The Press Box - Conservative Media vs. Donald Trump, Plus Who Wants to Cover the World Cup?

Episode Date: November 21, 2022

Bryan and David address Donald Trump’s announcement that he will run for president in 2024, and discuss which conservative media figures are behind him and which are leaving him behind (9:25). Later, they talk through the ongoing coverage of the World Cup (27:05), before switching gears and discussing Michael Lewis announcing his next very timely book (38:32). 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. David? Yes. My wife and I had a big night in Hollywood on Thursday. Oh. We started the night by having dinner at Dantanas. How a restaurant I believe he called Venerable.

Mm-hmm. ate a chicken parm as big as a place mat. And then we went to see Chris Rock in concert. And Chris Rock wasn't just performing at any Hollywood venue. He was performing at the Dolby Theater. Oh, wow. The home of the Oscars. Last time he set foot on that stage, a couple months ago,

Will Smith smacked him in the face. I seem to recall that, yeah. But wanted to see, Chris Rock in concert for a long time. And four days after the Oscars, I was online, I was like, wait a second. He's coming to L.A. He's coming to the Oscar Theater. This feels like it's going to be an amazing occasion.

And indeed it was. Walking to the theater Thursday night. First of all, it's just funny to be in the Oscar theater. Oh, yeah. We sort of think in our minds that that theater has used one night a year when Gwyneth Paltrow and Meryl Streep and everybody else filling the seats. Not that they'd probably be up for Wildcrats live, you know, in June or July.

But in fact, they are. At least they were up for Chris Rock. So we're walking around, see those purple seats that are so familiar. The box is on the side. Show starts late. There's a warm-up act. So everybody's going, okay, okay. Then Chris Rock walks out on stage.

And if I can speak for the entire audience, we were sitting there thinking, when is Chris Rock going to let Will Smith have it? Oh, yeah. When is he going to talk about what happened on this stage? And he really played it perfectly. He waited about 10 or 15 minutes. Any longer than that, and you're sitting there and you're sitting there and you're going, okay, we really are going to talk about this tonight, right?

This is not going to go completely unaddressed in your return to the Dolby Theater. But 10 or 15 minutes is just enough to get you laughing to build the anticipation and then, boo looks down the stage. He starts talking about what happened with Will Smith during the Oscar ceremony. Now, I don't want to pull a Michael Scott here and try to do a Chris Rock routine. All of our listeners will be disappointed about that.

But I will just give you one taste of it. He was talking about the size mismatch between Will Smith and Chris Rock. Uh-huh. Kind of an elemental part of that whole scene that I don't think about all that much. So one person is just way bigger than the other person. Yeah.

And as he put it, Will Smith played Muhammad Ali in a movie. Right. And then he said, and I played Pookie in New Jack City. There was a little bit of a size mismatch there. He also came out at the beginning of the show and started talking a little bit about things in the zone we would call cancel culture. Mm-hmm. And I got a little bit worried because. You know, there's been a lot of comedians that have been talking about cancel culture.

Yeah, it's a going topic in the comedy world. You've heard Jerry Seinfeld. You can't play college campuses anymore. I can't go to Ohio State University and I get booed off the stage. I'm like, there are things to talk about with this very large and thorny topic. I'm not sure Jerry Seinfeld is the... Best Messenger or... Yeah, I think Jerry's going to be okay.

You can say this is someone who's seen Jerry Seinfeld in concert. Absolutely. but what was interesting about Chris Rock is I don't really think he had all that much to say about it as a topic. What I think it was is this kind of way of telling the audience, an L.A. audience, a Hollywood audience, that let's just relax a little bit here. We have our guards up a lot.

We're trying to say the right thing, do the right thing. Let's relax. It's a comedy show. We're going to laugh tonight. And it was interesting without even having a critique of, quote unquote cancel culture and everything else. It just was a way of kind of getting everybody relaxed. Sure.

