The Press Box - Can Herschel Walker Run to the U.S. Senate? Plus, Epic Twitter Threads and the Power of the List

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

Bryan and David weigh in on the media’s perspective of the runoff election in Georgia between Herschel Walker and Raphael Warnock (4:58). Then, they discuss Matt Taibbi’s Twitter thread and the argument behind free speech on the platform (27:18). Later, they touch on the Sight and Sound list of the Greatest Movies of All Time and dive into the appeal of the “list” (42:39). 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

Hi, I'm Issa Kwanga and I'm Ryan Hunt. And we co-host Stadio, a football podcast, on the Ring of Podcast Network. If you like soccer or football, make sure you search for Stadio, a football podcast on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Yes. We're going to talk about a very long Twitter thread from investigative reporter Matt Taibi. But first, what I want to know is what is the biggest news you've ever broken on Twitter? Oh, well, you've come to the right guy. I break a lot of news.

I don't. I mean, I've broken some news on, well, on Twitter. I guess I've broken a few things over the past couple years, but it's usually like the tweet references an article. I guess I did have a scoop about a wrestler named Brian Danielson's injury at one point. It came, but it was like on the ground during a WrestleMania or something. just tweeted it out, but I don't think I've ever done anything beyond that. Did Elon Musk tweet out a popcorn emoji before you posted that one?

Yes, I hope so. Elon Musk is an avid follower of my wrestling updates. What's amazing about the Taibi scoop or whatever we're calling it, it was the return of the gigantic Twitter thread? Oh, yeah. Which I feel went slightly out of style. It was the tech backbone was a little bit messed up there. It was a little bit hard to follow it in thread form.

But yes, yes. It was in some ways everything that Twitter ever dreamed of becoming, maybe in its most idealistic moments. And yet also the exact opposite. The threaded tweets are just so, how should we say this? You want to be careful about using those. I found the only time I ever use it is when I'm talking about announcers during a football game. I want to thread those tweets just to make sure that people can tell who I'm making fun of in real time.

I find that's important. You don't have to set up the joke over and over again. I also found that this pro football talk blog post over the weekend where Mike Floria was in high dudge in about Drew Brees not really being struck by lightning. as he had initially appeared to be. And see, I had a few thoughts on that blog post. I wanted to make sure that they were connected. Yeah. So again, people could know that I was still talking about this blog post,

which I found to be one of the most amazing things I'd ever read. Sometimes when you write a story, it's helpful to do a thread to sort of like get your, get all of your promo materials, your whole promo packet out in one thread. Although that always just makes me so anxious, especially pre-edit button on Twitter, where you're just like, it's not, it's like, it, it, it multiplies the anxiety of getting every single thing right, because now it's everything is threaded together, right? There's not, you can't just be

like, yeah, it was just a tweet. Like, this is an official multi-part statement, which is something that Matt Taibi, I know, dealt with in his rollout as well. Um, honestly, I think that the most important part of Twitter threads in the journalistic community is, if you have a, thread, you can, on the last thread, you can thank all of the people you worked with that helped make the story come to life. But it's only the last, it's the last tweet in the thread where you just, you know, make sure that everybody's handle gets in there. It would not make the cut in a normal tweet. But, you know, for the end of a thread, you know, we're very grateful for your shoutouts. It's the kicker, as it were. My favorite part of that is when you're thanking the people

that you wrote the story about for talking to you? Yeah. We can just assume that with any piece of journalism. Thank you for picking up the phone when I called you for comment on this story. Some people have more adversarial relationships with their sources. Coming up on the press box, we've got one more election, people. It's the U.S. Senate runoff in Georgia, Raphael Warnock versus Herschel Walker, and it's tomorrow. We tell you who the media thinks is going to win.

Plus, we dig into that very, very, very, very long Matt Taibi Twitter thread about the internal decision-making processes at Twitter, plus the new site and sound poll of the greatest movies of all time. Why do we like lists so much? All that more on the press box. A part of the ringer podcast network. Oh, media consumers. Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, producer Erica Servantes here.

We got one more election, David. The Georgia U.S. Senate runoff. Back on November 8th, you'll remember, that was round one. Raphael Warnock defeated Herschel Walker by a little less than one percentage point, about 35,000 votes. But Warnock did not get 50% of the vote, as is required in Georgia. So we're going to have round two tomorrow. Democrats would love to get Warnock as their 51st vote in the Senate to have a Joe mansion or Kirsten cinema proof majority.

Republicans want this seat because they want to retake the Senate in 2024 when they have a better map. There was actually a lot of news out of this race over the last week. You might have thought we had already had all the scandals and negative stories about Herschel Walker that we could possibly have. You would be wrong. Roger Salenberger of the Daily Beast, more on him in a second, writes this, a former longtime girlfriend of the Republican senatorial candidate Herschel Walker has come forward to detail a violent episode with the football star

who she believes is, quote, unstable and has, quote, little to no control over his mental state when he is not in treatment. That's one story. Less seriously, Herschel Walker was, as of last year, using his Atlanta residence as a rental property. So it's always helpful when you are running for senator or public office from a state to convince the voters that you really live in the state.

