The Press Box - Everyone Dies: Michael Wolff’s New Book, Nancy Pelosi, and a Big Announcement | The Press Box

Episode Date: June 4, 2019

An important 'Press Box' announcement (00:45), the return of Michael Wolff (03:45), the Nancy Pelosi video (19:30), ‘Running With Beto’ (28:00), and more. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. It's Liz Kelly, host of Tea Time. Exciting news happening across the podcast network, your favorite celebrity and pop culture podcasts are moving out of Channel 33 and into their very own feed called Ringar Dish. On Ringer Dish, you can still listen to Jam Session on Wednesdays and Tea Time on Fridays, and we'll be launching a brand new show that will publish every Monday, starting with a deep dive on Jalo and Ben Affleck's infamous relationship hosted by Amanda Dobbins and Juliet Lippman. So to hear more about the royal family and our current celebrity obsessions, subscribe to Ring Your Dish on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. David, we've got a big announcement about the press box this week. What I want to know is, how excited are you? On a scale, or am I doing it on a scale?

Is it a scale of 1 to 10? Sure. Or you really want to get into my emotional state right now? As deep as you want to go, baby. Let's do it. I'm a solid, solid 9.75. Of excitement right here. I got to leave a little bit of room for some future excitement that may befall.

But yeah, this is really, really exciting stuff, really big news. And, you know, we couldn't have done it without our friends and family and loyal listeners. Oh, and also the people at the ringer who pay us. So we got two announcements. Number one, this thing is going twice a week. So you'll get your usual press box episode on Tuesday morning. And then you get another press box episode on Friday morning. That's big stuff.

Big news, yeah. announcement number two, the press box has its own feed. And it's the feed formerly known as Channel 33. It's the feed you're listening to right now. Oh, my gosh. So if you subscribe to Channel 33, you will see that has already transformed into the press box feed. And if you don't, grab your phone and please subscribe right now.

Now, David, what do these changes mean to listeners of the press box? Well, a couple of things. One is the episodes are going to be the same that you get now. When we talk about media, quote unquote, we do not. do Pointer Institute style hand wringing. It's us talking about stuff we watch, we read, we listen to, all that stuff. If anything, you'll probably

get an episode with one or two essential items at the top to get you squared away and then we'll run through a bunch of stuff because we want to cram more things onto the pod. And number two, this feed is now our own little sandbox. Yeah. So you might hear David and I pop on with an emergency pod

right after the Democratic debates later this month. You might see me sliding into your feed with an interview with a media titan or two. Oh. And those will be bonus episodes in addition to the usual show. So anyways, David said, thanks to Bill and Sean and Juliet Littman for their unending support of us, which we surely do not deserve.

And also to the huge number of people who tweeted at David and I over the last year asking, when are you guys going to get your own feed? It's here. You did this. Thank you. And this is gratitude not in the smarmy fake media way. This is genuine gratitude. Thank you for listening to this show.

this is not some personal news that kind of gratitude. No, no, no, no. Thank you. Because I think David, I are both surprised at how happy an experience this has been and how big this has gotten. And we're happy to do more, right, buddy? Yeah, I'm

very excited, very excited about election season, very excited about our own feed. And go to the ringer store to get your very own, when are you getting your own feed t-shirts? That is not true, but the rest of it is. With all that said, David, we are the Talk Magazine and Men's Vogue of Media Podcasts. This is the Press Box, a part of the Ringer Podcast Network.

The Press Box is the media podcast where we're just going to try not to screw this up. Brian Curtis and David Chewmaker here. Here's how we're going to do this thing this week, David. First, Michael Wolf is back with a new book on Donald Trump. And we need to try to describe just what it's like to be fed maybe true revelations from an unreliable muckraker. That's number one. We're going to do the overworked Twitter joke of the week.

And finally, a whole bunch of media items. I want to talk to you about the Nancy Pelosi video and where we are with that, the new HBO Beto O'Rourke doc. I want to talk to you about Geraldo Rivera threatening someone or something that I'm still trying to figure out all that and more. But first, David, I regret to inform me that Michael Wolf is back in our lives. He's got a new Trump tell all called Siege. which is a sequel to his 2018 bestseller, Fire and Fury. And can I just start with an audio appetizer

to get us in the right frame of mind here? Please, yes. To remind us what kind of reporter we're dealing with in Michael Wolf. So you remember in Fire and Fury, he claimed that Donald Trump and Nikki Haley were having an affair? Yes, alluded to that.

Eluded to that. Eluded to that. Intimated that. And then he went on Australia's Today program, and this happened. You said during a TV interview just last month that you are absolutely sure that Donald Trump is currently having an affair while president behind the back of the First Lady. And I'll repeat, you said you were absolutely sure. Just last week, however you back flipped and said, I quote, I do not know if the president is having an affair.