And totally worked on that. By the way, Chris Rock did almost two hours by our count of material. Covered everything from Biden to Trump to the pandemic to Megan Markle to the Kardashians. Wow. To Will Smith. Big range. Also wanted to ask you about this. Have you been to a concert where they put your phone in a bag of?

so you can't access your phone? I was going to ask because when you started saying jokes, I was thinking, are you allowed to tell the jokes? I guess you're allowed to relate your experience. I have, believe it or not, it's wrestling related. When I went to the first ever staging of The Undertaker's One Man show, they put my phone in a bag. Wow.

Yeah. I figured out the workaround, though, which was about halfway through, I went out to call my wife and then when I came back in nobody asked for the phone back. See, that was smart. There's always like one place in the auditorium, right?

Where you can get your phone back or get your phone out of the bag. If people don't know, it's like buying, the bag itself is like buying jeans at the gap where they have that white plastic thing on it and only one person in the gap knows how to take the plastic thing off when you buy the jeans.

Yeah, yeah. It was like a bank bag. Like what, like, those, those, like, leatherette bags where they, like, so where they put, like, bills or checks or whatever. You should have had a dollar sign on it, people carrying it out of the bank. There's one person that knows, and I got to say as a parent like you of young children, is a little nervy to just have no access to your phone. I know, yeah.

Because my wife and I are not checking Twitter mentions during a concert. You're looking down just to see maybe a little quick text of the babysitters. Everything okay. Yeah. everything going well. Or you might need your phone. If you have your kid with you, that phone might be important to keep the kid pacified during the entire presentation.

There's that too. You've been there. Yeah. I got to say, though, not having access to your phone, and I know this is like the most elementary observation in our tech-drenched world. Uh-huh. But, oh my gosh. I mean, that was the night the near death of Twitter was happening.

Oh, yeah. I know I would have just found some reason to look at my phone, convinced myself there was something important to see on there during that show. And instead, you're not only completely focused on what you're watching, which in this case was Chris Rock doing comedy, but I just had no idea how much time was passing. Oh, yeah. I mean, just think of like how many times you look at your phone and you're constantly noting what time it is. like two or three minute increments, five minute increments, whatever it is. Just constant, yeah.

It was amazing to look up like, again, like two hours later and be like, I just have no idea how much time is past. I don't own a watch. And so I have no idea what time it is right now. That was a very funny feeling. They should hand out just like cheap watches as they're taking your phone.

Like a Seco? Yeah. 80s. Basically free now. time X Yeah it is a very It is a very weird experience I found myself drinking more than I would have

Because I just the only thing I have to fumble with my hands Is the glass I'm holding Yeah Yeah I mean I try to not have my phone around Like evenings with the kids I might have in my back pocket but I don't I'm not checking it or whatever that sort of thing So time can pass but it is a totally different experience

To be divorced from your phone To be had to have to be forcibly removed from your phone because then all you can do is think about what might be happening on your phone. I love that Chris Rock and The Undertaker are the two people that society has decided, cannot, you can't have a phone. Focus, attention must be paid. I think there's a lot of music shows in which people do that. But you and I aren't going to anymore if we ever did. No, they didn't take yours away at the Gin Blossoms show, I don't think.

I think phones were encouraged, actually. Coming up on the press box, Donald Trump announced he's running for president again. Is he going to let the conservative media bury him on page 26? The World Cup has started, David, does any journalist want to cover it? Michael Lewis has appeared at the scene of yet another story that has the makings of another huge book and or movie. All that more on the press box, a part of the ringer. Podcast Network. Happy Thanksgiving week media consumers, Brian Curtis.

David Shoemaker producer Erica Cervantes here. David, whenever we do a segment about Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign and really any story about a Donald Trump scandal, we have to add the mandatory question, but will it matter? But will it matter? Yeah. But will it matter? Really, I think we've been asking that about Trump since like 2015 when he first started

running for president. But let's put that question on ice for just one second. while we relive what happened last Tuesday night. Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago announced his intention to pull a Grover Cleveland. He is running for president again. Yeah. And the reaction from Republicans and conservative media was, how would you describe it? Pre-exhausted?

Is that it? Pretty good. Sort of performatively disqualmie. dismissive? I don't mean over the top when I say performatively. I mean like, we have made the decision to be dismissive of this in a sort of formal but preordained way. Mike Pompeo surely made that decision.