It's sort of the least you could do. The least you could do. You should ask Dr. Oz about how that goes when you do not convince voters that you are actually living there. Walker was also getting a tax exemption from Texas for his house in Texas. which the New York Times says is meant for primary residents of that state. Raphael Warnock, already using this on the stuff.

You deserve a senator who actually lives in Georgia. Kind of a primary appeal to voters right there. Also, Herschel Walker took off five days from campaigning during Thanksgiving weekend. Now, are we counting that amongst the scandals? Well, just the bad news coming out this week. you and I took off five days or thereabouts. Thanksgiving weekend, maybe four.

No big deal. Watch some football. Reconnected with family. Ate too much. But if you're running for a U.S. Senate seat and you got a runoff, that might not be the best time to sneak in a little vacation. No. Although in his defense,

Herschel Walker has probably worked more thanksgivings in his football career than any of us. Finally, I get a chance to take one off when I'm running for Senate. Yeah, it doesn't really bode well, right? Can he mention the residency thing in Jest? Or is that just so, is it such a third rail that he, even he couldn't do that even in 2022? I'm not totally sure on that. Because he'd be sort of admitting. I mean, like, if he was like, you know, my first order of business, if you elect me,

I promise I will move here. I will. Which is actually the constitutional requirement. You have to move there after you get elected. Right. I mean, if he said that, would that be okay? Anyway, taking the five days off is, I mean, again, we're in least you can do territory. There's a lot of people.

That's more of an institutional thing, though, right? All the people around them, all the people who were fundraising, all the, you know, Republicans in Washington who are supporting him. I'm sure just for like, what in the world? he did a Politico interview over the weekend where he was defending his campaign strategy. It's never a great sign if you're doing an interview defending your campaign strategy late in the campaign. Be like those sideline interviews during the football game with the coaches. They went up to and were like, what are you thinking about that call? You know, the third quarter.

You can also see from the coverage that Herschel Walker's got a very tough argument to make, right now. And actually, maybe Raphael Warnock does too, but I think probably Herschel Walker's is a little tougher about why voters should turn out for this election. Republicans won the House. So there's not an argument, hey, we can't let the Democrats have total control of government, but Democrats have also already won the Senate. I already have 50 votes. Functionally, yeah. Yeah. So you can't say, hey, elect me and then Republicans will control the Senate. Now, do we think that that hurts Walker? Do we think that hurts Warnock? Do we think that hurts

both of them? Well, I think it probably hurts Walker more on the sort of absolute level, right? Because the Democrats would, I'm sure, be happy to have the extra seat and not have to rely on convincing every single Democrat to vote in party line and the vice president's vote and everything else. from the flip side of it, it's a little bit harder a case. I mean, a little bit, just slightly more difficult a case to make, right? I mean, because the argument is or has been, don't let Democrats get control. And from their point of view, they do march in lockstep. And they are a monolith.

And so I think it's a little bit more difficult that way. Warnock has had a really tricky problem during this campaign, which is that there have been a lot of Herschel Walker's scandals and gaffes. and strange things set on the stump. But as we saw with Donald Trump, at a certain point, there are so many of these things that they almost start to cancel each other out. Yeah.

That each one is not as big as the one that preceded it necessarily because there's so many, there's so much negative material out there. it's true i mean you have to imagine that just the the fact that more things keep coming out that the people i mean there are people at least in his circle that knew that these things might come out and you and in some sense you have to imagine that sort of put a damper on the runoff right even as as soon as he didn't win um the first time around i'm sure there were people you know Mitch mccannell on down who were just like, well, time for another few weeks of this because more and more is going to come out.

But yeah, I mean, it has it, but that's the Trump halo as much as anything else, right? I mean, how much stuff could you, I mean, he's owned it, Herschel Walker, or he has not owned it in the way that Trump sometimes did. But it does. It just sort of runs off as long as you just keep marching ahead as if nothing's happened. That's sort of the story that gets covered. We might have to rename it after Herschel Walker, just for the she. your density of stories, allegations, Twitter videos.

You can see the Warnock campaign trying to solve this problem with a couple of commercials. One of them has Warnock trying to peel off Republican voters that were happy to vote for Brian Kemp, who just got another four years of governor, Georgia, but don't like Walker and maybe didn't vote for him the first time. He finished way behind Kemp's total. Listen to a little bit of this ad. I voted Republican most of my life, and I was proud to support Brian Kemp. The more I heard about Herschel Walker, I became concerned about his honesty, his hypocrisy, but also just his ability to lead.

I just can't get past Herschel Walker's lack of character. It's interesting about that ad is she doesn't say she's voting for Warnock. She just says she's not voting for Herschel Walker. Mm-hmm. just sort of a message from the Warnock campaign. If you want to just go ahead and stay home during the Senate runoff, that's fine too. It's a great target, though, because no, I mean, presumably, no, there's not a single person who's moving the other way, right? I find it hard to imagine someone who voted against Brian Kemp that would now be motivated to vote for Herschel Walker.

