The Press Box - Jian Ghomeshi, NFL Grab Bag, and Cable Storm Coverage | The Press Box (Ep. 526)

Episode Date: September 18, 2018

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker look at The New York Review of Books' decision to publish Jian Ghomeshi's first-person story (03:30), dive into some of the top stories from around the NFL (28:15), and wrap up by discussing the cable news coverage of Tropical Depression Florence and Typhoon Mangkhut (43:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelly. I want to tell you about our great football coverage on the Ringer podcast network. Every Monday, Bill Simmons and Cousin Salle recap the weekend and guest next week's NFL lines on the BS podcast. On Wednesday mornings, Ryan Rucillo hits the hardest angles in college and pro football on our new podcast, dual threat. And on Wednesday nights, Cousin Sall and the degenerate trifecta figure out the best gambling angles on against all odds. In five times per week, the Ringer NFL show reacts to the latest news with Kevin Clark, Robert Mays, Tate Frayette, Michael Lombardi and the Dannasy football crew. Subscribe to the BS podcast, dual threat against all odds, and the Ringer NFL show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And on the site, Zach Kram speculates which NBA roster would be best if every player was in his prime. And Claire McNair is writing about American Vandal. You can check those out on the ringer.com. David, when Fox News host Tucker Carlson interviewed Michael Avanotti last week, the Kiron on the TV screen read, creepy porn lawyer toying with 2020 run.

What I want to know is what's the most singularly ludicrous and bad faith cable news Kairon that we could come up with for each other. Oh my gosh. Just imagine. I'm on the nightly news

with Shoemaker on Fox News. Top of the ratings. You're the guest on Curtis Country. Two Ks. And you just, What is the Chiron? Who wants to go first here? Man, you go first.

You go first. All right. You're sitting beside me, David, and the viewers at home see. First of all, I think these should all just start with creepy. It's just better when it's creepy, right? So here we go. Creepy obituary writer waits for underappreciated pro wrestler to croak. That's how I'd sum up your career.

Oh, that's really unfortunate, man. I don't think it's very good. What do you got? Man. I was trying to find a million different ways to work troll into this but I think I'm just going to go with sports media historian

for you but all three of the words are in separate quotes it was actually kind of insulting either way basically the saddest thing you could possibly describe oneself call this the creepy podcast that leers at the media for 40 minutes it's the press box a part of the ringer podcast network The press box is the media podcast. We are not allowed to watch the Ben Shapiro election special.

That is a thing. That was like signed today. Just imagine checking that out. We are Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer. Back with three topics today. And David, we're going to talk about the return of accused Me Too violator Jan Gamese and why the New York Review of Books let him publish a long, piteous first person story.

Second, we're going to do an NFL grab bag covering everything from former Browns receiver Josh Gordon, who just got released to the Nike Colin Kaepernick ad, which we haven't had a chance to talk about. And finally, if you watch cable news, you've been watching the devastation of two storms, Tropical Depression Florence, and Typhoon Manget. We talk about storm coverage in the United States and maybe some Trump tweets too. Plus, as always, our overworked Twitter joke of the week. But David, let's start here. Last week, something amazing happened in the American media, two of the nation's foremost intellectual magazines became the Me Too Players Tribune. First, Jan Gamesh, the Canadian radio host, charged and in a few instances acquitted of sexual

assault, wrote a piece in the New York Review of Books, and John Hockenberry, a public radio host accused of sexual harassment and other offenses, wrote a 7,000-word story for Harper's. This is, I got to say, this is one of those. If we hadn't been doing a segment about this, I might have just read the 12. tweets about these pieces and let them do the work for me. I'm glad I did because I think while neither piece is any good, they are illustrative of, you know, the moment we are here. And these, you know, again, we just talked about Louis C.K.

attempting to come back via standup into American life. And this was these two guys kind of coming back in their own way. What did you make of the two stories? Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing, and you mentioned it, is that they're both really bad. Just as story. I mean, forget the ethics, right? Yeah, forget the ethics. Forget the content more or less.

