The Press Box - Death of an ISIS Leader, Maddow vs. NBC, and D.C. Media Sports Fandom | The Press Box

Episode Date: October 29, 2019

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss Donald Trump and the death of terrorist leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (03:00), the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week (21:45), Rachel Maddow taking on NBC (24:00), and the awfulness of Washington, D.C., media sports fandom (43:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, in announcing the death of an ISIS leader, Donald Trump declared of the terrorist organization, quote, they use the internet better than almost anybody in the world, perhaps other than Donald Trump. What I want to know is, what are your using the internet power rankings? I sketch some out.

You just stop me here if I'm wrong. Number one, Donald Trump. number two ISIS, number three MSNBC's Kyle Griffin, number four worldwide Wob. Have I stepped wrong? Now, I think that's pretty much the list. That's the right. That was weirdly the same ranking. I think Jason Concepcion's in there too.

Oh, yeah, for sure. Sorry, Jason. Well, no, I mean, he's most of the time if you make a list in ISIS is on, you see Jason on there too. But I really wonder, I think, I mean, I listened to Trump say this live. I was, my breath was taken away. I got to say, because for the most part, I was pretty riveted by that press conference. I thought it was, it was pretty impressive and,

and entertaining to say the least. But, but this was really weird. And I couldn't help but wonder if this was just a traditional moment of self-aggrandizement. Like, if it was just like, you know, he gives somebody else a compliment so he has to give himself a better version of the same compliment. Or if there's some part of him where, it's just like, did he just figure out that if you put quotes around a search in Google, you get that exact search, you know, like only those exact results come up and he feels

really good about himself right now? Right. Is that what's happening? Did he just figure out some new internet stuff? The old person self-congratulatory. Do you know what I figured out? Kind of smile? He did look a little bit like that.

We are the at fart of media podcast. This is the press box, a part of the ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here. We've got lots and lots of stuff to get to today. We'll talk about Rachel Maddow versus MSNBC. We'll talk about how this decade has broken our collective senses of time. We'll survey the awfulness of Washington, D.C. media sports fandom, all that plus the overworked Twitter joke of the week.

But David, let's start with Donald Trump and the death of a terrorist leader. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was the leader of the Islam. state. And on Saturday, after American commandos raided the location where al-Baghdadi was hiding in northwest Syria, Trump tweeted, something very big just happened, exclamation point, which was kind of Trump's version of standby for news. By Sunday morning, Al-Baghdadi was dead, and Trump was exulting. Listen up. Today's events are another reminder that we will continue to pursue the remaining ISIS terrorists to their brutal end. That also goes for other terrorist organizations.

They are likewise in our sights. Baghdadi and the losers who worked for him, and losers they are. They had no idea what they were getting into. There were a lot of mixed reviews about this press conference, and I think that's, you know, as with anything, sort of this, serious

and anything with her president kind of separately, there's going to be a variety of reactions. I was, I guess, impressed is the word with President Trump. I think my main takeaway

is that he was presentation-wise. I got the vibe that this was the president that he sort of imagined himself being when he was running for office, right? I mean, this is not based on any internal knowledge of Trump,

but this is totally my speculation, but obviously. obviously. But this was, um, a very, this was like this sort of movie president that like, that, that, that, that you can only imagine that he kind of thought he would be once he, once he took office and, instead he got bogged down and, you know, what, all the things he's gotten bogged down in. Um, it, it was a, um, you know, I mean, it, it, this is, this is a, this is a, this is a really important, obviously, thing that, that, that happened in a very kind of monumentous thing and a thing that, you know, for the most part, would, would, you know, should

be celebrated or treated with, with some amount of reverence and, and, uh, gravity. It's just kind of feels so weirdly out of place if, you know, in, within the context of the Trump administration. But, um, but, but, you know, he, it was, it was, it was, like I said, quite a, quite a, press conference by him and, uh, and, you know, I guess we'll get into the details now. What did you think. It did feel like that is what Trump envisioned the presidency was going to be like. He stands triumphant in front of the

media announcing the death of a terrorist leader. We did check off a few things. First of all, Trump sort of self-aggrandizingly putting himself in the narrative saying, I just kept saying, why don't we get Al-Baghdadi?

We kept killing these terrorists I'd never heard of. But I wanted Al-Baghdadi. And damn it, we finally got him. The other thing that struck me was the whole sub-tweeting and not even really sub-tweeting of Obama, where it was like, my terrorist warlord was bigger than yours.

Yeah. He put out a photo of the situation room, which was meant to sort of be an answer to that famous Obama Clinton situation room shot. I remember Obama back when bin Laden was killed, he says he was talking about why they weren't releasing the grisly picket of bin Laden's body. And he said, we don't need to spike the football. So Trump, on the other hand, he spiked the football.

And then he and everyone at the White House ran to the end zone and did that little group photo shot that all the teams do now whenever the defense scores a touchdown and everybody gets together and poses. That's what they did. Because there was no sense at all that, you know, on this occasion, you sort of pull back. and you go to formality. He's just going to be Trump. I guess the difference is he actually had something of an accomplishment to crow about,

as opposed to the press conferences where he's just spinning and trying to gin up anything that he can to convince America that he's winning. Yeah, and maybe I'm reading too much into this, but didn't he seem more engaged than normal, at least more engaged with the facts and details than normal. Yes. We'll get to some of them in a minute, but he was certainly more lustily delivering them, I think. This was sort of the least meta of all of his public speeches, or at least his press conference oratories since he has become president.

