The Press Box - How to Cover a Snowstorm and the Case of TJ Ducklo

Episode Date: February 16, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker talk about why local media is essential when it comes to covering things like the Texas snowstorm (2:31). Then they discuss the case of TJ Ducklo and how a media ethics story became a White House scandal (20:22). Plus, some Overworked Twitter Jokes and Strained-Pun Headlines. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, after the U.S. Senate failed to convict Donald Trump during his impeachment trial this weekend, Eric Trump, adult son of the president, tweeted 2 and 0. What I want to know is, is this the political equivalent of saying scoreboard? 2 and 0, like 2 to 0. Like they won both of, oh my God. That's like if you were caught having, like you were like caught standing over two dead bodies, but got off on manslaughter two times and you're just like in your face justice system. Like I guess you would do that if you really murdered them, which is sort of the metaphorical parallel here.

If he was impeached by the house, isn't he 500? Aren't you two and two? Well, that's just it, right? I mean, the goalposts have been moved to such an extent. Like there were, the vast majority of people who are out there, I guarantee thing Richard Nixon was impeached 18 times, let alone once, right? I mean, the fact that it's never happened, I think, is just sort of just secondary information to most people. Donald Trump has now, has now faced, like, twice the political condemnation formally that any president before him ever has. So I guess, you know, if you want to count that as a victory, um, I have.

I have a feeling that the Trump family is going to be looking for victories anywhere they can find him over the next year or two. So, you know, they can have it. So let's do all the impeachment records. Donald Trump is two and two. Bill Clinton is one and one. Right. He was also not convicted by the Senate. Andrew Johnson is one and one.

And Richard Nixon never got formally impeached, but he did resign. So is he facing the potential of impeachment? Yeah. Is that like 0-0 and 1? Like you had a tie? All right. I got an announcement. Richard Nixon has won the NFC East.

Of the worst presidents of all time. Coming up on today's show, we'll talk about how the media is covering those deadly snowstorms in our home state of Texas. We'll also investigate the case of T.J. Ducklow, the now former White House deputy press secretary who was gone after making derogatory comments to a reporter. All that more on the press box. A part of the Ringer podcast network. Hello, media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here. David is former Texans. I think we've got to start by weighing in on the massive winter storms that have hit that state and surrounding areas.

Have you been receiving updates as regularly as I have? Yeah, my sister and her husband are in Waco. And, man, it's dire. I mean, part of it is, I think, the unexpected nature of it. But I mean, certainly the catastrophe, I mean, it's the situation of just not having electricity. And this is obviously incredibly anecdotal. But I think they were under the impression it would be 15 to 20 minute rolling blackouts. And they were, I think, half a day into, I mean, 12 hours or so into the blackout before the power came back on.

And even then it was a happy surprise. You know, I mean, I was across the country trying to book them hotel rooms that would accept them and their dogs as they drove. around trying to stay warm because the inside of their house was below 50 degrees. All that is to say there's the shock and surprise and just the actual, you know, situation that they're in. And then it's just the sort of hopelessness of it all, right, to not know anything at all about the direction that's going to go and to not be getting any information from the people in charge. And as I saw a number of people point out on Twitter, the calculation people like your sister are making is, okay, the powers off.

for some unspecified time, do I tough it out and drive around, or do I try to go over to somebody else's house? But, oh, wait, don't forget the previous American catastrophe, the coronavirus. So you're forced into making this horrible decision. And mini catastrophe won before. I mean, everyone heard the stories of the 100 plus car pile up in Fort Worth, Texas.

Texas is not used to these sorts of temperatures. Texas is not used to this sort of winter weather. my sister and her husband, my sister's in-laws live in Denton or near, right outside Denton, which is in any other point in time a pretty regular jaunty drive in the state of Texas. I mean, people would drive that far to go see a band play. But in the weather that they're experiencing right now, that's dangerous in and of itself. Absolutely. Absolutely. Just to give people a sense of the danger in Texas and elsewhere, 20 people have died as a result of the weather, the winter weather as of this morning.

