The Press Box - Claire McNear on Her ‘Jeopardy!’ Reporting. Plus, Listener Mail.

Episode Date: August 20, 2021

Bryan and David are joined by Ringer writer Claire McNear to unpack her story about recently chosen and now-ex ‘Jeopardy!’ host Mike Richards (0:30). They break down Claire’s reporting, discuss the response she received to the piece, and touch on what will come next in the ongoing saga that is the search for the next ‘Jeopardy!’ host. Later, Listener Mail, in which they answer questions about David’s new WWE content and add more in-journalism words to their list (27:50). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week, and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline.  Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Claire McNear Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Join author and former vibe editor-in-chief Danielle Smith and Black Girl Songbook as she celebrates and uplifts the talent of black women in the music industry. Tune in for in-depth discussions with your favorite songwriters, producers, and artists, as well as anecdotes from Danielle. Plus, you'll hear the songs of black women who change the landscape of American music forever. Check out Black Girl Songbook exclusively on Spotify. Hello, media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here, along with producer Erica Servantes.

David, should we do the worn-out joke where we introduce our guest today in the form of a Jeopardy question? Yes, please. Can we make it final Jeopardy so it can make some money off of it at least? Let's do it. Bet as much as you want. Bet in the house.

Because you can take her reporting to the bank. She is the ring reporter who this week set Twitter ablaze with a piece on Mike Richards Jeopardy's new ex-host. Who is Claire McNier? Correct. All right.

Hey guys. It's great to be here. Yeah. Well, great to have you here because we're thrilled. You've had an amazing week. If people have not followed this in a ringer piece published Wednesday, Claire revealed that Mike Richards, the newly minted host of Jeopardy, had a history of offensive comments. She is joining us just as we've heard the news that Richards has stepped down as Jeopardy host

and that the search for Alex Trebek's replacement will resume. Claire, how's your week been? It's been a little eventful, but, you know, it's been, it's been interesting. Certainly has not been boring. So for people who have not followed this story, those 10 or 20 out there in the world, Alex Trebek, longtime beloved Jeopardy host, died last November. How did Jeopardy set out to choose his replacement, and how did that replacement turn out to be Mike Richards? Yeah, so when Alex Trebek died, he was in, he was taping his 30.

seventh season with the show and he was 80 years old and, you know, he at various points in kind of the decade leading up to that as he entered the 70s had talked about retiring. And so it was absolutely something they had thought about like, like, what does Jeopardy look like after Alex Trebek? Because, I mean, he wasn't just the host, right? He was the face of the franchise. I mean, literally on the Sony sound stage where they filmed this in Culver City, there was like a multi-story decal of his face. I mean, he was Jeopardy. Um, so Sony was very, aware that whenever he stepped down or passed, it would kind of create this identity problem for the show.

So at the beginning of this past season, so last May, May 2020, a new executive producer named Mike Richards stepped in who'd been shadowing the old EP for part of the last season. That previous EP had been there for like 25 years. So major changing of the guard. And after Alex Travecant died, they launched into this guest host process. They've said that that was always kind of the plan because they knew if they brought somebody on the air immediately after Alex Trebek.

You know, Trebeck's last episode airs on Friday. And then there's a brand new person on Monday. And that's the new host. Here they are. Like, no more Trebek. I think fans were grieving. I mean, really, like a lot of people felt like a very emotional connection to this fan had been in their living room five nights a week for 36-half years.

So I think they had been coordinating this. But Mike Richards, as the. E.P kind of went around and told these interviews about how it wasn't just guest hosts. It was really a live audition process for the permanent host position. And so people kind of started to care quite a bit about who is their favorite and who is their least favorite and felt like they were voting by watching. And lo and behold, a couple weeks ago, report surfaced that he was in advanced negotiations. And just last week, they named him the permanent host.