Do you owe the president and the First Lady an apology, Mr. Wolf? I can't hear you. Just last month, you said you were absolutely. sure that the president was having an affair, and now you say that he is not. I'm not getting anything. You're not hearing me, Mr. Wolf? I'm not getting anything. We were hearing each other well just before. I can't hear you. My mic has cut out right at the moment when you're challenging me on one of my more dubious assertions. By the way, another amazing book interview from the Anglophone world. They all sent, they all did happen in England or Australia now.

On that note, let's start with Wolf's reporting methods. For the new book, Siege, Wolf did not ask Donald Trump for an interview, which is pro forma with most authors. He didn't seek comment from Fox News about one of the book's biggest alleged scoops, which we'll talk about here in a second. In an interview with the New York Times as Michael Grinbaum, David, Wolf makes this distinction between Michael Wolf-style. reporting and what he calls institutional style reporting. He says, quote, it's a distinction between journalists who are institutionally wedded

and those who are not. I'm not. You make these pro forma calls to protect yourself, to protect the institution. It's what the institution demands. I'm talking about those calls where you absolutely know what the response is going to be. They put you in a position in which you're potentially having to

negotiate what you know in some curious way. That's what much journalism is about it's about a negotiated truth. Here's my take on Michael Wolf, and this extends way back to him writing the media column in New York Magazine years ago. He's not totally full of shit.

Often Michael Wolf is merely 90% full of shit. And to me here, the 10% non-shit-filled part of him contains an interesting idea, which is when you have an institution like the Trump White House, and we may also throw Fox News in there, that's just going to lie to you officially and on the record.

Is it worth making the phone call merely so that your book slash article contains a crazy, untruthful denial? Or does he potentially have something here? I mean, I feel this is the argument that liberal Twitter has been having with the media off and on for the entirety of the Trump administration. why are you treating them like an institution, you know, like you would a normal White House? Yeah, I think it, and it's not just a question of whether you do it, like you said, so your piece contains a denial, a pro forma, a pro forma, you know, request for comments. You get a pro forma denial, but I think there's also the question of whether or not your piece contains a no comment, right? I mean, if you, that's the institutional thing that Wolf is talking about.

And, you know, on the one hand, the, you know, the expectation of the reader, one would assume and of, you know, of journalistic history is that you, that you, you're not seeking a no comment. You're seeking a comment. And the no comment is just, you know, a note that you, that you pursued it because, of course, you would want a contrasting point of view from the subject. Well, you'd want more information, ideally. Sure. Ideally, you'd want what is true. It's like don't want a contrasting opinion, right? Sure, but you want, but if you're leveling accusations against somebody, you would want

to give them the opportunity to say none of that is true, right? I mean, or if it, if indeed it is. But you're right, it's the pursuit of the truth. But I guess, you know, I mean, from a, from an armchair perspective, it's easy to say you should have done it. It's also easy to say he's like correct in this case that he wouldn't have gotten anything out of it. I'm not sure that that means that the practice is somehow like rendered

archaic by the modern era or the current presidency. But he closes out that interview that you mentioned by affirming that yes, siege is a work of journalism because I guess that is the question at the heart of it. Which is a pretty low bar, by the way. Well, I think that's it. I think that if nothing else, his sort of protestations about why he didn't seek comment from the White House are proof that he's kind of, I mean, to put it simply, he's doing a different thing than other people are doing.

And I think that that's that's both defense and a qualifier to anyone that that might want to read the book. Yeah. And like I said, I think it is in his own very odd way. And he's certainly not playing to this crowd. But it is what liberal Twitter has asked reporters at places like the New York Times to do. Don't let yourself get rolled by Jared Kushner and Ivanka said that earlier in the administration. Don't let yourself get rolled by people like Hope Hicks. You need to be, you know.

just about adversarial with this administration because it's not normal quote unquote. And, you know, I think he is just taking that idea and taking it to the logical extreme or the illogical extreme and he's like, you know what? I'm not going to make even the routine follow up call so that, you know, I'm just protecting myself on this. Or I am, you know, and again, including the, you know, control plus v disclaimer, the trumpet, you know, administration denies XYZ. It is interesting, but he is right about negotiated truth because I think a lot of times reporters know something and they make the call, they do what you're taught to do in journalism school, and you wind up just putting misinformation or a denial that's not true into a piece

of journalism. And there's kind of an interesting question about whether you should do. Now, let me add quickly, if you're going to do the Michael Wolfe style of journalism, your scoops should probably be true. Yeah. And his books, now that we have two of them, they feel like the steel dossier of Trump books to me, which is it consists of a lot of stuff that really sounds right, but may not be totally right in siege. The one that's going around now, Wolf claims Robert Mueller's lawyers had drawn up a draft indictment of Donald Trump on obstruction charges. Peter Carr, spokesman for Mueller,

says the documents described do not exist. Wolf also claims that Fox News gave Brett Kavanaugh a list of questions ahead of time when it interviewed him during the confirmation process. Martha McCallum, who did the interview with Brett Kavanaugh says this. Michael Wolf, you may not care to know the facts, but I do. So here they are.

