The Press Box - Covering the End of Roe and “I’m Not Reporting This But” Scoop

Episode Date: June 27, 2022

Bryan and David discuss the Supreme Court’s ruling to reverse the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and address the policies within newsrooms that prohibit journalists from speaking out on behalf of the issue (9:11). Later, they weigh in on the comment, “I’m not reporting this but…” where reporters and podcasters express their opinions whilst not being held accountable (29:14). 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

I'm Derek Thompson, the host of the podcast, Plain English. We tackle technology, politics, culture, history, everything that's happening in the world and why it matters. New episodes of Plain English drop every Tuesday and Friday on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. David? Yes. I was in Philadelphia last week. What do you think I did with my spare time? Did you go to any use bookstores?

Oh, yes, I did. My gosh. What a lucky guess on your part. I did the same thing in Ocean City, New Jersey. But we're very predictable. Philly turns out to have really good used bookstores. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. What did you find?

Well, there was a place called Mostly Books, which just had stuff all over the place. I mean, on the floor, on the shelves, all over the place. That's the kind of bookstore you and I like. Mm-hmm. We don't need the 3,000. dollar first edition in myelart jackets. That's fine.

But what we really want is stuff. Oh, yeah. A bookstore that looks like our house is a better bookstore. It looks like our house before we both got married, probably. But yes, go on. So I'm walking around mostly books, and I picked up a gently used copy of the book, King Leopold's Ghost. Oh, wow.

Wow. By Adam Hockschild. Yeah. Subtitle, a story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial Africa. Now, you know King Leopold's Ghost. Came out in 1998. I would like to nominate this book for a new category. The I Did Everything But Read It Book.

Oh, no. Go on. There's a certain kind of book, David, where when it comes out, in this case in 1998 you read the ecstatic reviews you may buy the book you might talk about the book with friends you might know what's in the book at least in a generalized way you may even at some point convince yourself

you have read the book but you've never actually read it you've just absorbed it in some non-reading capacity now what I want to know is what are the I did everything but read it books in your library. Well, not in my literal library. You mean in my hypothetical library? The library of your mind, sure.

Well, does it count if you read the New Yorker article that the book was based on? You did put that criteria in there. I did everything but read it, but I also read the New Yorker excerpt. Books by New Yorker writers, by the way, figure a lot in this category. They figure a lot. But there's this whole section to read the article, love the article, hear that the article is being made into a book, get really excited about it, talk about how much you can't wait for it, and then never read the book. Probably buy the book and then never read the book. My list, even separate from those, is quite, quite long.

Because as, you know, avid listeners of this podcast will know, I worked at a bookstore, Politics and Pros, one of the best bookstores in the very early 2000s. and so my job was to pretend I'd read a bunch of books. And, well, I guess I could have read them. Nobody would have, you know, thought that was odd, I guess, but I'd actually read it. But there's a whole, like, I mean, I only worked there for a year or so, but there's a whole sort of like three-year window of books that I only, only in my, like, late 30 started coming to grips with the fact that I had not read, right?

I mean, because I was surrounded by them all the time and then sold them, like hand, sold books multiple times a day with the say and the sales technique was oh you're going to love this let me tell you about it implicitly i've read it right um king leopold's ghost is a great one i don't know if i would have said that but that's i definitely hand sold that book and then also just for all the if there's anybody out there taking notes i also worked as like a editorial assistant in the book publishing world right after working at the bookstore so my timelines may be off there were a lot of books that i lied about having read in that near decade as well. But like the whole like narrative nonfiction boom,

like I did read into the wild, but everything that sort of surrounded that, I did not read, you know, like Black Hawk Down. There was the more sort of like fru-frew ones, like the girl with the pearl ear. That was a novel, The Girl with the Pearl Airing. But like everything from the like Mark Kirlansky, Simon Winchester,

Good ones. Nathaniel Philbrose. Brooke, that whole, like, that whole school did not read a single one of those. Even, like, I definitely did not read Malcolm Gladwell or Atul Gawande in book form and definitely pretended I had read those and could probably, you know, speak at some length about their contents. What else? Oh, the devil in the white city, which I did finally read as an audio, but he listened to it

was an audiobook in the not too distant past. That was obviously like the big, one of the biggest of the period. What else? I can literally like see myself holding the book. Oh, like, what was the one about depression? The Noonday Demon. Andrew Solomon. Fake read the heck out of that book.