4 million Texans were without power as temperatures dropped there below zero. In the city of Houston, David, there were 553 car crashes, according to police chief Art Acevedo. William Joy, reporter at the Dallas ABC affiliate, tweeted this roll call from MedStar last night. That's the emergency services company. 570 ambulance calls, 44 for hypothermia, 82 power-related responses, and 540. responses with nine patients treated for possible carbon monoxide poisoning, which as you know, you can get from, say, using the wrong kind of space heater or just sitting in your car in the

garage in an attempt to get warm. And oh yeah, speaking of COVID, COVID vaccinations are delayed in Texas, meaning some COVID vaccine may no longer be usable. So this is a multi-tiered intersecting disaster. A couple notes, David, about how this is being. covered. It is so easy, and you and I do this, to live in a world where you completely ignore local media and just feast on national media. We ignore what's being written about the Lakers and the Knicks, and we read about the Mavericks. We ignore politics in California and New Jersey, and we read the 900th article about Marjorie Taylor Green or Pat Toomey getting censured or whatever it is. Then you have an emergency like what's going on in Texas, and there is no

other place than local news to get vital information. You are reminded that there is no possible replacement in a situation like this just to know information that basically will help you survive. I mean, listen, this isn't the time for the scolding of national media, but I guess I will. I mean, certainly they're covering the story. But coming off of a year where we've all had to kind of play ambitmen and people in the network, themselves been playing internal almonds men to tis tist their own employers for not covering the coronavirus epidemic to the degree with the degree of gravity that it deserves. You know, you look around and

if the network, I mean, certainly they're like, they're covering it. But you get to, if you get the feeling that it's being covered as a, you know, as a snowstorm, you know, the same way they would cover kind of extreme weather somewhere else and not, I mean, people are going to die. People are already dying, you know, and this is a, this is a national catastrophe. I mean, you know, that has global warming or global climate change written all over. You know, I mean, this is a, this could be the bellwether of a problem as big as what we're dealing with with COVID. There's a particular type of weather story that's especially on those network morning shows where it's like, oh, terrible thing has happened here. And it sees like little one second clips of a snowstorm or hurricane or whatever it is.

and then these like one little sound bite from some resident in the street telling you what's happening in their part of the country. I guess that's fine for what it is. It often seems like weather porn to me. But if you live in the affected area, that that doesn't help you. That's worthless. For instance, did you know before this week what a boil water notice was, which I've seen a lot of in North Texas? This is from NBC5. More than 200,000 North Fort Worth residents are now being urged to boil their water prior to consumption.

after a power outage at a water treatment plant, the city says. That means that you cannot drink a glass of water or brush your teeth or whatever because that water might not be clean enough for you to do that. That information is not going to come to you from Matt Iglesias as Twitter fee. No offense to Madaglacius. Well, we're learning a lot from Twitter. Not that. I honestly thought you were going to say that that's when the government tells you it's so cold,

you should be boiling water for heat, which my sister was literally doing. I guess this is an even graver situation than that. Then you have the massive power outages, you mentioned at the top of this, David. All of which are pointing us toward Urquat, aka the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. So somebody's power doesn't work, and they are turning to the Electric Reliability Council for some answers. It's the way the Houston Chronicle put it.

millions of Texans were without heat and electricity Monday as snow, ice and frigid temperatures caused a catastrophic failure of the state's power grid. And there has been bewildering and often just completely unintelligible bits of information. William Joy, the aforementioned, points out these dueling tweets today. This is from Urquhart. We are optimistic we will be able to reduce the number of controlled outages throughout the day. But then Encore, which is an electric utility, says we are unable to predict when grid conditions will stabilize.

And again, this is not just when does my heat come back on. This is when do I pull the trigger and go over to somebody else's house and potentially expose me and my family to COVID or expose that family to COVID? That's a big decision. That's a really, that's a, that's a terrible place to be in right now. But those are the kinds of things that rely on local news to help you sort it out. It's true. I mean, at least we're able to access a lot of that online with social media. The people who are actually in the heart of it cannot access a lot of it.