Sure. Do you see him getting up there on Twitter? Oh, I did. Yeah, but why don't you read the tweets? Well, I guess it just got, he wanted to put some distance. between himself and the former president. Now, you remember that Mike Pompeo was in Trump's cabinet. You sure was?

He was in Trump's cabinet, and there was not a lot of distance putting during the administration. But he was ready when Donald Trump announced. We were told we'd get tired of winning, but I'm tired of losing. And so are most Republicans. That was one of his tweet. A lot of talk about the electoral record of Trump-endors candidates. It feels like the sort of thing that you'd be willing to hand wave away if you were even remotely interested in another Trump run, right?

It feels like a little bit too much weight is being placed on something that is, you know, relying on a lot of other outside forces. So that's what interests me in part of this. When I read these pieces about Trump and denunciations of Trump, they're almost all based on the fact they think he's going to lose to Joe Biden. That's the argument. That's the argument they're making. Yeah.

And what I'm kind of interested in is, is that their beef with Trump? It's not January 6th. It's not the documents at Mar-a-Lago. It is, we don't want Trump to run for president again because he just helped us lose a lot of midterm races and he's going to lose the presidency against Joe Biden. This is exactly the problem. And this is why it won't work. I mean, I don't know if Trump's going to. be the nominee. I don't know if Trump's going to be our next president, but this is, but this line of

attack certainly won't work because they're, they're not, they're being disingenuous. That's not the argument, right? That, that is, they're trying to basically, like, work the refs in order to get the outcome that they, that they desire, but it has nothing to do with the, with the, with the, with their actual feelings about the man are, right? I mean, as far as Mike Pompeo goes and put Mike Pence in the same category, the fact that they, like, hit him, their wagons to Trump, I mean, at the time and in retrospect, seemingly solely to set themselves up for presidential runs, should be disqualifying on the merits just right off the bat, right? Not just from a moral political standpoint of view, but just from an idiocy standpoint of

view. You know, I mean, it's they, that was a terrible decision, especially when now when Trump can run again, what you think he, you expected him to clear out? I mean, how, how naive are you? and clear out and endorse you. You know, that's, I mean, Pompeo is in his own weird category. I was texting you this. I mean, there's always, every, every administration brings at least one person with it who believes to be positioning themselves for a future presidential run and just could not be more wrong.

It's not that Mike Pompeo hasn't been discussed in those terms, but there seems to be, he's discussed with a sort of obligation, right? Former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo is exploring his own presidential run. I mean, it's a, we should call it like the Bill Richardson Memorial Award or whatever. He's not Memorial. He's still alive. But there's always somebody who just like takes their, takes their, you know, their work in the White House is on the resume. And just like, well, now I'm up, right?

I'm next. I got next. No, you don't. I mean, that's not even remotely how this works. Mike Pence, being vice president obviously has some history behind it. But that on its own, especially with that track record? No. I mean, just absolutely not.

the last thing you should be doing is going is go from a vice presidential run than to be seen is turning your back on the person you were serving under and then expect to be handed the nomination but anyway no they they all and it's the same thing with fox news and everybody else they all kind of made a deal with the devil they're all like we'll tolerate trump for x amount of time or you know to whatever extent uh for yeah and there is a transactional part of it for the for the electoral victory he's going to promise in in his own electoral victory. And then for whatever help he will have

in setting up our next one, and then we will be rid of him. Well, that was the same deal they were making when he was dabbling in politics, when he was running for the presidency. They made this deal over and over again. And at every point at the end of whatever the holding note, whatever the contract they signed,

at the end of it, they're always just like, well, now we'll roll our eyes at him a little bit and hope that he just sort of shuffles away. and then he doesn't, and then everybody goes back to acknowledging him again. I mean, that's just the way it works over and over again

because nobody actually is going to stand up and say, we think he's a terrible person and an even worse politician, terrible for our country, terrible for our party, and we don't want to be part of any party that he's a part of.

No one will say that. And unless you say that, then the viewers are, I think just left a little bit, the viewers, the voters, are all left a little bit perplexed. The coverage of the announcement was interesting. Fox News cut away from it at some point.