For a number of reasons, but most basically because. It's Herschel Walker. So yeah, it's a good, but, but you're right. I mean, in any situation like this, you have to give people, you have to give the voters a sort of cover, right? It's not exactly plausible deniability, but it's also not. It's just sort of like, you know, this is a normal, this is a rational way to act. And then that commercial sort of, you know, allow, gives them the sort of allowance to make that decision. See, find a voter who can put that idea you just mentioned into words.

She has an absolutely fantastic accent, by the way. So I'm just all ears when I hear that ad. And then she just says, here is what I'm thinking. You have the permission to do this. This is what you might be thinking. But you're a Republican, that you voted for camp, but you just don't feel comfortable with the final step, which is voting for Herschel Walker or voting for him one more time.

So I'm going to say that out loud. And then you can do that, maybe. Follow my advice. Yeah, or stay home also. Or stay home. Now, also speaking of voters saying things out loud that other voters might be thinking, here's another Warnock ad. This time they had voters wear headphones and listen to some of Herschel Walker's riffs on the stump.

Take a listen to how this ad turned out. Oh, my gosh. He's talking about vampires and werewolves right now. Yeah, you're serious about this, right? So I've been telling this little story about this bull out in the field. What? I'm a cow. And three of my pregnant.

There's no substance. There's nothing. So you know you got something going on. It makes me want to laugh, and then it makes me think we're in trouble. And on and on until a woman finally takes off her headphones in disgust, puts them down on the table, and walks away. another ad there for Warnock as he tries to make his closing argument as we say in political journalism

that was pretty good I might just go as simple as just like one person reading the headlines for each for each scandal one after another and then at the 30 second break

just put to be continued and then just pick up in the next commercial with the reading still going on it's it gets it I just said a second ago this idea that you might have been

you might have heard so much news. So much bad news about a particular candidate that it all just has this self-canceling mind-blowing aspect to it. So then you have voters listening to him being like, yeah, I'm not going to vote for that guy. Yeah, that guy should be a U.S. Senator. Yeah. Very interesting ad. I don't know if you feel this way watching cable news and reading stuff about this race, but it sure feels like our favorite political reporters think Raphael Warnock is going to win. but many of them are constrained by newspaper

and or TV style from just coming out and saying that. Do you get that vibe from the coverage you've read? Well, I don't think that's specific to reporters, but yes, I mean, I think that, you know, my mom thinks that the Warnick's going to win, but I'm sure she's not going to say it out of, you know, for fear of jinxing it.

Yeah. I trust her. Yeah, true. Yeah. Yeah. it's kind of hard to know what to lean on though, right? I mean, polling has been sort of all over the place in a lot of these races and, and, you know, conventional wisdom, whatever, horse sense. What do you want to go on?

Which race sense? Yeah, it's, you don't, you don't want to, you don't want to get out over your skis. Yeah, to, to mix metaphors terribly. The political media doesn't want to get over their skis? Remember those? What are just, like, reporters or like opinion? And like just people, we were more Twitter opinion-based. Well, remember the November 8th election where all those Republican consultants were in the New Yorker?

Celebrating like Zeke Elliott jumping into the Salvation Army basket last night with the cowboys. We're like, we got it. Blake Masters, he's in. Dan Bulldog, he's in. We did it. We won. There's a lot of getting out over skis. But this just feels like it again, I haven't heard somebody say this.

They'll talk a lot about Democrats. get out the vote effort, which is very concentrated in Georgia, especially during early voting. They'll talk about how much money Raphael Warnock has, but there's just a sense if you read the stories that reporters think Warnock's going to win, but whether because they don't want to be wrong or their paper doesn't exactly allow it, they don't want to come out and say that completely. They don't want to have that New Yorker style thing somewhere in your uvra. Where people are, he fell for the consultants. the other thing that may be leading to this impression is that Herschel Walker has basically stopped talking to the mainstream media.

Oh yeah. Outside of that Politico interview I just mentioned, which is very short. About the theory behind his campaign? About any, yeah, about anything, really. No, but that's the piece you're talking about. Yeah. Yes. Just defending him.

He's defending himself, yeah, in that short piece. but he has just not talked to the mainstream media regularly at all. It feels like a real, like it feels like the release strategy of just a dead in the water movie, doesn't it? Whereas just like the only piece is like a Hollywood reporter item about the contentious nature of the set and everybody arguing with each other.

Again. No one's really like promoting the movie. And then you're going to get... Careful there. Careful there. If Hersch Walker wins, somebody's going to play that clip. Oh, man.

when Herschel Walker does the, has the big glossy magazine spread like you talk about, then we'll know that it's really, that's really over. Huffpo also had a very funny piece about Herschel Walker's Fox News appearances. They called it the buddy system. Because when Herschel Walker goes

on Fox News, he is often flanked by a Republican senator like Lindsey Graham or Ted Cruz or sometimes both Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz. Yeah. There was a November 22nd appearance with Sean Hannity, according to Huffpo,

Hannity asked the first question to Lindsay Graham. So now we're talking about Herschel Walker's race here. But the first question goes to the senator from South Carolina. And then the second question went to Ted Cruz.