I wrote my questions on a legal pad, the old-fashioned way, on my way to D.C. in a car. No one from the White House or, for that matter, from Fox weighed in on my interview at all, period. This is a news show. We deal in facts. I have been doing this for 25 years,

and I have never given anyone my questions prior to an interview. That is the story. That is not negotiated truth. So there's Martha McCallum. We've talked, I think, before in the show, and certainly we've talked off-micophone a lot, about the sort of when you this the flip side of this where you can read a piece and

investigative piece you read a book and you and you you can almost tell by the way that it's written that there that even if it's not a tsunami of evidence in the piece that there is probably you know you know a sizable hurricane of information that the lawyers kept out of the piece and you can tell by the way it's written that it's written with such confidence even with I mean that that the broad accusations are true even if it seems a little bit wanting in the in the evidence provided. Some of this was in, was discussed about the Baxter Holmes, the Lakers piece, how that sort of, there was a lot of discussion. There was stuff that was kept out. A lot of the Me Too articles that came out in the past couple years, you know, it's, it's the, when, when the author knows something that he can't entirely prove in the, you know, with, you know, we can't entirely validate to the, you know, to the degree that the lawyers or the editors want him to, this is the other side of that. Because you read, and you feel the exact opposite level of confidence, right, that ended what's being told is true.

Yeah, there's too much. We didn't leave anything out. Yeah, it's really odd. And to go back to what you were saying a little bit earlier about that the way that his, you know, lack of requesting comment is what liberal Twitter is demanded of media in the Trump era. I mean, there's a degree to which it's also what liberal Twitter or liberals in general have rightly accused some conservative media of doing over the you know, over the years, which is, you know, sort of arguing in bad faith and taking everybody at their, you know, assuming the worst about everybody's intentions and statements and assuming that everything you hear is, is correct if it, if it fits into your argument, right? I mean, so there's, there, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I'm sure there is some truth here.

And I'm sure that, you know, the things that he's reporting in this book are things that he heard from a source that he trusts, whether or not that is a, you know, whether or not that source is Steve Bannon and all of those. instances or something that Steve Bannon overheard or not is sort of, I guess, the interesting question here. I am also fascinated by the just whole dynamic between Michael Wolf and quote unquote mainstream media reporters. Because this is a guy who has absolutely blistered those people and will do it at any possible. And now his whole institutional reporting is of course a sub-tweet of basically anybody that works at a newspaper.

And now what he is attempting with these two books is essentially to go onto their turf and get scoops out of the Trump White House that Maggie Haberman at all are working every day to pull out. And he's sort of saying, I can do this better than you. Watch me do this. And I'm going to do this in a different way. And I'm going to do it better than you. And I'm going to get stuff that you don't have while side swiping. So then you have the quote unquote again, sorry for sorry for all the air quotes today, mainstream media coming back and saying, whoa, you know, look at the errors in this.

Ryan Liz's review in the Washington Post, the cringe worthy errors, as he called them that he pointed out and saying sort of in a way, I mean, it is really a kind of high class turf war for the White House beat, is it not? Yeah. I mean, you can certainly see, I mean, and this is, this is separate from the argument of veracity. I mean, and journalistic ethics and everything else, you definitely see some people whose reactions are, I mean, you talk about people who are working the beat every day. There are people who, in so much as some of these accusations are probably true, there are people who have probably been trying to source them to the degree that they're allowed to publish them for months or years, right? And so there's going to be some pushback just from sort of a turf war perspective on. that. And then, yeah, and then there's the part where you say something that's not, that's demonstrably not true, and you don't really know what your place is as a journalist,

how you can react to that. I mean, there, you know, there is, I think with the last book, and there's certainly been other, other, you know, Trump exposés in the past couple of years that fit into this mold where you can see some journalists that are, especially like the folks on TV that are sort of viscerally relieved that somebody went out there and said it so that it can be discussed openly now, you know, and they don't have to have that on their, have that onus on themselves to have broken the story or relayed something that might be, that might be, you know, uncouth or whatever. But, you know, this instance, and maybe because it's the second book, maybe because,

I don't know, the floodgates are a little bit open. It feels like there's a little bit more of a exasperation with this one. All right, David, now it's 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. Did you see David the tweet from NBA insider Shams Tarania on Friday, quote, the Los Angeles clippers have been fined 50 grand by the NBA for violating the league's anti-tampering rule when Doc Rivers publicly commented on Kauai Leonard. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write the Clippers really are the new Lakers.