Yeah. Laura Engram with the performative eye roll of her, you know, just like, yeah, we'll go back whenever he says something significant. We get the gist of it. Yeah.

And apparently they then moved to a panel of people praising Trump. So again, not exactly the editorial line in the sand. New York Post put the announcement on page 26 of the physical newspaper with the punt. headline, Ben There, Don That. Oh my gosh. And wrote this very arched little write-up that said,

with just 720 days to go before the next election, a Florida retiree made the surprise announcement Tuesday night that he was running for president. That's how the New York Post covered it. That's great. Trump's daughter Ivanka was a no-show at the announcement. Stepping away from politics, yeah. Stepping away from politics. This was my favorite.

Don Jr. was also a no-show, and I saw someone tweet that this is Philip Melanthon Wagman of Real Clear Politics or Real Clear News, tweeted,

Donald Trump Jr. was on a hunting trip in the mountains out west. Is this a Sam Shepard or David Mamet play that we have stumbled into in the mountains out west and wasn't able to catch a flight out to attend the campaign

kickoff per source familiar because of bad weather. Oh my gosh. That's my new excuse. If I cannot be in the place that I am otherwise expected to be in, that I am going to be on a hunting trip in the mountains out west. Oh, yeah. There was also a conga line of Republicans who were raising their hands to not endorse Trump. We mentioned Pompeo.

Dave Weigel and Semaphore noted that Corey Booker's 2020 campaign for the Democratic nomination for president launched Weigel rights with more congressional support than Trump has now. But here's the question that every Trump segment must grapple with or at least end with. Does it matter?

Does it matter that there was this almost scripted pre-exhaustion with the idea of Donald Trump running for president one more time? Well, I just want to point out that outside of the political and on-screen talking ads, there was also the weird tension between the various headlines in like the quote unquote serious or even some would say liberal

media that people were pointing out on Twitter that, you know, while CNN always trying to curry that centrist or, you know, find that centrist's ground said they broke the story with just in former president. Donald Trump announces another run for the White House and enters the race aiming to become only the second U.S. president ever elected to two non-consecutive terms. While at the exact same time in PR said, breaking Donald Trump, who, tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and inspired a deadly riot at the Capitol in a desperate attempt to keep himself in power, has filed to run for president again in 2024.

Wait, so CNN prioritized Grover Cleveland, that's what you're saying? That's one way of putting it. But does it matter, David? Well, that's the thing. Does it matter? Does it matter? How you frame his announcement, his run. Does it matter if Laura Ingraham cuts away?

Does it matter if the New York Post buries him on page 26? Well, I do think it matters. The Fox News stuff, I do think, will matter if they're, if they stick to it. But they've shown that they're not really willing to stick to it in, you know, at previous points in time. I mean, because the same, with his first election, you know, with his first run, I think it was pretty definitive that just. the news networks, the fact that he was constantly on TV was a huge part of legitimizing him as a

candidate. Yes. And not having him on TV at all. I mean, if you can actually just ignore the fact that he's running, I think that would probably hurt his candidacy quite a bit. But that's a, you know, that's a tough call even if you're, you know, not a fan of the man. And probably a bad call to outright ignore a candidate of that. that stature, even if you believe him to be a criminal. Will it matter? I mean, it's really hard to predict. I think probably none of this will matter at all.

I think framing him as a criminal is the right thing to do, but how much effect would that have amongst voters? I mean, it might be marginal. And in terms of, you know, other Republicans in Congress, elsewhere, I mean, if it's not a, if it's not a unified front, I just don't see how it all matter. I mean, nobody was behind Trump last time, you remember? Until he started until he, until he like perp walked Chris Christie out there on stage. And then a couple people started like lining up behind him, you know, but it wasn't, it's not

like he had a whole bunch of like people out there advocating for him that weren't members of his family. Now, he doesn't have members of his family maybe around him this time either. But I don't think it matters. Trump creates his own, his own orbit, you know, he'll get, he'll get Linda McMahon out there, Carrie Lake or whoever, you know, and. Yeah, Carrie, Carrie Lake is in, for sure. I think it's interesting when you talk about other Republicans,

a number of whom would like to run for president in 2024, either would Trump not running or against a weakened Trump so that they have a chance to actually win the nomination? what he's doing is a fairly normal political tactic. I'm going to get in the race and I'm going to try to scare everybody else out of the race. People do that all the time. And, you know, I'm going to suck up as much oxygen as I can. I'm going to try to have this show of strength. Even if I just help the Republicans lose several midterm races, I'm going to flex my muscles.

