020, about the Mexican and Brazilian presidents congratulating U.S. President-elect Joe Biden, the Associated Press erroneously reported that Biden's first name is Jose. His first name is Joe. Thank you, AP. His name is not Jose Biden. What I want to know is, can you think of a more spectacular error that a wire service could commit in calling the next American president, Jose Biden?

It's like the inverse of all those years we spent in Spanish class, whereas you would just be like, hey, can I work with David? And the teacher would be like, no, no, no, no, Davy, say I'm, Te am a Davy. That is an incredible flub. I don't even know what to say about it. How do they call him Jose? it must have been in context, right? It must have been in context. Unless it was like the quote was like someone saying,

No way, Jose, and they felt the need to correct that. I kind of don't think that was appearing in an AP foreign relations column. I think the best part of this is just putting aside a particular mistake, you got the name of the president wrong. I mean,

is there anything more when you're doing like what I need to get right in this news article? Is there anything more fundamental than get the name of the president of the United States correct. Isn't that a day one thing? Get it first, but get it right. Get Joe Biden's name first, but actually get his first name right.

Yeah. Yeah, it looks like maybe somebody who's using Google Translate or something and just looped a few extra words in there. Coming up on today's show, what will MSNBC and CNN do with themselves after Trump? We answer your listener mail. Plus, David Axelrod talks about the election and his early years as a reporter. All that more on the press box. a part of the ringer podcast network.

Oh, media consumers. Brian Curtis and David Schumaker here. David, I want to start by reading an anonymous quote from an MSNBC personality. Now, we know Donald Trump helped MSNBC get big ratings the last few years. We know Trump has given MSNBC a kind of purpose. But he's leaving in 30 odd days. And the anonymous personality told the needs. New York Times, what happens when you don't need us?

So let's talk about that. What's going to happen to MSNBC and CNN when Donald Trump leaves the White House? Woo. I mean, it's a great question. I mean, I think that we've had this question before. We had this question, you know, after the, about Fox when the Obama years were ended. and, you know, I don't think that conversation persisted for any great period of time. We could go in depth in how they kind of pivoted during the Trump administration.

But I think that by and large, the answer is going to be that it's not going to seem like that big of a change, at least not from, you know, 100 feet away. There will be significant changes. And it's not to say that there won't be like laboring over the answer to this question internally at MSNBC. every day for the next three and a half years. You know, I mean, it's going to be an ongoing consideration. We know their ratings are going to go down, right? There's going to be less interest in their target demos in keeping up with day-to-day, you know, I mean, we don't have their righteous indignation to keep people tuning in.

That said, the question, I guess, is there anything they can do to stem the tide and what they will attempt to do to try to keep eyeballs on the screen? You know, there's one direction you could imagine some of the show is going, which is just sort of a continued sort of investigatory tone towards the Trump administration, the now previous administration, right, or the then whatever. Kind of like Fox did with Hillary, where they were still doing Hillary segments two years into the Trump administration? Sure.

And listen, Trump's not going to disappear, right? I mean, Hillary, to her credit or whatever, I mean, just wasn't much of a figure on the national scene after the election. Trump is going to continue to try to do business on a national, international scale, right? So if Lawrence O'Donnell wants to talk about what the Trump corporation is, you know, what hotels are building and what countries for the next four years, there will be grist for that, right? And there will probably be a lot of interest, maybe not to the same degree the last four years

have given them, but there will be interest in watching those, you know? I mean, it's, there's, I mean, I'm just trying to imagine for myself, there's probably, it's probably a lot more of a sort of palatable sort of guilty pleasure viewing, watching that stuff than having to, like, stomach the idea. that our democracy is going down the tubes while you're watching it all, right? Yeah, our post-presidency is going down the tube.

Exactly. And then, I mean, one of the things that the election has allowed them to do, and honestly, just the sort of inanity, to put it lightly, of the Trump term, is that MSNBC and CNN, although they had, like, is probably a shorter distance to go,

have sort of been able to position themselves more as like a serious news, serious news outlet as opposed to just an opinion outlet? Does that make sense? Maybe not like, you always kind of say it from the top, but there is a sort of like championing of this, of like a certain set of standards of like the American ideal and also of reporting news in the face of a lying administration, right?

And it's not as far of a pivot now, at least in theory, to be to pivot to we're just a news network. We're just covering what's going on. We don't have to be an antagonistic source. Now, obviously, like we talked about last week, I think, they continue to be antagonistic towards the Biden administration. They've learned the tools. They've set their own standards.

I mean, it is conceivable that they will continue to be antagonistic, both towards the administration and towards government in general, which now, and of course on the Republican side, that'll be Mitch McConnell at all. to still be determined to what degree he's a sort of tenable media foe. I mean, I don't think.

I'm not sure if he rises to even the Pelosi level in the in the fun house mirror. I mean, I don't, it's sort of hard to imagine. Yeah, I don't know. I can see his picture behind Chris Hayes, you know,

on the graphic in the same way I can see the Pelosi picture behind every Fox News host. But yeah, it doesn't quite have the same, doesn't quite have the same currency on MSNBC. I think this is, the part here that's interesting to me is the different approaches that CNN and MSNBC took to the Trump era. MSNBC was resistance TV. And I don't say that negatively, but they were pretty clearly resistance TV.

Their idea of a Republican was not Rick Santorum. It was Steve Schmidt who just became a Democrat. They were all in on that idea. CNN set themselves up as truth. teller TV. It's like Jake Tapper and Don Lemon were like, I'm just telling the truth here. But it just so happens that Donald Trump is telling tons of lies. So we're dunking on Donald Trump every night.

Right. So CNN, I feel, has been rehearsing for this, don't you think, for the last couple of years by not giving in to that thing? They're just like, okay, we're just calling it down the middle and okay, new president, we're going to do the same thing. Yes. Yeah. I mean, or, I mean, I think that there's a strong likelihood of that.

