The Press Box - ESPN’s 40th Birthday, Joe Biden Owns His Gaffes, and a Playboy Writer vs. the White House | The Press Box

Episode Date: September 6, 2019

Dan Patrick, Keith Olbermann, and the 11 p.m. SportsCenter (03:00), the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week (20:15), Joe Biden trying to own his gaffes (22:30), a Playboy journalist challenging the Trump White House (34:00), and more. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, this is Liz Kelly and welcome to The Ringer Podcast Network. Up on the Ringer.com this week, we've posted our streaming recommendations for the month of September, updated our 50 best superhero movies of all time list, and make sure to check out our Stephen King coverage by Ben Lindberg on the site and on the big picture podcast. On the sports side, our NFL experts are giving their predictions for the season, the storylines they're most excited about, and finalizing their rankings of the top 150 fantasy players of 2019. You can check it out on the Ringer.com. David, Donald Trump altered a weather map this week with a black marker in a really lame attempt to cover up false information he put out about Hurricane Dorian. What I want to know is, if you could alter reality with the flick of a permanent marker, what would you change? God, I mean, if I could draw myself a full head of hair on like photos and have that become, if I could just change the subject slightly for a second.

We're not too far removed from a time when Trump would do something like draw on a map with a permanent marker and that we would just be eagerly awaiting Sean Spicer or Sarah Huckabee Sanders' painful attempts at rationalizing that in a press conference. And now reality such as it is has been permanent markered away to the point that we don't even have press briefings to deal with these things. I know. I can't decide if this is like Stanley Kubrick and Dr. Strangelove or the Marx Brothers. It really is. It really is right in the line. And by the way, if I got to grab that permanent marker to write or wrong, I'm going to my birth certificate. And I'm changing that Y in Brian to an eye just to simplify the next four decades in my life.

Just Brian with an eye. Now my grandparents won't even misspell my name. We are the dry erase board of media podcasts. This is a press box. A part of the Ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis and David. Shoemaker here. Lots and lots to get to today. We'll talk about how Joe Biden isn't just making gaffes. He's trying to own them. A playboy journalist challenges the Trump White House and wins.

A Margaret Atwood novel is a deep, dark secret. Ashley Feinberg wrote something good, wisdom from a master journalist and much, much more. But David, I want to start off by talking to you about the 40th birthday of ESPN. The official date is Saturday, which means you have have one day to go to a novelty store and get one of those black armbands and says over the hill. Do they have novelty stores anymore? Is that still going on? Yeah, actually, I believe that Spencer's Gifts is making a comeback if my occasional visits to the malls of our great nation is any indication. Yeah, that seems like one of the first things that should have gone digital and really did.

But good for Spencer's. Anyway, to mark the occasion of ESPN's 40th birthday, I wrote a story Wednesday about Dan Patrick and Keith Olberman and the 11 o'clock sports center they hosted back in the 90s which I think is the best thing that network has ever produced and let's do some sound first to set this up

in case you are young and do not remember the self-titled big show here's an episode from 1995 we'll begin with Keith Olberman doing some Raiders Steelers highlights count the references if you can The Immaculate Reception game the time the Raitos spent sunning themselves in L.A.

And the vagaries of the sometimes roulette wheel scheduling, all notwithstanding, the date of the last Pittsburgh Steelers regular season win at Oakland is still astounding. November 11th, 1973, so long ago that then Pittsburgh quarterback Terry Bradshaw still had his own hair. Raiders hosting the Steelies. There's the PR director of the week in Oakland. First quarter, it's scoreless. Neil O'Donnell says, not any more to Ernie Mills. 37-yard touchdown, play 7-0.

Pittsburgh. Second quarter, Steelers are up 10 zip, but O'Donnell's in trouble. Big trouble. Andre Bruce, see what I got. Raiders down 10 to 7. Steelers answer at the end of the first. They're ahead 13-7. O'Donnell this time, connection with Mills one more time. He had two, Steelers 20 to 7 at the break. Yes, I had two touchdowns. Second half, Billy Joe Hobart, trying to rally the Raiders. He's got Darrell Hobbs, open in the end zone. And the next play, go to the experience, Tim, ground. And frustration sets in.

it gets worse. First and goal. Hobart. Yeah, great. That guy holds on to it. Willie Williams's second interception of the game. Hobart throws four INTs in his first NFL start. Steelers 29-10, the Ritos have now lost three straight at the Oakland Codiceum for the first time in history. So Al is moving them to Garmish Parton Kirchen in Germany. Now, I want you to appreciate for a second.

We're going to get to Dan Patrick in a second, but just appreciate the density of that copy. And what you can't see there is he is writing to picture. This, this, that was not a podcast. That was, all that was matching up with highlights brilliantly. But the density that Keith Olberman could achieve with a sports highlight is absolutely incredible to me. Um, you hear him talking fast because he's trying to get so much in there.

Um, let me, a couple of references. If you don't know, net in a more is inspector Cluzzo, Peter Sellers. from one of the sequels to that movie. The writer is Al Davis. And there was a Renan Stimpy reference that I cut off there at the end. But it's as if everything the public collectively knows about sports and everything they know about pop culture is in a bag. And he's just reaching in there and just pulling stuff out.

And I don't know. That sound to me is absolutely amazing. Yeah. I mean, part of it was that he was given space to do that. Not that he needs a terrible amount of space to inject, you know, an incredible amount of content, but he was given space. He was given time. And he was the perfect person to do it. I mean, I think that there's a lot of, I mean, I think the conventional wisdom in a certain sense is shifted, even though we all, I think the average person would acknowledge that Dan and, that Keith and Dan were the best. Sorry. that that sort of like the institution of ESPN is it plays a huge part in their success. And obviously giving them time, it does. But that everybody came after them

was sort of succeeded based on the institution. It's important to go back and look at the, like you mentioned. I mean, the careers that they both had before like you talk about in the piece and the fact that these two kind of carved out, stake the path for everybody that followed them, right?