There was a whole lot of like the Middle Eastern. So I don't remember if like the kite runner was out then, but it feels like a book I definitely pretended to read. That was very like, like, you know, of the moment at that period in time, obviously. And we're selling those books like that hand over fist at the store. I did read out of the fiction or some of the fiction of that era, although in retrospect, would happily trade in the time I spent with like Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Saffron 4 to have actually read some of the nonfiction books I didn't read.

But yeah, I think that, oh, oh, oh, oh, Emperor of Malities. That's my last one. But this is a very, very good one. This is all a very specific thing. But yeah, I mean, there's definitely more. books in my later semi-adulthood that I didn't necessarily lie about, but just sort of was so familiar with something that it felt like I had, like you said, everything but read the book. Man, the list probably is too long. It's such a fascinating category because you

could probably put you or I on a podcast about these books. And if there were at least three or four guests, we could probably hold down our part of the podcast. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, listen, I have a wrestling podcast, you know, wrestling podcasts. Obviously, I watch all the wrestling, but there was a big show last night that I couldn't watch and so I couldn't go on the after show. And I, and, but as it was rolling around, I was like, well, I vaguely followed this on Twitter as a mental experiment. Could I go, could I go on the show and pass myself off as having watched it? I probably could have. You know, I mean, it's- That's a new category. Can I, I go on the post game podcast of the game or wrestling match that I only followed on Twitter.

Mm-hmm. Maybe. You could probably just put together a soundboard of tweets and Reddit comments and just like and totally have a perfectly fine podcast about something. By the way, so I'm in Philadelphia. I get on the plane back to L.A. And wouldn't you know it, David, they're beckoning to me from my carry-on bag is King Leopold's ghost. I pull it out.

I opened a page one. It is so good. Oh my God. Oh my God. This is what I was missing all those years. I ripped through like four or five chapters of it, despite it being really late at night. I was so happy I bought this book and actually read this book.

So let this be an advertisement. If you have books that you've done everything but read, they're probably worth it. Start with David's list and go from there. I mean, my list is great. I'm going to go grab King Leopold's Ghost. This sounds fantastic. I mean, I know the book.

And as soon as you brought it up, I was just like, oh, that's one I would really love to read. The Press Box this summer will be an eight-part series book club with our listeners on King Leopold's Ghost. Join us, please. Coming up on today's podcast on Friday, the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion. What position did journalists find themselves in after the decision? We have a new frontier in journalism, David, the. I'm not reporting this but scoop. Plus, new media with NBA players, novels read by your favorite podcasters,

and more on the press box, a part of the ringer. Podcast Network. Hello, media consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, and producer Erica Servantus here. David, the Supreme Court draft opinion that was published in Politico last month, turned out to be a pretty accurate roadmap to future events. On Friday, the court reversed the 1973 decision, Roe versus Wade. There is no longer the court's five, four majority says a constitutionally recognized right for women to have an abortion.

Now, reversing a 49-year-old ruling is a highly emotional moment. If you're politically inclined like David and I are, it's an awful moment. There are reporters out there, David, who'd like to say that. But as soon as the Supreme Court's decision came down, several news organizations, said, by the way, please suppress whatever it is you feel and do not tweet. The New York Times, according to Jay Rosen, repeated language from its social media policy. If our journalists are perceived as biased or if they engage in editorializing on social media, that can undercut the credibility of the entire newsroom.

The Gannett chain of newspaper sent an email per Hana Tamiz of the New Yorker, which said, you cannot use social media to take a political position, criticize or attack a candidate, or express personal feelings about an outcome or ruling. So if you're a reporter at the Austin American statesman or Indianapolis Star or another Gannett paper, and you're upset, you're not allowed to tweet that you're upset. What do we think of journalists not being allowed

to weigh in on this decision on social media? Oh, man, it's tough. I mean, I think that, well, let me just start by saying, like, I understand the position of the, I mean, of whoever's writing the newsroom memos and where they're coming from. There's definitely been times in my work history where either I or someone else has said when something happens, like, this is probably not a great time to, like, to be real active on Twitter, right? I mean, and it's not about politics or anything else. is just about kind of temperance, you know? And obviously the higher up, like the higher that that message comes down from,