We're also learning a lot in real time about how power grids are built and now energy is distributed. And all of that is important. But I do feel like it's moving so quickly. And listen, it's good that people aren't, that this information is out there. So it minimizes people blaming and pointing fingers in the, the wrong directions. But the news cycle, sort of the information cycle, travels so quickly now that I feel like we're almost skipping over the human tragedy in an effort to get to the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

that point. Remember last year, I noticed as Paul Feinbaum, who hosts a sports radio show on ESPN, is at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. And he said, you know what my show's about for the time being, the coronavirus. We can talk about like Alabama football, which may or may not happen, but really what everybody cares about is the coronavirus. So we're going to take calls and we're going to tell stories and exchange information. I was listening to my favorite radio station, period, and favorite sports radio station down there in Dallas, the ticket today. And the midday host, Dan McDowell and Jake Kemp, we're doing the same thing. Like, you know, I'm sure they were doing sports today, but the subject is the storms,

taking calls, comparing experiences, all that kind of stuff. And it turns out sports radio is a pretty great format for that. Yeah. It's open-ended. It's people you like. It's a way to sort of sort of sort out information, sort out good info from bad info. and here is I promise this is the last sentence of my nut graph here sports radio turns out to be the original emergency podcast something happened and these two guys that I like are going to try to sort it out in real time

yeah yeah I mean and and in a world that's kind of increasingly uh spread out parceled out, you know, sports radio, I mean, you've written about this, to sort of become our, our, you know, water cooler for a dispersed America. You know, I mean, for the people that listen to that sort of thing, it's more than just talking about free agent signings. It is a sort of common language. It's a, it's a way that we get together to talk about anything at all. And sometimes things more important than sports do occur.

Right. Well, the format loosened up a couple decades ago. There was a, there was a so-called guide talk came into it. There was like wire recaps. Stylistically, sports radio and a ringer slash Grantland podcast kind of merged toward one thing. But I know you and I have talked about this here and everybody at the ringers talked about this. When there is like a really bewildering crazy news event and you're sitting there going, what do we do? Right.

What is the right take to this? Sometimes the answer to that question is let us put on people who can try to figure it out in real time. That's what you and I do when Donald Trump gets taken off Twitter. Like, okay, let's turn on the mics and have a discussion and figure this out. And for some reason, you know, emergency podcast has become a semi-trademark term of the podcast industry. But that's kind of what radio stations are doing all the time. have been doing for decades and decades in situations like this. Yeah, it's certainly a bigger.

And they're really, really good at it. Yeah, I mean, it's certainly a bigger shift when sports talk radio stops talking about sports than when you or I recorded a podcast two hours early. Well, that's true. But it's also, I think it, I think there's this decision that you make at a local level. Like, what, what do people care about today? Do they care about whether the cowboys are going to resign Dak Prescott? Yes. But maybe it's two notches down the list.

from where it was the other day. I think I've noticed from Texas is the just user-generated video. Yeah. Now there's like the one version, which is my mom sending me pictures of her backyard in Fort Worth and what that looks like in front yard

and can you believe all this snow? P.S. I'm okay. Call me when you have a chance. And then there was the car crash you mentioned in Fort Worth. Last Thursday morning, involved more than 100 vehicles, six people at least have died as a result of, of that crash. I kind of thought I understood what something like that would entail. And then I saw a video. Yeah. One of many, this was shared by J.D. Miles is of the CBS affiliate down there. That is the most slow motion horror show I have ever seen in my life.

Mm-hmm. I mean, just imagine cars getting backed up and, and then there being this, like, in horrible, like, five to ten second wait while the next wave of cars comes. they can't stop either so they smash into it. And then a FedEx truck arrives and it can't stop and it smashes into everything. I mean, something that's just like I said, a particular horror that almost must be experienced by video if you can stand it, not for the squeamish, to understand. It is awful. And again, we see, oh, car crash, something happened, bad things happen. Okay. But when you see it in those terms, it becomes even more.

horrifying and just makes you, to me at least, makes me think, oh my God, what would I do? What would you do in a situation like that? Yeah, certainly. Like I said, we'll talk about infrastructural issues and government issues and everything else. But when you're talking about 150 cars, six maybe more people dead, I mean, that's, we're in the realm of natural disaster, right? I mean, that's the sort of, that's the sort of damage that that is usually, you know,

breaking news notice across the country. The story would not be complete, David, of Texas weather without Tucker Carlson entering. Tucker Carlson railing against windmills. You might say tilting at windmills, but I don't think quixotic is exactly a Tucker Carlson kind of word. Let me give you a little bit of his wrap from last night. The Green New Deal has come, believe it or not, to the state of Texas. How's it working out so far? The good news is all that alternative energy seemed to have had a remarkable effect on the climate.