But of course, like, I mean, the implicit, well, not implicit. I mean, the explicit kind of message of the past four years was that Trump, the Trump administration was a historical anomaly, right? I mean, it is an extreme. And I think this is going to be sort of the abiding question of at least the next six months, next year is going to be to what degree media sort of continues with the same volume, with the same level of kind of indignation. towards the new administration

or to what degree they say we're going to do we're going to kind of reset to a pre-Trump mindset. Either way, I kind of feel like they're going to get attacked. You know, it's not going to come off well. So I think it's going to be a lot of sort of, you know, groping through the

darkness for a while. Yeah, no, I completely agree. And I think like, that's what's funny, right? If you're doing truth teller TV or resistance TV, they actually sounded exactly the same during the Trump years. Yeah. But now that we're moving out of that,

well, they might sound a little different. It's almost easier to look at it this way. If you're the truth teller TV, you got louder during the Trump administration because it was, because normalcy was going off the rails, right? You were just,

you were, you blew your gasket every night because of something Trump did that just sort of defied norms, right? And if, but if your resistance TV, you sort of get more serious during the Trump administration

and more earnest because the, these are real issues. These are real serious problems that we're looking at every night. And so the sort of volumes meet in the middle, right? And it does. It seems like it came off sort of being the same. But we're not going to be the same, presumably, starting in a couple of weeks. There was a New York Times piece about MSNBC and CNN by Michael Grinbaum and John Copeland. I thought it was really interesting a point they made in there was that within the Trump presidency, there were all these almost George R. Martin length novels, right?

Ukraine was a thing. Russia was a thing. Impeachment was a thing. And on MSNBC especially, those would be like night after night events. Let us tune into Rachel Maddow because she is going to be parsing the clues and telling us what we discovered about Ukraine and Russia tonight. And they report, and I'm quoting here from the Times, producers, watched an amazement as ratings nose dive during good news periods for Trump. Viewership dropped sharply, for instance, in the days after the release of a report on Mr.

Trump in Russia by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller. So what happened was you would have these, you know, day to day, oh my gosh, what is the latest bombshell? But as soon as they would end, people would just kind of snap out of it and stop watching for a while. And I sort of wonder if the end of the Trump presidency is going to be that in much starker fashion. like oh my gosh the novel's over now are we just going to come back and watch with the same

you know excitement every night i i don't think that i don't think that ratings will necessarily continue i don't think ratings will be as good but i don't think that it's the same i don't think that we're going to see a similar reaction at least i can speak from personal experience and secondhand experience when i say that you react to bad things happening on tv by turning off the tv right Like when when when your team gets eliminated from the NBA playoffs in heartbreaking fashion, your team loses in the finals, you don't watch first take every day for the next week to hear more about it. You don't watch the Sports Center on loop so you can see the loss again and again. You turn off the TV.

You were watching Sports Center five times a day up until that moment. And now the math are out of the playoffs. And like I am reading a book, right, with that time. It's a similar thing with politics. on a major, I mean, if your candidate doesn't win the presidential election, I think a very normal human thing to do is to stop watching TV. Now, if you're watching, hate watching or watching because, you know, you think Robert Mueller is going to turn over the dirt on Trump,

and then he doesn't, I can see you're disappointed in the ways that you kind of lost the game or lost the series, but if it's just that now Trump is no longer president, there's a lot of reasons to keep watching, right? I mean, there's not, you haven't lost anything except your righteous indignation, for the moment. You know, your team won, you've at least talked yourself into the idea that there is a vibrant

and important future that we are marching into, right? There's a lot of changes that the Biden coalition has to hold its own president accountable to, right? Moving forward, and you want to be along for the ride,

even if everything goes beautifully and swimmingly without your, you know, torch bearing. I just think there's a lot of reasons that you would keep going just to see, and then maybe it would peter off after a while, okay, this is now we're back to business as usual. There's not going to be a major story every day, right? And that will, I think, drive ratings down more than anything

else. I think just sort of the monotony or the, the tedium of the whole thing. Well, that's what I'm talking about. It's like you have to tune into Chris Hayes or Rachel Maddo or Jake Tapp or whomever, and you don't have like an overarching narrative to tune into. This is not day 45 of something that is seemingly a world shaking event, even if we're not. we know under Trump, it didn't often turn out not to be. So it's just like you lack narrative in a way. Well, I mean, there's nobody, I mean, honestly, I don't think there's anybody better at a certain sort of narrative on television than Rachel Maddow.

And, and Chris Hayes has a lot of sort of worse, by the way, because a lot of that pressure stuff just blew up. I totally agree. And I think Chris Hayes is a lot of sort of unrivaled skills that, that operate on the periphery of what Mattout does. You know, there is a. case to be made that they're sort of whatever activist posture they want to take moving

forward would be, they would be well suited or they would be well advised to use their kind of narrative skills on the really boring next four years making it constructing a narrative that activates people to be engaged.

It's infrastructure month folks. Day 35, day 31, here we go. Tune in. Even as something as simple is drawing a straight line from what Mitch McConnell is doing right now with the coronavirus bill to his inaction on everything else. You know, every moment of inaction, every moment of like ideological turpitude, whatever, moving forward over the next three years, it's one story, right? So make it a compelling

case, make it a compelling story and make that a sort of flashpoint for your audience. We've talked about this, but I also think if MSNBC is looking for purpose, that being the sort of honest broker of the fights between Biden and the left, the leftward flank of the Democratic Party, that to me is a really interesting place for them. I'm sure they're recruiting people right now from that zone. They already have people who kind of more or less fit into that world. But rather than the never Trumpers, who were the stars of, for better or worse, of the last couple of years, you know, why isn't like Elizabeth Brunig going to be on MSNBC talking about what Joe Biden is doing and talking about, you know, is Joe Biden going far enough?

Is he, you know, getting gold by this? Let's see if the Republicans will cooperate with me thing. Is he, you know, governing the right way from this coalition that put itself together in 2020 to vote for him, more or less without complaint? I mean, I, so that is a really interesting night to night narrative for them, I think. Yeah. I mean, that's definitely going to be an enormous story. And it's going to be a big story that's, I mean, I think that story is probably going to occupy a lot of territory on, well, if not Fox News specifically, then sort of right-wing media too, right? The degree to, like the internal squabbles, real or perceived. We've already seen some of this in the past week between the Biden administration and the sort of left

flank of AOC and everybody else. And I mean, and of course, that's to say nothing of the people working on more of a grassroots level, especially if the, I mean, this is sort of getting in the weeds, but if the majority in the house is as small as it looks like it could be right now, I mean, we're talking about a couple of seats after some of these runoffs, then the far left could have an incredible amount of bargaining power, right? Just to sign on with the rest of the Democrats. So, you know, that's going to be a real story that we're going to hear a lot of. And I think you're right. MSNBC is in a really an interesting position as both the sort of mainstream, well, liberal mainstream in a lot of ways, but also

as the, I mean, I said it a million times, Bernie Sanders declared his candidacy four years, five years ago on Chris Hayes' show, probably because no one else would have him. You know, I mean, like, that's like, this is as mainstream as the far left gets in a lot of ways. So, it will be, I mean, it will be an interesting thing to watch. I, um, I do want to try back to a point you made a second ago, which is about MSNBC's whole approach to being a cable news network. Because Tom Clutt wrote an interesting piece about this in Vanity Fair and reminded us that during Obama's second term, MSNBC was really into reporting rather than opining in the same way. He reminds us that Ronan Farrow had a daily show on MSNBC during that period, which did not last very long. But their whole thing was, we're going to be like NBC News, but on cable.