Yeah, they're just bad pieces of writing. The Zhangamashi piece was just, I mean, there's no need to, like, overly, like, glorify the past of these periodicals or, you know, to compare, you know, apples to, Hemingways or anything in this situation, but the, the, Gamesh's piece was just silly and bad and not up to the standards of, of, of,

you know, any, you know, purportedly highbrow publication. The Hockenberry piece was just weird. I mean, I get, like,

I kept, I mean, giving it the benefit of the doubt. You try to, try to read some sort of, you know, mystery train style, you know,

genius behind the madness sort of, but it's not there. and what you kind of end up with though and I think what's pertinent is to people who are you know legitimately confused and legitimately and feel legitimately I don't know if wrong is the right word

I don't want to read I don't want to I don't want to you know mess up the vocabulary here but who have who have been hurt in some way you know by the by the accusations you know the very legitimate accusations leveled against them separately and and and are

trying to come to grips with it. And I think if anything is clear by the style and the, and the writing itself, it's that they have not made much progress in that journey. No, this was the, this was the point of Michelle Goldberg's column, which was passed her out a lot on Twitter. She writes, I feel sorry for a lot of these men, which she genuinely does, but I don't think they feel sorry for women or think about women's experience much at all. And maybe that's why the discussion about Me Too and forgiveness never seems to go anywhere, men aren't proposing paths for restitution. They're asking why women won't give them absolution, which is a terrific paragraph.

And immediately, when you start to read these essays, you start to see the problem because neither Gamesh nor Hockenberry admit to most or at least the most serious charges against them. So they're not grappling with what they did because they don't admit it or didn't do. They don't admit it, right? So immediately, narratively, we're just stuck, right? I didn't do what those people said I did. Therefore, I don't have, I'm sort of offering a limited apology or a limited reckoning. And nothing goes anywhere.

In commission's case in particular, it's, he, it's not just that he's, he denies it. He presents a watered down version of it, right? This very like, this, this just airbrushed, very, very brief acknowledgement that some stuff happened, that some people were talking poorly about him online. online and that was a great touch right not that this had been somebody pointed out on Twitter this has been like reported by the Toronto newspapers extensively and he says oh you know it's like there was a got that Gawker post one time or something that was like that was his basically his hint there yeah and I think that in some sense you can I mean I think the

the the sympathy that Michelle Goldberg you know expresses I think is is is so is powerful I mean that really was what her response I mean that that's the the most powerful element of her response in a lot of ways. But yeah, but she, but the, the sympathy is, the sympathy is for, you know, for the, for the world changing so quickly and his complete inability to, let me just say this, one of the most important things in this whole process, and this gets, this is going to get into the weeds in a lot of ways. I understand. I am sympathetic to Gameshi in the sense that I don't think he was ready to write this

piece and he probably shouldn't have been the person to ever write this parting shot. And I mean, for a lot of reasons, I'm not mad at him for putting pin to paper and writing this thing down, even if it leaves 99.9% to be desired. That said, he's, you know, being willfully or not very dishonest about a situation, and it's the editorial process that should be, that should be reconciling that. And it's really, really clear

that his editors didn't have any interest in the details of what happened to him. Yeah, so this is typically excellent Isaac Chowdner interview in Slate with the New York Times Book Review's editor, Ian Baruma, who has a sentence where he says, the exact nature of his behavior, how much consent was involved,

I have no idea, nor is it really my concern. And I just think when you punt on that question, you've just punted on everything, right? This is a guy you're allowing to write for the magazine. I don't quite know if you haven't examined, if you have no idea. And again, people speak off the cuff and maybe he regrets that line and would phrase it differently, I suspect if asked again. but if you have no idea what he did, then it just doesn't seem like you should be able to publish him in your magazine. That's the whole point.

I mean, right? It wasn't a one-off comment. Right. Well, it's like his whole thing is, well, he was exonerated in a trial. But we know that that, you know, sometimes people are exonerated. We're guilty. Yeah, sure. But that's just like if you just don't understand the nature of the charges, the wide-ranging nature of the charge,

then you just, you're not even prepared to, you say Gameshi wasn't prepared to write this piece. Baruma wasn't prepared to publish this piece either, by the way. He certainly wasn't prepared to have a conversation about it, which is really unsettling. You know, it wasn't one, it wasn't one comment that may or may not have been taken out of context, you know, and if, if that one line had appeared in a, in a otherwise reassuring, or just, you know, intellectually consistent and confident point of view,