Totally. Totally. You know, Berman, Berman, Chris Berman is the first guy. And he makes all these jokes. But Berman is a little more cat skills. He's a little more, you know, red meat kind of Jay Leno. Yeah, Borsch belt.

I would accept that too. He's, you know, he is, you know, here you go, buddy. I'm going to do this kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And these guys come in and they just go way, way up the, up the highbrow scale without doing it and losing sports fans. Because that's a big thing. If you watch that and you didn't get any of those references and you didn't know what he was talking about, you could still appreciate that just because the energy and the delivery and the sort of glee that Keith Olberman used when he talked, it's pretty amazing. To me, part of the, I don't know if it was part of the schick, but is that they both look like actors who would play newscasters on television, right?

That they could be so off the wall and not, I mean, and yet look like they're straight out of central cast. Now, that to me, I love that part of it. Especially Dan, because he looks like that handsome guy who was on your local newscast in Dallas or Charlotte or wherever it is you live. And he didn't look like he was going to be funny. He looked like he was going to be that guy talking about the traffic fatalities that afternoon on I-35. And instead, he turns out to be a comedian too. Let's listen a little bit of Dan. What I want you to note here is the sound is going to be totally different.

instead of big and scenery chewing. Here in these NBA highlights, he's going to be very buttoned down. He's going to be not intruding. He's going to be not at all upsetting you or grabbing you by the lapels, just blending into the background. Here's Dan Patrick.

Now to the NBA, where Emerson once wrote that we don't count a man's years until we have nothing else to count. With that in mind, the Knicks, Derek Harper, has a message for the younger, players in the NBA lay off the old men jokes. The 34-year-old Harper says he and his teammates

are being treated like, quote, some old dogs you just kick away. On Sunday night, the Knicks tried to hand the spurs a dog pounding to the garden we go, Derek saying, where did I put that game plan? First quarter, Harper steals from David, passes to Starks, and look out below. End of the first quarter, three seconds to go. Chuck Persson. Late in the fourth quarter, spurs up 98-97. John Starks, the point. The point. The up for three that touches absolutely positively. Nothing but the bottom of the neck. Nick's 12 by two.

Spurs, 35 seconds to go. Avery Johnson, down low while baseline shot it goes. We'll try it at a hundred. So the Knicks a chance to win. Ewing, misses, Oakley, rebounds. Out to Harper, Harper, three-pointer, shoot it. Two seconds to go. What I love about that is, on one of those calls,

you can hear the announcer who was actually doing the game, exploding on a three-pointer. Good! And you can hear Dan on Sports Center going, good, good. As if he is shrinking himself down to the fewest syllables, the quietest tone you can say on television and still be heard. That was Dan. Dan was all about Dan's, Dan's catchphrases were the whiff, good, gone. Just, just one syllable.

just making himself so small, making himself a straight man to Keith's obvious comedian, but being really funny at the same time. And again, I think that sports center and the big show generally achieves its greatness because of the way those voices come together. And the fact that you hear one and then you hear the other and then you go back to the other one. And the tone is similar, I guess I would say, but so, so different on a fine-grained level. I think the similarity, I mean, the notion of similarity, sure, there's some similarity between them, but we do put them together in our heads, right? I mean, it was the combined, it was the combination of the two. It was the total effect of the act.

That the effect that we, I mean, that's, I think to me, that's why that's the similarity, right? I mean, it's the, it's that they mesh together so well. And that's in the end of the interplay as well, you remember. You know, there's a, there's a great line of the top of your piece, which is fantastic and everybody should read it. Either on the ringer.com or you can click through longform.org, which I just featured the piece. I should just shout you out there. There's a great quote from, from Dan at the top where he says, ah, the older we get, the better we were. And, I mean, sure.

That's like, that's a real phenomenon. that exists across media, right? And we all glorify the best of the past in a way that they never got glorified, or they maybe didn't quite get glorified in their time. Yes. Or maybe it's just the people that had more, had more effect. You know, had, you know, I mean, people, and it's, and frankly, it's easier to, it's easier to glorify people based on, you know, one minute YouTube highlight reels

than it is to sit through their show every night and break it down segment by segment. And again, that goes for everything. It goes for, you know, S&L and, you know, bands and everything else. But there is really something about them aging, about them, about the way that time has treated, that has treated that addition to sports center. What do you think, why do you think that we remember them so fondly? Is it just the skill, or is there something about the way that we watch media now

that has changed the way we look at them. I think it's maybe threefold. I think one is it's just so smart that it worked beyond the bounds of television. I think I had a survey that I cited in there that said at one point sports writers were using the same phrases as people on television on sports center, which so very rarely happens. We think of TV guys as those kind of buffoonish guys who don't really know anything. We're the clever ones.

So I think it sort of reaches out of. TV and into the world of writing. The second one is I think that that sports center basically predicted the way a whole bunch of sports media was going to go. Everybody wanted to be Dan and Keith. And for a very brief moment in time, and I think this is maybe over now, maybe it's still going on, that job became the biggest job in sports TV, not being a play by playman, which had been that for three decades before that, but being a highlight guy because,

came the coolest thing you could do, which was really interesting. And then the other is the kind of thesis I try to argue here, which is I think when you think about all the John Stewart disciples on television now and John Stewart himself, the whole funny newsman genre who's given you the truth and then he's also giving you satire and he's kind of doing both. I think, I don't think Dan and Keith invented that, but I think they predicted that sound in a lot of ways. And they predicted in a certain sense where television was going to go. And so if we think that that kind of, you know, John Oliver's sitting there grabbing at his necktie and, you know, dropping jokes and looking at the camera and kind of, as you say, being very self-conscious of being a newsman, you know, kind of looking like a guy who finds it funny that he's there to give you the news. if that is kind of the house style of TV today,

I think Dan and Keith predicted that in a lot of ways. And I think that's one of the reasons that show stands up like it does. What do you think about, I mean, we all have, sports center has been an institution in our lives forever, beyond, you know, the original years and even into the modern day. But, you know, it did seem like there was a period parallel to them, but especially right. after them where SportsCenter kind of became all about the jokes. Yes. Became all about the catchphrases, all about the punchlines. Now, I don't want to, you email me earlier today to ask about a publishing question.