We're not we're not going to try to match, you know, to be kind of a mirror of Fox News. We're going to be reporterly. I feel, don't you during Trump that they married those two things pretty well, that you had Maddow and you had Chris Hayes and you had people like that. But at the same time you had Jacob Soberoff who's been on this show, who we like and all these reporters who were in that daytime lineup of Katie Tur and those kind of people who were a little more news anchory, Brian Williams at 11 o'clock. They kind of put the two together, didn't they? Yeah, and you did see a sort of, you know, I mean, watching, even on social media and stuff, you saw this sort of some new signings on MSNBC, the sort of rising profiles of people like, people like Brandy Zad Rosny, whose profile has been rising with her, I mean, even without the Tucker Carlson nonsense that happened. Ben Collins, who she writes with a bunch, sort of covers the Q&ONN conspiracy theory beat for NBC and MSNBC. people like that who are investigators, investigative reporters, who are, you know, who are interested in these sort of conceptual, I mean, kind of big think pieces that are both, I mean, that are

political but sort of apolitical at the same time. These are things, there will still be Q&ON stories to tell in a Joe Biden administration, right? There will still be stories about, you know, the far right, the religious right. There'll be stories about, you know, there are, there are sort of political stories that you can tell that don't involve taking on the presidency. And if you sort of, you know, turn your fire in that direction, I think you can make some, you can tell some really compelling stories and not be, I mean, it still be like a honest journalist, you know, an honest arbiter of news. Completely agree. And those people are really good. And they've become stars in this world. And there's no reason they, they're reporting is not just

going to be as urgent, even if QAnon isn't. quite in the West Wing in the way it was during the Trump years. When he had just one structural thing before we get off here, there are leadership questions at both of these places. Phil Griffin, who's been running MSNBC forever, is stepping aside. He's being replaced by 39-year-old Rashida Jones. It'll be really interesting to see what her... By the way, apologies to our listeners and to Rashida Jones for that not being a show

opening bit about Rashida. I don't know how we missed that in one episode. But yeah, that was a pretty remarkable mini news cycle. And it'll be interesting to see what her imprint on MSNBC is. CNN is really interesting, right? Because they are now basically being overseen by Jason Kailar. Jason Kailar is the guy, David, who just deem that all Warner Brothers movies in 2021 are going to come out in the theater and on streaming on the same day. So if that is his reverence for movie studios, what's going to be his reverence for cable news, which is maybe an even clunkier system than the movies?

The Times reports that Kylar, quote, sent a note congratulating CNN on its election coverage only to include several factual errors in his opening two sentences. Apparently, he implied that CNN called Arizona for Biden first. That was Fox News. What a weird mistake to make if you're running CNN. but um and a jeff zucker still at cnn there's been talk that he might leave that he might sort of call to call you know claim victory and walk out of there too so there's just that stuff beyond you know what do you talk about at nine p.m eastern i do think that sort of more boring structural stuff will probably dictate some of what we see on the news over the next couple of years for sure i mean we talk how many times we talked about sort of you know zoomed out big shifts

and all sports and news media platforms, anything can happen. I think that to go back to what I said at the very beginning of this segment, it might not seem like things are changing dramatically from the outside. But with all this is going to add up to, I think some pretty significant philosophical

or ideological shifts in how we kind of tell news going forward. So it'll be interesting to watch. All right, David, let's do the Overward 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. David, in a bit of a surprise, Joe Biden will nominate Pete Buttigieg to become Secretary of Transportation.

It was an awkward Twitter joke to write. Well, Buttigieg was a Rhodes scholar. Thanks to Derek Burke, super rookie Tim Hayes, and perennial contributor Mark Eisenstein. In coronavirus news, David, CNN's Jake Tapper tweets, the mayor of Dodge City, Kansas has resigned because hostility to the new mask requirement has caused folks to act inappropriately. The mayor of Dodge City, Kansas, resigns. It was an overword Twitter joke to write, I guess it was time to literally get out of Dodge.

Thanks to Andrew, Joe Potter, and Greg Horowitz. I mean, this is what the phrase get out of Dodge. means. I believe it was usually originally used for bad guys you know leaving town in the old West days but it is really funny. Finally David during that Ravens Browns

Monday night football game the other night Ravens QB Lamar Jackson ran off the field during the fourth quarter. Now he would later deny this but a lot of people watching thought that Lamar Jackson just had to poop

and that's why he was leaving the field. It was an overword Twitter joke to write. Got to wonder if that's the second time Lamar successfully went for two this quarter. I just want to draw your attention to Brendan Bianowitz's lead in the New York Post. This is deadline

writing, folks. The Ravens won 4742 on Monday night. And despite much speculation, Lamar Jackson said he did not take the Browns to the Super Bowl in the process. Thanks, Nuggets, Bengals fan, Charles Prayer the 3rd, Aaron Bryant, Esquire, and Danesore.

If you think poop jokes are funny, you're not alone. And congrats, you made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, time for the notebook dump. And we're going to do some listener mail.