Again, before we circle back to, well, the fallout of your reporting on this story, as a long time Jeopardy fan was the quest sort of misbegotten to begin with I mean it's sort of like picking a new pope right like you said they're so Trebek and the show are so tied into each other I know this isn't the process but I could almost see the argument of picking a nobody for the job because at this point maybe we're just kind of shepherding it on for the next decade and

then putting out the pasture As somebody is a little bit biased, I hope that's not the case. Okay. So I think they were very aware that there was not going to be another Alex Treveck. There wasn't another Alex Tremec sort of waiting out there waiting to be found who could step into those shoes, because not only was he this sort of bull up his cultural figure, he was also somebody who had been on the job for more than 36 years. And even when he came into the job, he was a very, very experienced.

broadcaster. So I think really that Sony had kind of put itself into a difficult position by playing it up as an audition. And to be perfectly fair, it was Mike Richards himself who said this and all these interviews that this was an audition. And he was the one who kind of went out and said, you know, we're looking at data. We're looking at analytics. All of that is a little bit more suspect now from some of my reporting, some other people's reporting, which we could talk about. But by doing that, instead of being this sort of tribute to Trebek, which is how they sort of initially framed it, it became this thing where you were not just rooting for your favorite host. You were rooting against the other host. So they inevitably set themselves up, not only to not have Alex Trebek, which of course was going to be a ratings drop off and a sad thing and a hard thing for fans and for the show.

But also, anybody who's been rooting for one of the 16 guest hosts and it's not that person who becomes a permanent host is a of course, going to be disappointed and upset. And so I think they had really kind of primes the audience for some level of disappointment. And then having it be Mike Richards for a whole lot of reasons, but including the fact that he was effectively an internal candidate who had been for at least the early part of the search, kind of one of the main people leading it, has a lot of people just feeling like the whole thing was fishy and that they were sort of, you know, had by Sony. And that it was never really something that was an audition.

Two of the fan favorite guest hosts were Ken Jennings, the former champ, and Lovar Burton. What happened during their alleged auditions to be Jeopardy host? Well, from talking to sources around the show, what became clear is that Sony has said that once Richards became a candidate, he stepped back from the kind of search committee, as it were. But even if we take their word for it, let's say we do. as the executive producer of the show, he had an enormous amount of influence over just all these different levers of how the show is made and how the guest hosts were training. So, I mean, he was the one on the host rehearsal days because they always had one day of rehearsals before they would go into tape. He was the one counseling them on what to do. He was the one literally in their

ears with an earpiece telling them, hey, you know, you're kind of messing this part up, you're going a little too fast here, you're being too repetitive. I mean, he was the one doing that. He was the one it has come out via the New York Times. They had a few sources tell him this that he was also the one who picked the episodes that were then sent on to focus groups, that he was the only one who made that decision. So kind of left out the rest of the Jeopardy stuff. So as much as Sony and Richards talked about their use of data and analytics and looking at focus groups, it wasn't a neutral process.

And it was a process that somebody who was one of the contenders was intimately involved in. And then, you know, I mean, he was the one making the choices about how to promote all those episodes. So he was very, very involved. And it's not hard to see how that would be a conflict of interest. So you're reporting for this piece that came out this week. Did it begin as soon as he, Mike Richards was announced? I mean, obviously you've been reporting.

You wrote a book about Jeopardy. You've been on this beat such as it is for such, for quite a long time. But what motivated you to start digging into Mike Richards' career and personal history. Yeah, so I had been, I mean, like you said, I've been writing about Debrity for a while and I've written quite a bit over this past like nine months or so since Trabeck died about this guest host rotation and what has gone into it and I've gotten to interview a bunch of the guest hosts. And, you know, it's kind of looking into, I came at it originally just kind of from the stance of this is a really interesting thing that Debris is doing. Like it's very,

it's very strange at Jeopardy to have any change whatsoever. And so, suddenly there was a whole lot of change basically constantly on the show. So I've been reporting on it. And from talking to sources who work around the show, what I kept hearing over the last couple of months, and especially as Richard sort of emerged as a permanent host contender, was that morale at Jeopardy's, it was really low. It, you know, it's an interesting workplace. Like, it's a thing that, you know, when you're watching Jeopardy, you don't really think of it as, like, an office environment. But it absolutely is. And the, you know, it's, you know, people who work for Jeopardy, many of them have been there for decades.