And his Huffpo says, finally after five minutes and 30 seconds when he had done a little more than nod, Walker spoke. So we're putting on with other senators and then also asking them the questions instead of him. truly you know it's associated you're associating him with greatness you know i mean that's

that's right it's a full proof plan also i'm always fascinated that every election has a star reporter uh-huh or multiple ones how about rogers solenberger of the daily beast the georgia senate campaign is a vanity fair profile a while back so fascinating he lives in Austin. Salenberger got an MFA in fiction. And as Vanity Fair notes, he just kind of decided he wanted to be an investigative reporter. For a time, he was putting out his own shingle, then he worked at Salon.

And then he starts coming up with this unbelievable run of scoops, discovered that Herschel Walker had an unacknowledged child. And then two more unacknowledged children. we talked on previous shows that Walker allegedly had urged a woman to get an abortion. He told Vanity Fair, this is Roger Salenberger. When you get a character like this, that is where my narrative background comes in, right? I see these stories and I see people in them, and I'm drawn to things that are weird and contradictory. And Herschel Walker is one of the weirdest, most contradictory people I've ever come across.

Before we end this segment, and speaking of getting out of our skis, Would you like a recent way too early 2024 Republican primary poll? Please. Is Herschel Walker on there? You're not listed yet, but if he wins on Tuesday, it might be. Number one, Donald Trump. 36% of the vote. We should note this is a national poll.

36% of the vote. Who are they polling voters? Mm-hmm. Okay. Number two, David, Ron DeSantis. Okay. What was his number? A 30%?

All right. Same tier there. Number three, Donald Trump Jr. 9%. Is he going to get in the primary against dad? Can we just assume that if he doesn't, that 9% goes right to senior? Yeah. Wouldn't you like to re-interview that voter and say,

if Donald Trump Jr. isn't in the election, are you comfortable supporting? Donald Trump Sr. I don't want to be a part of any country that Donald Trump Jr. is not an elected official in. 8% in finishing fourth is Mike Pence, Ted Cruz. Who is who who who is what? Okay. Yeah.

The Pence voter is also I kind of want to interview all these people. Yeah. Like the Trump voter and the DeSantis voter, I feel like I have a decent hold on. I think the Pence voters then default to DeSantis? Is the Pence vote an. anti-Trump vote kind of inherently? Or are there some, is there still some Trump? Trump fans who are just like, oh, you know, I always liked Pence. I always thought that he'd be a good presidential candidate. I'd always thought that he was the real talent in the Trump White House.

Ted Cruz, 3%, Marco Rubio 3%, and Nikki Haley, 3%. And now we're just giving 3% to any Republican that most people have heard of. Or whom ran eight years ago. Exactly. I really want to see a debate stage with all these people on it. Oh, I think they will. I think Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. on the same debate stage. I have got, I mean, listen, Cruz will be there. Nikki, is Nikki Haley? Is she, she's going to run?

You're saying Ted Cruz is going to run against Donald Trump again. Yes. Oh, my gosh. Nikki Haley, yeah, I think she's, I think she's a definite maybe. Why would you be sitting next to Herschel Walker? Why are you doing the good soldier schick, if not to set something like that up? Doing it for the Senate. And it's Ted Cruz.

This is what I'm saying. Like, Rubio, I don't know. I haven't seen a Rubio temperature taking. He seems like the sort of guy that would want to keep running, but he also, you know, might have gotten comfortable in his role as he's gotten older. Cruz will definitely run again. Strange new respect for Marco Rubio. Cruz is going to run again.

Cruz is going to run again and he's going to do it. He's going to try to like double talk his way around the running against Trump thing. It's just like, no, I'm just here in case Trump changes his mind. I just want to make sure I got my ducks in a row. I want to make sure that all the loyal Trump voters have somewhere else to go and that would be me. But I'm not going to actually run against him even though I'm running against him. That's what he's going to say. I hope that happens.

that just the possibilities. I hope that Donald Trump Jr. runs. I think that. Imagine that if there's just like an empty podium on the debate stage. And like at the last second, like the lights come on and like I have the Tiger plays and Trump Jr. comes out to go head to head with his dad. Who's not watching that? Oh my gosh.

Coming up in 30 seconds. Did you get to the end of Matt Taibi's epic Twitter thread? We did. we asked some questions, plus the new site and sound movie poll and how the list ate movie criticism. But first, David, 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. This week's runner-up comes to us from Dennis Reichold. There's been a dispute going on between Elon Musk and Apple. Musk had been claiming that Apple wanted to take Twitter out of the app store, which caused one Musk fan to tweet, Elon Musk is going to put Apple out of business. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write,

wait, did Elon Musk buy Apple? Thanks again to Dennis Reichold for that. But this week's winner, David, comes from Jacob Greece. You saw on Saturday that the U.S. men's national team has been eliminated from the World Cup in Qatar. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write. This is the fastest the U.S. has ever pulled out of the Middle East.

Charity laughed there from David. If you thought the World Cup would be a cakewalk, congrats. You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. All right, in the notebook dump, let's talk about this Matt Taibi threat. You texted me on Friday night and said, yeah, I guess we're going to be talking about this on Monday.