This wasn't a, you know, working the ref situation. This wasn't a, you know, just talking about politics. This was, you know, him regaling him. us almost with a with a with a story that he kind of got to sit shotgun and watch and and he you know had a pretty you know he had a firm grasp of the details or at least the details as he knew him and and he um you know in some ways i it was an incredibly refreshing refreshing if like disarming way to have this sort of i mean this was the black hawk down of like presidential uh you know monologues, right?

I mean, he was, he made it into a, he said it was like a movie over and over again. His experience was like watching a movie. He told it like, you know, the best version of your friend explaining the action movie to you. Yes, let's get to that. So he watches Trump, watches this raid from an overhead drone. He does say, as you said, it was like a movie. And he, in fact, then delivers the full-blooded Americans or victorious script. Here is Trump's not-so-so-sober rendering of Al-Baghd

Daddy's final minutes on this planet. Through recruiting and everything, and that's why he died like a dog. He died like a coward. He was whimpering, screaming, and crying. And frankly, I think it's something that should be brought out. So that his followers and all of these young kids that want to leave various countries, including the United States, they should see how he died. He didn't die a hero.

He died a coward. Crying, whimpering, screaming, and bringing three. kids with him to die. Certain death. Defense Secretary Mark Esper could not confirm the bit about Al-Baghdadi whimpering and crying. And a lot of people were wondering how

Trump was able to discern that from a drone camera. We will put that aside. According to the New York Times, he used the word whimpering six times. That is extremely Trumpian. And Leon Nafak, formling of the Slow Burn podcast, noted on Twitter that Trump made several

references to dogs. I'm only saying, he died like a dog, but that the terrorist leader had some, quote, very frightened puppies who worked with him. I guess this really reminded me of bin Laden's death. And do you remember there was a whole thing not just about spiking the football, but about people in New York where we were living at the time celebrating? You know, there were a few places in New York where people were literally had a party that night when Obama announced what had happened. and you know I think the immediate place that the New York Times went today and a lot of punditry went today is okay you've had something that is

an accomplishment a big foreign policy accomplishment or an accomplishment of sorts why do you then go into this mode risk inflaming people risk doing all that kind of stuff versus just swallowing whatever trumpiness you have and deliver the news soberly. Why didn't you do that? What do you, what do you make of that question? Are you talking just like the, the vocabulary that he used? Yeah. I think, I think it's, I think, you know, we, we, we have, we have killed Osama bin Laden is different than Osama or whom ever spent their last, you know, moments on this whimpering and crying like a dog. I mean, that's sort of, that's very, very different presentation. I don't, honestly, I don't,

know enough to, to comment on this expertly, but that of every, of everything, sort of of that didn't that didn't jump that didn't bother me it did jump out at me it didn't it didn't bother me so much because I guess I just maybe wrongfully assumed that this was the sort of vocabulary obviously Trump was relishing in it but it was this sort of deliberate word usage to you know every time a terrorist leader like this dies there's some effort to sort of demystify him in the in his in the afterlife you know it is sort of I mean obviously there's already rumors and there will be that he didn't die or that he never existed. I heard that today on NPR or that he was an invention of America.

But there's, but, but, you know, there's always the, you know, some, whether or not is, his, you know, how they treat the remains, I think was a big deal with Osama bin Laden and just the sort of, you know, releasing photos of the body just to prove that he's dead. There's a lot of, I don't know, there seems like there's a lot of sort of, um, deliberate sort of pomp and circumstance around that kind of thing. And my assumption was that Trump was literally was was literally was was deliberately doing that, um, you know, the the whimpering stuff, the going out, you know, like coward was just as a means to just sort of undefy him kind of on the way out the door. But may, I mean, I guess there's a there is a point to be made that he shouldn't, um, you know, that, that, well, I mean, there's many, there's been many times where you could say that Trump should have been more earnest or, had more gravity or whatever and that's just not not going to be his method regardless

so yeah I mean personally I can't think of the diet you can't say he died like a dog without me thinking of the three amigos so I was just in another place already maybe but I'd be in the probably a first for presidential quotation the 80s comedy

there's a lot of reporting today in the sense in the sense in which the raid succeeded despite Trump the time story by Eric Schmidt, Helene Cooper, and Julian E. Barnes, says the radio Kurd, quote, largely in spite of and not because of Trump's actions, Richard Haas and the Council of Foreign Relations tells the New York Times, the irony of the successful operation is that it could not have been,

could not have happened without U.S. forces on the ground that have been pulled out, help from Syrian Kurds who have been betrayed in the support of the U.S. intelligence community that has so often been disparaged by the president. The Kurds are a particularly interesting part of that, because we found that they provided, in fact, the president, admitted they provided vital intelligence in terms of tracking down al-Baghdadi these are the people of course who we abandoned and left into the arms of the Turkish military and we saw how that went with a one of terrorist dead david you would think trump would get a hero's welcome at game five of