Like, their entire professional life, they've just done Jeopardy. Like, the writers, you know, people have been there for 20, 30, some odd years since the beginning of the show in a few cases. And that's true kind of throughout the show. Like, if you've only been there for a decade, like, you were the new kid on the block. And so, you know, of course, any change would kind of mix up a workplace like that. But then I started talking to people who had worked on other shows that Richards worked on. And he was the executive producer of The Price is Brighton of Love,

of Let's Make a Deal before he came over to Sony in 2019. And I heard a lot of things that sounded like what I was hearing at Jeopardy, that he came into a workplace where there were a lot of, you know, long-tenured people who kind of dedicated their lives to the show, and he let a lot of people go, and there was a lot of turnover, and that there was a lot of unhappiness on the staff. So I started looking at that, and, you know, I tried to just sort of find everything I could about him online and, you know, he literally on his jeopardy.com biography, if it's still up there in

its entirety today, he talks about the comedy show he hosted as a student at Pepperdine called The Random Show. And I thought, well, that would be interesting to see. Like, that's his start as like a television personality. I would like to see that. And, you know, it was filmed in the 90s, so I could not find a trace of it. But it did lead me to the podcast with the exact same name. And as soon as I started listening, it became abundantly clear very, very quickly that there was just a lot there that, you know, is just not not acceptable. And again, I mean, that was when he was the executive producer. He started that podcast when he was five years in. So, I mean, he was the boss. Like, he had been overseeing this big workplace and, you know, of a big prominent game show just like

he's been doing it, Deppery for the last year. And it was just some really damning stuff. So that was kind of the, that's the long answer of how this all came about. So this is 2013 and 2014 when he's hosting the random show podcast. Gosh, the random show. I trip every time I read it or try to say it. Will you give us a little bit of a taste for people who haven't read your piece of the kinds of things he was saying on the podcast? Yeah. I mean, it's a, so the episodes range from anywhere from like 35 minutes to like an hour 15. And it was sort of pitched at. as the inside look at the Price is Right. And so it's kind of freewheeling conversation,

and it's sort of gossipy, and they talk a lot about pop culture, and they talk about the latest going on at Price's Right, and they have on other cast members and crew members from the Price's Right, and occasionally let's make a deal. They call up big winners from the show. So it was very, and they filmed it all, or recorded it all, rather, on the Price's Right set, often in Richards' office. But Richards use it, I mean, just in nearly every episode, he kind of dips into, you know, sexist language or ablest language or classist language and, you know, uses some ugly slurs and just talks a lot about women's bodies and women's clothing in ways that, you know, many have interpreted as quite offensive.

And with this sort of coming on the heels of new scrutiny over a pair of Price's Right lawsuit, that were filed kind of while he was the executive producer there that had a lot to do with workplace discrimination and kind of mistreatment of female employees by male leadership. It just, it felt like a red flag. So I, you know, that was that was the crux of it, really. And just give us a sense of your reporting in that moment. So you've stumbled across there are dozens of these episodes. Do you sit down and listen to all of them in order, make notes?

How do you go about that? Yeah. I mean, I think I started in a very scattershot way where, you know, the episode names didn't really say much about what was in them. They would say, you know, maybe a name of a guest or something like that. He interviewed Ken Jennings in one, so I think that might have been the very first one I listened to because it was like, oh, my God. Like, I didn't know that they were kind of talking to each other that far back. But from there, I just sort of jumped around and, you know, as I got through more and more of them and found more and more. things that I found to be kind of quite worrying and quite newsworthy, it sort of became clear

talking to my editors that we sort of thought it was worth just going through all of it. So it was originally, I think, 53 episodes, but taped over almost a year and a half. And when I found it only 41 of those were actually available online. It's not really clear when or why those other episodes went down, but they weren't there. So I listed all 41 episodes. And then, you know, earlier this week before we published, we, you know, did our due diligence and approached Sony and approached Richards via his agent to ask for comments. And within two hours, all of the episodes were deleted from the internet. So. Well, if you didn't have a smoking gun already, yanking them all off the internet, it seems like what you were looking for.

Did you get the sense I mean it didn't seem like you have that much communication with the people behind the scenes Did you have sources at the time that So you could take the temperature of what was going on As you were doing as you were doing your reporting Or was it were you operating sort of in a vacuum? You know without going into too much detail with my sourcing

You know I was certainly hearing from people as they were getting up from running I mean, so Jeopardy tapes, its season from usually July, but this year, August, to April. And so this was kind of the end of their summer break. And they were just beginning to ramp up for the new season. So yesterday, Thursday, was in fact the first tape day of the season. And that had been planned for a long time. So, you know, even before we knew who was going to be the host, we knew there would be a permanent host.

