The Press Box - Covering Coronavirus. Plus: 2020 Updates | The Press Box

Episode Date: March 12, 2020

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker talk about the coronavirus (02:00) before looking at what Bernie Sanders does next (24:00) and the discussions about Joe Biden’s health (33:30). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the ringer here. This is the press box and our usual funny opening is canceled for the coronavirus because that's what we're here to talk about today, David. We will do some campaign stuff toward the end of this podcast if we have the stomach for it. But I don't think there's really much of a news story in this country right now other than what we watched unfold in its latest iteration on Wednesday night. I wanted to start David by just talking. about what it was like to watch TV and consume the news on Wednesday. Earlier in the day, we had the Dow Jones fall into a bare market for the first time in 11 years. We learned the NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments would be played without fans.

Now they might not be played at all. On Wednesday night, we watched Donald Trump address the nation. And then it was like, oh, wait, if you're watching cable news, you're actually watching the wrong channel. because over on ESPN, we were learning that Utah jazz player Rudy Gobert had tested positive for coronavirus, and the Jazz Thunder game had been canceled. And then the NBA announced that all league play had been suspended. We now know that Gobert's teammate Donovan Mitchell has also tested positive. We learned that Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson had tested positive for coronavirus in Australia.

there now been more than 1,300 cases in the U.S. and 38 confirmed deaths. We don't need Rudy Gobert and Tom Hanks, David, to tell us this was a serious issue. But it did feel like last night was the moment a huge chunk of America sort of finally locked in. I mean, I can only speak from, you know, where I was sitting, which is with my family, with my two kids. and for, you know, for their sake was sort of avoiding the news once I realized what was going on. But it all sort of came to me as, as these things so often do in the modern age, it's like a series of push notifications. I left work and then, you know, realized that there were some stuff that they had already announced some of the, you know, sporting events without fans and that sort of thing. And they were, you know, the NBA was obviously looking eyeing that as a possibility.

and then, you know, California, I mean, you know, there were the, yeah, in California, they'd already prohibited that. But it was only, but it was only when the Rudy Gobert, or the Utah Jazz stuff started popping up on my phone, got pushed notifications about that, games completely called off. I mean, that just seems like something from a science fiction movie. And then push, then multiple, multiple notifications about Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson testing positive. in Australia, which again just seems like something so bizarre. And then at that point, I mean, you know, I went back and watched, I mean, the president afterwards,

but I mean, everything, everything, I mean, at that point it just becomes hard to sort of separate oneself from, right? I mean, it's hard to get any, it's hard to get any, like, intellectual distance from the situation at all, for some reason, I think everyone can agree if it wasn't a real concern, if it didn't feel really immediate before yesterday evening, that was the evening where the news made it urgent. Yeah. And I think part of the reason the coronavirus story has been hard for American consumers to wrap their mind around or a lot of American consumers anyway, for a couple of reasons. One is, you know, it was somewhere else, right, for a long period of time. And we have

seen politicians, including the president of the United States, really try to make it as a foreign virus, right? This is something that is somewhere else that may be coming over here. It's also that it, at least in America, was slow moving until it wasn't, right? Or until it isn't right now. So there's this whole sort of time lapse kind of issue where you think, well, you know, hey, I, yeah, I hear about this coronavirus in the news, but I went to the grocery store today and everybody was fine. And, and that kind of stuff. So again, it's just very difficult. I was actually, it was very funny to watch Washington governor, that is Washington State Governor, former presidential candidate Jay Inslee yesterday.

He had just announced that there could be no more large gatherings in the Seattle area. Reporter from NBC asks, how can he enforce that and listen to Inslee's response? What are the penalties exactly for not abiding by the ban? The penalties are you might be killing your granddad if you don't do it. And I'm serious about this. the principal reason this is going to work is for people to understand the consequences of lack of community responsibility. What you hear Inslee doing there, don't you, is just trying as hard as he can as somebody who's a leader there in Washington State to cut through the noise.