the world series right well not so much listen to the crowd last night at nationals park everybody was saying on twitter that you could see trump's face actually change the moment he realized he was being booed and not being greeted as a victorious leader that he had to have expected that he really had to have expected that and by the way the speech we were talking about

that he gave at the White House yesterday that's going to be in every single campaign speech for until election day 2020 you know the Obama Obama used that remember the big Joe Biden line in 2012 Osama bin Laden is dead and GM is alive. Yeah. This will be,

there's a question about whether these kind of things actually boost to president's popularity. Obama got a six point boost when bin Laden was killed, which was gone by the next month thanks to the economy. So whether this will actually help Trump as anything. But this will be touted as the perhaps singular accomplishment of Trump's first term. Do you agree? It's probably good for Trump that, you know, most of our most ardent conspiracy theorists are already in his voting block.

But there is a sort of like miasma confusion, I feel like created or odd juxtaposition with his Syria policy as of three days ago or whatever. I mean, pulling the troops out, letting Turkey in, sort of abandoning the Kurds. And obviously there was a lot happened after the original announcement, in no small part due to a Republican revolt. in Congress, but, yeah, I mean, I kept waiting for there to be a through line between his initial decision to withdraw from Syria and, and, uh, the killing of al-Baghdadi. And I, and I don't, I mean, maybe there is a sort of vague one that like, you know, I think it's been implied some places that military intelligence decided to make this move because they knew they were about to, you know, their intelligence was about to come to an end, was about to dry up. I think that's right.

Um, um, but honestly, like, I was like, I was, sitting there staring staring at the TV and saying wait this wasn't a long con by Trump right this way he wasn't like he hadn't just said he's withdrawing from Syria to lure Abadadadadi into complacency but I was like no he would be out there like high-fiving or patting himself in the back literally if I guess if that had been the case he would have revealed that 10 seconds into the speech yesterday yeah yeah exactly and and and but I do think that there that with the kind of contradiction inherent in his between that you know this success and the Syria policy. I do think it's a little bit, I don't know that it's going to, I think he'll

still get a big bounce, you know, and approval ratings from this or he potentially will, but I, but I do think that there's that sort of, I think that the bounce would have been a lot more significant if there hadn't already been this sort of Syria issue going on in the background. So I, you know, we'll see how that plays out. All this said, we, um, Almeida just sent me this Nate Silver tweet, um, which, which bears mention, I guess, but, He tweeted a hearing today. Yeah. Go ahead.

It's trending on Twitter. It really amazing. This is from Nate Silver. It's really amazing to me how many libs can't even permit Trump to have one good day. Perin, nobody will remember this stuff by Tuesday. After U.S. forces kill perhaps the world's most wanted terrorist. I don't know.

I haven't paying a lot of attention. I don't think that there's a... First of all, no, like you just said, this will not be forgotten by Tuesday. I mean, even if it would have otherwise been forgotten. certainly, you know, Trump and the Republican Party won't let us forget it, nor should they. But the idea that there's liberals out there that won't let Trump have one good day, I mean, I'm not sure that I just haven't been paying attention, but I guess, but I haven't seen a lot of people who are like going after Trump on these grounds. That said, I think that the sort of, I don't know, you can find some sort of opposition in maybe the lack of congressional. Congratulations? I don't know. I mean, did you...

Is it surprising that Resistance Twitter didn't observe a day of solemn reflection that they just kept being resistance Twitter? Is that surprising? No. And if you're looking around for, you know, small sample sizes based on that sort of Twitter subset, I don't think you're going to find anything that resembles reality outside of, you know, social media. The actual paper New York Times Day, like all the stories above the fold are devoted to this story. Yeah. But several of them are devoted to the fact that Trump, this, this is the kind of thing that was, A, as you said, sped up because Trump was leaving Syria and B, seems to actually be at odds with the things his Syria policy is trying to accomplish, which is get us out of there, we're done. Whereas his many people in his administration and outside his administration are arguing, no, no, we need to stay there to do things like this. This is why the reason why we're there is to do this, is to try to capture and kill terrorists that could potentially. potentially harm the United States or our allies.

Yeah. So I think that was, you know, and of course, that's a perfectly smart and fine thing to argue. Yeah. And I think if you want to look at what, you know, the pro-Trump contingent online on Twitter, everywhere else, is latching onto is like the view of the opposition, of their opposition. It's the Washington Post. I mean, Washington Post right now, you can, you want to talk about their headline that that kind of went viral? too? I do. They were a little

unsure about how to headline that obituary. So take one, David, in the Washington Post, was al-Baghdadi Islamic State's terrorist-in-chief, and there were air quotes around that, dies at 48. And for some reason, that seemed off. So they changed the headline to al-Baghdadi

austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State, which made Al-Baghdadi sent a little bit like the Dalai Lama. And then they finally went to Al-Bagdadiqaddi extremist leader of Islamic State. Yeah.

And that got the hashtag Wapo death notices rolling. Yeah. Can I give you a few of the, a few of the funny ones? Yeah. Osama bin Laden, father of 23, killed in home invasion. That's one of the Wapo death notices.

Saddam Hussein's successful politician, oil baron, and noted tough boss dead at 69. And I enjoyed this one. Genghis Khan noted traveler dies at 64. That is funny. And apologies for for busting up the clean segue into overwork Twitter jokes. Oh, please.