not what climate beans, but we'll continue. Sunday night parts of Texas got the temperatures that we typically see in Alaska. In fact, they were the same as they were in Alaska, so global warming is no longer a pressing concern in Houston. Just to stop right there for a second. Can we get an oral history of when every time it snows, conservatives start talking about, hey, is that there was global warming, but it is snowing somewhere in America right now? Was there like a particular C-PAC where it was decided that? would be the response? Well, it certainly wasn't, like, Trump's idiocy, and I use that term in a very

deliberate literal sense. I mean, Tucker Carlson would probably agree that Trump's a dumb person at this point, but him making those jokes didn't disqualify them from quote-unquote serious discourse, right? I mean, there's no, again, we don't expect anything better from Tucker Carlson, but he's smart enough to know better. You know, he's talking about the death, he's talking about human death, human death, you know, a human catastrophe and he's making, he's stating, restating stupid lies

and bad jokes to try to score cheap points for it. So after we get the old history of what I was just talking about, I want the like gallery of people that were smart enough to know better. Remember because that was Josh Holly and Ted Cruz on January 6th? Well, they're smart enough to know better. Tommy Tuberville

is excused, but Ted Cruz is definitely smart enough to know better. We need a new phrase. We already say this. We need a new phrase for people who who idiocy is not the excuse, but they're deliberately, I mean, they're deliberately, I mean, evil, evil would be the word if it wasn't too dismissive and a sculptory. But I just like how certain

people are in the smart enough to know better category. And certain people aren't. Like nobody's saying, you know what, Jesse Waters is smart enough to know better than this. I didn't hear anybody say that. Was Ann Coulter, the original smart enough to know better? Or does it pre-day. Are we going back to like Reaganades? Yeah, I'm sure there was an 80s version, but I definitely, Ann Coulter was on the list somewhere. Let me continue with Carlson here. The bad news is they, meaning people in Texas,

don't have electricity. The windmills froze, so the power grid failed. Millions of Texans woke up Monday morning having to boil their water because with no electricity, it couldn't be purified. Bloomberg's Catherine Treywick writes, the blackouts in Texas are primarily because of frozen instruments at gas, coal, and nuclear plants, as well, limited supplies of gas, according to Ircot, frozen wind turbines were the least significant fact. Well, again, that messes up the punchline, but I'm not sure that's going to affect anybody's routine. When you start off bullshitting America to score political points, I don't think, I mean, truth has already failed to get in the way. So here we are.

Yeah, I also just love the, just love the, the thing about you're pouncing on a tragedy to make a political point, right? Because that's something I see all the time, right? Every time there's, oh, once again, we're pouncing on a tragedy to make a political point. Oh, oh, wait, I've got an opening over here. I'm going to go ahead and pounce. I'm going to go ahead and score my, I'm going to score my layup right now while everybody's still recovering from that. Amazing. All right, David, 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. There was a whole subgenre of tweets this week imagining conservative reactions to the storm, a la Tucker Carlson. I enjoyed this one. Roads in Dallas are snowy and icy,

and the government is telling me to stay home. I will drive the speed limit on untreated overpasses because I refuse to live in fear. Or this one. Nobody in Texas owns a shovel, so locals have resorted to shooting at the snow. Thanks to Shell, David Trattner, Jared Williams, and Lincoln, Trulay. We kid Texans because we love them and we are them.

David, during Donald Trump's successful impeachment defense, one of the Democratic impeachment managers showed a Twitter account that Trump had retweeted during the whole saga that included a blue checkmark. Trump has retweeted this account and according to the impeachment manager, it has a blue checkmark. Aha, responded Trump lawyer, David Schoen. the account didn't have a blue checkmark. And therefore, I guess in his mind,

Trump was completely innocent of all charges. It was an overword Twitter joke to write, if the blue's not checked, you must forget. Thanks to Doug Cybor. You know, I was laughing about the idea of like Donald Trump being defended by OJ lawyers. And I was like, oh, wait, Alan Dershowitz is currently on television

talking about Donald Trump. Finally, David, please tell me you saw the profile photo of Texas Senator Ted Cruz in the U.S. Capitol the other day where his hair appears to have been cut into a mullet. Are you looking at this in the Google Doc right now? Yeah. Yeah.