I mean, they could, it, you know, you might say, well, that's just one line taking out of context. But the entire interview was more, was more of that. I mean, just line after line was him just sort of engage in this very, very, like, lightweight intellectual exercise about the whole thing, but not actually interested in, in any of the details of the person he was publishing. There's another line from the Goldberg piece that I really loved, where she says, you know, she's talking about her sympathy for some of the, you know, broadly defined me-to victims, not the wine scenes of the world, but the, you know, people who have been kind of caught up,

like what Hockenberry claims of himself. And she says, I can only imagine how disorienting it must be to have the rules change on you so fast to have your reputation obliterated an instant and to suddenly be unable to do the work that gives you identity. I think that the rules changing so quickly is a really I mean we've touched on this before but that in some ways I think is the source of the greatest unease for a lot of people

and I think and certainly there are a lot that is even if even for people that have not been accused of anything and and maybe for people who haven't even done anything wrong the perception that everything's changing and we don't know the sort of fear amongst

you know I mean I don't want to like paint a target on Ian Barum but like, you know, I've certainly had old white male bosses that would have been looking for an excuse to publish the Gameshys of the world to sort of try to reestablish traction or to just define where we are in a very, in a way that's been deeply unsettling and confusing to a whole generation of men, really. And I think that that sort of disorientation is in the back. a good thing and battling against it. Again, we're so early in this process. Battling against it so soon under the pretense of intellectual exercise or open interrogation of the subject or whatever is just, it doesn't surprise me that he wasn't

interested enough to know the details of his writer's piece because he wasn't interested enough in interrogating his own feelings on the situation. Yeah, I was thinking about this over the weekend. This to me harkens back to this age, and I say age, but it ended like five minutes ago, where so many publications were invested in just like, this piece doesn't have to be good, it doesn't have to be right, it just has to be provocative. There was this whole like subgenre of journalism that has kind of gone out of style now. This was The New Republic, and again, I am a product of this world, by the way. Sure.

The New Republic, it was Slate. It was, it still is in many ways. The New York Times op-ed. page, which is why it gets so routinely shat upon all the time on Twitter, where you're just like, hey, it's just, look, this is interesting, this is just kind of, I thought this

was interesting and provocative. And that's kind of all the reason you need to publish it. And, or that was what, in the old days, was all the reason an editor gave because they published it. And this is kind of what Brum was doing here, right? It reminds me of that period. And we've seen that now.

So many people just don't accept that anymore. It's like, well, but it's sucks or it's you know the piece isn't any good or the piece is you know written in bad faith by the way you mentioned it essentially you mentioned an idea where you say it seems so early in this in this whole me too endeavor uh this me too movement i should say i think it's funny because when you read these two pieces to commeschi and hockinberry it doesn't seem early it seems early to people like us looking at it from the outside it doesn't seem early to them because they've been sitting around not working for months or years oh yeah and just watching and and sort of

in this as they portray it in this isolation. And to them, it feels, I think, like a long time. And that's why, and they feel powerless, right? That's the point of these essays. They feel like they're in this purgatory that they can never come out of. And that just struck me as funny. By the way, to the point about publishing stuff, here's an interesting tweet from the New Yorker's Nathan Heller last week.

He says, it seems okay to me for a publication to publish ill-advised things, ludicrous things, even bad things, and be thoroughly kicked around like a football for it. That seems like the system working. A publication publishing only things it knows it won't be kicked around for seems worse. What do you make of that idea? I'm less opposed to publishing contrarian ideas than, well, one, the sort of ethos that you were talking about before of sort of contrarian for its own sake, contrarianism for its own sake, that almost always will end badly, you know? I mean, even if it's, it doesn't have to be, you know,

Andrew Sullivan publishing the bell curve in the New Republic to like, you know, for people to be, I mean, to realize that there are limits to contrarianism. But I think it's the lack of self-awareness, right? I mean, it's, I think publishing contrarian stuff is good and important. I agree with that. And I, and I, and I feel like deliberate contrarianism has a different face in 2018. And most of it's like Twitter meaming. But I still think some of that can be, can be good. I don't know. What do you think? Well, this is, this is to me, it's like, there's a distinction right between contrarianism, like Democrats should support Trump or something like that, which is the old style of political contrarianism we're talking about versus

something like this a little bit, you know, and saying like, ill-advised pieces are, are okay. You know, it's like, that's a little broad, right? Because we can look, you can look at something like, oh, this is a thought experiment. And then you can look at a commensia essay and be like, this just seems really bad and sort of pointless. I just said, I also thought about the question of how would, let's say you wanted to, you wanted the Gamesh's story to be in your journal of letters. How would you do that is another question, right? Do you run the Gamesi essay and then run, you know, a big fat editor's note?