I mean, let's keep it. Let me, let's go ahead and steal ourselves because now, not without some justification, the only one of those headlines, Washington Post headlines that will, that will be remembered by history is the middle one,

is the austere religious scholar one. That's already been, that's already been, you know, cut and pasted all over pro-Trump, Twitter and other parts of Twitter as well. And, and when Trump,

you know, goes after fake news and the liberal media and everything else on the campaign trail. That's one of the things they're going to be waving around. So,

you know, I'm not saying that there's, you know, obviously there's a justification for it, but this is, it just kind of falls right. I mean, it's,

it's, that's weirdly a huge win for him too. It's a data point, but you know, I don't know about him in a speech, right? The Amazon Washington Post

called him an austere religious glaring. Could you believe that? I mean, that's really, this isn't really land, does it? We're going to start cheering when I do that, an austere religious scholar. I just got to think that's going to blow over. All right, David, time for the overworked Twitter joke of the week, where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received.

When Trump was booed at Game 5 of the World Series, David, it proved once again that we haven't totally exhaustive. our national supply of Simpsons references. That's right. It was an overword Twitter joke to quote Waylon Smithers and Charles Montgomery Burns. Smithies? Are they booing me? No, they're saying Boeruns. Boeruns.

Are you saying boo or boons? Boone. I was saying boarins. I thought we'd called a halt to all Simpsons references in print like 10 years ago. Did Twitter bring it back? Oh, yeah. We just outnumbered.

Sometimes something fits so well that you just have to go back to the old school Simpson's reference. Thanks to stereo sifter Marcus Gilmer, Dr. Blumen, Young Bob Kennedy, Raj Bonle, Bonnie Rachel. And for a second straight week, Adam Waltonbaugh for that one, in worthwhile Canadian election news. You remember Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's blackface scandal from a while back, David? Oh, yeah.

Well, Trudeau was elected to a second term last week. Despite his Liberal Party losing seats in the House of Commons, it was an overword Twitter joke to write, congrats to Canada's first black prime minister. Thanks to nightmare Kong Paltta for that one. And finally, David, last week, Trump lawyer and former

New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani butt dialed an NBC reporter named Rich Shapiro. I saw tweets calling this but gazi or saying Rudy keeps talking out of his ass, but it was a superior overwork Twitter joke to write

but her emails. Thanks to Tim Sampson, Jamdad, Chris Deley, Jake Christy, Michael, David Eldred, Jake Garcia, and Derek Burke for that one. All right, time for the notebook dump. And let us begin with Rachel Maddow, because last Friday before interviewing

Ronan Farrow on her show, Maddow took aim at her own company addressing claims from Farrow's book, Catch and Kill that NBC had stimmed the reporting of his Harvey Weinstein story, before he left for the New Yorker. Matt Lowe went on to criticize NBC's investigation of Matt Lauer, who was fired in 2017. After another employee told the company, Lauer had raped her in a hotel room during the Sochi Olympics,

NBC maintains this was the first time the company received a complaint about Lauer's behavior, but in Farrow's book, he reported that the non-disclosure agreements and severance payments to women with allegations against Lauer and other men at NBC News were quite common. Listen as Mattow addresses the discomfort within NBC here. Now, NBC News is obviously our parent company here at MSNBC. The allegations about the behavior of Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer are gut-wrenching at baseline, no matter who you are, or what your connection is to this story. But accusations that people in positions of authority in this building may have been complicit in some way in shielding those guys from accountability, those accusations are very, very hard to stomach. And I can tell you that inside this building, this issue,

The Weinstein story, having to leave the building in order to get told. And combine that with another previous gigantic story on a related subject, the Access Hollywood tape, Billy Bush story, also having to leave this building in order to get told. And the amount of consternation this has caused among the rank-and-file people who work here would be almost impossible for me to overstate. I've been through a lot of ups and downs in this company since I've been here. It would be impossible for me to overstate the amount of consternation inside the building around this issue. Since Ronan Farrow's book was published, I have been trying to get answers about some of his key allegations.

As to whether or not Ronan Farrow was told to hit pause and any new reporting at a time when NBC didn't think there was enough to go to air with, we have independently confirmed that NBC News did that, that that did happen. He was told to pause his reporting. In light of Farrow's assertions that there was a pattern at the company of women making allegations against Matt Lauer and being paid off and signing away their rights to speak about it, all before Matt Lauer was ever fired. Well, we doubled back with NBC, and they confirmed their denial

that that ever happened before Matt Lauer was fired. But as far as we can tell, there has never been an independent investigation of that. So until there is an independent investigation of that, if there is ever going to be one, that remains NBC's word versus Ronan Farrow's reporting and assertions. Pretty remarkable, and it follows Chris Hayes, sounding similar themes

when he was talking about the story would you make it that David it's something we don't see in media all that much and certainly I don't think quite to that degree in that tone no we don't the best case scenario

in this sort of situation is this is usually the purview of an ombudsman or some sort of you know outside investigation outside inside investigation by a third party. It is certainly unusual that the onus,

or not, I mean, not onus, I guess. I mean, this is clearly a deliberate choice by Maddow and like you said previously by Chris Hayes to go after this subject. But this isn't the way we usually see it done. And certainly not with this sort of gravity, sort of veracity or voraciousness. It was pretty impressive.