That is a mullet, right? I mean, I don't know what else to call that. It's not... I mean, I believe that. I mean, that is the straight up. That is the Morgan Wallen prior to his cancellation. And I think you got a haircut just days before, but that is Morgan Wallen's haircut.

It was an overboard Twitter joke to write business in the front, party over country in the back. Wow. That's fantastic. Thanks to dad to the people. Why don't we ask Leanne Caldwell when she was on the other day how to approach a senator in the hallway who happens to have a mullet? I should have forgot to do that. If you've made fun of something that would cause Ted Cruz to say, you've got the wrong guy.

And congrats, you made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. All right. In the notebook dump, David, listener, Aubrey Abril, direct. directed us last week to the T.J. Ducklow saga, which somehow transformed from a media ethics story into a full-blown scandal. You have not followed this. T.J. Ducklow was Joe Biden's White House Deputy Press Secretary. During the campaign, he was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, which became subject of a number of stories. There were actually two parts to this last week, and I'd love for you and I to take them in order because they're kind of different stories. The first part is that we learned Douglasson. Duclo is dating Alexei McCamond, a reporter from Axios. Now, McCamond covered the Biden campaign, so she spent a lot of time around Ducklow. They told People magazine that in November, they started dating.

Now, both Ducklow and McCamond went to their employers and said, we need you to know that this is going on. Ducklow's job did not change as far as I can tell. Axiow said, okay, we're going to take McCamond off the Biden beat, because that'd be a little too close. but we're still going to have her cover, quote, progressives in Congress, the progressive movement and vice president Kamala Harris. So here's my question for you. Can you cover a beat that is both White House adjacent and pretty much inside the White House when your significant other works in the White House? Oh, man. I mean, I don't know if I don't feel like I'm qualified to answer this question.

I certainly think you can, and I barely wouldn't have to dig too hard to find, you know, prominent examples of it happening. I don't, I think that you can call the press office. You find a story, whether it's a positive story about Biden or a negative story, you can call the press office knowing that you're either going to talk to your significant other or talk to somebody who works with your significant other. That would be doable? No, I think, I know what I'm saying. I think it's doable in a very abstract way. and I think in practice, it's probably not worth the trouble to,

to, you know, the effort that it would take to actually make it ethically viable. I mean, I just don't think that there's, I mean, I honestly, what's giving me pause is the, like, absolute confidence I have that this sort of thing happens

with some frequency. But, you know, it's not, it's not, it's not, I mean, you know, it's not a viable situation. I don't think, for anyone to be. Unless, you know, unless you're a news outlet, and I'm not talking about anybody in particular here, but unless you think that there's actually some advantage in being that positioned that closely, right?

I mean, you make the sort of minimal ethical step to pull someone off a beat, but then, you know, obviously you're not doing anything more serious than that. I was a little confused at the Axios intermediate step here, which is you're not going to cover Biden, but you're going to cover Kamala Harris. Mm-hmm. So is that, is that like, if we think that it's not a great idea to cover the White House in that case, is it a great idea to cover Kamala Harris? Is there a difference in those things? No.

I mean, I don't, I don't think, I mean, obviously there is a, there is a, you know, a difference when we get down to brass tax. But, I mean, it is a little bit perplexing. Yeah. I find like in normal circumstances, almost every circumstance, I'm like, let the person write it and just be very, very clear to the reader what's going on.

If my worst enemy wrote a book, I should be allowed to write a review of that book as long as I mentioned that this person is my worst enemy somewhere prominently in the review, perhaps even in the headline. And that would be potentially entertaining or potentially worthwhile as a review. I just again,

I'm with you on this one. I just don't, I just don't functionally see how this works. Even putting aside ethics for a second. If my significant other worked in the ESPN press office or in some like tangential press office, ESP, like how would I do that? How would we make that work? And I mean either how would we make our jobs work or how would we make our relationship work?

I just don't, I don't actually know. Now, maybe it's possible, but I don't quite understand it. Politico noted, by the way, the McCammon had bylines on stories. about potential Biden appointees, which sort of makes it seem like it's not exactly a big line between Biden and Biden-related stuff. On Friday, David, we learned-

Well, and also we got to say, listen, even if it's doable, even if it's doable to a certain extent, it's a different calculus that the editor is working with McAmmeter or with anybody else in a situation, even if you think you have it figured out, at some point you've got to ask yourself.