I'm going to start attacking and I'm going to, you know, make it very, very tricky for other people to get it. Make them think twice and make them think, you know what, 2028 may be just fine, says Rhonda Santis, says Nikki Haley, says Chris Sununu, whoever you want to put on that list of people that would potentially seek the nomination. So let's say it's, it's very normal. It's just, it's Trump. So of course, it's ad normal. It's one week after the midterms. It's in this announcement that, you know, nobody can wrap their minds around or wants to wrap their minds around. also by the way does america really know what to do with one-term presidents no is that just such a weird idea that uh you know george h w bush would have run for another term or jimmy

carter after they lost the presidency i feel like beyond trump that just does not exist in american political media vernacular no i mean there's a sort of the sort of norm that would argue against it. Well, obviously we know that all norms are sort of out the window in this day and age, but also from any sort of like logical point of view, any regular human, no matter how power hungry you are, whatever kind of person it is that makes up to, you know, that decides to run for the presidency,

it's pretty easy to imagine talking yourself into the post-presidential life as being a better option, right? I mean, you can kind of wield as much power behind the scenes as you want to within your party and in the world and whatever kind of backdoor lobbying and speechgiving, quote, unquote, that you're doing. I mean, you can so wield a whole lot of political power and potentially more in certain ways. And, you know, you're one of the whatever, like the 20 most famous human beings after post-being president.

you know i mean there's it's there's there's not a lot of downside and the upside of not having to live that life every day is i think for most people who've done it pretty pretty pretty pretty palatable i don't know uh it's but trump's you know trump's one of one so i mean we can all understand reasons why he would want to i mean it's justice department etc etc yeah yeah and i mean And listen, I think, you know, Biden presents an interesting foil for him because while people don't, I mean, you know, his approval ratings are great, people don't hate, hate Biden like they've hated Trump and Obama and whatever on, on the, on the, on from the opposition. Um, he's, he, he, he seems, he, he, he probably seems beatable to Trump too, you know, I mean, another, you know, it's, it's, winning reelection is fairly common, you know, and, and, and for a lot of presidents. It might seem more of a straight line. But Trump kind of throws everything into disarray.

Coming up at 30 seconds, does anyone want to cover the World Cup this year? Plus, Michael Lewis seems to have done it again. But first, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the Pressbox pod where they are always gratefully received. this week we considered tweets about Bob Iger coming back to Disney to replace Bob Chapic samples has there ever been a more popular release

from the Disney vault or Bob Iger just sent a company-wide email telling all employees to print out their 10 best pages of scripts and bring them to the 15th floor of Disney HQ by 1 a.m. for review. That is Bob Iger as Elon Musk. But this week's winner comes from the continued emulation of altruist and crypto guy

Sam Bankman-Fried the Michael Lewis subject this item is from Bloomberg David Crypto brokerage Genesis is suspending redemptions and new loan originations at its lending business after facing what it described

as abnormal withdrawal requests in the aftermath of the collapse of FTX it was an overwork Twitter joke to write Genesis is experiencing an exodus whenever I see a biblical one, I just got to give it to the son of the preacher man. Yeah.

Feed it to Shoemaker. If you think there's something biblical about this scandal, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. In the notebook dump, the World Cup has begun, David. US is playing whales as we record this podcast. And I wanted to dive a little bit into the coverage of this year's World Cup.

We have some journalists, some sports writers, who are there covering it to use a tried and true press boxism. This really feels like covering the Olympics on steroids. Where as a sports writer you got two jobs.

Cover the sports. Bring me home the story. Yeah. Give me U.S. Wales. Give me your gamer. And then tell me about the host country. Yeah.