And, you know, a long time coming, I think some people would say. These things often move slowly. And, you know, obviously in this case, it was sort of time for the book more so than, you know, a lengthy investigation based on the previous reporting. But yeah, kudos to Maddow for going after it. um kudos to you know to i guess on some level kudos to nbc and msnbc for allowing her to do it um i'm not sure what power they would have had to really shut this down with the with the stature that she has and the and the you know the the reach that she has with her without them but um

this is the sort of thing that we ask for all the time when these situations arise right is much this is a day late and a dollar short in a lot of ways but you know just open open investigation and honesty with the findings. I mean, that's,

there's still a lot to be discovered. But so far, I mean, but this is, you know, thanks to Rachel Maddow. This is,

I think what she accomplished was really impressive. It's, it's the potential for discovery that drives this, right? Because there's, there's a version of the story

where NBC has done something wrong and Maddow comes out and reports the news or, you know, shows her discovery. with it and that's kind of where it's maybe interviews Farrow and that's about it.

But this is sort of slightly different than that, whereas she's saying we're all trying to discover what's true here. NBC is saying this is the first complaint about Lauer's behavior. Farrow is saying, no, no, no, there's this whole culture of payments and non-disclosure agreements, the whole hush money thing that we've seen in so many different forms against that relating to Lauer and other people at NBC News. So she can sit there and be like, we need an answer to this question, right? It's almost different than just dinging your own network.

It's holding your own network accountable and saying, you need to fess up, right? So I think that's also what drives this and what makes it so interesting. She NBC responded with a statement saying any former NBC News employee who believes they cannot disclose their experience with sexual harassment as a result of a confidentiality or non-disparagement provision in their separations. agreement should contact NBC Universal and we will release them from that perceived obligation. An attorney who has represented multiple former NBC employees tells the Hollywood reporter that,

quote, if this is a full release and everybody can flood the gates, we should expect to see a decent number of women coming forward and talking about their experiences of sexual harassment at NBC. If we don't see that, it means it's either not a full release or people are still terrified or NBC was running the only clean shop on the block. Dot, dot, dot, dot, and I don't think it's number three. So, you know, in a way, I think Mattow, too, is giving, is sort of giving cover and demanding, you know, is allowing maybe creating environment she thinks where people can come

for, right, and say, we're going to hold NBC to this promise and that if you can come forward and show that the network is not being truthful, with what they're saying about Matt Lauer, please do and this is this is this is this is the environment for which you can come forward in it'll be interesting to see what happens next I mean it'd be interesting to see how many people come out and and and have things to say um you know that quote that you read is right there's a there's a big difference between uh the sort of you know broad you know release of of people's non-disclosure release from obligations of non-disclosure agreements and the actual

you know people being brave enough to to to break them him. But, you know, like, we'll see what happens. And, and, you know, we shouldn't particularly be hopeful after the past couple years in some sense. But, you know, I guess there's some amount of hope that comes out of, like, what Rachel Maddow did. This just broke. I just, Chris just sent me this thing.

And this is, I guess, a semi-related subject. But we should definitely touch on it today. So excuse me for the pivot, but Max Taney, noted Kevin O'Connor fan, just wrote a story for The Daily Beast about saying that Go Media tells Deadspin staff in League Mimmo. This is the headline. Stick to sports. Apparently a memo went out where they made it. Yeah, the quote is, where such subjects touch on sports, they are fair game for Deadspin, where they do not, they are not. and he goes on to quote a deadspin staffer at the end of the article saying this isn't what any of us signed up for it's amateurish and pushing long-time readers away and making the site is difficult to enjoy um you know this has been kind of in the air it's been bubbling for a while i don't think this is too surprising although on some level uh it's a little bit surprising to see that they just you know wrote it explicitly in a memo and um um you know maybe they've interested

a new era of complete forthrightness and straightforwardness at Go Media. Maybe they didn't expect this to ever get out, which kind of seems more likely. I don't know. I mean, it's a...

I have to say it's not too surprising. What do you think, Brian? Well, it's, I mean, it's not surprising, but it's also just... The whole bit of it is this is just a sports site. One, as we talked about on rounds one and two of the story, it's not just a sports site. Right.

It really, if it ever was, it hasn't been in a really long time. And with this sweeping kind of, you know, cut off of every, of all these other topics, you're also just cutting off a lot of like food stories, right? It's not, you're not just cutting off like, here is David Ross story about Trump. Mm-hmm. You're also, you're also like, here is a story about some food. made the other night. Here's a good recipe and I and I wrote a funny story about my cooking. Yeah. I mean that that just seems I guess and maybe maybe they think in their very,

very peculiar way of thinking that's the only way to do it. You can only do this by making a clean slice of sports and everything that's not sports. But there's this whole part of Deadspin that's just, you know, other stuff written in the voice of Deadspin. Yeah. And that just does doesn't, I mean, even, even if you're going from the very strained and nutty geo-media view of the world, I don't get that at all. That's nuts. Yeah, I mean, it kind of seems like it's, I mean, I don't know. I mean, it's like they're, they're angling towards something that's a little bit easier to describe in like ad sales meetings or something, you know, I mean, the, if that's, that's part of the calculus, it wouldn't surprise me. And we, in a weird way,