Thanks to Joseph Munganielo for that one. By the way, someday someone's going to have to explain why a coach saying that a player is really good in public. This is one of the ones that I truly didn't understand. Listen, if you can have a different level of contract, you're like, you can make more money if you make the all-NBA team a certain number of times. I think if you make the all-NBA team a certain number of times, then everyone's just allowed to say they want you on their team.

I think that that's, I think we can write that into the bylaws. I really, I don't, I cannot possibly comment on the idea that Kauai Leonard is a great basketball player. I certainly wouldn't want him on my squad. I mean, just some of it just becomes comical. All right. David, don't know if you stayed up late for the crazy heavyweight title fight on Saturday night,

but a seemingly very out of shape guy named Andy Ruiz Jr. Knocked out Anthony Joshua to become the heavyweight champion of the world. And if you saw Ruiz, he was not the body beautiful, as Brian Kinney noted during the broadcast. It was an overwork Twitter joke. to say, I'm just so proud to have the same physical dimensions as the heavyweight champion of the world. That was one. And I don't know if you saw this, David.

Ruiz came to his victorious post-fight news conference in a Knicks jersey, which is kind of funny. Yes. A lot of Nix jokes, the best of which was this is the first time anyone under the age of 46 has seen a man in a Nix jersey holding proof of a championship. Great stuff there. All right. That's good. Some rolling items for you. This from the Dispatches from Hell category.

By the way, every media story now, I almost think that we should just have a Charlie Worsel bat signal just go up. Because it's really not a Howie Kurtz world anymore for media reporters. It's a Charlie Worsal world. Everything is just like, what in the hell is happening? We have been for more than a week now dealing with this Nancy Pelosi video, which as the New York Times describes, Pelosi's speech was slowed down and slurred, making her appear drunk. YouTube took down the video, but Facebook did not.

Pelosi this last week said, I think they have proven, she's talking about Facebook, by not taking down something they know is false, that they are willing enablers of Russian interference in our election. Hillary Clinton added, and we saw why it's so important just last week when Facebook refused to take down a fake video of Nancy. It wasn't even a close call. The video is sexist trash. Facebook explains that they haven't taken the video down because being true is not a requirement of a Facebook video. Right. That is that is not a red line.

What did you make of that decision tree that they've gone down in that? Well, it's hard to have sympathy for. Facebook. It is? There's been so much sympathy for Facebook in the media. I can't believe you'd say that. But okay, go ahead. But this is the, I mean, this is the issue that you see them wrestling with.

Now, listen, I mean, there's a degree to which you understand why they can't come out and say, this is a real problem that we continue to have that we've had since the beginning. And we don't know quite how to deal with it, you know, for fear that their stock price might dip a quarter of a penny or something like that. But, but, I mean, this is a real, this is a real philosophical. conundrum, right? I mean, it's, I mean, is this, how, is, is separate from the, separate from Donald Trump's involvement, because that distinction is significant, but, but, you know, I'm not, and I'm not tossing, you know, throwing that out the window, but separate from his involvement,

is there something wrong with that? I mean, is there something, is it a matter of, for some reason, I'm flashing back to, this is so far afield, but I'm flashing back to James Fry's memoir, a million little pieces and how they're and how he was just condemned for misleading everyone and lying in his memoir even though like every single bestselling memoir is full of lies like that's the point of of like literary memoir is that you say this crazy stuff and sometimes you write in floored ways and and there's different ways to do it I mean is it only a percept is the only thing that matters how much you have fooled the average viewer or reader is that the only thing that matters because it's okay to have it's okay for those memes to go around of like

Adolf Hitler giving speeches and saying, and you dub the words into his mouth, right? It's a, it would be okay to have Donald Trump, you know, overdubbed with like, whatever, like, like, Oscar the Grouch's voice coming out of a Donald Trump speech. Like, that would be fine. But if the average person is more than, I mean, is whatever percentage is likely to be confused, then that's actionable. Now, obviously, this is problematic. The question is where the line is drawn.

Yeah. And by the way, I think you bring up a good question, because if we have, had Nancy Pelosi talking overdubbed with a dictator's voice, that probably doesn't get taken down. Right. Because that's a pretty obvious, you know, however awful it is, is a pretty obvious, you know, comment, I guess, on Nancy Pelosi. Sure.