We knew that, you know, that day was going to be the first tape day of the season. So it's kind of been a hectic timeover. at jeopardy, but of course, you know, especially in these last two weeks as, you know, variety reported that he was in advanced negotiations for the job. And then, of course, when Sony confirmed that he had been hired for the nightly job and that my end biolic was going to do some primetime specials, I started, you know, hearing just sort of grave concerns from people. And these are people who, you know, had worked with him for the last year as he served as the executive producer. And actually, Sony has said that he's going to remain the executive

producer. So that's an interesting wrinkle to all of this. But these are also people because of, you know, how long so many of them have worked there, they knew Alex Trebek really well. I mean, I think, you know, it was a thing where after he passed, it was not only incredibly disruptive to the show, but also, I mean, he was a major figure in so many of these people's lives. And he kind of was this father figure within the jeopardy casting crew. So, you know, I think it's been a tough year for a lot of people there.

Give us a little ace reporter behind the scenes here. your piece comes out Wednesday. David and I saw the Twitter reaction and participated in the Twitter reaction. What kind of reaction did you get from Jeopardy World to your piece? I think there was a lot of interest. I don't think that he was overwhelmingly, has been overwhelmingly well-liked within the Jeopardy staff. I mean, it's been a weird year. In addition, everything I was just talking about, it has been a weird year as it has everywhere else because of the pandemic. So a lot of the Jeopardy staff has actually been working from home this whole time, has not been on the Sony studio a lot since early 2020, you know, or hasn't really worked with Richards

at all, or at least directly. So, you know, it's been kind of a strange fragmented year in addition to everything else. But yeah, I think that the general mood in response to that piece, as I have understood it was more or less the kind of shock and revulsion that sort of dominated social media in the hours after we published. And then, well, what happens next? Do you want to take us through the... Yeah. So there are a few questions.

So, I mean, one, a very big one is the fact that he's still the executive producer and he is still presumably the executive producer of Wheel of Fortune because their sister shows that literally tape next door. to each other and usually they'll tape Jeopardy a couple days at the beginning of the week and then wheel a couple days at the end of the week they share a lot of their crew and they have historically shared an EP. So Sony seems to be sticking with him for that.

I don't think that will be an uncontroversial decision within Jeopardy or outside of Jeopardy. But we'll see, I suppose. What's kind of a complicating factor for Sony is they sort of as they abandoned him as the host. is they taped five episodes yesterday. They taped the first five episodes of the season.

And I mean, it's not just that those are supposed to be the first week of shows when it begins airing in mid-September. It's also that this past season, which just finished airing, but had finished taping back in April or May, we have an incredibly dominant champion going on right now. So Matt Amodio finished the final game of the season, which just aired this past Friday, winning his 18th game, which I think is the, I should know this off the top of my head,

it's the fourth, maybe fifth, long, I think fifth longest win streak in Jeopardy history, but he's also super dominant, wins a bunch of money in every single game. So he's now third place in all-time winnings after Ken Jennings and James Holthar. So he is like a historic Jeopardy champion who has just come back yesterday morning

to defend his crown. So, you know, it's, there's a lot writing on that. So I think what is likely to have, though it is kind of just a debacle to even contemplate how this will go down is they don't want to have, you know, kind of removed Richards from this position and then a month from now have a whole week of his episodes air. So it is possible that they're going to try to do some sort of re-tap, but you can't retape the games because the games happen the way that the games happened.

So they might try to doctor something where they have a new host stand in and just read all the categories and clues and never show the shot of the host on the stage with the contestants. I mean, it would be weird, and it is a week of episodes and like a high stakes week at that. So we'll see. I mean, they've said that they're going to restart the search for a permanent host. They said that they were going to go back to guest hosts. We don't know who that will be. We don't know if they're going to return to some of the faces we saw last season.