Like, how can I get the attention of the public? It's going to kill your grandfather if you do. don't do what I'm saying, right? That is what it has the potential to do. That's what we're talking about here. And that's the reason not only the government should have some urgency in confronting the virus, but you should too. Yeah, I mean, tearing through the noise is, I mean, getting through the noise is the most

difficult part of anything, especially anything really serious in our media landscape today. And, you know, without politicizing it too much, I mean, our president has not done a great job in being really clear about the severity of the situation. And it's taken, you know, I mean, even statements like that, I think, I mean, maybe didn't fall in deaf ears, but I don't think all the ears were necessarily tuned in. It takes, like, the real world examples of, you know, sports shutting down, you know, of, like, offices of your job saying work from home for the receivable future. I mean, this is, like, real kind of halting stuff.

famous people, right? Testing positive. Because again, it's, oh, well, you know, there have been 1,300 cases in the United States. What does that mean to a normal media consumer, right? Oh, Tom Hanks has it. Rudy Gobert has it. Now I suddenly sort of jolt awake and go,

oh, whoa, that's weird. Over at our Twitter handle at the Pressbox pod, Jace Barton asked an interesting question. He said, how do you think the coronavirus outbreak would be different in the world 20 years ago, to what extent does a rise of social media and ever faster news cycles help or hurt the world's response?

I don't know if you and I have the epidemiology background to actually answer the disease part of that, but the news consumer part of that's really fascinating because there's more good information than ever out in the world. There's also more bad information out in the world than ever before.

I think that's probably, you know, one of the problems we confront about everything with the new media universe. But with something like this, right, you can, and I see people complaining, like, I saw somebody complaining a day, only, oh, you know, we should take this out of the hands of political reporters, because this is not a political story. I'm thinking, what, what, what are you reading? Because every time I open the New York Times every day for the last two weeks, there's been a billion articles about coronavirus, not written by not written or not only written by Maggie Haberman. So I'm not really sure whether even the complaint is. But there is also this institution of Fox News out in the world in places like that where allies of the president, I saw Rush Limbaugh making comments about this today on the radio who are putting, you know, this is a hoax, right? This is this is part of a democratic plan or just panicking you. So people are also getting really bad information.

And that's sort of the nub of it. Yeah. I mean, I think you hit all the important points there. Certainly, the technological age that we live in has huge benefits, right? I mean, anyone can Google coronavirus symptoms and the first hit that you're going to get is going to be a legitimate source. I mean, unless you're using a search engine that, you know, is already off the rails. But I mean, you can, you, you immediately find yourself with the answers that you would have only had sort of anecdotally 20 years ago. I think, you know, you're talking about cutting through the the noise earlier and I think that that's maybe that's probably the hugeest difference is that 20 years ago you know the president certainly would have had a big role but I think even more centrally than that that like Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings and Ted Cople would have been telling us exactly I mean they would have been the guiding voices in the whole thing right and if Tom if Tom Brokaw says you know everybody stay inside then I think most people are going to do it

right I mean they have they had a power of an ability to cut through the noise in a way that doesn't exist now. So it's, you know, it's hard to imagine. I mean, listen, there's going to be a lot of misinformation on social media. I think for the most part,

hopefully people are getting good information. But I do, I am seeing a lot of people who are in kind of various states of ironic denial. And I think that that's both the symptom of the age that we're living in. And it also probably has a lot to do

with sort of ingrained politics and the news and the sources from which you're getting your news. Definitely. The Brokaw point is a great one because if you just, I was watching Rachel Maddell last night and she was doing one of her typical, incredibly well-informed, incredibly tonally sort of,

you know, middle of the road explainers about just what was going on, what were likely to face as a nation over the coming days and weeks. And I thought, this is great. And this is just, this is like in about 15 minutes, you can learn a ton about coronavirus,

even if you haven't been paying attention to anything else over the last few weeks. And then at the same time, I thought, how many people are watching this right now, especially compared to just like reading Twitter, whatever they're doing? And the answer is not very many,

right? There isn't that Brokaw, rather Peter Jennings-style character saying, here is kind of something, here is where the monoculture is right now. Here's where everybody is doing this. Instead, everybody's getting stuff from different places. And again, often those places are way more detailed, way more nuanced, way better than the NBC Nightly News was in 1989 or whatever.