the more sort of mechanical and the more it feels just like you're suffering under a dictatorship, you know? And that's a really justifiable feeling. But I can understand where it begins, right? I think that in some ways this is an extension of, and I think the feeling is that it's an extension of the trillions of the Trump era sort of conundrum that a lot of newsrooms faced when they were, you know, faced with dealing with, dealing with with, with, with, with, with, like, what weight do you

give it to something when someone is just like lying on his face or just completely incorrect? Is that, because that goes beyond the standard definition of politics or whatever else, you know. but you know this is this does feel like sort of a it's easy it's really easy to see why someone would say this is not a political I'm not taking a political stance by saying that this is a incredible like moral and cultural catastrophe

that should be acknowledged as such because by giving because by defining it down to a one side versus the other political disagreement, you're actually giving too much credence to an illegitimate side of the, illegitimate side of the conversation,

both because a lot of people who are arguing on one side on arguing on arguing good faith, but also because this isn't, to most, I think to most people on both sides, most vocal people on both sides, but particularly to the people on the pro-choice side, this is not a matter of politics, you know?

This is a matter of, like, inherent rights. You know, it's a matter, it's a, it goes much deeper than any sort of legislative act or judicial ruling or anything like that. So to sell people that they can't voice an opinion on this, obviously that memo is coming down because it's such a contentious issue, because it's such a big, you know, because it's going to be such a big deal that people are going to be paying attention to what reporters say. But it's a big deal because it's a big fucking deal. You know, you can't, you can't just hand-wave it away. I have some sympathy, like I said, for, you know, bosses who are trying to figure out the best way through this. But, I mean, an edict like that just really seems to be misguided at its very, at its, at its, like, moral core. Kyle Koster, the big lead, points out in an additional sentence in the Gennett email.

get a load of this. If you notice a newsroom colleague posting inappropriate comments, immediately alert your supervisor. This is like the Texas abortion law. This is like you see something, you say something, and you would you get $10,000 for like pointing out that your coworkers going mad on Twitter? I mean, that's kind of crazy. Can you imagine that?

Are you liable if you saw it and didn't say anything? Well, I don't think this is a rule of law, but they are saying, Please tell us immediately if you see someone violating our social media policy. It's wild. Pretty wild. It's funny because I feel like you and I have talked about this a couple of times. In certain ways, I like that newspapers are anachronistic. I like that they're different.

I like that in the case of the New York Times, they're not just publishing political stuff that's going to get lots of traffic and op-ed columns that are going to get lots of traffic. They also cover the arts and ballet. and books and other things that you and I are interested in. There's something old-fashioned about that. There's also something old-fashioned about the way they deliver articles, which sometimes is kind of cool. I just want to read an article about this. And then my favorite podcasters will chew on it later.

I'm not talking about both sides and political things or something like that. I'm just saying sometimes there's something kind of nice about them. Listen, the history of newspaper journalism is often over-mythologized, right? I mean, from both sides, I mean, I think that the general perception of what, you know, the life of a newspaper scribe in the, you know, mid-20th century is probably, you know, just either imaginary or mythology. Brian's smoking a mimeed cigarette, as I'm saying. Hey, boss, I got a hot scoop for you. But if you think, I mean, but there's, you can't think, I mean, you can't possibly think that the newspaper people of, of that era or of any era were without political judgment, political opinions, without moral judgment or opinion. I mean, do you really think that the, as you did, doing the, the chain smoking hand gesture, do you really think that the staff of like the New York Herald Tribune in this, if they were like, transplanted by, like, you know, time machine to today would just be like, all right, let's just, let's just do this down.

the straight and narrow. We got to report it as just the facts. Of course not. No, they would be sitting in the newsroom like just cursing out loud, right? I mean, and the fact that we don't have record of it, well, we do have a lot of record. People's memoirs and memoirs about the newspapers and nonfiction books, essays, a lot of those guys wrote, particularly the Herald Tribune. I mean, their creative output was obviously not limited to newspaper journalism. and as such we know them a little bit better as humans. But, but I mean, these, obviously not. The fact that they didn't have,

the fact that they didn't have Twitter is the only reason that you can describe any sort of neutrality to any journalist prior to the year 2000, right? And the fact that people have to be on watch now, like I said, from the top down, you can attempt to understand the motive of the people on top.