We don't know if they're going to kind of reconsider people like Ken Jennings or LeVar Burton. or Ozzy Cohen and David Faber were two other, you know, very big fan favorites, I think. So we'll see, I suppose. But yeah, there is, I say, I think it's likely that we see some utterly bizarre, partially reaped Jeopardy episodes in September. I just want to put an underline under the timeline here. Claire's piece comes out Wednesday. Yeah, okay. Sony reads it.

Everybody in Jeopardy World reads it, presumably. Mike Richards reads it. And then they go out and tape five episodes with Mike Richards on Thursday. And then on Friday morning, Mike Richards steps down as Jeopardy host. Just let that whole sequence of events marinate in your mind. The one thing that I think is kind of worth thinking about within that time frame is, I mean, there are these people who've spent years and years trying to get on Jeopardy and training for Jeopardy. and they got the call that finally there was a place for them on this show.

I mean, 150,000 people took the test last year to get on. They only let on 400 and change every season. So to finally get the call is this huge event for people who get on Jeopardy. I mean, they remember everything. They know where they were when it happened. And then they probably spent that last month, you know, really studying on buzzer training and final Jeopardy wagering and, you know, studying all these categories that might come up.

And then they're at their hotel in Culver City. the night before they're about to go in and play their first game of Jeopardy and the story drops. And I know that a lot of them read it. And then, of course, going to the studio and kind of knowing this is going on and having Mike Richards be the person emceeing those games. And then, of course, having Day 2 canceled. So somebody won the last game of yesterday's tape day, the Friday game that we'll see sometime in September.

and they were about to come back this morning to defend, and now it's spiked. And, you know, probably there, I mean, they might be from the area, but probably they've got to just fly home and then fly back out for that. So it has been incredibly disruptive and is kind of a sad aspect of all of this.

So that's, you know, a kind of complicating factor here. At the risk of taking is totally off topic. Does Matamodio, if they cancel any episodes, does he have a complaint that they're like icing the kicker out here. He's like prepared to go defend his title and now and now they're like pulling the rug out from under him. What's good? This is. He had already waited, I guess, like three months, right? Since they taped that that season finale. So he did have the usual, the usual break. But I mean, of course, it was probably a very strange day in the studio. I mean, I heard from multiple sources that

it was extremely awkward in there. And, you know, would Richards is was was Richards as a effective as a host in those five games and as focused on in those five games as, you know, he was when he guest hosted or would have been otherwise. Like, I don't know, but certainly, but one of the things that I've been really interested in and working on another story for right now is the effect of the guest hosts on contestants over this past, past season, because Matt Emodio is the huge exception. There were a few other people who, who had pretty good runs, but there were wrong stretches where nobody won more than two games. And so it seems pretty clear that something about the disruption of the guest hosts,

whether it's, you know, the host's rhythm and buzzer timing, which ends up being a really big part of Jeopardy gameplay, whether it's just sort of the kind of strangeness of having somebody who is, you know, on their first day on the job, literally, as the host, or something was going on clearly because it was totally anomalous in Jeopardy's history. So, yeah, I really, I feel for the contestants who were in there yesterday and consider them all to be very brave to have kind of gone through with it. Claire needs to go right and report for the ringer.com,

but we'll close with a question from Alan Corridor. I'm really looking forward to reading about this in the updated paperback version of Claire's book, answers in the form of questions or possibly a sequel. Claire, are we going to get an update from Ringer books? Yes, this might be breaking news to my publisher, who I know listens to this podcast. So, no, we'd already push back to paper back a little bit because it usually comes out one year after

and we knew we wanted to hang on for the permanent host announcement and now we don't have that anymore. So it might be a little bit later than the already later thing because we obviously do want to address it. But one thing I wanted to add, though, before I go and let you guys get on with non-game show business is that I just wanted to thank the Ringer staff. So many people worked on this story.

with me. I mean, there were so many people who had a hand in this behind the scenes. It was a ton of editors, a ton of copy editors, a ton of fact checkers. It was a lot of work went into producing this story. So I just want to thank all those people because they, they kind of helped make it into the piece that it was. And I'm very grateful for that. Fantastic. Fantastic work this week. We are honored to be your colleague. You did an awesome job. Claire McNair, thank you so much for coming on the press box. Thank you so much for having me. All right, 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. I miss this one from a few weeks back, David. GOP representative Matt Gates did a video stunt on Twitter. In the video, you see him trying to open a door. and he tweets, the D.C. Department of Corrections

locked out multiple members of Congress from reviewing the conditions of the January 6th prisoners. What are they hiding? It was an upward Twitter joke to write, you may get in soon enough. Thanks to Terry McDonald for that. Special award this week for the Greek mythology jokes.