And I think that, I mean, part of the problem is we're not everyone, most people viewing this probably aren't as familiar with Nancy Pelosi speech patterns. They're not going to immediately identify it as being doctored. And then I think the more, I mean, maybe the more interesting question is Trump's role in this for Trump's social team's role in this, but I think that this kind of goes to the central, um, you know, philosophical question about Donald Trump in some ways in that when he saw this video,

presumably, presuming he saw it, that he think that was really her and he was like, I'm going to get this out here and that'll really, that'll really mess with her. Or did he say, I know this is fake and it's hilarious and I'm still going to put it out there. Because whether or not Trump,

whether Trump is your, you know, whatever, your confused grandmother on Facebook or just some sort of like ultra-canny meme lord or both is I think at the very core of our questions about our president. He's your ultra-canny grandmother. I think it's probably closer to the truth. Yeah. I mean, I just don't think he cared probably if I had to guess whether it was true or not and thought it was funny and put it out there. I mean, I just, I guess what you're saying is that it's just, it's very, very hard to make any

kind of coherent line here and that people get mad. But it's like what what is the rule? that rules out this video but includes lots of other stuff. Is that what it is? Like what is the Facebook internal policy that says you cannot put up a doctored video of a public figure because people won't know exactly

that it's doctored? Right. But you can put up something that's obviously doctor. I mean, it does get to be very thin sliced. And to be clear, I think that the appropriate,

I mean, that it's entirely appropriate to, to, quite to ask the White House what the hell he was thinking, to, to, to repeat it. I mean, and we, you know, it's been established that repeatedly asking the same question is not necessarily the most effective way to,

or asking any question is not the most effective way to, to resolve an issue with the Trump administration. I think it's, as well within, you know, Twitter's rights to, to take some sort of action here because it was spread on their platform. But I'm not sure, I'm not sure that going after a site for hosting it,

in the first place is I mean that just feels sort of reactionary and that feels like what we like what we've been trained to do in other circumstances I'm not sure that it holds as much water here as

as we would like it to well what if you're Facebook and you are staring down the barrel of regulation but possibly extremely invasive regulation by the government and it just so happens

that the victim of the video you won't dink town take down as the speaker of the house it is I guess in a weird way sort of amazingly amazing that this is where they draw the line because if you're acting purely out of political expediency like whoa we need to take this down right now

yeah but it's been established that the people that the people that are most effective at taking Facebook to task are the conservatives right I mean the people that complained that the trending news wasn't you know it was biased even though that's it that was a pretty vague conjecture or not conjecture but pretty you know that that was entirely true the way the story was told. And I mean, by and large, I think if you take that down, then you get a lot of people saying that they're censoring conservatives or more specifically,

they're censoring the president. And that's even more problematic. So I don't know what you do. Over at the Daily Beast, Kevin Paulson published an article last night about the person who he calls a Donald Trump super fan and occasional sports blogger. By the way, what a business card that is, named Sean Brooks, who at the very least amplified the video and helped send it into the world.

He sort of claims he was not the creator of the video. But there emerged this whole other sort of side controversy about whether his name should have been out there.

That is Sean Brooks's name. Ishaar Ali, the reporter tweets, I got to say, it sets a really bad precedent when a private citizen, particularly someone who is working a blue-collar job,

has their identity publicly revealed simply because they made a video of a politician appearing to be drunk his identity offers nothing to the story I cannot say how strenuously I disagree with that idea and surely it's news we're not talking about a video that

as you say is touched the president of the United States the speaker of the house herself Hillary Clinton and about a billion other politicians surely whoever made the video and or popularized the video video is news, especially if the person talked to a reporter. I just don't, I mean, I don't, I don't even understand the other argument. And this just seems to be one where people are just thinking, gaming this out too much.

But it just, I, again, I just don't get it. Maybe I'm missing completely missing stuff, but I don't get the argument at all. David, I've got takes on the HBO Beto O'Rourke doc, running with Beto, which came out March 28th. Watched it. there's a lot to like about it. A filmmaker certainly got a lot of Beto in it. A lot of those shots from the passenger seat of the car while he drives through the Texas hinterlands.

I haven't seen it, so tell me all about it. Well, here's, I'll tell you about it with my minor problem with it, which is it's almost like they got too much access to Beto. And when you're watching this, I sort of realize politicians aren't particularly sympathetic characters, but the people who work for politicians, often at low pay, crazy hours, there's several scenes of Beto kind of berating his staff members

in a very nice way, but in a very, you know, if you're the staff member and this is appearing in a nationally released documentary, pretty embarrassing way, those people are sympathetic characters, the people who are supporting Beto and were truly gutted and shocked when he lost to Ted Cruz on election night,

their sympathetic characters. But the politicians themselves, it's just hard to get work up much emotion for them. I mean, the filmmakers here have Beto and his wife at their dining, at their kitchen table the night after he is lost. I mean, that night. And, but he's really in concession speech mode. And, you know, what are we going to do with all this energy? And how are we going to,

how are we going to take this and how are we going to do the next thing? And it's, and it's the people who work for him and worked, uh, you know, spreading, you know, putting up campaign signs that are the devastated one. And it's really interesting because I love that old documentary, The War Room that's about Clinton's campaign in 92.