Do we need to weigh in on the Dr. Biden debate that is raging at this very moment on Twitter? Well, I mean, I feel like we should. It's because it hasn't just been Twitter. It began with an op-ed and the Wall Street Journal. that shouldn't have been published

and sort of reached its apex in a sort of these dueling columns and National Review that are mostly exist, it seems, just to be screen grabbed and tweeted about in the negative. National Review

would never do that. Come on. I don't know. This is one of those weird times where like I don't, where the, we're sort of know-nothingism and, and bad faith bad faith journalism

have just sort of rammed into each other and I can't quite tell where the blood from one ends and the blood from the other ends it's a uh like certainly many of the

idiots who are making who are making or have something to say about Jill Biden's doctorate understand that more than just MDs in the world are called doctors like you have been in a university before or been around a person who has been in college for more than six years before like you're aware that this exists right you or someone you know has been to

college right uh but the but the but the the jo this is just one of those weird things where like i don't know why you would put yourself in the position of looking like an idiot even if like if you're trying to pander to an audience that doesn't know that, I'm not sure that you're going to convince them from the perch of National Review Online or the Wall Street Journal, right? I mean, it's like, it's such, and even so, why would you betray such idiocy? It's different to be like, it's different to like, he-ha, like to talk with an accent or to do whatever else you think you need to do

to like speak to the plebs to talk about God and not and you know the red white and the blue or whatever but it's different to like betray your own ignorance so I'm not exactly what I it's it's really hard to look at any of it and not just think it's like the best reading of it almost is like just base misogyny and I don't I don't know well okay I'll just setting all that aside there has been this question a lot of people have said this there's been this question of what you know, how the right, the right wing media is going to pivot out of, uh, their Trump indoctrination and how they're, and, and, and, and, and move on to the Biden administration. A lot of people said this on Twitter. This is how. I mean, this is, this is exactly how they're

going to move on, right? Pivot, pivot, it's executed. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, there's, we're already, we're already talking about gray Pupon again. Like, it's, it's so, it, I mean, it's, John Kerry wind surfing, you know, you know, no, no, no, we're, we're, We're back. It's back, baby. How dare this woman call herself Dr. Biden? That's so crazy. I, yeah, and I think it's just shit posting.

I mean, I think you, everything you said is plausible, but the much just, it's just like, I just want to write something mean today. And, yeah, why not this? This annoys me. Well, the vast majority, I mean, it's a pile on for sure, but you saw the vast majority of the noise that was being made on the right is, or people who saw this thing knew because they're not total idiots. They're smart enough to, you know, use all of their skills to to con other idiots out of money. But they're, but they're, but they know that it's wrong,

but they're still making, writing little mini op-eds or just making Twitter jokes or, you know, recording podcasts about it, whatever. But like, even if they're making jokes, like they, most of the noise are people that understand the distinction and are just being jerks, right? They're just, like you said. So it's a, ding, ding, ding, Yeah, I mean, so maybe we shouldn't waste that much time on it. I will say after sort of being subconsciously, you know, pissed about the whole thing for a couple of days, I thought Biden came out and did exactly the right thing. You know, I mean, this is like the second or third time in recent days where everyone's just kind of thought, what is Joe Biden doing? I mean, actually going back to the Hunter Biden tapes or whatever, I mean, you know, why is he not saying anything?

And it turned out that was exactly the right move or whatever response he does have just turns out to be sort of. workshop to perfection, you know, maybe he's going to just really navigate his way through the next four years of bullshit. I love it when David is subconsciously pissed. You don't want to see David when he's subconsciously distracted. How about that? Like, there's too, like there's too, there's too much other stuff going on and literally around me to really care that much about this debate. Another story we talked about on this podcast, the New York Times has finally waived the white flag on their podcast caliphate. Now, if you didn't follow the Caliphate story, Caliphate was one of these long-form podcasts.

The main subject was a man named Sharoz Chaudhry. He described committing executions on behalf of the Islamic State. The times after an investigation, after multiple investigations, in fact, now says it can find, quote, no corroboration that Chaudry, quote, committed the atrocities he described. this is pretty amazing and I want to go back to something I said on our first round on this subject what was so weird about this story is that the times

figured out while they were producing the podcast that their main character might his stories might be a little iffy and what they did was the ultimate long form podcast brain thing of making an episode about the fact that they couldn't tell if the stories were correct or not.

They were like, oh, we're doing this investigation. I'm having some bad feelings. I'm getting some bad signs. I'm going to do this investigation about the story. They turned it into like a serial style narrative. And you're like, no, no, no, no.

This is not something you need to present to me as a like investigation. This is something you needed to figure out before you start it. Yeah. Because there's no podcast if this guy is not telling the truth. And I just found that so weird and dishonest. Even if you want to sort of write it off as a part of and parcel of a sort of evolving

or new art form, right? Even if you want to draw some sort of artificial line between other times journalism and the journalism and the journalism that will take place in podcasts, or at least right now, even if you wanted to give them that benefit of the doubt, and we shouldn't. But if you did, nobody was making them except a Peabody Award, right? I mean, like, nobody, nothing prevented them from pointing out the, like, the distinction between this and, and their other award-winning or, you know, thoroughly vetted journalism in the intervening period, right? Even if you wanted to make this a story about journalism that's different than the way it was pitched and platformed and different than

the way it was reacted to because you had to, if you were at the Times, you saw everybody reacting to something that they believed to be 100% true because it was coming from the New York Times. Absolutely. So by the way, whenever anybody does a U-turn from a story like this, you go back and they always won a journalism award. Did you see that New Yorker correction the other day? Like, oh, the story won a journalism award.

Here we go again. It's like the case against journalism awards. by the awards themselves. Rukmini Kalamaki, who was a reporter on this and they're on the terror beat for the Times, has been reassigned.

New beat, TK, for her. And let me tell you the worst part of this, David, or actually the most ignominious part. According to the paper, quote, every episode of Caliphate now begins with a correction read by Michael Barbaro,

the host of the daily podcast. So he has come in and he is reading a correction before every single episode of Caliphate. How about that? That's it. That's quite a, that's quite a flex for Barbaro. Yeah, well, we still trust him, right? I mean, I guess that's the, that's the, that's the method here when you talk about trusting the New York Times. In the new, in the, in the modern era, the public editor of your periodical is just literally the most public person at your periodical. The person is just, the person

whose voice is most recognizable is in charge of like all Omsbidman duties from now on. The person who my mom knows at the New York Times is the de facto public editor. This was brought to our attention by Michael T. Andrew Joe Potter and King Chinook. Scotland, David, gives pun nicknames to its fleet of snowplows. They honest, this is real. They assign pun nicknames. Are you ready for some of these Scottish snowplow pun names? Please.

Hans Snowlo. Spready Mercury. Gritty, gritty, bang bang and for your ice only those last two are Ian Fleming puns. What is spreading mercury? I don't know, are you spreading? What are you spreading? What are you spreading?