I don't know if you saw this bit on Twitter. Some examples, I've got a joke about Athena, but it's a headache. I have a joke about Sisyphus, but I'm tired of telling it over and over and over. Thanks to Brad for pointing those out. What's the problem with this? This sounds we should be celebrating this sort of brilliant. Oh, well, this is kind of a celebration.

You're right, it is. In an appearance on CBS on Thursday, David, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg introduced a new product. It was, quote, a virtual reality app that lets you and your coworkers feel like you're sitting around a table in a conference room. So the new app makes you feel like you're in a meeting in a conference room. Okay. It was an overwork Twitter joke

to write this meeting should have been an email. Wow, I didn't see that. That's really funny. Thanks to the New Yorkers. Ian Crouch for that. If you think Zuckerberg's invention sounds worse than anything you've ever heard of, congrats. You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. I don't know if anybody

said this on Twitter, but for this to be really authentic. You'd have to be in the virtual reality conference room and instead of paying attention to the meeting, everyone would be looking at their phones. Yeah, exactly. Just eyes down, eyes at the lap all the time. Yeah. A few bits of listener mail, David, before we take off here, we got a really good too funny for journalism headline from Andy Mosley. It's from NBCLA. The Las Vegas Raiders have a new policy. In order to get into the football game, you have to show. show you're vaccinated or you get vaccinated there at the stadium gate. Okay, interesting story.

Sounds like a fair deal. All right. NBC, Los Angeles went with this headline. Raiders set COVID rules for fans. Come with a vax proof or get shot on site. See what they did, right? Yeah. Pretty, pretty, pretty clever, except it's local news.

So that counts is way too clever. from NBC, Los Angeles. The original headline on this article has been changed to clarify that a dose of the COVID vaccine will be available at Raiders' home games. The previous tweet has been deleted. Too funny. Too funny. For local news.

Some home news, David, from Ryan Thomas. Does David Shoemaker's new Spotify deal require him to tweet? Because he tweeted multiple times today and even replied to some people and I'm honestly a little scared and confused. It does not, it does not require me to tweet. No one told me to tweet. No one told me to tweet in a long time except for, well, except for you.

I retweet the, you know, things about the press box. But, you know, it's good. It's exciting. It's a thing. We got to, you know, help get the word out there. I don't think they needed my tweets, but it's fun to, it's a fun thing to be a part of. So it looks, you know, I'm happy to get out there. You want to do the quick summary if people didn't say?

see what the move was. Yes. So the ringer and Spotify have just signed a deal with WWE to be this exclusive home of WWE podcast. They're not all going to be Spotify exclusives off the bat. So don't freak out about your RSS feeds just yet, guys. But we're going to be kind of taking over their podcast program. I have been doing a wrestling podcast called The Mask Man Show.

for a long time and we are expanding that out into the ringer wrestling show. We're going to have two or three shows there a week that are going to just be a celebration of wrestling. I mean, it's regular wrestling podcasting stuff. And for the record, editorially independent of the rest of the stuff we're doing. And then people have been very concerned about that. There were some people that said, wait, is David turning into mean Gene Okerlund? And David said, no, no, I'm doing my wrestling podcast as you, that you know and love.

Yeah, it's funny. people are kind of more upset about the potential that I might skew the things they say on my podcast than they would be if I were like accepted a job as a WWW writer or something. But in fact, what's going on is the ringer is just doubling down in wrestling content. We're doing more wrestling stuff. We're going to have more fun doing wrestling stuff. And also I and others are going to help like produce some interesting stuff, wrestling related stuff in conjunction with WWE.