I used to always joke when I worked in the industry that there's a period in time where all the great, like the grand figures in publishing were brilliant assholes. And then somewhere along the line, everybody just got confused into thinking that you just had to be an asshole to be good. This is not the same thing. I'm not calling anybody at ESPN an asshole. but there was, it did seem like they started hiring funny people to do a smart job. And it's not like they were hiring comics or, you know, whatever, like, but you know what I mean.

That it was more about schick and less about skill. And it did seem, it does sort of seem like the way you tell the story that, that Oberman and Patrick were brilliant first and foremost. Is that the right way to say? they were they were they were good at their job first and foremost and the humor was almost a happy accident yeah i think that's one way to say i think another one was that there were times and without slandering everybody who came after them because there were a lot of really talented people who did their own act and weren't just doing dana keith um is the humor got detached from the actual

sports highlights a little bit and it sort of overshadowed them and it was all about saying the catchphrase rather than saying the right thing. And in a way, you didn't honor the highlight, I think. And I think all of us who watched them and then watched the next now, you know, 20 years of Sports Center,

there were so many moments where it seemed like the balance was just a little off. And it was certainly off with them, I'm sure, from time to time. I just think they got it right. And I think it maybe goes to what you said, is that you start off as just a smart guy

who says, how can I do this sports cast well? And humor is one thing that comes out of that rather than I'm going to do punchlines all night. And then that comes out of that. The couple things, by the way, David, that I never knew or had forgotten before I started this. Dan and Keith were together for about four and a half years, four and a half years, because Olberman goes over to ESPN2 during his run there. I heard Tony Corneiser say today that he and Wilbon have been doing. pardon the interruption for 18 years. So just think what a tiny amount of time that is in the

history of television, four and a half years. They had no writers at all. They had researchers, who they liked, some of whom were great. They had producers who were great. They didn't have any writers. So that was probably the only comedy show in TV history, at least a hit comedy show that had no writers room. When Trevor Noah goes on the air tonight, everything he's says is the product of a writer's room, just about everything, every joke. These were written by comedy professionals, or a lot of them were anyway. Dan and Keith wrote everything themselves, which is just phenomenal and to be unthinkable. And I guess the other thing that was so much to me, and I wanted to talk to you about this,

since we are doing a very sub-Dan Keith version of this on our own podcast, is just the way their relationship manifested itself as a TV show, which is always so fascinating when think about TV because, you know, Cornheiser, Cornheiser Wilbon, it's more like, here are two guys that got to the top of the newspaper mountain,

ultimate respect for each other, friendship, and that becomes a show. Skip and Stephen A, you know, the relationship is more like, here's a guy I'm legitimately afraid will swing a right hook

and knock me out. And so I sort of had that fear respect of him, and that becomes a TV show or became a TV show back in the day. Dan and Keith, it's a little different. They were not the bestest, bestest, best as eternal friends of all time. It was actually a little more subtle.

It was more like, the guy sitting next to me is the absolute best audience for this joke. And that is my ideal audience is sitting right next to me. So I'm going to write in such a way that pleases him that makes him laugh, that makes him try to crack up. And it's just such an interesting thing. Like I said, I think it's, you know, when I told people I was doing this, everybody said, are Dan and Keith friends? Are they, are they still friends? And I, I think that's actually the wrong question. It was, they are still friends. But it was the wrong question, which is, it's not about that. It's about a shared kind of aesthetic sense that they gloriously found that they

both had and that they did on the air for four and a half years in the 90s. Wow. It's sort of beautiful when you put it that way. I look forward to year 18 of, the press box podcast. God. We will have less hair than Will Bonn and Kornheiser combined, which is saying something, David, by the way, it really is. All right, time for 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. By the time you hear this podcast, the NFL regular season will have begun. And we have one sad update. the NFL network's Ian Rappaport reports.

The Saints are releasing core special teamer Chris Banjo. Chris Banjo. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write. His stay with the Saints ended on a sour note. Thanks to KGB follows for that one. Yeah, I know. I'm sorry. It was not a great week in the overworked office.

I'm just doing my best here. It gets better. Big weekend of college football coming up, David. Go Texas. Beat LSU. and one issue that has been blowing the minds of college football fans is that of the so-called transfer portal, a player who is thinking about changing schools

puts himself in the transfer portal, which allows him to be contacted by his next school, etc, etc. If you were a fan of South Carolina and you lost to North Carolina last week, it was an overworked Twitter joke to write, yo, that transfer portal open for fans to or dot, dot, dot. Thanks to Pearson Fowler for that one.

That's nice. And finally, David, more headaches for Boris Johnson, the PM of the UK, his younger brother Joe Johnson, and no, I'm not talking about the big three champion Joe Johnson. This is Joe Johnson,

the Tory MP. He has announced he is going to resign. Among other issues is the tension with Boris because Joe is on the opposite side of Brexit. Boris is leave. Joe Johnson voted. Maine. It was a very, very overwork Twitter joke to write.

Joe Johnson is resigning to spend less time with his family. Thanks to literally 20 people who sent that to me. I will name you on Twitter. I promise. If you tweet Boris Johnson by massaging a political cliche, congrats, you made the overwork Twitter joke of the week.

All right, time for the notebook, Tom. And David, I don't know if you were watching Stephen Colbert last night, but he had Joe Biden on. Biden did some very Bideny things. he quoted his dad. He made a little news by saying he decided to run for president after Donald Trump's response to Charlottesville. Biden tried to talk to the kids out there by saying America dissed our allies.