But you just don't have that single clearinghouse. And again, not to make this overly political, but the one person who has the potential to do that probably is the president of United States. and when he is himself an untrustworthy vector of information, you know, you are in really, really a strange media climate. Speaking of which, Trump did address the nation last night, the idea was project calm, show that the administration was doing stuff. In that effort, he said this. After consulting with our top government health professionals,

I have decided to take several strong but necessary actions to protect the health and well-being of all Americans. To keep new cases from entering our shores, we will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days. The new rules will go into effect Friday at midnight. These restrictions will be adjusted subject to conditions on the ground. There will be exemptions for Americans who have undergone appropriate, screenings and these prohibitions will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo, but various other things as we get approval. Anything coming from Europe to the United States is what we are discussing.

These restrictions will also not apply to the United Kingdom. So that turned out to be incorrect. Yeah. The incredibly important address to the nation turned out to be factually incorrect. trade from Europe is not banned. And Trump had to clean that up on Twitter later. Trump also said during the address that insurance companies had agreed to waive copays for coronavirus treatment.

That is incorrect. They only agreed to waive it for coronavirus testing, which of course two very different things. His delivery of that speech was one of the strangest things I've ever seen. You could hear a little bit of it there, almost struggling to sort of get the words out at some point, you know, or read the prompter or something and you're just going, I don't know what the worst case scenario presidential address is in that case, but that has got to be like bottom 10%.

Oh, yeah. And what, I mean, what's interesting to me is, you know, you put that, you can juxtapose that with the first press conference he gave on coronavirus a week or a week and a half ago, something like that. He actually was really upbeat. I thought really kind of compelling, even though we got some facts wrong. like he was kind of, he was focused and he was seeing, I mean, I'm reading too much into it probably, but seemed to be sort of like enjoying the fact that he had like one big thing that he could focus on.

This was completely different. And obviously there's been a lot of reporting that he's just overwhelmed, not just with the job responsibilities, but also with the notion that like the liberal media is blowing this up to try to like tank the markets and, ruin his presidency. There's, there have been stories that he is even more conspiratorial that he thinks people are actively trying to infect him. I mean,

there's all kinds of just incredible reporting going on around this. And you, and that was the sort of, again, reading too much into it, that was the voice of a man who was not happy to be giving the speech that he was giving, right?

I mean, not, that he was not happy to be in that position. And certainly, as we, you know, mentioned earlier, that does a written incredible disservice,

not just in the errors in the things that he said, but it does a huge disservice to the fight that America is going through right now, that the world is going through right now, to sort of present such like a literal, I mean, just like an unenthusiastic, mealy-mouthed present. It almost doesn't matter what the words he says were. It's just like he was just so out of it

that it lost any significance it might have. And even if we forgive him for the, theatrical part of it. Let's just say, okay, we'll just put that aside for the moment. The fact there were mistakes in the speech, the fact that a great amount of the speech was devoted to praising his own administration's efforts and his efforts to combat coronavirus when, in fact, what's been coming from the president is a blizzard of misinformation, downplaying the virus, blaming Democrats, right? Didn't he call Jay Inslee a snake the other day? Which didn't think we'd see that insult twice in 2020 under totally.

different circumstances. As of Thursday, when we record this podcast, he had not yet canceled a campaign rally in Florida later this month and in fact brag on Thursday that the rally was sold out, quote unquote. The other thing, when we talk about symbolism and how it takes somebody like Tom Hanks or Rudy Gobert to kind of wake everybody up, well, here's another symbolic thing. The president of United States was in the company of various people

exposed to coronavirus. Yeah. Over the last several days, including one. Brazilian official who has tested positive himself. So, you know, when you're trying to project something to the nation, you're like, oh, wow, the protocols weren't even in place to keep the president away. That was a surreal. He had that news conference the other day where it was mostly being handled by Mike Pence,

but Trump kind of came in to say a few things and didn't take any questions. And as soon as he's walking away, reporters are yelling at him, have you been tested yet? I mean, when have we ever seen anything like that with the president of the United States? That was wild. Yeah, I mean, supremely weird. But talking about the symbolism of him, you know, coming into contact with infected people, I mean, that is kind of in microcosm, maybe the most significant and the most positive thing that our modern media landscape can do is actually show us in real time to draw out the significance,