But yet, they are adding a level of discretion of whatever you want to say to the job description that never existed before, right? I mean, to act like this, the perception that news is unbiased is a goal that has existed for a long time. Frankly, could exist no matter what people are saying on Twitter.

That's a little, that's beside the point, and that's kind of the whole point in the conversation. But, yeah, that ideal has always been there, but Twitter is, I mean, regulating what people can say on Twitter or slash in the, you know, public sphere is a very new thing. And it should be something that we really pay attention to. I believe this feels anachronistic for the sake of being anachronistic.

I just, I just don't. I mean, Wesley Lowry was tweeting about this on Friday and Saturday. He's thought about this, I think, as much and as well as anybody else. And he says, it comes down to the perception of objectivity, which is about theoretical reader perception impossible to control versus objectivity of work process. What matters is whether a journalist journalism is fair. So you see the difference there. Is what I am putting into the paper and the way it got into the paper fair versus does

some reader who I can't even put my finger on potentially think, potentially perceive that I am unfair? One demands journalist silence part of their idea. identity, Lowry writes, the other respects their humanity. He goes on to say, by attempting to control for theoretical reader perception, we empower enemies of our journalism and other politically motivated actors to work the refs and concern troll about personal bias as a means of silencing or otherwise muting journalism and journalists they don't like.

To your point about the olden days, I also think it's interesting and probably relevant to this, is you're now newspaper reporters. world we used to live in a world of newspapers that world has shrunk the world of not newspaper reporters has grown exponentially since then so what you're asking is for a very very specific subset of journalists to take these kind of monastic vows not to tweet about the end of row versus wade or whatever the political issue of the day and be surrounded by journalists or kind of sort semi-journalists who are tweeting about it like crazy. Surely that should be play a part in this too.

Yeah. Well, to go with what she said about the sort of concern trolling. I mean, listen, this is one of the biggest issues that journalism sort of has to take on. And it's obviously very separate. You got to be able to walk and chew gum to deal with this issue because it's totally separate from like the real day-to-day operations issues of what you do as a job. And this Twitter edicts, I think, probably straddle the line between the, too. But, you know, you could say we're just going to ignore the concern trolling. But I guess

in an era where, you know, the top-rated guy on cable news is just a larger-than-life concern troll. It's sort of hard to pretend like it doesn't matter, right? When Tucker Carlson or whoever else goes after a New York Times reporter for exposing a political opinion, right? I mean, it happens all the time. the effects are sometimes more pronounced than others, but it's a real issue that newspapers have to have to deal with. So, I mean, but it's not an issue that they should have to deal with, right? I mean, it's not a thing that, like, should, that should, no one believes that should actively, I mean,

that should actually, like, affect the way that they do coverage, that they do journalism and assign, coverage or whatever else, and yet it's going to. And so, I don't know. I feel like if, I feel like the time spent writing that don't tweet memos is probably better spent actually figuring out an organizational plan to deal with the sort of concern troll present and future. These people are going to attack us no matter what.

Yeah. So what do we do? Yeah. What's our plan for? Give me, give me a, give me like an antiseptic, 2000 word memo on the path forward. vis-a-vis concerned trolls rather than wasting my time with just like piddly borderline

HR memos about what I should be tweeting. That kind of leads us into the recent news about the athletic, David, that Laura Wagner reported on Defector. Headline was under New York Times ownership, the athletic lays down no politics rule for staff part of the further New York Timesization of that sports publication.

And that to me is an interesting aspect of all of this too. We're not just saying to our political reporters or the person that covers the Supreme Court, hey, can't tweet about this. That will undermine the image of the newsroom. We're saying that to the Golden State Warriors beatwriter, the person that reviews music for the newspaper. We're saying that to everybody. Now, maybe it's something you pointed to and nodded at a couple of minutes. ago, which is it's just too complicated to do it any other way.

And you don't want to pick and choose people in the newsroom who have special social media privileges. So you just issue blanket edicts. But that was an interesting aspect of this to me. Yeah. I mean, I think that there's a, man, I have a lot of issues with this. But let me just take a really narrow view of it. I mean, I'll make a really narrow argument.