Oh, yeah. And it was almost better, I thought, to see Clinton kind of glimpsed on television or glimpsed from afar at a rally and to focus on the people. I don't know. Maybe it's the politicians are just, you know, kind of cyborgs, even admirable ones. But there's just a certain sense of even Beto, you know, cussing, listening to music, driving around, being Mr. Casual politician guy. There's just something about that, you know, impenetrable shield that you just never quite get through. Yeah, I think that's probably right. I mean, I think that access is, like, as you discuss it, is both, you know, a gift and a curse and these sorts of things.

And, and you know that people are, I mean, that the, you know, you're selling this based on the level of access that you have. But it also just sucks you in and skews your perception. And also, I mean, even if you're not, you know, politically skewed by it, it definitely affects what goes on. in the editing room like you're talking about, you know? So that's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's up to make it's as compelling as they want it to, I'm sure. This is David from the annals of existential despair. Uh, there was a big debate about a New York Times hope Hicks piece the other day, they used the term existential. And actually, I thought the piece described a problem that wasn't existential. I thought the word was misused in that context. This Jan Crawford, CBS interview with

William Barr, Attorney General of the United States, is existential. I mean, this is, this is what the word means. Listen to this clip. Losing a lot of political capital, and I realize that. And that's one of the reasons that I ultimately was persuaded that maybe I should take it on, because I think at my stage in life, it really doesn't make any difference. You're at the end of your career? I'm at the end of my career. I've, you know, I mean, it's a reputation that you've worked your whole life on, though. Yeah, but everyone dies and I'm not, you know. Everyone dies. Kind of wipes all criticism off the table.

Yeah, it does. Brian, you've become an apologist for ball or stool sports through that the last 10 years of your career. Well, everyone dies. You know, so that's my defense. I am one day going to die. And so that will be it. I love that. And this is very related.

This is the non-answer of the week, David, which we give. to a political figure who ducks a tough question. In this case, it goes to Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Oh, yeah. Who had this amazing exchange with Axios reporter Jonathan Swan that was broadcast Sunday night on Axios' HBO series. Give this a listen. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she calls, she has called President Trump a racist. Have you ever seen him say or do anything that you would describe as racist or bigoted?

So the answer is no, absolutely not. You can't not be a racist for 69 years, then run for president and be a racist. And what I'll say is that when a lot of the Democrats call the president a racist, I think they're doing a disservice to people who suffer because of real racism in this country. Was birtherism racist? Look, I wasn't really involved in that. I know you weren't. Was it racist?

Like I said, I wasn't involved in that. I know you weren't. Was it racist? Look, I know who the president is, and I've not seen anything in him that is racist. So again, I was not involved in that. Did you wish he didn't do that? Like I said, I was not involved in that. That was a long time ago.

I was watching that. I just want to say, I watched that for the first time on, I don't even know what channel is watching this morning, MSNBC maybe, and they played, I think pretty much the whole clip that you just played. But I was watching it on my laptop, so it was like over the top, you know, like it skips around sometimes and I literally thought that it had just jumped backwards and I was hearing the same thing. This is not a bit. I really thought that. And it wasn't just because Kushner repeated himself. It's because the interviewer repeated himself verbatim. And I thought that was an incredible,

it's not just repeating the question. There's something very effective about repeating it with the exact same cadence and the exact same notes in your voice. It was very, it was, it was truly just one of the most surreal things to listen to. If you wanted to duck a question, what is your preferred method? Do you say, I wasn't involved in that or do you say everyone dies? What do you? Which way, which door would you open there, David? Oh, man. If there's some way I could put them together, I guess. I guess probably start with I wasn't involved with that. And then I yell everyone dies as I'm jumping out the window to escape the follow up. I'm repeating myself here. But we need only, we need only English and Australian people to conduct all our interviews from here on, from henceforth, as they may say. Just that is it. America American television interviews, you're out. You're canceled. We're, we don't even. you anymore. I've got a Heraldo update for you, David. I don't quite know what to do with this,

but at 10.04 p.m. on May 29th, heraldo was having a heat check on the subject of Trump's possible impeachment. He tweeted fair warning, all caps, by the way, fair warning as I did with Bill Clinton in 1997 through 98, I tonight announced that if you want to impeach this president on these facts, you'll have to come through me. So, Geraldo is sort of setting himself up Royal Rumble style in the ring, you know, like kind of holding the ropes and waiting for somebody to come down the aisle. Do you like kind of just threatening

humanity at large? That's great, especially from the whatever, I don't even know what the seat of Geraldo Rivera is right now, that it's just like a really impressive thing. You don't know what like his power base is? Yeah. I mean, I mean, it's not, I mean, it's not, I mean, it's not, I don't even know what that, what the implications would be.