The snow? The ice? Salt? I mean that was like salt? Is that what's going on here? I live in California. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know how the snow plows work. Thanks to everyone who brought that to our attention. And David, a note from our copy chief here at the ringer, Craig Gaines. Oh, great. How about that? Who's Who's on paternity leave right now, by the way. Congratulations.

Always nice to hear from Craig. He writes, I've been wondering when will be the first time I'll see the phrase detrumpification in print. And Doyle McManus of the L.A. Times wins the prize. Might not be the first time it's been used, but I saw it here first. Makes me think of debathification from the second Iraq war days. Hopefully this version is more successful. Remember debathification? That was going to be the post-Saddam process in Iraq.

So now we have detrumpification. And the LA Times has won the prize for the first usage. I'm not sure that that my mind didn't immediately go to debathification when you just said the words that were detrompification. I mean, I don't think that it's inherently a reference to a totalitarianism, although that implicitly that might be what you're getting at. A leader leaving a party, a very, very strong. Someone who sort of left is, left is, you know, left a bad smell in the White House. We're like dethrumpifying now. We're, you know, we're getting the fumigation.

Figuratively speaking, yes. All right, to the listener mail. This is from Ian Day Martino. What will COVID remembrance events look like in a year, five years, ten years down the line? Will there still be deniers on television telling us it wasn't that bad that Trump did a good job? I can't remember a travesty being so divisive before, so how will we the media remember it? So I guess the question here is when we write COVID into the history books, how big a role will these, you know, it's just the flu, don't worry, you know, help is around the corner, it's going to disappear. How much of a role will those people play in telling the story?

Oh, man. It's an interesting question. it is I I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm right in the weeds of it right now right right I mean we're writing this weird time we're like like like I mean Tucker Carlson's out there this week like doing being a vaccine skeptic right I mean it's like there is a raising a raising skepticism whatever you want to say sure raising skepticism about the vaccine yeah so one would

have thought now would be the time to move on, right? Especially when there's such a straight line to crediting Trump for this whole thing and sort of, you know, I mean, there was this sort of like question the whole, for the past nine months or the past

year about to what degree the deniers on television were driven by, you know, chasing ratings, commercialism, you know, just general, you know, you know, allegiance to the Trump administration, like, you know, what they're actually

motivating factors were and what, how much the world would have been different if they could have, if they would have just told the truth, they've been, you know, kind of generally helpful, tell people to wear masks and wash their hands, and it's not that hard to do, but, and they haven't done it. Now it seems like, well, I mean, I don't know what the motivation is, but it does seem like there's some sort of motivation beyond just business as usual, you know, maybe being counterintuitive, being anti-establishment, whatever, is always seen as beneficial. All that's, I mean, that's just kind of an aside. It seems like it's not going anywhere, but it does seem like once people, it does seem like

logically, once people start getting inoculated and moving forward, that, I just, I don't know, I don't know. I've been, I guess my overwhelming feeling separate from all that over the past couple of weeks is watching these, watching the death toll go up and up and up. it's for as much as much as people were were semi-seriously suggesting that Trump given you know Geraldo said we should call it the Trump vaccine or whatever it's really hard for me to imagine any way forward that doesn't involve people referring to this as the Trump virus at least at least in their minds right i mean Donald Trump the Trump administration was like directly responsible for hundreds

of thousands of deaths and and it's going to be i think really hard to to separate that out i sort of i don't want to draw a bad analogy here, but you know when you read the history of the Vietnam War, and I would say the majority position is, you know, this was a catastrophe, this was a bad idea, and then you have a smaller number of historians or people involved in that who say, you know what, we were actually winning the Vietnam War, but what happened was, you know, America lost its will and made bad decisions, et cetera, et cetera. in history or at least just American society accommodates both of those views

I think it'll be the same I think it'll be similar with the virus that I think you'll have a vast majority of opinion tracking along the lines of what you just said about Donald Trump and then you'll have a smaller body of opinion and a couple of books written about hey what if XYZ I think it's probably fairly normal

even if this just seems so ridiculous right now in the moment. I think it'll I think it'll probably shake out like that. This is from Aaron McDade, who is the best strain pun headline creating writer, editor, both of you have ever worked with? I'll take this. Go for it. Michael Solomon.

You know Michael Solomon. I know Michael. Editor at Esquire for years. He's now at Forbes. Like David, he was in my wedding. He is the best headline writer on planet Earth, as far as I'm concerned.

Because, you know, every writer, including you and me, we think we can write a funny headline and come up with with puns. Michael is M.J. He is really, really, really good. I think I told you like when he did, I did a story on Mori Povich for Grantland and the headline Michael gave to me was from here to paternity. I mean, let me tell you, he is, he's the best. And we should, we should have him on this show at some point just to to bat around headlines and you know that look that when michael when mj belabor this when mj was about to give it to somebody and the camera would always find him like at the waiting when someone else is shooting free throws the camera to always find him with his hands on

his knees just like grinning out of the side of his mouth with a little glimmer in his eye michael has a glimmer in his eye a lot of the time that it's a twinkle right that little twinkle There's something he's probably he's writing headlines like 75% of the time. A man in full control of his art. I agree. This is from Evan Hipp. Question for you guys. Did you ever notice the word dichotomy is only ever used by folks,

particularly podcasters, with the word weird in front of it? Has there ever been a normal dichotomy? Pretty sure we're guilty of this. I think if you went back through the press box files, you'd find a lot of, David, there's this weird dichotomy between fill in the blank. I don't have a great explanation for that other than dichotomy is just kind of a weird word and

we're all trying to sound like we've been studying to the PSAT. I got nothing. I'm sorry. This is from Gregory Scott Dilcox. January is my turn to pick the book for book club. Which Charles Portis novel should I go with? Oh.