it reminds me of, of, I mean, it evokes a little bit of what we're seeing over it. Sports Illustrated. Obviously there's not the political issue there and there hasn't been that kind of pressure from on high yet, but you know, they're talking, the story there is that Maven's sort of interested in breaking the, or, you know, just establishing all these subsites in a sort of espion or athletic sort of way and using the SI name to, you know, to imbue some sort of credibility onto it. But to me, it's the sort of, the bigger story is these, whoever, the only, the only, the

owners of all these web properties now, which are, you know, basically just like hedge funds and other, otherwise, you know, other just like, you know, money factories that think that the best way to run the internet is to just have like these little single subject microsites and stack them on each other. And eventually that adds up to to some big media property. But it's, I mean, it's just so nuts. I mean, the lesson of the internet and of writing the history of like journalism is it like, it takes. humans, it takes personality, it takes lived experience, and you have to be able to, I mean, no one's signing up to read a blog because some like bots have written exactly on the subject that you want to read, you know? I mean, it's got to be, it's got to be, it takes more than that to have a site like Deadspin work, make a site like Deadspin work. I look forward to the next six months of the Deadspin staff devising hilarious ways to get around this rule, or hilarious ways in which this blog, this blog is really about sports. Yes.

And then insert Trump commentary. Yeah. Or insert, you know, random piece about TV show or food or whatever it is. I actually look forward to that. That's going to be fun because they're not going to stop. Those, the people that work there now are not going to stop. They may find some editor that they hire who comes in and agrees to stop that. But the people who work there now are not going to stop.

That's just, that's clear. I certainly hope that's true because that could be incredibly valuable and maybe in some ways even more deadspinny than it was before or, you know, more true to the legacy. Let's hope that that's what happens and they're not just sort of disheartened or they're not, you know, all working elsewhere in six months. Yeah, the non-sports writing is coming from inside the house. I want to talk to you about this essay. The 2010s have broken our brain. We call these the 2010s. Is that what we're doing?

The teens? What do we call this decade? Didn't we have this discussion? while back. It's an essay by Catherine Miller in BuzzFeed. And what she's talking about is just a strange condition of being alive, and I guess more narrowly working in the media in the 2010s. She writes, life has run on a certain rhythm of time and logic. And then at 100 different entry points, that rhythm and that logic shifted a little, sped up, slowed down or disappeared, until you could barely remember what time it was. This is what happened, according to Miller.

So much of the way our phones and lives work today congealed during the 2016 election. In the 20 months between Hillary Clinton's campaign announcement and Trump's inauguration, everything from Apple Music to HBO Now to Apple News launched and relaunched the Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple Watch hit the full market. Publishers established the current form and tone of the news push alerts you received. Facebook launched a live streaming function and then deprioritized the function when people aired violence. Instagram launched the ephemeral and exhaustive stories that you can share as they put it everything in between the moment you care about.

Twitter introduced the quote tweet option, which formalized and democratized a function from the early days of Twitter, and transformed every Trump tweet into an opportunity for commentary. And she goes on to cite other things, too, the fact that TV stopped happening at certain hours of the day and that you could just watch TV shows whenever you want. Instagram and Twitter, she says, going from chronological to algorithmic timelines,

news arriving at basically any time, us going away from the old ideas of TV news programs, at certain times or newspapers arriving at our doorstep at certain times. She also talks about smartphones. When Pew first began collecting data on the subject, 35% of U.S. adults own smartphones

in 2011. In 2019, 81% of U.S. adults do. And I thought it was a really interesting essay because she does hit on this fact that there is a sense that we don't know what time it is now. And it's not just us being inundated by news

and being clobbered by news. I think that's now, we've now, we're not used to it, but we've now experienced that for a couple of years. But this idea that we really don't know where the news is arriving from, I don't know about you, but I feel like I experience that in my daily life all the time. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's certainly a lot of, I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of people when we hear about this all the time that are, that, you know, get their news in fragments and bits and pieces. They see a headline. They don't really read the article and they don't get the full story or they get a, a misimpression of what the story is. But then there's the other half, I mean, another big group of people that I

often count myself among who are instead of, in the effort to actually understand stories, we find ourselves being the, I mean, having to spend way more time processing the story than if we had just kind of waited for the times to come out the next day or waiting to read the finished article when it was, when the story could be explained to us.

And so, yeah, I mean, there's this steady, like it goes from, every event seems to start with a tweet and progress to a push alert and then by the time that you know by the time that you actually have a handle on what's happening

you know someone's finally come out with the article you could have just waited for waited for that to come out I guess but we're all so invested all the time that there's not a there's not a there's not an expected you know time of delivery and I think that part of it's definitely true The part about Twitter going from chronological to algorithmic timelines really resonated with me. Oh, yeah.

And I'm but you, but like half the time, especially on the West Coast, I'll wake up to an alert that someone has just tweeted this. And I go to it and I think tweeted like 12 or 14 hours before. Right. Like a day ago. And I'm like, what? Wait, what? Oh, big tweet. Here we go.