And I was right. Matt Taibi started everything off by posting on his substack, which is called TK News. Very shortly, I'm going to begin posting a long thread of information on Twitter at my account at M. Taibi. This material is likely to get a lot of attention. I will be absolutely understand if subscribers are angry that it is not appearing here on substack first. I'd be angry too. There's a long story I hope to be able to tell soon, but can't. not quite yet anyway.

What I can't say is that in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions. So that was the prelude. Then he started tweeting out a story about Twitter. It's called the Twitter files.

He said it was based on thousands of internal documents obtained by sources. Is one of the conditions that he had to agree to that it would be called the Twitter files? This is like a branded operation. Tweet number three in this very long thread is kind of what you call the nut graph, or we would if it was a written story. The Twitter files tells an incredible story from inside one of the world's largest and most

influential social media platforms. It is a Frankenstein tale of a human-built mechanism grown out of the control of its designer. actually kind of sounds more like a subhead than a nut graph, but that is what Taibi thinks the story is about. The gist is, and please tell me if I'm getting any of this wrong, because you and I were both texting back and forth that we didn't quite get this the first time we read it.

Twitter, Taibi contends, started out being a forum for lots of free speech, for mass communication, as he calls it. And then he puts it, started manipulating speech or what could be speech on Twitter at the request of the powerful. This comes to a head in his story when the New York Post publishes a story about Hunter Biden's laptop in October 2020, right before the presidential election. He has these internal communications where Twitter executives and people who work there are trying to figure out

what do we do. At first, they want to call the story unsafe. they say because it might be based on hacked material. And then you begin to see this whole debate within Twitter about, is this the kind of news story that we should be dubbing unsafe or suppressing in any way? Here's one of the communications that he publishes. I'm struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this unsafe. And I think the best explainability argument for this externally, would be that we're waiting to understand if this story is the result of hacked materials.

We'll face hard questions on this if we don't have some kind of solid reasoning for marking the link unsafe. Another exchange. The policy basis is hacked materials, though as discussed, this is an emerging situation where the facts remain unclear. Given the severe risks here and lessons of 2016, we're erring on the side of including a warning and preventing this content from being amplified, etc, etc.

So this is sort of produced a story that got two reactions. One reaction is, ah, look at Twitter, look what they're doing. Look at how they're treating this Hunter Biden laptop story that they don't want you to see. Look at how they are manipulating free speech. The other reaction is, well, this is an interesting window. to see how people inside Twitter were reacting to this. And the way they're reacting is, hey, we got tech journalism and tech broadly got burned in 2016 by publishing the results of hacked material.

So let's be careful. Let's proceed cautiously. Let's make these decisions. And this is a window into that. Yeah, we discussed it at the time. The story, if indeed it turned, You know, that the laptop was Hunter Biden's and the material was actually left behind at a laptop repair shop somewhere or whatever, and that's how it got to Rudy Giulia on his hands. Despite, like, you know, today's protestations from Glenn Greenwald, that doesn't negate the fact that, and others of his ilk, sorry, that doesn't negate the fact that, like, it was a reasonable assumption at the time or question at the time as to whether or not this was hacked material.

etc. With potentially with, you know, provenance outside the United States, whether or not that makes a big difference, who knows? Overall, if you read the Taibi story, the conversation seems like remarkably rational and even-handed between then-Twitter employees management. Jack Dorsey said relatively soon thereafter that they should not, that it was a mistake to limit it. But in retrospect, and I don't even know if Taiibi touched on it.

this. I mean, the story was, quote, unquote, banned for two days, for two days. And I think Jim Surwecki pointed out on Twitter probably did more to draw attention to the story that it was banned for two days. Now, there is a subsequent question about the New York Post's account being banned. They continue to be banned for like two more weeks because they refused to take down the initial story in some sort of weird, you know, backroom pomp and circumstance thing of, you know, trying to, having to abide by the rules, whatever. But setting that piece aside, I mean, everybody knew about this story, you know, and especially they knew about it on Twitter because everybody was talking about how it wasn't allowed on Twitter.

I don't think there's no smoking gun here. There's nothing approaching a smoking gun. That's obviously not the case because this is even giving Taibi the benefit of every benefit of the doubt. The goal here, the larger goal here, whatever conditions he inadvertently agreed to, or deliberately agreed to. This is part of the same sort of Project Veritas thing, you know, gateway pundit spin cycle thing of like just entering into evidence the notion that a cut, that an argument was made. A year from now, you will still hear Republicans saying, and online

activists saying, oh, that Taibi story proved that the government in Twitter were in cahoots without any links or anything else, right? Or with a link back to a tweet that said it, you know, that was referencing something that didn't say it at all. It gets it kind of in the conversation, and that's what's important to them. Truth sort of be damned.

There was nothing interesting in this piece. And I think the most interesting thing about it was the publication strategy. I'm not sure why they positioned it as a Friday news dump. My guess is that it It was supposed to be an earlier in the week said thing and got pushed because of fact-checking and legal and whatever else, and they just wanted to push play as quickly as possible. But I think he also, Elon Musk also said part two is dropping tomorrow or something and

then had to immediately follow up with like, no, it won't. We have to do some more fact-checking. But, I mean, I don't even know. I mean, I think it's more interesting that this was published that was published as a Twitter thread, that the Twitter thread itself started. malfunctioning almost immediately. I mean, it says way more about sort of the current state of Twitter, I think, than the previous regime.