Do you run a kind of rebuttal to it saying, this is self-pitying and ridiculous? Yeah. I mean, to me, the best, the best solution is like, why doesn't Michelle, if you think that's issue, why don't you call Michelle Goldberg and ask her to end if she wants to interview. Well, that's why, I mean, and obviously I said probably, or you said the word contrarianism, that's not, you didn't pull that from someone else's mouth, but the defense of contrarianism doesn't really hold any water here, because I think what's the most, the thing that's most salient about the Gameschi essay is that there was no deliberate contrarianism.

I mean, there might have been, in the sense that it was battling back against some perceived, some perceived enemy or something, but it was, it was, there was not that level of thought put behind it, right? But on the editorial side, especially. And it did feel very much like I mean, again, we've all been in these situations when the big boss takes interest or takes, you know, is steering the ship on something. It probably, there's not as many people

aren't as willing to voice, you know, concerns about something that's being, I mean, something that seems like it's barreling forward unstopably. Yeah. And we, and at this point, we just have to take Burma's word that there wasn't any, that the internal pushback wasn't very fierce.

And we won't really know that, I think, without further reporting. Yeah, no, and I agree with that. But even just, sometimes it's even, I mean, and again, we've both experienced this. Sometimes it's not even just whether or not someone's pushing back, but it's the sort of internal in-house self-awareness that like this is a piece that we should be considering pushback on. We're welcoming pushback. Read this. Everybody read this draft and push back, you know, because we're because we know. Because we're aware enough that we know that we might be getting a response.

Let's be, let's get out ahead of it. Let's edit this piece in such a way that it's, that it stands up to criticism. And none of that could have possibly happened. I agree. I mean, it's, it's just impossible. And by the way, also that we, the New York Review of books are conferring highbrow respectability to this guy just by publishing this story. I put, you know, I looked up, I was pulled up like a TOC of a recent New York Review.

it's amazing how it's all the same guys and gals. It's like you went back to the classical sieve division of your wing of your college and all the professors offices were still in the same place. I was like, wow, okay, let's see. Timothy Garton, Ash, check, Christopher Benfey, check, Lori Moore, Jeffrey O'Brien. It's like Jed Pearl, Jed Pearl, Deborah Eisenberg. It's the same, it's the same peep. everybody. Everybody's still here. Like Michael Tamaski is like the young, the young buck, the

Donorous rated rookie of this group. And he's not a young buck. No offense to Michael Tamaski. But it's sort of like there's a sense of like you were you were taking the gravitas, the combined gravitas of all these people and transferring some of it onto Gamesei the moment you push publish on this, no? Yeah. I mean, and all these people, like you're greats. They're also, I mean, it's sort of the, you know, cyclical. I mean, or it's a circle. They're greats, partially right because they're published in the New York Review of books. And it's a sort of a self-sustaining infrastructure of like what the Northeastern, you know, highbrow literary scene looks like.

Who is it that said, this is a joke that we've shared several times over the years. Who is it that first hilariously called the Nairobi, the New York Review of each other's books? I'm going to look that up while you keep talking, yes. I don't know. It's a great joke. It's a great, it's a great, like, very inside baseball or inside publishing gag, you know, at the expense of the New York Review. You're right to ask the question about what would be the right way to publish this. And I don't know that there's, you know, that we can, that we can fantasize a perfect way through this.