I'd love to know who wrote that phrase for him. Biden was James Hardening the interview a lot, a lot of long answers that Colbert made fun of at one point. But one interesting thing Biden did was address his mistakes, some of which are gaffes, if you will. This was a chance for Biden to apply the Bill Clinton, I've caused pain in my marriage bit to his mistakes. Let's listen to Colbert and Biden's exchange on that subject. A lot of people want to talk about your gaffs. You have called yourself a gaff machine, okay?

In the last few weeks, you've confused New Hampshire for Vermont, said Bobby Kennedy and MLK were assassinated in the late 70s, assured us, I'm not going nuts. follow-up question. Are you going nuts? Look, the reason I came on the Jimmy Kimmel show is because I'm not. And he flashed a big artificially teeth whitened Joe Biden smile there. That was a good start, right?

Mm-hmm. You know, I own the joke. Here we go. I called New Hampshire, Vermont. I'm going to call Stephen Colbert Jimmy Kimmel. Okay. Now listen to Colbert, push him. a little bit on the same subject.

I'm trying to talk about what other people have done. Like, for example, they made a big deal of my saying that I pinned a medal on two people. I did, but anyway, I pinned a medal on two people and the dates, et cetera. Well, they said that the branch of the military was wrong and the date was wrong and the act he was awarded for was wrong and the medal was wrong.

And what position you held at the time was all of those were fact checks for you. And you said that details don't. No, well, but here's the deal, because I was not talking about me. I was praising what the valor of all these people out there that I've visited and over 20 visits in Afghanistan and Iraq and I've watched these people and I've watched what they've done. And I was pointing out the young man who I did pin the medal on in Wardock Province.

He didn't want the medal because his buddy had been killed as we, as he was being dragged out of a burning Humvee and he didn't. He said, don't pin that on me. I know that the man who actually you did you who said that don't pin it on me said that the important thing to him was that you empathize with him you understood what his emotional state was at that moment which is something that we sorely need right now well so look it's a different thing to say when you're when you're talking about honoring the bravery or the sacrifice or what other people went through and the essence of it is absolutely true the fact that I said that I was vice-pressing Well, in one case, I was vice president-elect. The other case, I was a senator. I'm not sure that's relevant, but I don't, you know, I don't get wrong things like, you know, there is, we should lock kids up in cages at the border. I mean, I don't, you know.

It's interesting there because Colbert really rescues him. He's got Biden, he's challenging on him and, you know, essentially he's working up to, how can you be president if you're making this many mistakes? And then he says, well, it's really in your heart. That's what's important. You know, we need somebody who has the right kind of empathy at this time. And I thought Biden was actually just kind of lurching around. I thought that was kind of an inflatable inner tube thrown his way. What did you think?

Yeah. I mean, the whole thing is sort of interesting. I mean, we've spent a lot of time talking about, Biden and his gaffes. And I, you know, stand by what I've said, which is that I think the biggest problem is going to be a problem of perception, especially when he starts kind of dueling in earnest with other Democrats, that, you know, the perception that he's too old, that he's, whatever, not up to the job. The gaff thing is a particular, I mean, is sort of almost a weird detour. And I do think that in the era of Trump, there's a lot of question about, it's very,

it's very reasonable to question whether or not any of that matters. And you see that sort of exasperation seeping up from Biden. You know, I thought it was a good performance overall on the show. And I don't think that I think that bit with Colbert kind of saving him will stick with me. But I don't know that anyone else is really going to, is really going to, you know, feel the same way. To me, it's kind of hard to watch any politician on any of these night shows. I mean, 99.9% of the time, it just feels, if not contrived, it just feels so transactional that I rarely enjoy it, even to the degree that I would enjoy a celebrity, like literally promoting a movie. I was going to say, transactional, that's a high bar on a late night shows.

That's sad that it feels even by the standards of the genre. I guess like I'm interested on some meta level to hear what to hear what story of Brad Pitt's childhood his PR team decided he would tell that you know that that that is that's interesting to me or what story

from the set or whatever like those are you know I mean it's still it's there's I don't know I don't know I guess it's easier for me to I've been watching that my whole life it's easy it's easier for me to swallow but um and honestly I care less so I you know it's a little bit it's different when it's someone like Biden but I thought it was I thought it was good that he was on there And I think that the best way to combat the sort of stigma that Biden's dealing with right now is just to make yourself like incredibly present. I mean, listen, it's totally true. If this is part of his defense that like, I mean, if someone followed me around with a camera, you know, 20 hours a day for two months, they'd catch me probably with a lot of quote unquote gaffs, you know. I mean, seeing a lot of things that were like. They just have to listen to this podcast and get 20 from each of us every week.

And I think that I think that if that's, you know, in so much as that's a good defense, I mean, who knows. But if that's a good defense. I mean, if that's a good defense. defense for some of the stuff that Biden's dealing with, making himself literally more present to a national audience might, I mean, is in some ways a really thoughtful way out, right? I mean, just like, like the more he's, the more he's present saying anything at all, the less significant, the gaffs told secondhand or, you know, repeated via newsreel will be. That's a very good point, because his, his relative media scarcity has made all these things much worse. And, you know, you're like, if Biden is hiding from us and then he comes out of hiding. twice a week and says something wrong, that is, that is a lot worse.

I guess what was, you can't really run, I think the short way to say it is, you can't run a frontrunner campaign and a gaff filled campaign, right? You kind of, you got to, you got to, you got to sort of hedge towards one or the other. That's probably true. I like how we begin to see here what his defense of this is, which is, I might have the wrong facts at my fingertips, but I have the right feelings. That's essentially what he. he's saying. And you see that him taking a typically long Biden's detour to that. But like a minute into that answer, he goes back, well, at least I don't think kids should be in cages. So he's essentially saying, look, I'm trying to honor the military just because I had like 19 mistakes when I was doing it.