I like this Katie Natopoulos tweet. She covers tech for BuzzFeed. I think it's wrong to completely dismiss the Matt Taiibi Twitter files as being totally boring. It's extremely interesting to see the inner discussions around big decisions. Any news outlet would have loved to have this scoop. It's just not a scandal, quote unquote, as teased. And I was thinking that, too, reading it, because all the news.

these internal communications, this would have been fodder for a New York Times story, Wals or journal story. How did they handle this? Even if they ultimately came to a decision that Jack Dorsey then reversed or so they later regretted. Like, what was this like in this moment? To have this story drop, you've just, you've got your head of a swivel because of 2016. But it almost argues for newspaper packaging. Like, you know, where you have it and you say, you know, those newspaper.

nut graphs. Like here is a, here is a rare window into the decisions, decision making processes of a tech company under stress because of 2016 and pressure from Congress, whatever it is, right? You're right. And even if it goes exactly according to your expectations that doesn't make it any less newsworthy on those terms, right? Even if they're having the conversation that you would imagine they would have. Of course. Because, and, you know, there's like a Republican, there's, excuse me, a Democratic congressman who comes into the chat. one way like that that's freaking interesting you know like and it's saying like i i want joe biden to win this race very badly but i don't think suppressing the story is the right idea and i don't think

it's going to help with that anyway you know i just think this is that's the wrong move here stuff like that like there's there's lots of texture but it almost you know when i ever i see that kind of newspaper packaging sometimes i just wince and be like man just tell me what it is right don't don't do this kind of classic this and then this and this and than this, but this is one of those stories that really would have benefited from that. Oh, yeah. Because then you would have, I felt, understood it instead of doing this, like, and then this, and then this, and you come to the end of it, but like, wait, what?

Yeah. When are we getting to the Frankensteinian monster part? Yeah. No, I mean, listen, there, there were, and there were, there were deliberate, you know, Mr. X in the story as type you published it, right? I mean, he had an image showing the Biden campaign requesting that certain tweets be taken down only for it to later be revealed by other people who were doing the research, who were, you know, fact-checking Taibi's piece that they were actually requests that nude photos of Hunter Biden be taken down, which is just pointing out terms of service violations, totally within bounds, right? and a lot of people have made that point. A lot of people, for a lot of people, that tweet was the smoking gun,

and some of them had to admit that they were wrong. It's, I mean, it's, I think that when you look at the way that they discuss these things, you're right, at 2016 in mind, but it's also just, it's not a matter of politics, I think, at the end of the day, it's a matter of sort of general self-respect, right? if you're a platform like Twitter, what you're trying to prevent in the most sort of apolitical way is you don't want to look

ridiculous. You don't want to get got, right? And you're trying to figure out the best way to thread that needle to not be, to not have your own powers turned against you, right? And to still find, and to make the fewest people mad in the process of navigating that. You know, it's, I honestly, I mean, reading all that just made me think, well, they just don't want to be, they don't, they don't want people to be, I think that they made the calculus that even if everything came out that people would look back from this 2022 vantage point and they probably be harsher on Twitter if they were wrong and they public and they allowed it to go forward, then the place that we are right now.

I think you're right. And I also think from Elon Musk's point of view, this is exactly what he doesn't want Twitter. to be. He wants Twitter to be publish it. But, you know, do not mark that New York Post story unsafe. We want that up there. Well, he says that. And I think this is more than anything, just a little like symbol of what that, but he's learning in real time that you have to make those tough decisions, right? I mean, we're going to see this over and over again. This might be the free speech high point of it. I mean, it's more than anything. It's like, doesn't it feel like a rich old man who like, like a billionaire that buys the local newspaper

to like have to force people to write op-eds about his rivals you know I mean it just feels so so silly you know but you know this is this is the dirt this is this is not dirt but it's sort of something in the shape of dirt and people have been clamoring for it and Elon's going to deliver it there's a certain power to the shape of dirt by the way see also the

the Hunter Biden laptop story. A lot of shaky use of the words First Amendment in the reaction to this story. Musk mentioned it. Tucker Carlson mentioned it. David A. French in an Atlantic column says Musk and Carlson are both profoundly wrong. The documents released so far show no such thing.

In October 2020, when the laptop story broke, Joe Biden was not president. Which is an important point. Yes. Democratic National Committee, which also asked for Twitter to review tweets, is not an arm of government. It's a private political party. Twitter is not an arm of government. It is a private company. This matters for a simple but profoundly important reason French continues. The First Amendment regulates government conduct. Yeah. Yeah. Elon Musk, I mean, Elon himself had to walk that back,

or at least tweet through it, right? Or he was like, while what I initially tweeted, about was not a First Amendment violation. If there had been collusion between the powerful and the Twitter, then I mean, it's just, it's nonsense. Okay. It's nonsense. Get the fact-checking team on those tweets, you know? I mean, it's just, nobody, everyone willfully ignores what the First Amendment means,

or they don't know, that's, I don't know, which reflects more poorly on somebody, but it's, it is. It's just, it's got to be, it's good, you have to assume it's just misrepresentation. I remember one time I was in middle school and a teacher told us, I believe this was in health class, something that most of us did not want to do some homework or some assignment. And somebody sitting behind me said, whatever happened to the freedom of choice, they like scream that out. First of all, we don't actually have that as students in school. And number two, that is not in the Constitution. That is something Pepsi is guaranteeing you in a commercial.