So it's a, it's, you know, a multi-pronged operation over here. congratulations david shoemaker uh in also in other ringer podcasting news corbin dubois asked this did you guys purposely drop the today's military ad right in the middle of the last episode while discussing spencer ackerman's reign of terror do you i don't can i if we're going to be tangentially wrestling related did you see this thing where a w wrestling was in a total coincidence had a guy and like who's doing a sort of irons it's not was not gruesome at all but like an ironic hardcore match where he was taking a pizza cutter to a dude's forehead and it went to a picture and picture Domino's pizza ad while this was happening and everybody was flipping out as if it was

like a deliberate play and Domino's should be Irish. First of all, the best advertising Domino's has gotten in a long time, but whatever. But this is basically what he's accusing us of. No, we did not do that on purpose. No. And I did appreciate people pointing that out so we could send an email and everything. Thank you for listening closely and we appreciate all the heads up. I got into a lengthy conversation about press box ads with a PR person. We both know yesterday. So I'm glad that people are listening to the ads and supporting our sponsors. Let us do some only in journalism words, David, before we get out of here. Got a bunch of good ones from Brandon trumpeted. Trumpeted. Listening to you say that makes it so clear that no one's ever said that out loud.

I know, I did put a little extra English on there, didn't I? To make it sound like a human word rather than the journal. Trumpet it may be in some hymns that I grew up singing. I feel like the angels who trumpeted the arrival of various things. This is from Grouchy Broderick, gleaned. Gleined, yeah. Gleined is a great only in journalism word from Aaron J. Galloni, Ignoble. Kind of a funny word.

Anyway. Yeah. I don't think many people would use the word. word ignoble in normal conversation. I like this one from Alex Maori razzed. Rast. Oh, I've used that one for sure. H. Hendo says

Beatific. Probably some upscale journalism. You know, maybe the George Will. Another one that I've definitely used. I don't, but I don't, I've never heard anybody say that. Again, maybe in church. Aaron McDade suggests

clip, meaning the verb when a team barely beats another team in sports. Cardinals clip the Cowboys. Oh, yeah. That's a headline word, right? Because it's short. That's a four-letter headliner.

Dale Hollow nominates cadre. Oh, my. Codra, though Brian did use it, he says, in the midst of the emergency pot about Andrew Cuomo's resignation. Whoops. And finally, Brian, not me and other Brian,

nominates clad as an iron clad or bikini clad. I've had people say, like, you have an iron-clad contract. right? Or like, we have an ironclad agreement. But you're right. Bikini clad. Nobody says it when in terms of like wearing clothes. There we go. Okay. So ironclad may be normal speech. And finally this one from Jim Corrigan, which is really great if we haven't had it before. I've sort of losing track of our only in journalism words at this point. But it's a great one. Loggerheads. Loggerheads. nobody says loggerheads

but journalists often write loggerheads wait was I don't this is the first time this is coming into my head was the was the website which still exists the platform blogging heads at TV was that a play on loggerheads and if so why wasn't it bloggerheads

talking heads I think okay you're right talking heads blogging but bloggerheads would be good it would we're at blogger heads yeah exactly When two people are going at it online, they never came to a resolution.

David and Brian were a blogger heads. It's time for David Shoemaker. Guesses the strained pun headline. Yeah. Last Monday's headline about a weird fanless summer Olympics was Stranger Rings. Today's headline comes from Matthew Felling.

It's from Harper's, one of those patented deadpan Harper's readings lists, David, that I love whenever I see them. One of the greatest things in journalism broadly defined. And also a thing that if it were, if that was created today, it would be like foisted upon us once a week minimum

and would be like a weekly showtime show on Sunday nights. You know, like it would be. Or John Oliver bit. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's one of those things that Harper's has always been so kind of slightly averse to the internet that I think probably is really underrated at this point in history. Yes.

Not slightly averse of the internet, by the way. It'd be extremely. For this one, David, the magazine put together a list of nicknames of accused mob defendants. So they just did a list. Joey Electric. Mr. Brown. Louis Sheep. Danny, aka.

Butch, Tony Meatballs, and on and on and on. I want you to pun off the title of a famous piece of journalism by Harper's contributor, David Foster Wallace. What was Harper's Strain Pun Head? line. Wait. Oh, the name of the list was a, okay. This is the headline above the deadpan Harper's list. A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again. Is that, or is that just a keep going? Keep, keep, uh, consider the, consider the mobster. Consider the mobster. Yes, all right. He is David Chewmaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. We're back Monday or maybe Tuesday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.