You know, like we're all accustomed to sources, potentially working reporters, right, to try to get to float false information or, you know, to feed certain. They do that all the time. Right. But then you're working with it. It's an entirely different calculus when you're like, well, maybe the reporter's in on this,

you know, or maybe there's, there's totally different stakes in the relationship between source and, and journalist if there's a, you know, human relationship. On Friday, we got more from Vanity Affairs, Caleb Acarma. So on January 20th, two political reporters, including Tara Palmieri, reached out to Ducklow and McCamond to potentially do an item. Or in fact, they said they were doing an item on their relationship. Ducklow called Palmieri back. And here I'm quoting a Carma's article.

Ducklow tried to intimidate Palmieri by phone in an effort to kill the story. Quote, I will destroy you, Ducklow told her, according to sources. Adding that he would ruin her reputation if she published it. Continuing, during the off-the-record-record call, Ducklo made derogatory and misogynistic comments, accusing Palmieri of only reporting on his relationship, which do the ethics questions that factor into the relationship between a journalist and a White House official, falls under the purview of her reporting beat because she was, quote, jealous that an unidentified man in the past, quote,

wanted to bad word, McCamond, and not you. Ducklow also accused Palmieri of being, quote, jealous of his relationship with McCamond. So. Well, there's one note. And correct me if I'm wrong, this might have been updated, but I think according to that story, Tara Palmieri didn't wasn't even the one who called Ducklo that one of her male colleagues called Ducklo for comment

and he called her back directly which is He chose to call her back. Yes. Yeah. So yeah. Palmieri took notes on this call Politico reached out to the Biden administration and then the Biden administration did a couple of very stupid things.

First, according to Caleb Karma, a White House official got a little upset that Tara Palmieri of Politico had shared all this because the conversation she and Ducklow had was off the record. I'm sorry. Being off the record doesn't give you the right to threaten to destroy a reporter. That doesn't work or make misogynistic comment. That's not an immunity idol where you get to just do whatever you want with that.

Then on Friday, Team Biden didn't fire Ducklow. They just suspended him for a week. and the idea was that Ducklow could return to his job, but he wouldn't deal with Politico reporters, which a couple of people pointed out on Twitter was really strange. Like, you can come back, but you just can't talk to people from that publication. It does not seem particularly tenable.

On Saturday, team Biden huddled and Ducklow resigned. Ducklow wrote on Twitter, no words can express my regret, my embarrassment, and my disgust for my behavior. Well, I mean, I don't know. I mean, it's a sad story. I mean, it's sad that anyone had to go through with Ducklow, any reporter to go through with Ducklow subject that person to. And that they were, I mean, it just seems like there's, there's no real winners here. I mean, maybe, maybe down the road everyone will look back and smile. I mean, one thing that I think is interesting. I don't think they'll look back. Who's going to look back? Or laugh, sorry, not smile. But I mean, that one thing that's that I thought was kind of interesting.

and is, again, not a surprise, is, I mean, listen, it's an untenable situation. We've said that a million times. But you kind of got the impression on Twitter that, I mean, you could see on Twitter, sometimes you get a window in that this is a much smaller world, the government and people reporting on it than sometimes it seems, right? I mean, whether or not people who, you know, were tweeting new T.J. Ducklow, they were tweeting, you know, about him by nickname, you know, I mean, people were, like, referring. to referring to both these people in the sense that you would think that they knew them.

Now, maybe this is just we know you online and we, you know, whatever. But if any of that is true, and so much of our, you know, the reporters that we get of our government is potentially fraught and we should, you know, consumers should read their news with, you know, an eyebrow up. That said, obviously what we've seen is that the repercussions for these situations or the, you know, the fallout is that website. and newspapers will act on this information, and they don't want to get a black eye,

they don't want to have bad reporting. So, you know, at least it's, I don't even know what to say, man. Well, a certain closeness is going to be part of the day. Inevitable. Yeah. In a campaign, you're traveling with these people, not this last year, but you're traveling with these people.