We've answered this before, right? Have we had this conversation before? I actually gave an interview about Portis, after we talked about it in the show last time, and I'm confused as to what to what degree I'd talked in the interview and what I said to the interviewer and what I said on the show. Listen, Dog of the South is the answer. If you haven't read Dog of the South, if you haven't read Portis, Dog of the South is just, it is just the best one. Now, you know, if there's a, if there seems to be some reason to choose true grit, it's the least porthus of all the Portis novels,

but it's, it's, if you're reading other Westerns, if you're, you know, on a run of books with, like, young female protagonist, you know, if there's a reason why you would pick that book, it's a fantastic book, um, transcend in its own way, you know, once you're deep into Portis, or once you've read those books, once you, once you've read Dog this out, you were going to get to, like, when you get to Masters of Atlantis, your head's going to explode. It's freaking awesome, you know, I mean, I, I'd be hard to say no to that book, although it takes them a while to get in, to like you're reading like you know like if you if you've ever read like train spotting it took you like 40 pages to understand any of the words you were reading but the uh but dog of this out

is the answer david's uh new podcast deep into portis will be debuting in 2021 that's the spotify original all right david in the interview slot today david axelrod you know axelrod cnnnn's senior political commentator host of two podcasts the axe files and hacks on tap and of course the architect of Barack Obama's presidential campaigns. What's fascinating to me is that Axe, as Obama calls him, was first a reporter, a really good hot-shot political reporter at the Chicago Tribune. That's what I wanted to talk to him about. Here's David Axelrod. Before David Axelrod ran political campaigns, he was a Chicago Tribune reporter who could drive politicians to distraction.

No less than the mayor of Chicago once told Axelrod, at a press conference. Excuse me, David. If I respected you, I'd answer, but I don't respect you, which sounds eerily familiar. Axelrod is here to talk about his former life in journalism and a few other things. Thank you for coming on the press box, David. Sure, Brian. Great to be here. Before we jump in the time machine, I've been reading Barack Obama's memoir like everyone else. You were there for a lot of those events. What have you discovered about Obama's thinking from that book that you weren't aware of at the time? Oh, you know, I mean, I thought he was pretty revealing about his thoughts about his self-doubts,

you know, for a guy who's very, very self-assured. I think he was very honest about some of the, on reflection, some of those moments in his life where he wasn't sure he was doing the right thing, either with his career or his family or on, decisions. And that's what makes the book so readable is, you know, I always felt when I was working for him, you know, he has a journalist sensibilities. He has a writer's sensibilities. So I always felt like he was of the scene, but he also was watching the scene. And, and you can feel that in the book. I mean, he brought to life his own thinking and the personalities around him. It's not surprisingly, given what,

what we know about him. It's a really good read. He described the two of you meeting for lunch in Chicago in 2004 when he's weighing his U.S. Senate candidacy. And he says, Axelrod spoke, quote, between hearty bites of his sandwich, and he later has you wiping mustard off your mustache. Is that inaccurate? Yeah, I know he loves those references to my culinary excesses. I give it to me. He left out the story that I like the most, which was, during that campaign, I was eating a sandwich while I was talking to him in his office,

and an onion covered in mustard went flying out of my sandwich and landed on him across the room. He looked down and he said, Acts, now you're fucking up my ties. I love that. One question about the 2020 election, because back in May, you wrote a New York Times op-ed with David Pluff, fellow Obamaite. And the two of you made this argument that by staying in his basement, as Joe Biden was, at the time he was cutting himself off a bit from the campaign and the country. We found out later this, you know, jarred a few people in Biden world. In hindsight, do you have any second thoughts on that op-ed? No, not at all. In fact, one of the points that we made high up in that piece was

this could work to his benefit if Trump didn't handle the opportunity that Trump had to rally the country around a solution to the virus. And, you know, they, the fact is that Trump having the stage alone ended up redounding to Biden's benefit. You know, when we wrote the piece, it was just about when Trump finally acknowledged the severity of the crisis and he announced that he'd be holding daily briefings. Well, if he had held daily briefings that were not, you know, sort of this weird burlesque that he did, he may have actually profited from it and Biden would have been sort of left out. But our main point in the piece was they needed to step up their game in other ways that they needed to use digital media

and their interventions there to create a sense of engagement and movement and even if he was stuck at his home. And they did do a lot of that. I have no, I mean, Jen, O'Malley, Dillon did a wonderful job, the campaign manager. And so, you know, I think we could go piece by piece. We talked about the fact that they needed to plan for a virtual reality convention. Well, they ended up doing that and they did a splendid job on it. There were a number of things back then that weren't as obvious as they seem in retrospect. Let's talk about journalism. Back in the 70s, you're an undergrad at the University of Chicago. What attracted you to journalism? Well, a few things. One is I'm a second generation journalist. My mother was a reporter at a newspaper in New York called PM in the 1940s.

And then she was a freelance journalist. So there was a reverence for journalism in my, in my home. I also was, you know, deeply interested in politics and news from a very early age and kind of obsessed by it. Came to Chicago and the University of Chicago because I thought, this is a really interesting political town. You know, they had just had this calamitous Democratic convention in 1968. There were a lot of racial tensions in the city, Mayor Daly, the first. first was still raining over Chicago, last of the big sea machines. I thought this would be really a great place to be really interesting. And when I got to the University of Chicago, where I

now work as director of the Institute of Politics that I founded there, at that time, it was hard to find anybody who wanted to talk about anything that happened after the year 1800. So I became a journalist in part to satisfy my interest in politics. And I went to New York in the summer of 73. And I talked myself into an internship at a little down and out community newspaper called the villager, not the village voice, but the villager in Greenwich Village. And they gave me a few bucks to do everything. And I learned a lot and stayed there for six months, went back to school, got a job as a political columnist at a little paper called the Hyde Park Herald around the University of Chicago. And that internship, I mean, that gig led to Stringer opportunities with time, with the Washington Post. I ended up getting an internship at the Chicago Tribune and that turned into a job.