The last, the last time we checked in on Haraldo Rivera on Twitter, he was shirtless, I believe. So, I mean, I'm not going to say that there's nothing intimidating him having to go through him first. But can I just say that, you know, people have to come through me too if they want to impeach the president? I'm not saying, I'm not going to put up much of a fight, but I want to get my name out there. Oh, yeah, of course.

People were tweeting in Geraldo. Are you still on television? And I, and I didn't take that as a, as a criticism or like they were trying to troll him. It was an honest question. Like, what do you do exactly now? Where will this, what would the arena for this be? David got some sports press conference news for you.

Did you catch this exchange between a reporter and the Warriors Draymond Green after game one of the NBA finals? And just to set it up, Green and the omnipresent Drake had words after game one. And here's what Green said after the game was over. Talk a little bit about that postgame scuffle between you and Drake. You got a question about basketball? It wasn't really a scuffle because I didn't hit him and he didn't hit me

or I didn't push him or he didn't push me. We talked. We barked a little bit, but I would necessarily consider that a scuffle, not really what I personally would consider a scuffle. I love the, do you have a question about basketball construction? Because by the way, with the Golden State Warriors, it turns out that there have been some non-basketball issues around the team this year. I don't know if Draymond Green remembers,

but there were some kind of big stuff that didn't involve stuff that directly happened on the court. The reporter's mistake, though, was using scuffle. Yes. It was absolutely not a scuffle. Yeah. And, you know, when you use the wrong word, you give the interview we and out. Mm-hmm.

It wasn't a scuffle. What can I, what can I say? You know, I don't, I don't have anything to tell you. So, um, so that would be precise. You got to be precise. You got to be precise in those post-game interviews. It's, it's already loaded enough. Media reinvention of the week, David.

I'm talking a lot about Stephen A. Smith lately. lately. Here's another candidate that has somehow pushed through near universal derision and come out on the other side of the Shawshank sewer pipe. How about Guy Fieri? Oh, yeah, yes. He's now got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which is just really not much. But I want to direct you to what Matthew McConaughey, yes, Matthew McConaughey said when he was introducing him the other day. From his days as a contestant on the Food Network star through his major success

was with over 13 network shows and multiple Emmy nominations, you really haven't changed who you are. Authenticity. We talked about it the first night we met. And in a business where you can be anyone you want to be, you've been you the whole time. That ain't easy. Congratulations and congratulations on getting your star

on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, brother. You been you, Guy Fieri. what do we have what to what do we owe or to whom to whom can we cast blame for guy feary's reinvention in american life i think guy feary is is uh is hilarious and inherently hilarious in ways that he probably doesn't necessarily intend himself to be but he is self-aware and he knows what he's doing and listen i mean he's a guy that he like like macaona he said he came up on a on a on a TV game show to become a food network host and I remember making the joke at the time what a leap by the way this seems I remember joking at the time it's not it's not exactly like

becoming a Pulitzer Prize winning historian from a TV game show just okay but yes please no but I remember I remember joking at the time this seems like the most inefficient way possible to become a food network host I mean the food network has like you know 12 hours a day of like open programming I feel I you should you could just like get a show on the food network I mean this is this 10 years ago or something, you know. I mean, I made fun of Guy Fierry with everybody else all along the way. And then at some point, I found myself, you know, you take a work trip somewhere and you're like, where are the places that I need to stop off and eat when I get there?

And you kind of find yourself on diners, drive-ins and dimes, like, website, you know? And it's like, you know what? This isn't the most, this isn't the worst thing that's ever befallen American culture. Now, there are some restaurants that'll disagree with that or whatever. But, I mean, I don't know. I mean, he's just, he's, I think part of it is exactly what we discussed with Stephen A. Smith, that, like, everything in our culture has gotten so silly that, like, someone like him has, you know, some level of, some level of, you know, authentic cred despite being so, despite being so nutty. I also think that, I mean, I don't know. I mean, maybe this is too, I'm too, it's too much a part of, like, just what I'm cognizant of, but I do feel like the, the tenor on, on Fieri turned a little bit after that Pete Wells review of his, uh, Times Square restaurant that, just the total like nuclear bomb takedown of it, which was a work of art,

don't get me wrong. But I think at some point you're just like, all right, this is just someone making fun of someone for having like delicious aoli dipping sauce that comes with everything. And I like delicious aola dipping sauce. Like give me awesome sauce or whatever it's called.

Donkey sauce. Donkey sauce. At the Burbank Airport, there is like a guy's burger joint that also has a like a bar and like a bar separate but next to it. That is literally, I ate there. drank a beer there on my way

leaving L.A. And I said, jokingly to my coworkers, but with some level of seriousness that I had found the best bar in Los Angeles. And it was Guy Fierry's establishment in the Burbank Bob Hobart airport. I noticed you didn't write that piece of the ringer, but go ahead. I would have written it if anybody had responded to it. But I don't know.