If you were stuck with the Comeshie piece, how do you balance it out? It's so far, it's so far from being balanced out. It's so far, I mean, just what we started with, his disingenuous about what he had been accused of. and and you know the the court verdicts that that had led to you know someone has the fact that no one that no one thought

hey we should just be really clear let's just not get that wrong before we put this out into the world but um but yeah I mean I think that you I think that publishing a counterpoint right there is is one way to do it um

I think publishing I mean I think I think the first person first person in this case was just a really, really bad look. You know, I mean, there was, there was, there was zero, none of the introspection of this piece was actually introspective. Yeah. And I, and I, let me just push back against the phrase bad look, which is one of my least,

it's just bad. Yeah. Right. It's not, it's not bad because it looks bad. It's just bad. You're, you're absolutely right there. Yeah. No, and, and I, I, I, I just think that it's, that if there's anything, if you were, if you were

firmly in the, of the opinion that many of the men caught up in Me Too, had been wronged. This is not, this is, even then, this is not the way to do it. You'd think there, there would probably be more, there would certainly be more of interest and of worth gleaned from a reported piece with Gamesh as the central figure than giving him the voice in the platform to, you know, write middle school mash note poetry

in the New York Review of books and pretending that it's like, intellectually riveting. The Hockenberry essay, I want to call just a few details of this before we go on this, because these are just, like I said, strange and bizarre, you know, are grappling with offensive here when you to describe these essays. He talks about there's, there's, in all these essays, there's like, there's sort of like an obligatory, piteous detail in Gamesh's that said he's singing, he's been reduced to, like, singing karaoke instead of being on the radio. In Hockenberries, it said his Emmys and P bodies are in a storage unit in Brooklyn. that's his. He also, his is kind of strange thing

where he's going through all the kind of works that he said helped him develop his ideas of sexuality, one of which is Lolita, another of which is a 1974 production

of Zorba the Greek that he started in high school and has this line about saying that that production of Zorba from the early 70s is still talked about in his hometown.

Which like in where and in what forum is that still talked about? Just like, what is being glorious? Like, okay. Uh, that's interesting. And then he holds his whole thing about that his, what has happened, you know, he's sort of one of these, again, he's, he's not trying to, you know, fully sort of push back.

But one of his thing is, he's saying that it's like, what has been lost in American society is this idea of romance, you know? Yeah. Uh, which is just like, of all the tactics to take here. Like, essentially, I was just trying to conduct myself as a romantic. And then we've all lost the plot on romance. No. You know. You just don't.

No is the right answer. That's right. That's like a, that's like a, like a serial killer being like what's really lost in this in 2018 is the ideals of butchery, you know, of like being able to cut good meat with a finely honed knife. Like, no, this is a totally separate thing. You're not the guy to talk about that. No. By the way, do you want me to give you the, who made the joke about the New York review of each other's books? Yes.

It was Richard Hofstadter. Wow. Cousin Sal had that at plus 300. by the way, had Richard Hoffson. I think we need to get against all odds in here because this is... What's going on, buddy? I would like to have it. Did you have it as Richard Hofstetter did?

That was not going to be my guess. That actually, I was expecting to be someone of a little bit of a younger demographic, but I love that Hofstetter was coming off the top rope with that. I also really, before we really get out of here, not to make too light of the situation, but to make light of it. I had desperately, desperately won an episode of Storage Wars that's set in whatever storage unit, John Hockenberry. is putting his goods in.

I just want to see the weird cast of that bad show come across and try to define a Peabody Award, you know, just like going to various, going to various, like, trophy makers around Brooklyn and trying to figure out what it is they have in their hands. That would be really fantastic.

Now, is this distinct from a Polk Award in some way? I can't remember the difference. All right, now it's time for the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious, David, that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time.

One I missed while we were in Labor Day mode. Candice Owens. What do we call Candice Owens? Conservative Twitter presence? I mean, I don't. We need a word for it. We need a word for this. She's not even particularly present.

I mean, it's not like her tweeting seeps out of her own timeline a lot. But yes, she's a conservative Twitter presence. Well, she was incensed at some of the funeral orations at John McCain's service and then the various memorial services that were held around. She tweeted this new trend. This new trend of using funerals and eulogies to deliver political messages is really quite disgusting. Sympathy from death as means to sway public opinion is next level corrupt. Everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves. I got 25,000 retweets.

But as Bruno Alves points out to us, it was an overwork Twitter joke to point out that Pericles used a funeral oration for this purpose in 431 BC. Now, I include this not because it's particularly funny, but I love highbrow Twitter owns. That's great. Oh, yeah, what about Pericles? I think there should be, you know, we always do that there's a Trump tweet for that. I think there's a Pericles funeral oration for that really should be the comeback. Thanks to Bruno Alas for that one. A tweet from Time, the recently sold time on September 9th.