to draw out the actual method of the virus's infection that is happening to be able to, I mean, the most positive thing, I mean, it sounds terrible. Maybe the most positive thing for raising awareness Trump did was to come into contact with those people because now there's news articles drawing those lines, right? And what was really, what was really, I thought, I mean, I think what got us the most about some of the NBA stuff, certainly canceling games, having, you know, the specter of having games without fans, that's all real stuff. But, you know, the Utah Jazz situation drew a really great diagram of the dangers that we go through. Now, who knows how much of this stuff is real,

but Rudy Gobert, who is apparently diagnosed the coronavirus, had kind of scoffed at the notion of eliminating reporters from the locker room a couple of days ago, and apparently it'd, like, performatively put his hand on every microphone. Then he comes down with it. But it's not just that. Now, Donovan Mitchell, another star of the team, has tested positive. he's handling it superbly well, but now stories are coming out that his dad, who works for the Mets,

I believe, was visiting him in the past few days, is now back with the team. So we're seeing how this thing can spread in real time, right? And by the way, word has just come out

that the NBA has told its teams that they're suspending the, you know, games for a minimum of 30 days. So, I mean, this is a real, like, ABC, like you see how, you see what this, with coronavirus or any epidemic like this can mean.

and I don't know that we should be grateful for that. I mean, it seems odd to say, but at least we can be aware in a way that maybe we wouldn't have been in the past. Yeah, I mean, at some point America was going to have to figure this out. Like I said, it figured it out the most dramatic way possible and involved NBA players, movie stars in the president of the United States. So, yeah, I don't know if you're right, grateful may not be the right word, but it's like, here it is, right? If you didn't understand how serious this was. And to the Gobert point, this is pretty fascinating, right? Now, we don't know.

I think people are taking, we're taking a lot of quick steps, right, by saying Rudy Gobert did this and he, and he's the vector of the virus. We don't really know any of this, right? I mean, we don't know how he got it. We don't know who it is. There's a lot of, the story that I just told could have been that, I mean, the reverse could be true, right? I mean, it all could have come from like someone who flew on an airplane with Donovan Mitchell's dad, you know, and then it went the other direction. Like we just don't know, but what we do know is that this like web of connections is what we're is what we're battling against right now. Totally. And I was just, I was just going to go to your point about Gobert touching the microphones and the recorders the other day.

Because it goes to something you mentioned a few minutes ago, which is this ironic detachment that has, that you're right has been, I think basically the key of Twitter for the last week plus about coronavirus, including among the kind of educated. let us say left-leaning people that are reading the good information about the virus, right? That are that at least are plugged in and kind of are understand it or want to make an effort to understand what's going on. There's been a lot of that. And I understand that. That is kind of like journalists like go-to mode for handling anything, especially bad news is gallows humor, right? But it's also one of these things where, oh, you know, oh, oh, fuck.

I'm just, we're all doomed or whatever and I'm just going to do whatever I want to do is actually really the wrong course of action here. You know? And the right course of action is prevent, you know, prevent this as much as you can, right? Overreact a little bit so that what's coming isn't worse than it has to be. And it's just funny how those two things, and again, I'm not blaming anybody. I'm not saying we made it worse or anything like that. But that emotion of just ironic detachment, oh,

screw it all. It seems just particularly, particularly wrong for this external event. That's all on the time. It's true. And I mean, this is a different piece of the media. But, you know, I think everybody sitting where we said just saw a very quick trajectory from our peers reacting to the potential of being like shut out of locker rooms for a period of time. Right. I mean, there are a lot of people who are just absolutely up in arms about media, you know, media being removed from post-game, you know, interviews or whatever because of coronavirus concerns to go from there to where we are now and just, I mean, honestly, what, 48 hours, 72 hours? It's been an incredible shift in the tone of the whole conversation. Yeah. And I wrote