I mean, there's something about just like a cold beer and a hamburger loaded with donkey sauce and like three flat screen TVs all weirdly playing exactly what I wanted to be watching right then. It just is like the distillation of Guy Fiery's America and I'm happy to be a part of it. So just so I understand the Guy Fierry media timeline here, he gets slaughtered in the New York

Times by Pete Wells, who makes fun of the donkey sauce. That is the moment you're saying when people who, those of us in elite media circles who might have snickered at Guy Fierry thought, wow, that's a great review, but maybe that was kind of harsh. So now it begins to turn a little bit. I would say when these guys have that just spin in the media where they all of a sudden everybody likes them, you can always go back and find a profile, which usually argues exactly what you said, hey, this guy gets it.

This guy's self-aware. You might think he's like this cartoon character. And to me, that was Drew McGarry's profile in GQ. Yeah. Which was sort of oddly, surprisingly sympathetic. And I feel all it takes that nudge. You need somebody who's one of the. the cool kids to sort of, you know, lay their hands on Guy Fiery's frosted, spiky hair and say,

no, no, this guy's one of us. Yeah. And then that gets the ball rolling. And then he's cool. So is that, is that it? Am I missing any steps here? That's about right? I think that, I mean, listen, I don't know that if that's everything that happened, but that makes, but if that's, but if that is all that happened, that is a very compelling case for the trajectory. But before we go on the next thing really quickly, you mentioned Drew McGarry. I don't think we've mentioned his name on the show lately or at all, but I do want to just say, Drew, I love you, and I'm glad that you're doing better. Godspeed, absolutely. All right, it's time for David Chumacher. Guess is the bad pun headline of the week. David, I have a book title for you this week. It is a book

that is number one on the New York Times best sell list. I hope you haven't seen this. I know you're familiar with the conservative media critic Mark Levin. Mark Levin, do you know about this? You don't know the name of this book? I swear I don't. I don't. Okay. I know this is going to shock you, but he has written a broadside about the evils of the liberal media. I know you thought he was going to do something else, but it's about the evils of liberal media. And in it, he argues, while the liberal media might seem on the surface to be welcoming of new ideas, it actually is, you know, enforcing a, you know, a tough line against any new ideas, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know the critique. What is the title of this book? And I just want to give you the clue.

What is the laziest possible title of a broadside against the liberal media? I mean, the laziest would be like illiberal media, but I don't think the word illiberal. Is it illiberal? Because I was saying that's not a very lazy word for the audience. That's not it, but that's exactly the formula here. So maybe think of the Constitution. What does the Constitution say about the media? The freedom of the press?

Okay, okay. Now, what is the laziest? possible way to tweet that. I don't. What is the opposite of freedom? There's not freedom doesn't go negative, does it? Well, it does in this case. Freedom.

Unfreed, an unfreed press? Even more basic. What, unfreedom? The book is called Unfreedom of the press. Is that a word? No. But the book is called. called Unfreedom of the Press.

That's what they came up with. Now I got to Google it. This is fantastic. This is really true. It sounds fake. Number one New York Times bestseller. Unfreedom of the press by Mark R. Levin. I'm not going to, speaking of someone who may or may not have been a book cover designer in some part of his life, I'm not exactly sure why.

I feel like they should have done more with the way that they laid out the word unfreedom. if we're stipulating that this is an unusual or maybe non-existent, like, you know, maybe have untilted to the side and like spray painted on or at least make unfreatom like bigger than the word press, because this is just anyway. Maybe some italics, something like that. Yeah, just something to let us know that you know that this is a wacky title. He is David Shoemaker.

I'm Brian Curtis. Producer is Jim Cunningham, research by Chris Almeida. I'm so excited to say this, David. More lukewarm takes about the media coming Friday morning. Not next week Friday morning. We're going to have more of these. This is incredible. I'll see you then, buddy.

I'm not getting anything. I can't hear you. David, we've got a big announcement about the press box this week. Yeah. I tonight announce everyone dies. Oh, yeah, yes. Sureless, I believe. How excited are you?

Very excited. David. Is there something wrong with that? David. Yeah. You like it. Just threatening humanity at large? I can't hear you.

Why are you treating them like a kind of high-class trash? Read a book. I am also fascinated by donkey sauce. This isn't the worst thing that's ever befallen American culture. I cannot say hell. Strenuously, I disagree with that idea. And I yell everyone dies as I'm jumping out the window to escape the follow-up. You'll have to come through me.

People have to come through me too? Why are you totally full of donkey sauce? Is that a word? No.