I feel the right thing to do is honor the military and not put children in cages. And I have the right feelings. I don't know how long that defense can possibly last. Because honestly, dude, you make enough of these mistakes and it tends to draw attention away from your feelings, not to mention chip away at the electability argument, which is pretty much Biden's number one argument. And it's funny because I feel like we almost go down the meta media rabbit hole immediately here because we start to flashback to like Al Gore. Well, Al Gore said something about inventing the internet, the press labeled him a liar

and forgave 19 things that George W. Bush did. which were worse. And that, we can't do that again. That cannot happen to Joe Biden because he messed up a story whereas Donald Trump is putting children in cages. How are the, how are these the same? Okay, I'll grant you all that. But it, it does seem important to me that a guy who is old is running for president and consistently can't get stuff right. Even easy stuff. And, you know, Biden also later would say something, it said something in the interview like, well, you know, if I'm about to do something, Like if I'm about to launch the missiles, the details are important. But when I'm telling you a gauzy story on the campaign trail, the details aren't so much important.

Okay, but I think the details that you say on the campaign trail, people are in the press, are absolutely within their right to use those as a predictor of what kind of president you're going to be and how attentive to detail you're going to be. And I sort of think the argument that they're not is kind of stupid. I think to make the case that people are being too hard on him is the wrong or is the wrong response, right? And I think in a lot of ways his response to this whole situation has been a little bit floundering. I mean, at least that's the way it's come across. And to, and to be, I think, I think what, I mean, the lesson from Trump is obviously that you just, you know, you lie and in, in, and be defiant in the face of, um, people pointing out that you've been saying. something untrue. I don't know. I mean, that's obviously not what I would suggest Biden do, but I think defiance in some ways maybe is the right way forward. You know, I mean, to, I mean, it's just sort of watching him try to equivocate to say, oh, but that doesn't really matter. What I was trying to say is this other thing. That all sort of seems beside the point. And in terms of this meta-narrative of running for president, it seems like it's sort of

beneath him to spend his time doing that. So, I mean, I think it's a place he doesn't want to get stuck in and I just think that I just you know I'm sure he and his campaign hope that this puts it to bed and we can stop talking about it I sure do because I don't I'm not particularly interested in having this conversation every other week for the next

several the way next year so we've skipped it on the press box until now I think for like four or five you know episodes in a row but it's you know one one way to do that is to stop making ridiculous mistakes I mean that's not you know again some of them are silly some of them are, you know, okay, you know, you're talking all day and you, and you, and you step in a bear trap. But a lot of them just seem to be like, you know, if you're, if you're telling a story about a real person, you should probably get it mostly right. You should probably not get it like 30% right. That just, that seems like a story. If you can't do that, it seems like you're making stuff up. And by the way, you have a problem, you know, in your presidential campaign history of, you know, detouring all over the place to the point where you were plagiarizing a speech. So.

I, again, I just, I almost, I don't, I do not want to do more segments about what did Biden say to what crazy thing did Biden say today? But I guess the answer to that is stop. My answer preferred answer is not to ignore them, but don't say the crazy things. Give us a break. All right, David, should we talk about the strange case of playboy journalist Brian Karam? This is the guy, the White House tried to suspend his pass for access. Their complaint was that Karam had been disruptive during a social media. Summit back in July.

On Tuesday, a judge ruled, nope, you can't do that. So Karam is back at the White House. He tells Paul Farhey of the Washington Post, the judge, quote, didn't buy anything the White House was selling. As much as this president has tried to bully us, we're not going away. So if you're scoring at home, the White House is now 0 for two after trying and failing to do the same thing to CNN's Jim Acosta. Meanwhile, the post Aaron Blake reminds us of the bonkers circumstance.

that led to Karam's suspension. On July 11th, Trump had a motley crew of social media influencers on hand in the Rose Garden. And when Karam tried to ask the president a question and Trump ignored him, one of the influencers cried out, he talked to us, the real news. Another influencer said, don't be sad. Don't be sad. And speaking to the Trumpy influencers, Karam replied, this is a group eager for demonic possession. At that point, Karam got into it with Sebastian Gorka. a former Trump advisor.

Here's a little sound from that exchange. The first voice you hear is going to be Gorkas. Punk! Get on a drone. Let's jump. Go home. Go home. Hey, Gorka.

Good job. What you couldn't hear there clearly at the end was, Karem saying, Hey, Gork, I get a job. And on and on. So I guess two issues for us here, David. One is, beyond following the kind of broad rules of the White House, do you have to be nice to be a White House?

correspondent. And then the related question I'm going to ask you to it once is, do you have to be nice if you're in the Rose Garden surrounded by press baiting trolls that the president has invited to the White House? And in this case, the judge ruled for Karen, but what do you think? Let me just begin by stating that I have a blanket appreciation for any sentence that's formulated as, hey, then someone's last name, and then any kind of insult from the 1950s. Like that, like, that's, I'm always okay with like, you know, hey Curtis, why don't you shine your shoes? Like, that's, that's fine with me. And so I'll defend the, hey, Gorko, get a job. This is, does this not feel like one of those times where, like, if this, like, if this had happened, you know, 10, maybe even 15 years ago, certainly before, we would have just

never heard anything about it? Like, this is just like a total, like a White House reporter flipping. out or like, you know, is not, it doesn't seem like the end of the world. Am I crazy? Um, I think it seems like the end of the world if the White House suspended the guy, right? But that's, but that isn't, but I guess what I'm saying is, isn't that what's novel here? Yeah, from, from the Trump administration, yes. Like, the fact that, the fact that they are suspending people is the thing that is, that, that is new and different. Hmm. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I'm, because it's certainly not the first time for them.

no it's not but I but I think I think that I think it's I think it would have always been a story because the moment they kick him out no matter what the bizarre and very Trumpesque circumstances is the moment it becomes oh this is a press freedom issue this is not an issue of you know just something weird happening at the White House I don't know I think it is I think it certainly is a press freedom issue I thought you were asking me like if it's okay for him to act that way and I think that you know I mean obviously like objectively no no But like, you know, in context, does it really matter? I find it hard to get too worked up about it. No, I mean, it's almost the judge actually said this in his opinion. This is Rudolph Contreras. He said, what is deemed professional behavior in the context of a state dinner may be very different from what is deemed professional behavior during a performance by James Brown. And if I can translate that to the White House, if the queen of England was at a state dinner, Brian Karam would be expected not to yell at the queen of England, right? he would not say, hey, Elizabeth, get a job.