Tell me about their human rights record. Tell me about all the ugliness involved in how they the World Cup and how they built the stadiums for the World Cup. It is one of those things. And I've always, you know, somebody called me about this couple of years ago was like talking about coverage of the Olympics over the years. I was like, I think if we went back and looked that sports writers have done a pretty good job of balancing those two jobs over the years,

that and especially now, but I bet even historically, if we looked, they went in ready to tell both of those stories. Right. At an event like this. Now notice I say writers and not television. Because that is where it gets a little bit dicey. But what do you think? What faces the soccer writer who is right now sort of trying to tell the story of a tournament,

of an interesting American team, and also all of the stuff, to use an elegant word, going on around it. Well, hmm, John Oliver had a great segment on this this week, and I highly recommend it. Don't wouldn't go out of my way

to recommend all of his monologues as hilarious as he is on this show. So, I mean, I think it was really smart and pretty inclusive, I mean, pretty, you know, touched on just about every base you'd wanted to. But one of the points they made towards the end was when you look at the World Cup in Russia,

there was a good amount of coverage of human rights and civil rights and everything else in the country leading up to it. And as soon as the, you know, balls are flying around, that's all we heard about. And certainly, that's all you remember from that World Cup is the winning, right, and losing. And I think that that speaks to the sort of most difficult, the most difficult task for journalists, which is to somehow, I mean, to cover the non-socer elements of it in such a way that it's not fleeting, you know, that it's not color to the story of a game. You know, as horrific as some of the human rights abuses undergirding this World Cup are, it would and as shocking as some of them as many of them probably are to people hearing about them for the first time

if it doesn't stick it's not that much different than you know then the opening graph describing the poverty in the college town where you're covering the football game you know and and that's i mean i don't have an answer but that's that's the that's the real that's the that's the real difficulty Well, let's workshop an answer here because what would this look like? I mean, do we want a sports writer to say, okay, it's the run up to the World Cup. You're landed in the country. You're there for the first few days before the action kicks off. That's when I want you to write your pieces when you have time to deal with tricky issues with the time, give them the time and space that they require.

Do we want to say like you, you are not going to write an article about soccer without finding a way to put this into it, even if you're writing about a game. So find a way to nod to the reader about the stadium this game is played in or the conditions that got this tournament here so that there is not just a pure sports article that you're releasing. I mean, how do we think, what do we think? Let's say we come in with the right intentions. The publication comes in with the right intentions.

They want to cover both of these stories. What's the, how just functionally. do you do it? I don't know. I mean, listen, there's practical aspects to it. There's the clip of it. Was it a Dutch television crew that's been, that kind of went viral when they started shooting outside and immediately got shut down by some Qatari officials of some sort in a golf cart,

physically, you know, stopped from filming? How do you do it? I mean, it's hard to know. You know what I was thinking is, you remember when, what was it? was it Kelly Dwyer, the old NBA writer, who got into trouble for calling Quicken Arena, the Cube, predatory loans arena, and Dan Gilbert had him fired from Yahoo or whatever.

I mean, it's only that sort of insidiousness that would really, that I think would really have any lasting effect, right? And sometimes the punishment becomes the Clarion call or whatever, but to, but if there's a way to weave the sort of intrinsic human catastrophe into the telling of the soccer or football stories, I mean, maybe that would have a more permanent effect, you know, get it. I mean, something as basic as getting the human rights abuses on the record in the gamers, you know, like, so would you Google, when you search the New York Times for a story about this in six months,

they're not separate pieces, right? It's kind of key, it's weaving. it together in some sort of way. So you do your so maybe you have big pieces just addressing the country, the laws, human rights, getting the World Cup, those kinds of things, but then you find a clever way to weave it into the piece somehow. So there's not something that is just a 100% a sports story. Yeah. I mean, listen, it's you can put as much of it and insert on the athletes and they're in a very, you know, particular position. But if there's, were a single team of note that boycotted or that threatened to boycott, whatever. The most significant thing you could do to a tournament like this would be to put an asterisk

on it. You know, I mean, to have, so that, I mean, that's the way you discuss it. Instead of, yeah, well, they won, Lakers won the NBA championship, but it was in the bubble. You'd say, well, yeah, you know, whoever, Italy won the World Cup in Qatar, but that's because there was all these human rights violations and some of the teams didn't show up, you know? But that's sort of imaginary. I noticed Grant Wall on his substack today had an article. He writes,

When I arrived at the stadium media entrance to cover the United States Wales World Cup game today, wearing a rainbow soccer ball t-shirt supporting the LGBTQ community, the security guards refused to let me in, detain me for 25 minutes, and angrily demanded that I remove my t-shirt. You have to change your shirt, one guard told me it's not allowed. This is the moment that he tweets a picture of himself, and the shirt out in real time puts it on Twitter. He continues a moment after tweeting that one guard forcibly ripped my phone from my hands.