Got to get it on this one. And then you're like, wait, this was yesterday? I don't even understand. And the one that got me the other day, she doesn't mention this, but this just sort of came up. Do you remember like a week ago? There was a Twitter account called Classic Rock in Picks.

I mean, just about the most generically named Twitter account ever. Classic Rock in Picks. It published a tweet that said Rolling Stone magazine list of the top 100 singers of all time. Thoughts? By the way, that sounds like it was generated by a bot.

100%. And it had this list attach. Everybody goes crazy. They're mad that like, where is Karen Carpenter on the list? where is Chris Cornell, where's Freddie Mercury? I mean, you know, just every entry point of argument you can imagine for days. And then I saw Keith Olberman come out and point out that the list was more than a decade old.

The list, everybody's like, oh, it's zombie rolling stone. I can't believe it's. The list was made in like 2008 after this thing. But everybody just gets so mad. And nobody has any idea when that appeared. Yeah. picks. So like, hey, let's get in on it. Well, I wouldn't want to see Chris Cornell harmed by this list. But that's just one of those moments. We're like, holy crap. What just an incredible mind fuck this all is.

I don't even, it's not, and I don't even like, it's just, I don't know that that's ever going to get any better because I think when you combine it with the overload of news, then it becomes particularly severe, right? Right. There's so, you're always trying to catch up. You're told you have to read so much. much news and that there's so many things going on at one time. And then you don't exactly know when they happen. And they're not in any order. There's not like a, as you said, a daily paper sitting in front of you and going, okay, here's the news from yesterday. Okay, throw that away.

Here's the next day. Here's the news from that day. It just all kind of comes at you once. It's a very, very strange experience. Yeah. I want to talk to you about DC media sports fandom, David. Okay. The Washington Nationals, you heard that I'll made it grown,

are down three games to two in the world. series. And to add to their pain, David, let us talk about the way DC media professionals are consuming the World Series. I point you to an article by the veteran Washington writer Al Hunt in the Columbia Journalism Review. He was talking about the DC Press Corps being united by Nationals fandom. Now, at normal ballpark, see, they have celebrities. And National Sparks, they have Chris Wallace. That was literally a shot on the Fox telecast. As Chris Wallace enjoying the game. Brett Bear the other night, too. Brett Bear.

Who of us hasn't thought what's Brett Bear doing during this baseball game? This is a paragraph from Hunt. This is incredible. I put this on Twitter because I just thought it was amazing. He's talking about media fandom. At Nationals Park, Peter Baker, Chief Washington correspondent for the Times, takes his spot in the low section between

home plate and the dugout. A section over is the Oracle of Baseball-loving political columnist, George Will. There's no more unifying force in established Washington journalism than the Nats. James Carville, the political operative and commentator tells me. Carville is flying in from New Orleans. dot, dot, dot. And then for the first, James Carvel sits next to Luke Russert.

Okay. A fat cat offered Russert thousands of dollars above list price for his tickets to game one. He, of course, said no. Russert wondered aloud to his mom, Marri North, a writer for Vanity Fair, who he might take to the game. She had a quick emphatic response, moi. Okay. So, David, I want to give you Nationals Park. Peter Baker, George Will, James Carvel.

and Luke Russert all together in one section what's not to love makes me nostalgic for one the team was terrible yeah we got I think let's bring it all beta for this because there is an important difference

is there not between actual Washington DC sports fandom and DC media sports fandom right I mean it just happens Is it like all of the most famous DC sports fans end up being kind of awful? Like everyone knows Stephen Miller loves Nats. Maybe the most famous Nats fan is Brett Kavanaugh. Like I think the combination of the team being very new and also D.C. being the home to so many kind of fake famous transplants ends up getting you a lot of commentary like this.

it's not it's not the best yeah it's i mean there's a couple of things here as one it's just like the generally annoying nature of these people and i just remember i am not living in dc a long time it's my first job was in dc but one thing i one thing i sort of realized immediately was like all these people moved here yeah and they either dumped their childhood teams or they just sort of you know didn't dump them but then also pretended to be Washington DC sports fans basically for social reason. Sure. Yeah, this is doing nothing to shed the reputation that DC is just the swamp and there's nothing else going on there, right? This just reinforces that. It's like, oh yeah, everyone's just

George Will. It's like, no. Well, okay, in George Will's defense, you know, he's an old school baseball purist. I would have little doubt that he was hanging out at, you know, watching nationalist games, whether or not he's rooting for the team. Also, it was really great to see him start that lock him up chant at the game last night. But yeah, no, no, it's, this is totally true. I mean, there's what this, it's, it's a, it's, it's, D.C. is a, um, you know, New York's funny.