Like that, that would not work. Although that makes a certain amount of sense. I like that. But if Sebastian Gorka is trolling him to his face, then yelling, hey, Gorka get a job, would be okay. I think, I think that's what the judge is saying. And that seems like a totally reasonable standard to me. I agree. I agree.

All right. So we have 100% agreement. Let us move on to Margaret Atwood, David. Very funny piece in New York Times by Alex Marshall On the extraordinary efforts being made to keep the sequel to the novel The Handmaid's Tale is Secret. The name of Margaret Adwood's follow-up is The Testaments. It is on the shortlist for the Booker Prize. But in order to read the Testaments, the Booker Prize judges have had to treat the novel like some kind of unspeakable secret.

They had to sign a non-disclosure agreement or the organizing committee did. This is the only one of the 150 books on the Booker long list to require that, Alex Marshall reports. On Tuesday, I guess the Booker people had a bunch of reporters over for a press conference to announce the short list. And they put all the books on a table, the books that had made the list. And there was a dummy copy of the Testaments on the table. Like we couldn't even have the real books sitting there on the table lest one of the reporters come grab it or something. even look at the book, like even closed. Marshall reports that couriers refuse to leave copies of Atwood's book with anyone but the judges themselves, even family members. And when judges got

the book, he writes, quote, they found a stack of unbound copy paper in each judge's name had been printed across every page in large gray letters. So this is like when I was on American Airlines yesterday and I'm watching a movie and it says American Airlines at the bottom of the screen so I'm not like taping it with my phone or something like that. Anyway, you're a former book publishing guy. I know this kind of thing happens from time to time with a Harry Potter book or a Dan Brown thriller. Yeah. Explain to us what the purpose of this doing this to a Margaret Atwood novel is. I am going to say up front that I don't know the answer. I mean, this does seem like extreme and it is interesting and and largely humorous because it is so odd.

From where I was sitting in publishing, and I should make it clear that I was never sitting anywhere close to any, you know, important corner offices or anything like that, the decision whether or not to embargo a book, and that's, I guess, not industry specific, but the industry term for this is a little bit capricious, right? I mean, it's a little bit arbitrary. It often, well, that's not true. There's some newsy books which have

breaking proprietary information in them and you embargo them so that every you know that part's very clear so the reviewers the reviews come out the day the book comes out the book comes out

you know and everybody kind of gets access to it at the exact same time and people aren't spilling the secrets of the book before a customer can get their hands on it that part of it makes sense you know

I've definitely seen a fair share of books that were embargoed almost symbolically. Like this is the biggest book we're going to publish this year or next, so we will embargo it without any specific reason in terms of content. I mean, yeah, there's always the argument for content. Like, we don't want the plot of this novel getting out, right? If there's a huge twist ending, it's like for the same reason that, like, you know,

you would screen a movie in a certain way if it had a big twist ending or, you know, if there was something shocking in it or or if it were just such a big movie or the sort of a movie that you want audiences to experience without having read anything about it. There are a lot of reasons to do it. All the details of this are extreme. I mean, if this sounds like some sort of, you know, if this sounds like something you would have never

expect to happen over a novel being published, then yes, that is correct. I mean, that is not, I'm sure there are examples of this happening before, but none that come to mind from me. I mean, there are novels that had, I've seen novels with the, definitive embargoes. Big major novels. You know, the big one, I mean, the big example that

happened in the semi-distant past were books that were selected for Oprah's Book Club. That bookstores, okay, so one thing that needs to be said here is, and there's this whole thing with Amazon shipping some of the books early to some places or whatever. Yes. For every book that's ever been embargoed, the booksellers have always had those early, right? Because if they all have to go out the same day, then they all have to shift, it starts shipping a week or two before to get these ground rate books to the bookstores in time for everybody to put them out on the same day. So even if a book has the secret of life in it, it's probably sitting in a box in the back of the Barnes & Noble for seven days

before it pops up on the front table, right? So these books are accessible to bookstores. I mean, there's lots of stories about Michiko Kakatani, like going into bookstores and like trying to sneak, you know, trying to buy stuff ahead of times when things have been, you know, put on an embargo for her. That sort of thing happened. Now, let me get back to what I was saying, and this is a long explanation. It's happened before I know with Oprah's Book Club, and bookstores would get giant shipments of books that were like basically labeled Oprah's book club selection, and until you open the box, you didn't always know what was inside. So there's examples, but that in itself is the news, right? What comes out of the box of the news? Now, this,

listen, handmade sale is a lovely TV show, very interesting TV show. Margaret Atwood is one of our greatest writers and deserves the recognition that comes with being a multimedia sensation. I'm excited to read this book. I, for the life of me, do not know why all of this attention is being paid to preserving the plot. But, you know, if the entire purpose is for us to have this conversation and hype up the book just through the tales of its, of its, you know, secret of PR campaign, then I think that, you know, that's a, then I admire the Hutzpah of that move. I admire the Hutzpah of that move. Yeah. So we've just promoted the book. Sometimes these these embargoes become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy where you embargo a book and then you end up having to make promises to

PR, I mean, to different media outlets, right? I mean, if there's, if the New York Times, you get first serial, you get first, you get to run the first interview in PR, you get the second interview. And then you get so obligated to all of these different outlets that you, that the embargo becomes way more serious than when it first started. Anyway, back to the net hand. Well, and that's that's what happened is in Australia. Some of the books, as you mentioned, were sent out by Amazon yesterday. So a bunch of newspapers that had agreed to hold the excerpts until near to the books release day, which is actually September 10th, by the way, just went ahead and put up the excerpt saying, wait, people have their books. So we're not holding this anymore.