Nearly half an hour past one security guard told me my shirt was political quote unquote and not allowed. Another continually refused to give me my phone back. Another guard yelled at me as he stood above me. I was sitting on a chair by now that I had to remove my t-shirt. Eventually he's let into the game. But he does write this, talk about it, tweet it. in real time. It's kind of an interesting example of what you're talking about of joining these two

things. Yeah. I also want to point attention to Ben Strauss's article in the Washington Post. He wrote about the television coverage of the World Cup. Now, this is where it often gets dicey. You know, when I hear people saying, why aren't the media covering, they often are covering those kinds of things, especially in sports writing. It just happens to be, as we talked about in two different pieces. Well, here's Fox, which has the World Cup rights in the United States. Also, Telemundo, which has Spanish language rights to the World Cup, they have completely different ideas about what they're going to do. Fox said, we're going to cover soccer. That's why people are coming to us. Telemundo said, nope, we're going to treat it like NBC treats the Olympics,

according to Strauss's article. We're going to try to weave in some of that material. We can't cover it without doing it. Strauss also says that Qatar Airways, the Stadon airline, will serve as a major sponsor of the network's coverage, which means Fox's production in Qatar is essentially being underwritten by the Qatari government. According to three people familiar with Fox's plans, Strauss continues, the network was initially planning to use mostly remote production and send a minimal contingent of staffers and talent to Qatar. The strategy changed only after the deal with Qatar Airways was finalized that agreement included comped flights to Qatar said those people speaking on the condition of anonymity, et cetera, et cetera. Fox denied the part about the comp flights after publication.

But television, as it often does, is going to exist, I think, here on a totally separate plane, at least in the United States. And it's interesting to know that it's different from NBC, because again, NBC would get dinged for this every four years, now two years with Olympics coverage. why aren't you doing this? And I could, Bob Costas would come back and say, I talked about that on the air. I interviewed some of it, right? I talked about that.

It just was not literally present at the very end of the dream team's basketball game. But I talked about that stuff. Here is Fox essentially saying, we're not going to talk about it. Yeah. We're not going to have that mandatory pregame segment. By the way, as they have done with social issues for the NFL

and for many, many other things over the years. Yeah. I mean, and you understand from a Craven, you know, commercial perspective, why they would do that. I mean, and it's not literally, I mean, listen, it's not so different from my wife asked me, today, like, why are people, why do people even watch, you know, like, why can't they, can't they not watch the World Cup this time with all this, you know, horrific backstory? It's like, well, no, it's, this is the most important soccer event. It's like the Olympics, you know, and people are going to watch.

People are going to care. You can't, I mean, not everyone's going to opt out. You can lodge their protest and whatever way seems suitable to them. But at the end of the day, this is, you know, this is kind of the blood-soaked backdrop of an event we're all going to watch anyway. So it's a little bit, it's understandable why someone at Fox would make that decision and sort of hand-wave the whole thing away because, you know, no one's stopping them. No one's going to hold them accountable for it. So you take the easy way out.

David, I am pleased to report to you that Michael Lewis has done it again. Michael Lewis, that is, of course, the best-selling author of Moneyball and many, many other books, was the subject of an email that the Ancler obtained and printed the other day. This is an email from Matthew Snyder, the CAA agent, which revealed that, quote for the past six months or so, Michael Lewis has been traveling with and interviewing Sam Bankman-Fried. Yes.

So Michael Lewis's next book is about the biggest story in the business world right now. Childhood, early success on Wall Street, embrace of effective altruism and the creation of a crypto empire, et cetera, et cetera, the email reads.