If you look at a place like the athletic, you look at the sports journalism lens. more broadly, what you see is a generation of quote-unquote sports writers that are, have an outsized representation of people that come from the podcasting and blogging worlds, right? And I think sort of inherent in a lot of that is that your person, your personhood is built into your writing. We've talked about this a lot of different ways. You could tell somebody not to talk about political things, but like the personhood, person you hired is, I mean, if the person you hired has a personal experience that they would

normally talk about or that they, you know, that that would normally be applicable to not the, not the beat, but just their public presence, it's crazy to think that something as impactful as Rovers is Wade being overturned would not be a part of the discussion, not be a part of the personality of the person that you hired for their personality, right? Mm-hmm. And we already have Clarence Thomas out here talking about all the other landmark cases he wants to go after. Do you really expect that all of your gay employees are going to just, like, stick to sports if they, if they, if they, if they go after gay marriage next? Do you think that's an appropriate, it's an appropriate thing?

Is it, this is an appropriate expectation of your, of your newsroom? I mean, it's, it, I understand the motivation, you know? but it's just like there's some things we joked about this in different ways or sometimes when you just when you say something or tweet something or write something all that someone should have to say is man

you're sounding a lot like fill in the blank right here if you're sending out a company memo and they could basically be distilled down to stick to sports knowing like the history of that phrase maybe back off you know maybe reconsider I don't know it just seems it just seems like the more practical, the more practicality-minded some of these decisions are, the less actually practical they are. It's just very strange. You talk about stuff that may be coming down the

pike from the Supreme Court. I mean, just think of the last six years. If you enforce these guidelines on social media, how many things people would have been asked to sit out? Trump? Uh-huh. COVID? More Trump? Black Lives Matter, more COVID. I mean, we go on and on again, Roe versus Wade. We're not talking about one moment in time here. We're talking about a whole period of American life. And to sort of look into the, look back into history for guidance now is in some ways

helpful, but in some ways it's totally, it's totally eminent because we have such a divided America right now. And I know it's sort of like just tried to say at this point. But, like, there's going to be times in the future where the line should be clear, right? If you had a contingent of, if you had, like, a political party in America that was, like, pro-Nazi in 1936, could we not comment on Naziism during the summer games, you know, like, during the Berlin Olympics? Like, would that be out of bounds? And, you know, there's, like, there's always, there's going to be some thing. I use that very deliberately because it's the most extreme example.

But it's sports. You know, it's where sports at politics collide. These things are going to keep happening. And if the answer is, well, that would be okay, then there's no line. If there's any line, I mean, if there's no line somewhere, there's no line anywhere. And you have to come to terms with that. Yeah. How many sports writers have been saluted after they got off the job or passed away by, you know what, he was really, really objective?

Mm-hmm. That's not really what we go to. Those are the people that disappeared to the ether. Fair, perhaps. Called him like he saw him. Okay. But he observed a newspaper's ideal policy of objectivity when it came to sports and all the issues swirling around sports.

When that, when that man or woman dies, that someone will tweet about it. That's a tweet that'll get a lot of retweets. It will not get a lot of quote tweets. You know what I mean? Like it's like, it's just people are like, oh, yeah, like, I, like, I, like, I, I, I agree with that. I'm saddened by this this much. Click, you know, like that's it.

David, let us do the overwork 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. A couple of runners up this week, we considered people responding to John Mellencamp's anguished message about school shootings with,

ain't that America. We consider Joe Biden's bike accident being compared to the pilot episode of the West Wing. By the way, West Wing, something I kind of inhaled and absorbed rather than actually watched much. Kind of the King Leopold's ghost of prime time for me. But this week's winner, David, comes from Kevin Anderson. It involves what we just talked about. The reversal of the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe versus Wade. It was a grim but pointed.

overwork Twitter joke to write, be sure to set your clocks back 50 years before you go to bed tonight. Oh, wow, that's good. That's about all you can find to take solace in. Congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right. The notebook dump, David, I have several items I want to run by you. First comes from valued listener, Sean Devine. What's up with the journalist saying, I'm not reporting this but on podcasts?