So that upset the whole kind of orchestrated PR campaign. I like what you said about opening boxes of Oprah's book club and not knowing what's in it. Isn't it what like Trump Club does for men's clothes or something like that? Where you're not sure what they're going to send you? Like, oh, look at this. This snazzy shirt. So this is kind of nice. I was, by the way, reminded this whole thing,

a 2005 talk of the town item that I for some reason remember. It's by Tad Friend, which is probably why I remember it. He wrote about how Margaret Atwood was experimenting with a remote pen. Absolutely. I love that piece. Do you remember that? Tad friend, but yeah, I remember it so well.

It's called two pens. We'll put it up on the, uh, on the Twitter, but Margaret Atwood could sit at home and on a computer screen, write her autograph and David or I would be in a, could be in a bookstore and a robotic arm would be writing Margaret Atwood's autograph onto our book.

Right. So she wasn't, she was signing the book and writing to David. You're the best, you know, you're the best love you. Keep writing about wrestling. Margaret Atwood.

And this. robotic arm thousands of miles away could be scribbling that on David's book. And I went back and looked at this talk of the town item, David, and it said, Tad Friend wrote that this crazy autograph thing could be, quote, a solution to the perennial problem of highbrow writers being mobbed by screaming fans. He wasn't kidding. He was being snarky, but now we see that Margaret Atwood has an issue with tons of people wanting to read her book immediately. So, yeah, I guess it would, yeah, I mean, I guess what, I guess what that sort of didn't predict was the degree to which I mean, these writers would be embracing such fame and fortune in the era of prestige television.

Yes. But also, you know, there was that whole question in there. I believe this is part of the Tad friend piece about the kind of, about the integrity of the signature in the age of the robot signing arm. And, you know, I don't know if this, if this embargo is strictly a matter of integrity. integrity, but, you know, I do have, I have been at bookstores the day that, you know, novels came out. I've certainly been at comic bookstores, the day that comic books have come out that I desperately wanted to read. There is something really lovely about experiencing a work of fiction together. And the same thing goes from movies, too, and you're lining up at midnight to see, you know, new Star Wars or whatever.

Absolutely. And for that alone, I say embargo more novels. Come on. let us talk about Ashley Feinberg David and this new piece she's written in Slate this is one of those segments

where we just talk about a piece we like there's really nothing here other than this I just want to say up top that Ashley Feinberg writes so much good stuff and I know you agree

but your lead of the getting the show was Ashley Feinberg wrote something good and I just wanted to make it clear that wasn't that wasn't a shock that was yeah the tone of that was we know you know this already

so she always writes good stuff so here's another here's another good one Yeah, so we've talked about a couple of times now the whole Brett Stevens affair. And recently how he used his column in the New York Times to take a swipe at Dave Carp from George Washington University, comparing Twitter to Nazi radio and what he called the technology of the id. Well, on Wednesday, Feinberg did a compendium of all the times that New York Times writers, a New York Times columnist, I should say, have written personally defundity. defensive pieces. So this is everybody pulling a Stevens. And one of the winners here is spare me the purity racket by Maureen Dowd, which included the immortal line, yo proletariat.

This is still one of the best things I've ever seen in the New York Times. That's fantastic. Yo, yo proletariat. Another greatest hit is from Barry Weiss about the intellectual dark web. God, remember what we were talking about that all the time. A group known for, and here we should use extreme air quotes, saying bold truths that nobody else will say after getting criticized for offensive tweets. That's really funny. By the way, one thing I neglected to say last week, I started to say it and then figured I

might be saying something wrong, so I put the brakes on. But New York Times columnists barely get edited. And that is an often unspoken truth here. is they've got a job where they can just do whatever they want and write it however they want. And other than something that is like a grammatical mess, the editor's not going to step in. So I think that was one of the questions we had last week. How does this get to the, how does this get into print? Nobody's, why is nobody stopping this?

Well, it's designed for nobody to stop it. That's the thing. So that is, that is a, that is how this thing goes. I've got a little segment here, David, for you called, we can workshop this title, but I'm going to call it Wisdom of the Masters. And it's just when you find a little sentence or paragraph about journalism that is just perfect.

And this one comes from a book that you and I both own and love, Ron Rosenbaum's The Secret Parts of Fortune. Oh, yeah. Go out and get it if you're a lover of investigative journalism and great writing and all of the above. Anyway, in his intro, Ron Rosenbaum has a paragraph about pegs. You don't know what a peg is. It's a thing you use to justify you writing a piece of journalism, usually a longer story.

So when I wrote about Dan and Keith, ESPN's 40th birthday was the peg, even though Dan and Keith were just as interesting and influential on ESPN's 39th birthday. Okay, but I wait until the 40th birthday to write it. That's a peg. Ron Rosenbaum is not surprisingly against pegs. and here is his paragraph which I enjoyed. The peg is, I believe, the bane, the self-destruction of magazine journalism. I'm not against topicality per se.

I've done pieces that have pegs. I'm just against the doctrine that insists on only the topical and defines topical in the most obvious way, the way most attached to the timetables of the publicity industrial complex. I prefer things that become topical because some obsessed writer cares about it enough to compel attention to it. And it got me thinking, first of all, great graph. Second of all, it got me thinking

about whether the public cares about pigs. You know, on the one hand, I think these things sort of work subliminally on people. Now, if there's a movie coming out, naturally, there's a natural inclination to want to read something about the movie star. And, you know, you of course want websites, it's magazines, newspapers to in some way speak to what's going on in the world.

But I think a lot of the time pegs are kind of subliminal, especially when you're not, you're right, you're, you're sort of putting a peg into it just to just to sort of tell people why they're reading it. I think that works on readers in this kind of weird way where they're like, oh, that's why I'm reading this story because it's the 40th anniversary. That's why I'm reading this. But what's funny is, I think when you take pegs away, readers also really dig that because it's almost like taking the seatbelt off them when they're in the car. All of a sudden they feel this weird kind of like, ooh, I don't know what I'm going to get next. I don't know that I'm going to get a profile of the person in once upon a time in Hollywood.