Michael hasn't written anything yet, but the story has become too big for us to wait. Yep. Let me know if I've piqued your interest. The email printed by the Ancler concludes, what do you think of Michael Lewis being in the right place at the right time once again? Well, incredible work by him.

Love that pitch letter. I mean, that's like a book agent's favorite thing when they're just like, I've got, this news is breaking, and I have the book for you. I don't have to worry about cooking up a proposal. or dealing it all with the content of it. This is, man, this is a writer who's got the inside track for the subject. Let's just make this thing happen.

Let me know if this is of any interest to you. I think that sort of, and the answer is baked in there. Yes, we are all very interested. And this is a perfect Michael Lewisman, man. I mean, because even people who sort of have been following the story have no idea what's going on. You know, I mean, this is a field, a subject. where, you know, his retelling of it is going to be very important to our memory of it,

you know, to our understanding of it as it. And it's not over, right? So, yeah, he knew where to be, I guess. Here's my only question. There was a lot of journalism, congrats, Twitter and journalism performative jealousy Twitter about this announcement. what if Michael Lewis had published this book before Sam Bankman-Freed's empire collapsed? Like,

do we understand what book Michael Lewis was going to write about Sam Bankman-Freed before the whole thing came crashing down? Huh. You think he was going to be Billy Bean in this book?

I don't know. I mean, I have no idea. But I think that's an interesting question that I'd love to hear Michael Lewis talk about when this book comes out or anytime. Well, I mean, I think I can predict what his answer will be. I don't know who the heroes of the book are going to be when I start writing. Yeah.

But it turns out like that the ending came at a very convenient literary moment for him. Because now you can track back. And what you have, not only is the story of the demise of this figure, but you understand where this is going to end up. This isn't like writing a Houston Astros are awesome book after their first World Series championship. And that's like, uh-oh, Houston Astros, not so awesome. I wish I could pull that one back.

You have the whole narrative arc now. And there's at least a possibility. And again, I don't know what Michael was thinking. I don't know what book he was going to write, but that you come in at an inconvenient moment in the narrative arc. Mm-hmm. and write something that then six months later, year later, whatever it is, goes, uh-oh. So I think if we're doing right place, right time, let's extend it all the way to

right time. I mean, right time that this is going down. He can start from word one now, knowing the end of the story. Yeah. And tracking back to where this ends up. So it really is a superb bit of literary timing all the way around. Yeah. Yeah, I wonder how embedded he is. He is so embedded. Yeah. It's Billy Bean sitting around with the conference call about the baseball prospects embedded. I'm guessing that much or more.

Absolutely. What would you do at the first, like, the first All Hands ringer meeting, if Bill was talking to it and he was like, oh, that guy in the corner, that's Michael Lewis. He's just. I would not say anything. We journalists couldn't take it. No. Absolutely. That's Michael Lewis.

He's going to do a little something. He wants to track what we're doing here and maybe turn it into something someday. Would you sort of audition to be the Michael Lewis character if you knew that was happening? Oh, yeah. Just open a piece of paper and it's like, I actually ran some numbers last night about how we can build an effective website. And here's what I came up with. A lot of you older hands might not like to hear this. Oh, yeah.

You either have to recede it in the wallpaper or just try to become a character that you think would be appealing. And now it's time for David Shoemaker guesses, the strained pun headline. Yeah. Today's headline comes to us from Corey, Anvarapur, and Noah Leiford. It's from the paper that buried Donald Trump's announcement, The New York Post. The story is about a man who completed a marathon in three and a half hours. Pretty impressive. While smoking the entire time, literally he was running with cigarettes and then lighting up fresh cigarettes.

All right. For the length of the marathon. I think that's all you need. Apparently. What was the New York Post strain pun headline? Marathon. That's a marathon man, Marlborough man thing. Smoke.

chain smoking. Remember, it's a marathon, not a sprint. Type of running event we would call you. There we go. Not long distance, but... Long. Where's that all that's... Where's all that bad stuff going, David, when you smoke a cigarette?

Long. Oh, long distance? Long distance. That's great. long distance. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantus. David and I are back Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.