about that earlier in the week. And I think that's one of those things that I stand by everything I wrote, but the time to address that will be when this is all over, right? And then we see what like a media policy is. Hopefully there is another side of this, whether it's a couple months from now or weeks from now, whatever it is or years from, I don't know, but there'll be something down the road where that's addressed. But you're right. Now, and compared to everything that has just happened where the players can't go to the locker

room, forget the reporters, but the players can't go, we're just in a totally different situation. And obviously, I think that in a couple of people said this on Twitter, but that policy was motivated in part because the NBA was terrified of what has just happened, which is one of the players getting sick, and now two of the players getting sick, right? They didn't want that because, again, as it's unworkable as it seems, how are you going to play games with 20,000 people? Okay, well, let's let's take 20,000 people out of the arena. We'll just have the games in the empty arena. Whatever contingency plan you were making, as soon as players got sick,

yeah, that was all over. Yeah. And we were going to go to, what we are now. Maybe that was inevitable anyway. But now we go to season is suspended. Got to walk away for a while and figure out what we're going to do collectively. This, um, this is, this is, this is, this is a weird one. I got to say, it's hard, it's hard to wrap your mind around. Even if you're, you know, inclined to want to do it, want to seek out good news sources and all that stuff. It's pretty overwhelming. And, you know, it's to be one of those things where we all have to sort of like, you know, even people like you and me who are paid to do this for at least part of our job, it's tough. It's really, it is a really, really unique

event in American life and in the American media. Let's spend a few minutes talking about politics, David. Okay. I'm going to, I'm going to blow out the overworked Twitter joke of the week because really they weren't even funny. I'm not against Gallo's humor, by the way. They just weren't that funny. I want to talk to you a little bit about Bernie Sanders. we had an election Tuesday night. Doesn't that feel like 900 years ago? Yeah. Yeah.

Bernie, of course, had a bad night, lost Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, and Idaho to Joe Biden still may lose Washington State. The count's still going on. Last I checked,

he won North Dakota. Somewhat weirdly, Bernie did not come out and speak Tuesday night. Even when you get beat, candidates usually come out and convey to the public that they're not done yet. We finally saw Bernie Wednesday morning in Vermont. He gave a very, very interesting speech where he sort of emphasized, first of all,

it was a pretty brutal diagnostic of his own campaign, where he talked about the fact that he has really lost the electability against Donald Trump argument to Joe Biden. But a long time since I've heard a candidate who is continuing their campaign talk that brutally about their own campaign, did talk about the fact that he's done so well with young voters, but the fact that he's lost basically every other kind of voter. He laid out, to me, that speech was laying out a roadmap that goes something like this. He's going to debate Biden on Sunday. That debate has been moved from Arizona to Washington, D.C., by the way.

He is going to press Biden on a couple of ideas that they disagree about, challenge the vice president to meet him somewhere, somewhere between his position and Biden's position on things like immigration, student debt, ideas like that that are important to Bernie Sanders. He will probably do poorly in the primaries next Tuesday, which are in states like Florida that are not very Bernie copacetic. And that then he might drop out. The point having been made that look, we have this, we had this nationally televised debate. I got my ideas out there, and now I am going to step aside. What do you make of that? Yeah, I mean, listen, he did, he opened that speech by saying, you know, first and foremost,

we have to beat Donald Trump. And I think that that was, that more than anything, sort of sets the stage for a potential exit, whenever that may come. It might not come immediately. But what you're describing is, I mean, is intriguing and sort of just like, who knew it would go kind of go south this quickly, or at least the perception that it's going South quickly for the Sanders campaign. It's almost, you know, I spoke last week, I believe, about the potential of Elizabeth, I mean, Elizabeth Warren reaching out to the, finding some middle ground on these big idea subjects with the Biden campaign before she would levy an endorsement. And now it's, I mean, in the blink of an eye, it's almost Sanders is in that same position,

right? I mean, is like the main competition is in the position of negotiating an exit sort of based on ideology. I mean, potentially, potentially. I mean, he's still in the race, you know, know, but the trajectory is just not great. And, you know, there's a degree to which, you know, it would take something pretty significant, be it a huge gaff by Biden or bad performance in a debate. I think it would take more than that probably to really change the direction the way, the way things are going. But there was, as weird as that speech was at times, the part where he was constantly repeating, the refrain of, what are you going to do, Joe, and going down these issues, the big subjects that that you mentioned.