You're around these people, get to know people, often know them quite well. But, you know, and again, you're right, that can that, can that produce? a sort of closeness, forget the relationship, just a just sort of camaraderie that makes somebody in some cases pull, pull a story or soften a story, something like that, I guess. Yeah, maybe. The competitiveness of the Washington Press Corps, I think often sort of triumphs overall because

you're not going to last very long if you're doing things like that and protecting people or being nice to your people you're friendly with in an administration or on a campaign. It was also, David, a journalism story buried in this. is from Politico's playbook, quote, on Monday evening, playbook informed Biden's comm staff that this item, meaning the item about Ducklo and McCamond, would be published today. Today, meaning Tuesday. Hours later, a glowing profile of McCammon and Ducklo's relationship was published by people. So just follow the bouncing ball here. They went to the Biden people and said, hey, we're going to run with this item because we believe this is going to be in tomorrow morning's newsletter. Monday night, People Magazine published. an item about the relationship that it was, of course, not a media ethic story per se, as you would expect from, you wouldn't expect from people.

It was a story about, you know, them taking, walking the dog while the other one makes an important call in the apartment and stuff like that. So that was a weird sort of sub-story in here too. A lot of people also brought up a statement Biden made himself in January when he was putting in the administration together. Quote, if you're ever working with me,

and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect talk down to someone. I promise you I will fire you on the spot. No ifs, ands or butts. Now, of course, there were a lot of conservatives on Twitter who got very excited when to find this statement.

Aha. Aha. Look what Joe Biden said. And look at this behavior from a member of his administration. Aha. To which there was, if you were not on that side

of the political aisle, a thing of like, what a double standard, right? the Donald Trump administration and Donald Trump himself spent four years trashing reporters, trashing the media, specifically targeting reporters in all kinds of ways. And then this one thing happens and aha, got you.

T.J. Ducklow, he had this conversation. He's got to go. To anybody who feels that double standard, this is my message. Get used to it. This is the first of about 150 of these you're going to see. And that's, and by the way, it's not wrong. You know, it's not, the, the idea is not wrong.

Like Donald Trump committed 1,000 awful abuses of democracy. That doesn't mean that Joe Biden can do like 10 or 15 and it's okay because it's not a comparable number. Exactly. The standard to hold Joe Biden to is zero numbers of these things. And when it comes to press intimidation, this kind of ugliness behind the scene, the right number still is zero. Just because Donald Trump did this thing and Corey Lewandowski did this thing and these other people did this thing. Okay.

Okay. That was that was that was that was very wrong and wrong much more frequently. But the number of times for Joe Biden is still zero. There's just no. That's it. Sorry. You know, may not seem great. Anything else to say about this?

I mean, don't call people on the phone. and threaten them. I don't know. Like, is there really anything else to say about, I mean, just like, take,

like, I don't mean to diminish anything that happened, but if you ever feel yourself tempted to do something like that, take a breath. We're talking about it, presumably a good thing in your life.

Yeah. It's just, it's, it is, uh, it is mind blowing. All right, David,

time for David Chewaker guesses the strained pun headline. Yeah. Monday's headline was, is Bridgerton the closest thing to X-rated costume drama. of course it is. This week's headline comes from Connor.

It's from the New York Post. As everyone knows by now, Bruce Springsteen, a perennial old guy who has still got it, was arrested for DWI in New Jersey. Now, there's been some question about whether it was a legit DWI. Put that aside for one moment. The New York Post, David, tweeted a couple of prospective headlines.

I've never seen the post workshopping material before, but they sent out the potential headlines, lines glory dazed and dancing in the drunk. Dancing in the drunk. It's horrible. Dancing in the drunk may be the worst pun. Since Teenage Mutant Senate Turtle. I mean, really, it's not a pun.

But then the Post finally got its act together, particularly page six of the Post. You know, I'm looking for a song title pun here. What was the New York Post strain pun headline? Well, I mean, obviously I'm going to Born in the USA. Is it, like, bombed in the USA? Well, it's better than dancing in the drunk. Am I on the wrong side?

Let's scroll through the songbook here a little bit more. One we have not mentioned. Drive all night. Oh, there was potential there, though. Damn, I'm bad at Springsteen. What are they, what is it? You and I are not really in this, in this particular group. How about Thunder Road?

Oh, Thunder Road, of course. I'm just looking for a straight old, straight old rhyming laffer here. Not Thunder Road, but. Lunder Road. Blunder Road. Blunder Road. He is David Shumaker, a bride card. His production magic by Kaya McMullen, who's sitting in for Erica.

back Thursday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. Later, Brian.