Is this their version of Off the Record? to preface that clears space to say things for which they don't want to be held accountable. Huh. Do I have to answer this? You want me to start? No, no, it's funny because when you told me this was a topic, I was not thinking about podcasts. It's a really, I was thinking very specifically about Adam Davidson emptying out the notebook on Twitter lately. You know, like there's been a lot of, that was, I thought, incredibly like, Adam,

and just from a press box standpoint, interesting turn to events. He's not the only person that's ever done it, but it's been, it's sort of become a moment where he's just like, like, let me, it started off, I think, with like, let me explain where there's a lot of stuff that people take for, you know, take his gospel that couldn't make it

into an actual article about a subject, right? And, and kind of evolved into, like, here's everything that I couldn't say in the article, but that I actually believe, right? It was, it's pretty incredible. And in some ways, I think incredibly informed, I mean, obviously, informative. It is very helpful to, in an era where the newspapers themselves are under increased scrutiny and feeling the increased pressure to sort of stay between the lines. it's helpful to know all the information surrounding it

to kind of get the annotated version of what you're you know of what you've already read so that's where that's where my mind went right it's like here's all the stuff that I couldn't say but I could say on Twitter now if you're talking about on podcasts it's obviously a much less pressing less like dire issue and I don't want to like

just flippantly conflate it too but I mean it does go to a sort of of it does go to a similar place, which is that like so much of journalism, well, the ideal of journalism can be a lot of different things, but like it is in some ways you would say a conversation between like, you know, the institution and the reader, right? It's just a one-sided one. Now you kind of, I mean, a podcast is still sort of one-sided because it's just being heard, you know, no matter how many people are talking. But it does make it more conversational, you know, and information is

is not strictly, you know, governed by the same guidelines of, like, newspaper journalism. So it's helpful. It's interesting. And when we're talking about sports, you know, writers and stuff, it's fun to have all of the Kyrie Irving rumors that you can't really, like, source, source, but like you've heard from one person who you believe and, you know, whatever. Like, that's, like, that's the sort of information economy that the sports world runs on. And I think that, you know, Bill always jokes about.

aggregators and stuff. I mean, people are going to get aggregated for saying that stuff, whether or not they put up their defense. But that's because these are the conversations we want to have. You know, I mean, these are people want to speculate. You're basically just giving the guidelines for speculation. Absolutely. I mean, I remember one of the first lessons I learned from my University of Texas recruiting website was that readers would always go to the moderators, the mods, and say, just tell us everything you know whether you know it to be true or not. Yeah. They wanted the scoops, the stuff that was nailed down, but then they also wanted all the stuff that was not nailed down and might actually turn out to be false. They wanted

both of those things. So there was an obvious interest for readers in having that information out the world. And I would contend that there's a pretty big interest for reporters in, hey, I'm 80% sure this is right. Yeah. This is not a trade. necessarily or something's going to come down, but I heard this is happening. And I want a safe space to put that out in the world because I think you want to hear that too, something that's kind of speculation, you know, kind of reported, kind of informed thinking that isn't quite a scoop. Yeah.

Well, I mean, let's be clear just for one second. You can be, you as a human being can be 100% something's true without it being sourced, well enough for a mainstream newspaper to put into print. That's very, that's true. If you told me I'm quitting the ringer, I would believe that I would know that as fact, right? Whether or not I need an extra source for that or need to go seek comment from Bill Simmons or whatever, it's like that would be that that's, we're just going by, by, you know,

by the, by the guidebook at that point. But you're right. 80% is great. And guess what? 50% is great. 30% is great. I mean, I guess you wouldn't really go to 30 because, you know what? of like, like, if Zach Lowe or Brian Winhorst or whoever has just like a cockamamie idea about

something, it's probably a lot more, it probably merits a lot more discussion than my cockamamie idea about something going on in the NBA, right? Because like, they're more plugged in than I am. So that's like, that's what I'm talking about. It's a guideline. It's, you're putting up like the, the, the, the guard rails for speculation. And it's, it's a, it makes her good conversation. Yeah. We should actually put the percentage on it, like the, health department out here in Los Angeles used to put the grades on the restaurants. B minus.

C plus. A plus. You know, Kevin Durant will be traded to the Trailblazers. C. Right? C plus. But I want to know something. I want to know. I think we should do at some point a whole segment about

players, current informer in the NBA, taking over the media. The whole new media, old media debate. Yeah. Maybe we'll slot that in for next Tuesday. But I did want to point out one very funny feature of this, which is JJ Redick, had Kendrick Perkins on his old man in the three podcast.