In some ways, I watched that and I said, maybe this is what he should have been doing all along. That being in the lead obviously didn't serve him a whole lot, but regardless of your polling position, he was always the underdog to, well, not the under, I mean, he was always in some sense an underdog of the establishment, but he always should have been a fighter. It always should have been a campaign about these big ideas, because Bernie would probably tell you to him to tell you himself

that he's not particularly interested in the politics of running for president, right? So the idea that you would run a sort of traditional political campaign when you're not actually investing in the politics. And obviously that's a that you could define that a lot of different ways. But,

I mean, but I think that it should have been, I mean, his campaign is better positioned as a, as a clarion call, as a, hey, what are you guys going to do about this? than just running a traditional campaign. There was a good piece in BuzzFeed by Ruby Kramer called The Week that Bernie Sanders realized he was losing that went over a lot of the sort of potential missteps in the campaign,

which in no small part rest on his sort of unwillingness over the past three years to sort of make inroads into the traditional, you know, democratic power brokers and to, you know, the congressional black caucus in places like that where it really, really could have helped his standing that we see as we see it right now. It talked a lot about his relationship with Elizabeth Warren and their and their campaign's relationship with one another and how, you know, it was actions that he and the campaign made over the course of this campaign that have made it, that seemingly have made it really difficult for her to endorse him after dropping out. You know, there are a lot of elements to running for president that he clearly finds distasteful,

and that's fine. It's actually reassuring in some way. but now he's in a position of not being not having that option anymore and it becomes a campaign of ideas whether he likes it or not. Yeah, I think your point about his sort of the weirdness of this campaign and in a sense how the baton of who was the frontrunner was just passed around in such a strange way. That in many ways is going to be the story of this campaign because Biden was almost the national frontrunner. for almost the entire election in terms of national polls. He was often behind in Iowa and New Hampshire and Nevada and some of those early states, but he was the national leader. But there were times when all kinds of candidates, including Bernie Sanders,

became convinced that somebody else was their biggest threat. So when you talk about like, you know, Bernie did to an extent, like run a campaign as an outsider that was about ideas, but it just was not aimed directly at Joe Biden for a long time. And it really hasn't been until the last couple of days. So, and I guess a little bit before this last round of Tuesday primaries, we're Bernie sort of dug in on NAFTA and a couple issues like that. By then, it was probably too late. So I just, it's just, it's a, it's such a weird campaign to me that Joe Biden could be on the one hand. And by the way, you and I didn't pick up on this either. So if we go back and listen to us, we were all over the place on this. But the Joe Biden could be,

the national frontrunner to some extent, but in very few debates, starting from the fall to South Carolina could actually be the frontrunner, be treated like the front runner by the people on stage. He really wasn't. And, you know, Bernie's going to look back at that and think, man, if we had just been like, as you said at every debate,

Joe, why did you vote for NAFTA? Joe, why did you do this? Joe, why did you do that? he could have drawn a much, you know, much tougher contrast for Biden to deal with than the way it actually played out. It's true. I mean, there's a lot of things to look at in the primary system going forward. I'm not sure if it makes more or less sense to do it the way, I mean, the way that it's been done. But certainly a lot of these narratives would have been, I think we would have spent a lot less time on false narratives on or even on, uh, unimportant narratives. If, you know, we knew as much as we know, if we, if we, if all of the votes that have been cast so far were cast on the. night of the Iowa caucus. There's just so much, there's so much information that you don't have. And I'm sure even for a campaign like Sanders, who was presumably buoyed by what happened in Iowa and New Hampshire, I mean, I can imagine that campaign would probably wouldn't mind a mulligan either.