Yes. So it reminds me of the First Amendment talk here. One more item before we go. It is the sight and sound list of the greatest movies of all time. You don't have to be a truly up to your ears in movies film nerd to have seen content about this list. Sight and Sound is a movie magazine from the UK. Every 10 years since 1952, it has been conducting a poll of the greatest movies of all time. So since 1952, every 10 years, they put out a list.

Now it's 2022, and we have a new list. The director's poll has 2001, a space odyssey in the number one slot. The critics poll has Jean Dilman movie I was not super familiar with at number one. I get a lot of takes on this. But let's start as broadly as possible, David. What is the appeal of the list, of the greatest ever list as content here in 2022? Well, it gets engagement, first and foremost. It also gets, so it gets active engagement.

I'm not using actual technical terminology here, so I hope some of our social team friends will correct me. It gets active engagement in the sense that, like, people see, oh, look, someone ranked all the movies and then they get in there and they reply and they tweet themselves and they make their own list or whatever but it also gets the sort of like prolonged engagement of like if you google what are the what's what are the best fast and furious movies then presumably SEO will get your top 10 fast and furious movies with a very you know with its clear title and succinct cause up to the top of the list and it'll have some extra life that way and it's also like

But it's a sort of, it's a very concrete form of criticism, right? Like if you're taking it seriously and if there's a real measure, I mean, obviously not a real, this isn't a race, but to say if I'm ranking the works of a modern living director or a something to that effect, it's a, it is a form of critique that, you know, of criticism that that is just very, straightforward, you know, but it, but more often than not, I mean, the real draw of this is is the engagement. It's interesting to me how much film writing and film discussion has changed since we were young boys in the content minds because, you know, 15, 20 years ago, the review, the weekly review was still the basic form of content when you were talking about the movies. and then at the end of the year, the critic would come out

with their top 10 list. So that was the dessert at the end of the year. But now we've gotten to a world of writing about film where it's dessert all year long. As you say, if there's a Fast and Furious movie,

we want to talk about whether the new Fast and Furious movies any good, but also we want to put it in the ranking of the Fast and Furious movies. And then we want to re-rank the Fast and Furious movie. to accommodate that.

Yes. And who figured this out? I mean, I think Vulture is somewhere on the list of modern people who figured out the power of the list. Definitely. Bill Simmons, too, with basketball players and other things.

Like, if I just rank this and re-rank this, that will be something that will get people locked into this in a different way. Am I leaving anybody out of that? Oh, there's a lot of other people involved. I mean, you can see the sort of science of it by the fact that, like,

Like everything is already ranked online, even if a major outlet hasn't done it. There's like sites that are like ranker.com and stuff where like people vote or I don't even, I don't even know if it's just like submission, if the rankings are just like submitted by random people. There's rankings for everything. It's a good. I think that in some ways it, well, it very obviously suits our short attention span, right? I'm going to watch one thing right now. I want to know or I want to be able to understand what I,

am already watching right now, where does this fit in the pantheon or whatever? It's like wire cutter for movies. Just tell me what the best one is. You don't actually need to read the words. You just need to see the titles in an order, right? And there's nothing more frustrating than going to like a top 10 ranking on some site like Bleacher Report and realizing you're going to have to click 15 times to get to number one or whatever, you know. You got it.

That's making, you have to know, at that. point. But yeah, it is. However this came up, I mean, however this grew into the enterprise that it is now, it's, I don't know. I mean, it's, it's sort of amazing. But it is, it's not a bad thing. It's not some sort of pernicious thing.

A lot of the rankings, and we've done quite a few of them at the ringer, could be really, really beautiful things, both visually and in the way that they're written. You know, I mean, it's, it's, I think that it's, it's just a sort of measure of knowledge of like digested knowledge. And I think that's super attractive to people. At the ringer, we have, I mean, different, huge, different teams working on all this kind of stuff. But we do sort of, in a very general sense, lump like the Top Sopranos episodes rankings in with our NBA prospect guide, right? I mean, they're like special builds that are, that have numbers on them. I mean, they're in the same sort of general category.

It's like we're in a world now where you want to know everything. Or at least you want to have all the information at your fingertips. One of the interesting things about the site and sound list as opposed to say, you know, Batman movies are fast and the furious is that it does become like this college reading list. Here, if you want to be a film buff, here are the things for you to go see. Like you want to go, you want to figure that, you want to go see. Okay, Tokyo Story. Have I ever seen that?

in the mood for love, I ever seen that, and then you're going to go down this list and do it. I remember in the days before lists were everywhere, I looked this up today, 1998. Remember this modern library list of the best novels? Oh, yeah. English language novels of the 20th century. And it had like the Great Gatsby at number two.