I mean, New York is, is sort of, is a sports fan melting pot, you know. I mean, there, there are certainly people here that pick up fandums. I think that, you know, mostly that's probably a lot of people that, that didn't have teams where they come from or whatever. But, but for the most part, you know, in New York, relish going to our team-specific bars on football Sundays or just to the regular sports bar and rooting for a team against whoever sitting next to us. D.C. does have that. I mean, we experience that. But this is a, I guess because the nationals are new, you know, when years ago,

the sort of Ravens popped up out of nowhere and presented a sort of, you know, kind of hipster alternative to whatever team you used to root for. I mean, maybe there's some of that. I don't know that's a ton of people that move to DC and just like eagerly go by John Wall jerseys. I guess like, I mean, if I may, there's been a bit of a reset, I think, over the last 20 years or so, you know, during my lifetime, you know, the skins were the team in town for a very long time. And then obviously they've lost all of their favor. At the same time, you know, you have the wizards trying to find an identity and you have

the Nats moving in and the cabs becoming good. And so sort of there is just a total reset of the sports culture in the town. And that's made it seem if it's not totally true that, you know, everything is what's new is everything that's, you know, what's red. It's Nationals Park taking over Navy art and pretending like nothing was there before. Yeah, totally. And I just think, you know, the skins is like be the ultimate test for DC Punditocracy. What if the loathsome redskins became good? know, insert, insert laughs and applause, right?

But what if the Redskins actually became good? Would you see that pundit conglomeration start appearing over there? Would that happen? Yes. Really? I honestly can't imagine it. Well, I guess you're right. I don't know, man.

I mean, they're kind of a distressed asset, right? I can see, I can see DC people being that shameless and that eager to embrace whatever, wherever they think, Luke Russard is, but he's a Bill's fan, so maybe he wouldn't be there. Wrong example. James Carver, whatever. But like, I just, I don't know. I don't know. Dan Snyder, the name, the name,

I don't know if they're going to show up. Well, the name's a way tougher, you know, way bigger problem than I think than Dan Snyder. If any sports franchise in America has dropped low enough to even turn these people off, I think it's them. The other thing I keep seeing in these essays is this idea that D.C., not the nation, but Washington itself has been riven by Trump, torn apart by Donald Trump, and that the Nats are bringing Washington, D.C. back together.

That was a part of the Al Hunt thing. That was this piece in the New York Times this week in an essay. It said, quote somebody, 75-year-old resident, we've been so torn apart lately by politics and we need this World Series. It's uniting the hell out of us in these troubled times. Now, we always hear the thing that D.C. is this clubby, bipartisan, yucky atmosphere. And then we also hear that it's been torn apart by Trump and needs the gnats to come back together. It's got to be one or the other. It can't be both of those things, right?

Well, no, I mean, I think that's well stated. But, you know, if you wanted to read this meta-narrative into it, maybe all those booze that Trump got. And, you know, there's a lot of different takes on, you know, all the, I think the pro-Trump side is that the swamp was booing him, that everybody, you know, the DC's a just incredibly blue district. And so there wouldn't be that many fans anyway. And the flip side is like, really, are these Trump fans that are, I mean, are these, you know,

ardent Hillary fans that are going out to see baseball games, you know, at night? Maybe, maybe not. But yeah, maybe it's, these are people who are just upset that Trump is politicizing their one refuge. The one thing that's trying to bring the district of Columbia back together. I mean, I guess, you know, maybe Al Hunt could write about that for his next.

piece. All right, it's time for David Shoemaker guess is the strain pun headline. Last Friday's headline was McDonald's gets it scamping in a bunch. A bunch of listeners thought that should be cease and de fish. Cease and to fish. I saw that. That was great.

I think as Sam Doom, another listener was the first one to tweet to me that it should be seize and desist. I see a seize and desist, which we will also accept. Also, we got at least one nomination for the ringer's headline for the DeAndre Aden D'ondrey Aden suspension, Damn Son.

S-U-N. That was pretty good. I loved it. Loved it. Today's headline comes from Jaron Parizek, or Yaron Parizek. Sorry, I'm saying your name wrong. We found this headline in the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette, David. On Saturday, the Arkansas Razor Rex got absolutely pasted by Alabama.

Despite the fact that Bama was playing with its backup quarterback, okay? the Razorbacks were confused by Bama. David, you might say they were perplexed by Bama. Mm-hmm. What was the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette's strained pun headline? Arkansas was perplexed by Alabama. Um, um, uh, mystify.

Um, okay, what am I working with here? Is this like a crimson tide thing? No, there's a lot of hints in there. They were perplexed, David. They were confused. They were, God, I am off today. They were hoodwinked.

Tricked? Hmm. Tricked. Hmm. Keep more. Go back to the Sosaurus. The strain pan handline is. Bama boozled.

That's fantastic. Bama. Bama boozled. Oh, that was really good. I'm an idiot. This being the Northwest Arkansas Democrat is that they put the A in parenthesis in the middle of the word. Bamma boozled is kind of funny. Asa, they sent me the screenshot of the whole page here. And the column about the game is called, is titled, No perceived advantage could save Arkansas.

So we went wild pun on one. and we went about as straight as an arrow on the other one. No perceived advantage could save Arkansas. I absolutely love it. He's David Chewmaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Research by Chris Almeada. Production Magic by Jim Cunningham.

We're back Friday, bright and early. More lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian. David. Off today. Something very big just happened. Okay.

Holy crap. What is just an incredible mind-end. fuck. No. I just, I don't know. I don't know. No, we don't. Yeah, the non-sports writing is coming from inside the house.

Mm-hmm. I know. Insert, insert laughs and applause, right? That is funny. And no, we don't. Why do you then go into this mode? God, I am off today. You're always trying to catch up.