So it's interesting. And of course, coronavirus sort of freezes everything, doesn't it? One, is it freezes the action where it is right now, where Biden has a huge delegate. I shouldn't say a huge delegate, a significant delegate lead, a tough to overcome delegate lead for Bernie. And the second thing is does that it actually prevents just functionally Bernie having these huge rallies that are high energy around the country. Like it's hard to imagine a Bernie Sanders for president campaign being successful that doesn't have big organizing, galvanizing Bernie rallies. And for now they're not. I mean, but the way, I mean, obviously there's to be totally, you know, political about it, there's a way in which it helps Bernie Sanders.

which is that the discussion about Medicare for All really comes into sharp focus. But at this point, it's not, you know, probably not tasteful and to make that a real attack line. And, you know, it remains to be seen to what degree that would actually shift votes anyway. Yeah. And I think it's a bad, you're right, it does bring, whether it's an attack or not, the idea of Medicare for All has some new salience. but you got to consider that versus just make the guy who used to be vice president knows how to deal with a crisis the president. Which just favors Joe Biden.

Speaking of which, one thing we've seen about Biden pretty persistently over the last week plus has been questions about Joe Biden's health and whether he's up to the challenge of being president. This is a tough one to talk about because I feel there's an honest and important inquiry here that gets muddled by political actors. Dan Scavino, Trump's Twitter guy, was tweeting a doctored photo of Biden in St. Louis the other day, which made it look like Biden was losing his train of thought.

In fact, the full video is quite different. You hear Sean Tannity talking about Biden's memory and speech on Fox News. Matt Stoller, liberal Twitter guy tweeted the other day, Democratic insiders know Biden has cognitive decline issues. They joke about it. They don't care. Glenn Greenwald says on Twitter, the steadfast, willful refusal of dim political and media elites to address what is increasingly

visible to the naked eye. Biden's serious cognitive decline is frightening, indeed, not only for what it pretends for 2020, but what it says about the ease of snapping them into line. What do you make of that discussion? Because it's out there on Twitter. I don't know how much penetrates the non-Fox media, but is that a discussion on whatever terms we should be having? I mean, I don't think it's impossible to separate it from the kind of conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton's health four years ago. And I think that even on I mean, that's a subject which I think everybody sort of vaguely agrees played a had an impact on the campaign. Certainly Trump, you know, wasn't shy about spreading, you know, such rumors or whatever

else. But I don't think anyone can say with any definitive knowledge how much that affected the campaign, right, if that was only just the diehard, you know, the Donald Reddit users and Twitter users or whatever that were exposed to that kind of thing. So yeah, it's hard to know how much that's affecting perception of Joe Biden right now. But what I do think is that it shows that the, the, you know, the 2016 Trump playbook has now sort of been institutionalized. or is, you know, has been, it's now, it's now official, right? I mean, and, and, and the things that were sort of happening by fringe elements and, and, and, you know, campaign adjuncts before are now fully part of the establishment. I mean, the, the, the flip side of that is there may be some

truth to it, right? I mean, it's hard, it's also hard to, it's also hard to separate some of these, you know, you point out some of the liberal people who were saying this stuff, but it's, you know, I mean, those people are, by and large advocates for Bernie Sanders. and, you know, rather useless, I mean, not useless, rather ruthless Twitter users in their own right. So, I mean, it's, I mean, it's hard, it's hard to kind of get past the sort of, that sort of functional stuff or that sort of formal stuff and get to the functional stuff, which is, you know, I mean, some of that may be true, you know, I mean, I don't, it's really, it's hard to say. It doesn't, it doesn't shock me in the sense that, like, I have since the beginning of the campaign, kind of had an ongoing. going level of disappointment with Joe Biden in the sense that like he wasn't able to foresee some of the issues that were sitting right in front of them. You know, this stuff with his family

in Ukraine first and foremost, you know, and, and Trump's already laying that stuff out. Trump's already digging into that stuff. And this could be another example of the same thing where it's like, you know, there's some things that you just don't leave, that leaving yourself open to these attacks is a is is is a is is sort of sabotaged and and and it damages the entire party but you know uh it will be interesting to see how this stuff goes you know functions going forward and i think that just as anything else i mean listen bernie sanders wasn't releasing all of his medical records but if he but if he won the nomination and continued on as bernie sanders with no no further health scare i don't think anybody would be super concerned about it even if it was brought up in some