And I was like, oh, wow, you know, I've read that book. That's the second best. Okay, yeah, here we go. You know, it's like, it was such a funny, even at that point before we truly discovered the power of the list, it was like, oh, right. Okay. So I've read a couple of these, but I need to go get under the volcano and the way of all flesh

and an American tragedy and the heart is a lonely hunter. And then I will truly be an educated person. Yes. Yeah, putting great, the gas we have there too makes you feel like you've got a foothold. everybody's read it. I can check one off because I had to read it as a software in high school. Yeah, you're scanning.

You see scan. I have to scan. I'm looking at it right now. Scan all the way down to what, 1984 is at number 13. Okay, okay, I'm still in the game. That's a thing. I run a paper on catch 22.

Okay, I got three in the top 13. Yeah, I know what happens in the plot. So I can kind of check that one off too. But I think that's another part of these is that, you know, we all want to, be seen as having taste. And you and I have particular parts of the world where we feel completely confident that our taste is our taste.

Like, if you're David Shoemaker wrestling matches, David Shoemaker graphic novels, David Shoemaker, detective novels, Branker, sports and ads, whatever. Like, we'd be like, I know what I'm talking about here. I have my power ranking in my head. You cannot convince me of anything. But then there's all these other parts of life, like the greatest movies of all time or the greatest novels of the 20th century where you want to acquire taste. And short of actually reading all these things, looking at the list allows you to require taste very quickly. True.

And there's an incredible cheat code, right? Like I could look at this sight and sound poll, you know, and I could be like, you know what? good list. I think vertigo should be higher. I just had a take, right? That doesn't mean, I don't know anything about the, you know, half of these movies. I put vertigo higher.

You know, close up looks a little overrated to me. It's also a real life sheet code because if someone's getting to, someone's, if you're dinner and someone's just like, what's your favorite? Like, yeah,

what's your favorite film in the blank movie? You're just like, oh, you know what? Oh, wait, excuse me, I'm going to run to the restroom real quick. I'll be right back with an answer for you. And let me bring my phone. Yeah. I have an answer for you.

No, but it's like that's, you know, the world has changed so much from the middle brow world that you and I grew up in where you kind of were reading a general interest newspaper so that you could know a little bit about everything. Mm-hmm. But they're still, they're still, and I see this just on Twitter this all the time, right? People want to know a little bit about everything. They want to have a best film world. that they're ready to trot out, even if they have nothing, you know, if movies occupy exactly 2.5% of their daily life. It's funny because they're, I mean, obviously, the people do, re-rankings and some of these things are living documents or whatever, but they are at once

sort of like these, these epics, right? I mean, they're these, these grand statements, you know, if you rank the, if you rank all the movies, if you rank all of the, the greatest novels, as you rank whatever, then it's just sort of like, okay, this is set in stone. But actually more so than any, like, review of a book or review of a movie, it's so tethered to its time, right? Because it's just the sorts of movies, the sorts of books, the sorts of whatever, that we engage with,

the things that have a certain currency. I mean, you could say a lot of things about the movies list. I'm still scanning this book's list, and I'm looking, it's not until 98 of the top 100 that we have something resembling a genre novel, and it's absolutely great, The Postman always rings twice by James and Kane. I guarantee if they did this novel today,

there'd be something in the crime family in the top 10, right? Sure, sure. So it's like, it's, it's just interesting how we're, you position it as something as a sort of, these rankings are sort of timeless things. But really, they're almost, they're less timeless than the old-fashioned version of just reviewing a thing. New York Times has an awesome feature that speaks to that today

where it goes through all the site and sound lists since we can go back to 1952 with this thing. Yeah. And just shows how taste changed and movies moved up and down the list. And, you know, the idea is about Charlie Chaplin changed and genre movies changed. And the ideas about Citizen Kane changed, right? Like over the years. Yeah, that is totally invaluable when you have that kind of scope of time.

Speaking of time, it's time for David Shoemaker. Guesses the strained pun headline. Yeah. David, today's winner comes to us from two people in our Twitter mentions. Ping 33 and My Blue Check brings all the boys to the yard. Thank you, sir, or ma'am for your service. This comes from the publication, the Metro, the free Metro over in the UK. It is about England's win in the World Cup.

And how that could set up a quarterfinal match with, France. Okay. England wins. France wins. They're going to meet in the quarterfinals of the World Cup. What was Metro's strained pun headline? This is a UK headline?

Mm-hmm. I can't, I just can't, I can't not think of I see London, I see France. Um, um, uh, France, um, uh, France, um, let's see the French oh the the the the um this is not very highbrow by the way so oh i was going to say set your sights sort of french and english no accordingly um France I have no idea what's the most common uh French word that we that you and I okay there we go so hey let's start with that uh yes we can yeah uh is that we can't games about to happen so It's gone. It's happening. Here. Here we go. Here we go.

That's pretty good. Yeah, pretty good is exactly right. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic, as always, by Erica Servantes. I'm back later this week. And then David and I are back Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.