Oh, yeah. And I don't if you saw this, Perkins admitted that during the 2008 playoffs when he was playing for Boston, he was secretly hoping that LeBron would get injured so that the Celtics could win the series. well, an aggregator, NBA Central, wrote that up. Kendrick Perkins says he was so scared to face LeBron's calves in Game 7 and 2008 playoffs that he prayed superstar word terror ACL. And JJ reading Twitter tweets, you should start tagging the source because you don't create any content yourself.

Now, there's going to be a lot of features, David, of athletes moving into the space traditionally occupied by journalists. But here we are. They're where we were 20 years ago with the Huffington Post. Wait, there's this aggregator that wrote up all the hard work I did and got the headline. And didn't credit me sufficiently in the tweet or in the headline? How many journalists have you heard complain about that over the years? Oh, so many.

Here we are. Now it's affecting JJ Reddick. Dude, we've had conversations on this podcast. which has not been around for very long about like the New York Times, the unwillingness to hyperlink at times. It seems like they're sort of moving. They've sort of figured that part out. New Yorker was a violator too, by the way. Oh, yeah.

The New Yorker's big violator. That might have been what we talked about. I might have gotten that wrong. But I know the New York. I mean, obviously, you know, you read an article in the New York Times. It's not exactly linked up like, you know, an old gawker post or something would have been. But podcasts, I mean, separate from the fact that yes, we're all coming. Now they're all feeling the pain that journalists felt for so long.

I mean, podcasts are a whole separate thing too, right? Because even if you did credit it, you're not sending out a hyperlink to a news article that can then be read and immediately you can discern whether or not, you know, the quote is valid, you know, whether or not the pull quote or the scare quote or whatever else is like what the article is actually about. At this point, you'd be linking out to a podcast that someone now has to say, well, am I going to spend an hour trying to figure this thing, trying to figure out what the context clues were for this.

Somebody, sometimes they do do the clip. Yeah. But of course, then you have a minute and you're not sure what was said in the minute before that and the minute after that. Mm-hmm. And it may be totally out of context. Well, there's also, yeah. I mean, listen, a lot of people are doing that now, right?

We do podcasts. We put up video, we put up little video clips. We put up, you know, quotes or whatever. I mean, we used to, at least I used to joke at the ringer that we should just aggregate bill before anybody else got the chance to, right? Just like push pause on publication for an hour and just pull everything out that could possibly get out there. and whatever.

Bullet points. Yeah. But for the vast majority of the audience, they're only coming to it in the podcast form. And, you know, they want to experience it as a new thing, not as something with like a, you know, spark notes on the side. It's, it's an interesting dilemma because, you know, it's just like all those like, you know, whatever,

Instagram scam artists of years past. still out there, but people who just steal other people's content and republish it and have a trillion followers or whatever else, you get a lot. I mean, you can get a lot of traction just by like grabbing other people's stuff and circulating it, you know? I have to stuff. I mean, I don't follow any people like that on Twitter. And I feel like a quarter of the stuff that I see is stuff like that, you know? I mean, it's just, it's, it's the nature of the beast in some weird way. I want to make it clear that here at the press box, we are pro aggregation. grab away.

Put it in any context you want. We'll take it. Whatever you want to do. Oh, we're an open source podcast here. Another news item for you, David. This just came down right before we started. Alex Wagner is going to replace Rachel Maddow at 9 p.m. on MSNBC. I believe she is going to be working Tuesday to Friday.

Rachel Maddow's very unusual deal. signed last year. Do we ever talk about this on the air? I still don't understand it. Yeah. It's like here's a ton more money not to host your show most nights. Mm-hmm. She's still hosting it on Mondays and doing various Asundry other projects for MSNBC.

Yeah. I don't even, where has Alex Wagner even been? She was on MSNBC. I feel like she had a pilot on them, like a show on MSNBC. She did. That was sort of like just sort of disappeared. And according to the New York Times article, that show was canceled when they made

the day part of the daytime programming on MSNBC more newsy and less opinioning so she's been on the circus on showtime oh right okay but now she is back or now she's in primetime

hosting the nine o'clock hour formerly occupied by Rachel Meadow I remain interested in how much of variance there is between hosts on networks like MSNBC. Rachel Maddow is a giant star in that universe. But what's the difference between people who want to watch or consume in some way the 9 p.m. show on MSNBC if it's hosted by Rachel Maddow or if it's hosted by Alex Wagner?