I may just get some random story on some actor. I may just get some movie that happened 25 years ago. I may just get something altogether that I don't understand. I don't know what you think of that. But it's funny to me because I'm always wondering whether pegs are something that editors that are really important. And, you know, they really do affect how people like journalism or where they buy a magazine or something like that or whether there's something that we just impose on things and readers really don't care that much at all. it's a good question i mean i think that in a lot of times a lot of times the peg is so strained as to um sort of make a mockery of the whole endeavor even if pegs are you take pegs to be a

positive thing i don't remember this from i don't remember that part of the secret parts of fortune but i assume to some extent it was uh it was arguing in favor of his the timelessness of his own writing i mean i would is that that's the only thing that would make sense to me in the introduction because at least that's the point that I was going to make, which is, I mean, there's, as much as I love a timely essay or a timely profile or, you know, timely dive into history, there's nothing like the excitement of reading, this sounds so nerdy about like reading the secret book, a collection of essays, like the secret parts of fortune, getting to the end of one and just wondering what the next thing you're going to encounter is going to be, right? I mean,

It could have been written. And any of those things could have been pegged. But the fact that they kind of stood the test of time beyond that, I think, is what really matters, right? Yeah. An unpegged story, if it's good, we'll have a longer shelf life. I think that in my, you know, constant, I constantly invoke expectations and, and, and in line with that, I think that I can't go, I can't go fully anti-peg.

I think that pegs are a good organizational tool, not. just in terms of readers' expectations and understanding. Because as much as I love being surprised, you know, and especially in this multimedia age, it's hard to, it's hard to just sort of blissfully dip into a story that you don't know what you're about to encounter. You know, you don't have any idea about what it's about to be.

You know, this is not like, this is not like, oh, I got a movie recommendation. My friend said, oh, just watch it. You'll love it and wouldn't tell me anything else. I mean, there's a lot going on. You know, our time is always limited. So pegs are good in terms of, you know, letting us know what we're getting into.

And they're also probably good for organizationally from the editorial side, right? I mean, that you have some rhyme or reason to the way that you're assigning things and pushing things out and everything else. But if there's a, I will say, if it ever feels like the peg is holding you back, or the demand for a peg is holding you back, that might be a problem. Yeah. I mean, the answer is probably both, right? You want some stuff that seems current and seems at the moment.

And then you want some stuff that's, you know, you take a pull it on the slot machine and you don't know what's going to come out. But, but it's an interesting question. And again, it's one of those things that it's so ingrained in, it's one of those, it's a word you hear all the time. It's ingrained in editorial philosophy. And I just always wonder, like, do readers give a shit about this? Do readers know what that is? Does that work on readers in any kind of important way? Or is that just something that we are talking about among,

amongst ourselves and, you know, nobody out there really cares. And it has no effect on really on the numbers. You know, obviously news magazines are going to be about the news. We get that. But the other, but, but those kind of pieces where you have to pick door number one or door number two, that readers just don't give a shit at all. I wonder about that. Anyway, it's interesting.

All right. Time for David Shoemaker. Guess is a strain pun headline. Tuesday's winner was, but a fake dingo in Saskatoon. Headline was faux paw. we got some great alternates, David, from our pals online. Buster for Lundell thought it should have been K-9. Like, nine.

Pretty good. Andrew Bentavoglio had barking up the wrong family tree. There you go. Pretty good. Pretty good. And Petey thought it should be the dingo ain't my baby. That's it. Dingo ain't my baby.

I'd like to think I would have gotten there if you hadn't disqualified that whole line of I did. I took you off the scent but that was no pun intended. I'm sorry. Today's headline comes from Griffin Chase. It's from the AFP Al Jons France Press.

And it's from August and about a Church of England Cathedral David in Rochester, which is in Kent. During the summer, this cathedral took out all the pews and put in a golf course, like a putt putt style golf course

right through the middle of the cathedral. Is that the sanctuary? Am I mixing up my church terms here? Right through where the sanctuary of the cathedral, there is a full-scale golf course. That's all it is. All right. As the AFP notes,

putting a golf course in is the Church of England's effort to, quote, stem the dwindling congregations in an increasingly secular Britain. so they didn't put in a kind of millennial sounding band they put in a golf course okay that's all you need to know what is the afp's strained pun headline but is put put put a so a strictly american phenomenon uh i don't know that it it does not it does not figure in here okay put um so this is something with golf yes inside a church yeah i feel like i should just know this off the

top. It is among the lower hanging fruit. Club? Whole hole. Oh, like holy and one. Oh.

That's funny. Par. Holy water. Yeah. Holy water. Praise God and pass the five iron. You're going to have to give me something here. I don't know. I feel like I'm calling for it today.

Where do you? What does a golfer drive down? Oh, the fairway. Hmm. Fairway to heaven. There we go. There we go. Told you.

Low hanging fruit. Oh, I should have known that. That's so obvious. Okay. Fair way to heaven. It's harder. Guys, listening to this, it's harder than it. It's harder than it seems when you're listening to the podcast, okay?

Every time we have a guest host. No, every time we have a guest host, they come in with a lot of, you know, this isn't going to be hard. And they never get it. They never get it. David is in a tough seat. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Research by Chris Almeida,

production magic by Jim Cunningham. We're back Tuesday, bright and early, with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian. David? I agree. I agree.

All right. We have 100% agreement. Let us move on them. Yes. Let us move on. Hey, Curtis, why don't you shine your shoes? All right. Nothing like the excitement of reading.

All right. This sounds so nerdy. I agree. All right. If the Queen of England was at a state dinner and a robotic arm... Get a job. Anyway, a robotic arm... And for that alone, I say, get a job.

Honestly, dude, you make enough of these mistakes. Nobody out there really cares. Sometimes these become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Get a job. And then you end up having to make promises. Just because I had like 19 mistakes when I was doing it, that's all you need to know. See you later, Brian.