So it started because I wanted to write about politics, but I really loved being a reporter. I think I always used to say I went to college at the University of Chicago and was educated at the Chicago Tribune. because of everything that I learned in eight years in that newsroom, including two and a half years at night, you know, covering all manner of murder and mayhem and mishap. Yeah, so tell us about that summer internship. That's 1976. This is a very coveted opportunity. I think there were nine of you who walk in to the Tribune building. What was that summer like? It was incredible. I mean, there were nine of us, and there was an expectation that the Tribune would hire two and or maybe three. And so we all were we worked our asses off trying to get noticed and

trying to to make ourselves indispensable. And they also was a very diverse group, a number of really talented young women and people of color. And and we figured that that they would choose a diverse offering. So there was a fellow named Paul Weingarten who went on to have like a 40-year career at the Tribune. He may still be there on the editorial board. And Paul and I were both interns, and we figured there's no way they're going to hire two Jewish kids, white Jewish kids, you know. So we, if he worked, if he worked 15 hours, I would try and work 16 hours. If he worked seven days a week, I'd try and work eight days a week. And we were just in this rabbit competition all summer long. And he was a great reporter. And at the end of the summer,

the city editor, a really splendid, splendid journalist named Bernie Judge, who became a mentor in my life, called us in and he said, I just, you guys made it too hard. I can't choose between you. And, you know, years later, Bernie told me he had to go to the publisher and beg for extra money to hire both of us, which he did and which was life-changing for me. But, you know, we were thrown into every story. The first day I showed up at the Tribune, I came into a brand new suit I bought. The city editor looked me,

the assistant city editor on the desk looked me up and down a guy named Donna Grell, and he kind of chuckled. And he said, well, your suit's going to get a little dirty. There was a tornado in Lamont last night. You've got to go out and cover the aftermath of that. And I did come home filthy, but I came home with a story.

I was paired up with a journalist named Jeff Lyon. there who's a great legend at the Chicago Tribune. And the next day, the same guy, Agrella, said the Teamsters leader, Frank Fitzsimmons had voted at the national convention. They voted him like a 700% pay raise. He said, go out and find some Teamsters and see how they feel about that. And I thought, I was too stupid, too naive to realize this was like a death mission. And I went out to a loading dock at 26th and Blue Island in Chicago. And I would jump up on the side of these trucks and I'd try and get guys to come and most of them said you know get the fuck off my truck you you want to get me killed and all that's it but there were a few who were so angry that they

expressed themselves and they did it on the record and I got a really good story out of it but every single day they were throwing stuff at us and we were so desperate to perform and to do well that we just you know even if it meant risking life and limb we were going to get the story and that's of course what good reporters do. It's a good lesson. There will always be at least one person aggrieved enough to go on the record. We're a journalist, even against their self-interest. And if you can keep from getting shot in service of finding that person, that works out really

well for you if you're a reporter. As you said, you get the full-time job. You're interested in covering politics. But the Tribune says, young David, we're giving you the night shift, 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. So what was the night shift in Chicago like? Well, first of all, you know, Bernie Judge said to me, I was very versed in Chicago politics because I had written this column for three years about Chicago politics. And I spent almost all my time, as my professors would attest, out on the street rather than in the

classroom, trying to learn everything I could. And I knew all the arcane history of every award organization in Chicago. There were like 50 of them. And he said to me, you know, you know more about Chicago politics than anybody I've got. but you don't know how to be a reporter yet. And I'm going to put you on nights and this will be good for you. And it was, it was. And, you know, I mean, a lot of what you cover are tragedies, you know,

you know, cataclysmic fires or, you know, major homicide stories. And, and I think the, I think the gasey murders were in there. But, you know, the L fell off the tracks at downtown Chicago. Seven people killed. I'm there. That's my story. The DC-10 crashed outside of O'Hare. Biggest plane, most significant plane crash in history in terms of loss of human life.

I got out there, you know, limbs scattered everywhere. And, you know, these kinds of stories are the ones that you, that actually not. Now that I think about it, that story came when I was already covering politics. I don't want to get ahead in the story. But the mayor was racing out to O'Hare. And I jumped in my car and followed her detail out on the shoulder of the road, on the Kennedy. And I was one of the first reporters to arrive there as a result. And yeah, there were bodies scattered everywhere and so on.

But I, you know, I learned a lot about, we talk about, we call them first responders today. but I saw a lot of heroism on the part of police and fire. I also saw some horrendous things that we hear echoes of today by police and in their treatment of people, particularly in the black community. And one of the stories I had when I was on nights, I came in one night, I'll tell you two others. So you get me going here. You put in a quarter and you're going to get like 25 plays here.

But I got in this guy, Frank Blatchford, who was the city editor, old green beret, you know, he said, the mayor Blandic, who was a guy who succeeded daily, was marrying a young socialite and their reception was in the suburbs at some country club. He said, you've got to get into that reception and give me some color from that reception. He said, don't come back if you don't get in. So I go out there and there's like helicopters everywhere. All the press was penned up outside the country club.

and I knew I wasn't going to get in there. So I drove around the country club. I saw some woman sitting on her lawn on the golf course, and I jumped out of my car, and I said to her, listen, I want to be really honest with you, Mayor Blandek's reception is in there. If I don't get in there, I'm probably going to lose my job. I'm a reporter at the Chicago Tribune.

You got to help me. Let me go in off your backyard and walk into the – and she had had a few by this time, she said, well, I don't give it damn. They didn't invite me. Go ahead. So I snuck into this. I've, I wended my way in and kind of casually walked into the reception. Got about 10 minutes of notes until the mayor's detail came and said, who are you? And I said, I'm David Axford. This is, but where are you from? I marry you a guest. Well, not exactly. I said, well, I'm with the Chicago Tribune. I say, okay, come with us.

they threw me in a golf cart and drove me out the front gate and there was all of my there were all my colleagues and I was like triumphant having been having been in in this in this thing there was another time when I came they called me the only time I ever called and sick I had I was really sick and that's too bad because Hubert Humphrey who was a you know legendary figure in American politics is dying up in Minnesota and we wanted you to go up and cover that and I said forget it I'll go and I went and And he died that night. I got there after he had died, but I collected all these notes, called it, and stayed up probably for 36 hours talking to people around Minnesota, covering him lying in state and so on. And ended up getting strep throat, getting really sick afterwards. But one of the most inspiring stories I ever covered because this guy had a personal relationship with everybody in his state.

Now, I had a wonderful time, man. And I love being a reporter. Storytelling. Storytelling is what I've done all my life in journalism and after journalism. And that nightside gig was a great opportunity to tell stories that I would never know about and I would never have been exposed to. This is one of my favorites you were on. So Jane Byrne, who was the Chicago mayor I referenced at the top, you found out she was giving jobs to underqualified people. And one of those people happened to be the son of Mike Royko.

Yeah. The legendary Chicago newspaper column. Yeah. What did you do with that? That was, yeah. You know, I covered Byrne when she ran for mayor. They used to take me off nights to sate my interest in politics. They'd have me cover candidates who were dead bang losers.