I believe it's some difference. But Fox has shown that in their programming, it really doesn't matter. They've substituted all kinds of people in and out. of the prime time shows. And everyone seems to be a bigger thing. Yeah, but part of it is the machine that they put behind people, right? I mean, the machine that went,

I mean, Tucker Carlson had failed, you know, multiple TV show jobs before he got this one. And obviously, he made a really decision, a really deliberate decision to just become a terrible human being for ratings. But part of it is that, is that Fox, you know, put him in that spot

and sort of anointed him and got behind him and obviously didn't react to a lot of the pressure that various pressures that have been exerted to try to try to get him the air. But it's tough. I mean, you're right. I think that, you know, it's funny,

Ali Velshi has been hosting a lot of the Madh Al-Blocks when she's not been on the air. And I love Ali Valshi. It reminds me a little bit of, this is very personal story. So if you'll, you know, humor me. My dad's a preacher. And he's a really good preacher. He's very liberal dude, Southern Baptist, but very liberal eventually got, you know, booted from the Southern Baptist Convention for,

various heresies. But he's very intellectual, but also just, you know, comes from a very traditional, like, emotive place. He's not, you know, not grabbing the Bible and waving his hand at the sky or whatever, but he's not just a robot up there. But for the, for the region that we grew up, he was incredibly intellectual. When I left home, went to college and started going to churches, I ended up going towards the churches that were like incredibly intellectual, incredibly egg-hedy because I couldn't replace the total package of my father. Obviously, this is my very personal opinion. But like, you go to the one thing that you can like really put a score on, put a number to, right? They got the, they studied, you know, they did all the research. They

did everything else. They hit those beats. And a lot of ways, I feel like that's what Alivelle, she did for the Rachel Maddo audience, right? It's like he, he was incredibly, like, meticulous, and I mean this is a compliment, competent at the job. But I think at some point, if you're running the network, you look at that and you say, well, what's important is not digging in and holding on to 75% of the viewership. At this point, the goal has to be to create a new star, right? To find someone else who eventually will be, I mean, as crazy as it sounds, you want to build people who become too big to host every day of the week. I mean, you want to be people who outgrow the wonderful place that you put them in. And that has to be the gambit, you know, with bringing out Alex Wagoner on.

She's very good. I mean, she's really, really good. And certainly has, I mean, it's certainly has the credentials and the broadcasting ability to, you know, really succeed in a place where obviously MSNBC want some new growth. We talked last week, David, about how novels could be. read as audio books by your favorite podcasters. I believe you even pinpointed novels that are now out of copyright. Well, listener, Megan Withan Age points out that, in fact, somebody is already doing this. Last January, the staff of Planet Money read the Great Gatsby, which is now in the public domain.

Can we play a clip of Gatsby as read by the staff of Planet Money? Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future. that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter. Tomorrow we'll run faster, stretch out our arms farther, and one fine morning, so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. I guess I should have said spoiler alert.

Somebody hasn't read it yet. Somebody was planning to read it. That was in the queue. They had the, whatever, the book version of TiVo of that. for that book. It's time for David Schumaker guesses, the strain pun headline.

Yeah. Today's headline, David, comes for valued listeners Matthew J. Burley, Zach Jones and Matthew Moore. It's from the New York Times. The subhead reads,

an American actor moved to Britain to restore his crumbling ancestral home. But fixing up a 60-room castle isn't easy. So we are fixing up a British castle. What was the New York Times'

Strained Pun headline? Oh, man. Almost sounds like a home reno show, doesn't it? I was going to say, fixer-upper or property brother. What are the big ones? Wrong TV reference here. Think more British ancestral home. What was it?

Trading Spaces? Or British sweeping British estate. Oh, Downton Abbey? Photographed in kind of a soft, beautiful life. Yeah, Downton Abbey. So this would be, it was crumbling, remember. Downton Shabby. Downton Shabby.

Oh, that's good. Downton Shabby. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. I was on the East Coast last week to record some podcasts. Talk to Angelo Cotaldi in Philadelphia. Yeah.

And then I went up to New York. So come in Wednesday, David, Pablo Torre, who's done many things at ESPN. Now host of the ESPN Daily. we talked about podcasting. We talked about the process, just enough to get everybody all worked up. And what happened to Haino? Very interesting conversation.

That'll be Wednesday. David and I are off July 4th, which is Monday. We're back Tuesday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Ryan.