quarters of the conservative media. And I think the same thing... You know, he had a heart attack during the campaign. Yeah, and I think the same thing goes for Joe Biden. I think that any discussion of his health is going to be informed 90% or more by his performance in campaigns and on the trail. I mean, in debates and on the trail, right? I mean, if he seems fully together in every debate he has with Donald Trump,

if that happens, then I think the discussion of his mental faculties is going to sort of go by the wayside. Yeah, I mean, so I'm, I, I am sort of torn on this too. I mean, I think, so first of all, it is really hard to cut through the noise of people who are going to do this no matter what, right? The people who brought you Hillary's health were going to bring you Biden's health, no matter what happened, right? Even if, even if Biden, you know, was doing handstands at every campaign event on the stage, right? They were going to, they were going to go there or not be afraid to go there. Um, I do think. all of that said, this is important, right?

And for whatever we call the mainstream, non, you know, media that, that wants to, that sees its job as actually covering this stuff and being aggressive and not showing, you know, super favoritism to either side, but actually wanting to get the answers, there absolutely is an interest in finding out if Biden is up to the job. just as like there's an interest in finding out if Bernie and Trump are up to the job, right? And to some extent, I think it's up to Joe Biden to answer questions and prove to us that he has what it takes to be president. I just don't, I don't, I just can't imagine just because people on Twitter are telling, oh, it's a partisan thing or whatever. He absolutely should have to prove that. That absolutely should be a legitimate line of inquiry.

and if you watch Joe Biden through various debates for months and months and months, you should have questions. You know, again, maybe it's not, maybe it's not questions that rule him out from being president, but it's certainly enough to ask a question and say, is this guy going to be up to the job? And weirdly the only, I mean, the best defense against that is like,

well, Trump didn't have to admit to any of that stuff, right? Trump didn't have to have that conversation. And if that's the way that we're going, you should too, you know. I know. I'm saying that but the defense the defense from, you know, anyone on Biden's side that says just quit talking about it is weirdly like just points at Trump and waves, you know, and I don't know that that's really particularly helpful. It's certainly not, you know, right. Trump just was just a sign to give a 10 minute speech that was incredibly important and he could not complete the assignment of getting the words right last night. Yeah. So questioning whether Trump is up to the job is absolutely, to me, to me, more good coverage of the health of the candidates, the fitness of the candidates is the only solution here.

There's not a great solution because, like you said, there's always going to be Biden's health. Biden's health. Oh, my gosh, is Biden. Oh, look at this, look at this video. Look at what Biden. And it's always, there's always going to be noise out there. But the only possible solution is to tell people to cover it more, good people to cover it. and I know what's going to happen is, you know, as soon as Biden is the nominee for real, it was, oh, you're just feeding into the Trump campaign by doing this. You're just feeding it. No, I'm sorry. That's, that's a totally legitimate question. It's the president of freaking United States. Yeah. There was this piece. Did you remember this? This piece by John Hendrickson in the Atlantic. It was in the January, February issue, and it was about Biden's stutter. And it argued. that moments that look like Biden is not recalling somebody's name is actually the signs of his stutter. Very moving story. Very, very interesting piece.

Tom Skokka argued recently on Twitter, and I agree with him that what that story did was kind of freeze any mainstream inquiry into Biden. Because it kind of said, oh, you know, look, what he's dealing with is he had a childhood stutter. He has overcome this.

it may have be it may creep into his life occasionally now so when when you're criticizing or when you're going after Biden oh no no no you're completely misunderstanding this kind of thing and what skokka was arguing and i would agree with is that why did that rule out any further inquiry into Biden it really shouldn't and again i'm not trying to be conspiratorialist here i just think you have to ask that about every single man and woman who runs for president i agree everybody and here we are. But it's a tough one, because like I said, there's going to be, there's going to be a lot of bad coverage of this issue, a ton of bad coverage of the issue. So I guess what I want is more good coverage. David, should we just hang this baby up and come back next week and talk more about this stuff?

I think so. Me too. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis, researched by Erica Servantes and Chris Almeid, a production magic by Jim Cunningham. We're back Monday or Tuesday with more news about the coronavirus. virus, the campaign such as it is at this point, and everything else. More lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David.

See you later, Brian.