But they, you know, they'd say, go cover them for a few weeks. And you can come back to nights. Well, she won. I mean, this incredible upset toppled the machine, beat the aforementioned Mayor Blandic. And but she ran, she ran as a full. throated reformer and governed like a parody of a machine mayor. And one of the things that, and people, and I became sort of doing, I was doing investigations all the time. Someone dropped a story on me that she was loading the payroll up at O'Hare Airport with the sons and daughters of commissioners and prominent people. And the guy who handed me the story said, the only thing I ask is that you print all the names.

Well, one of them was Mike Roiko's son. And Mike Roiko was, Mike Roiko was. was someone I idolized. He was a legend. I mean, really one of the great journalists of the 20th century. He was the H.L. Mencken of his time, wrote five columns a week at the Chicago Daily News. And three of the five, every week you could be pretty sure was, were close to literature. They were so good. And, you know, hard-bitten Chicago guy. And I went to meet him at the place where you could often find him, which is the Billy Goat Tavern. Sure. And I told him, you know, I got this story and your kids on the list. And I feel like I have to include it.

And he said, well, he said, let me talk to you about it. And it was a tragic story. Mike's wife had died. His son just got into trouble, had emotional issues, and quit school. And Mike said, well, if you quit school, you're going to have to get a job. Well, a kid went to a friend of Mike's who was close to Mayor Byrne. He didn't know. He just asked if he could help him get a job.

And that's how he got the job. And Mike said, he felt like he had gotten himself a job like I told him to. And I just didn't have the heart to tell him. And I said, well, Mike, it's only going to be a line in the story. I'm not going to. I went back to the paper and I wrote the story. And the editor, the then editor, Jim Squires, came and he threw the story on my desk. And he said, we're not going to get into a pissing match with fucking Mike Royko.

I didn't realize at the time he was negotiating to try and bring Royko over to the tribute. But the truth is, Brian, if I had to do it all over again, this is the advantage of age. I wouldn't have put Royko's son in the story because I'm a father now. And I've experienced the challenges of being a parent. And, you know, I would hope that that I would have brought some of those sensitivities and exercised some editorial judgment because that story at the end of the day didn't rise and fall over whether Mike Royko's son was hired. I mean, there were literally sons and daughters of city commissioners who were in sinecure jobs out at the airport. And that was really what the story was about. But it was awkward.

And my relationship with Reiko was never the same, even though it didn't appear, my relationship with him was never the same after that, which I regret. 1984, you left the Tribune to go work on the campaign of Paul Simon, Democrat running for Senate. You have obviously done quite well in the world of campaigns. How many pangs did you have about leaving journalism and perhaps wishing you'd stayed there for a while? You know, it really, I didn't at the time because there were a few reasons I left. One was very practical.

I had a very chronically ill child who, and there were a lot of out-of-pocket expenses because we didn't have an Affordable Care Act then. And she had a pre-existing condition, hard to get insurance that covered her medications. And so money was a concern. And I thought I could segue from there into consulting. But the bigger thing was I love journalism so much. I felt like the paper was changing and that the wall that was ironclad between the business side and the editorial side was collapsing. And there was a smaller news hole, more pressure on what we would call it A-Clix, which were in clicks then.

But I felt like standards of journalism were being reduced. reduced in. I had some frustrating experiences with the editors. And I just decided I had been spoiled in my first six years with a bunch of great editors in a great situation. And I love journalism so much that I didn't want to do it in a way that was less than I was trained to do. So that was a big motivation. So I didn't look back. There was an editor, Doug Neeland, who was like an assistant managing editor at the Tribune. I remember him calling me aside and saying, you are about to destroy. your life. You could be editor of this newspaper someday.

And you're going to throw that all away to what go into politics. Come on. And you know, but even after that conversation, I really didn't die. And what, you know, there were a lot of my colleagues who came up to me privately and said, I think you're doing the right thing.

This is a good move for you. And it turned out to be a good move for me. But it does not detract from the fact that that journalism was the foundation upon which I built my entire career. Yeah, it's funny how the story of journalism in 1984 is the story of journalism in 1994 and 2004. No, it only got worse. It got worse. You know, my old paper is a shadow of what it once was and and the Sun Times is hanging on. You know, they're spunky, but they're really strained. You know, I mean, you've covered this,

I'm sure, many times on your podcast, but, you know, the internet basically just, destroyed local news, and local news is having a really hard time figuring out how to construct the new model. And there have been a lot of casualties. You know, there's just no one, no one is going to have, unless you're at a big national newspaper, you're not going to have the newsroom experience that I had. I had the tutelage of some of the really great journalists of that time and really rigorous editors and a grand newspaper tradition. You know, it was a real privilege to work in that newsroom. And, you know, we barely have newsrooms now. All right. Catch David Axelrod on his podcast, The Axe Files and Hacks on Tap, along with CNN.

His rendering of his journalism careers at his memoir, Believer, My 40 Years in Politics. Thanks for coming on the press box, David. Brian, great to be with you. Thank you. All right. It's time for David Shoemaker. Guesses the strain pun headline. Yeah. Monday's headline about the issues vexing museums was plight. the museum. Today's headline comes from Quanta magazine. The sender sent it to me so long ago that I have lost their name, but I will try to find it and thank them at a later date. David, the story is about penguin. It is specifically about the way penguins huddle together. I want to read you a quote here. A penguin huddle looks like organized chaos, said Francois Blanchette,

a mathematician at the University of California Merced, every penguin acts individually, but the end result is an equitable heat distribution for the whole community. Okay? So we're saying it looks like penguins are just huddled in mass like got people on the subway. But they are actually spatially arranged

according to this mathematician in a way that the heat is distributed. That's all I'm going to leave you with. What was Quantum Magazine Strain Pun Headle? line. I'm saying like the warmth of a million suns or the random uh random acts of uh random distribution uh I think you want penguins in the title the March of the Penguins. Okay that's that's your frame now the start the the mark um why can't I think of this the

what was the uh profession of the quote for the person I just read you the quote from Oh, I totally. I forgot already. A mathematician. Oh, mathematician. So it's the... The quark of the... The... We're going to bail David out here. Tell me.

Math of the penguins. What's the headline in? What? All right. I was trying... I was going for something deeper, I guess. I guess we should have known from Quanta magazine. He is David Shoemaker.

I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. Still getting used to leave in that. phrase out of there. On Monday, we've got sportscaster Jim Gray, plus of course, more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you, Brian.