The tweet was, you're more likely to retire wealthy if you do this one thing. Now, how is that, David, for a clickable tweet. Do this one thing. You and I, David, could retire wealthy. It was an overworked Twitter joke to say be born rich. Thanks to Dre for that. And by the way, again, I include this not because it's particularly funny, because if you just click on the original time tweet, it was just a pit of Gen X, Gen Y, millennial self-loathing. Like, we're all going to die broke.

So we have no chance. It was all like win the lottery, rob a bank. Anyway, it's funny because it's true. And finally, a tweet from Mediaite, I'm sure you saw this. this, David. Paul McCartney details in new profile the time he masturbated with John Lennon. This was about as close to an overworked, a universal overworked Twitter joke as we could ever get. The entire nation speaking like voice of Godlike at the same time to react to the news that McCartney and Lennon masturbated in each other's company by tweeting, come together.

Yeah, I'm a little surprised, by the way, the New York Post went with Beat the Meadles as their headline. It was a front page, which is fine as puns go, right? Maybe they wanted to be different. Maybe they wanted to go underworked. Beat the Meadows is great if it weren't for the fact that one of their greatest songs was called Come Together. It is indeed. All right. Thanks to Jared Salisbury for that. David, let's talk about topic number two now. I want to do an NFL grab bag because we haven't talked about the NFL. It is. We're two weeks in to football season. Let's start with this clip. Here's the bills, the Buffalo Bills. Lorenzo Alexander talked talking about the fact that his teammate,

defensive back Vante Davis retired at halftime of the bill's blowout loss to the charters. You've seen anything like that? You've never seen it ever. Pop Warner, high school, college, pros, never heard of it, and never seen it. And it's just completely disrespectful to his teammates. Did he say the name to you?

Did he say anybody to say? He said, anybody did it? He said, he said nothing to nobody. He left? Yeah, you know as much as I know. I know, I found out going in the second half of the game. coming out, said he said he's not coming out,

he retired. So. What? Yep. That's it. So who said that? Who said what? Who said he?

Sean said that. The guy's in the sign line. I mean, guys heard about it and said that he wouldn't come back out. First of all, this was like laugh at up gag on sports radio this morning, on Monday morning after the game. Doesn't this feel like one of those things that in the old days,

this would have gone in like the blooper, weird athlete happening Hall of Fame? But now in the age of CTE, we sort of think differently of this. It's more like, well, you know, if the whole goal is to get out of professional football with your brain somewhat intact, why not retired halftime?

This bill's season is going nowhere, right? You know, Vante Davis, been a Lee for a long time, make a lot of money. Maybe just step away now. And I think weirdly it's more sympathetic now. Again, not on the sports radio that I necessarily heard this morning, but I feel it's different.

well I think the half-time thing was the real was the easier thing to grab on to right his statement that he released after the game was fairly touching and extremely well stated as far as those things go and if that had just been a post-game retirement even if it had seemed like it was in a fit of peak or whatever like that I think that you know there would have been it would have been entirely understandable yeah there's some little sports norms or mores that that it do carry over into real life enough

that it's a little bit harder to get past them. And one of those, like, you know, don't quit on your teammates in the middle of a game or something. But, yeah, I mean, it's, I think that, you know, maybe you should get credit for just being more honest or more forthright, you know, whatever, because it's, it's clearly not, you know,

I mean, there's a lot of people that, that I'm sure quit on their teams halfway through in more sneaky ways. Without actually quitting? Yeah. Yeah. And the ethical thing of this is interesting for sports radio because what's the difference between like what if he just quit after the game? Right.

What's the difference? Is it worse because the bills were just getting blown out by the Chargers and looked totally hopeless before kind of rallying for a couple of second half touchdowns? Yeah. Versus just doing it afterwards. Like, hey, you quit on his week week two. I mean, that seems pretty dramatic too. Again, I'm very sympathetic to him. I think that it's, I think it's very easy to make the case that like the problem with quitting halfway through is that, you know, you put your teammates in a difficult spot and maybe more danger because the game plan you drew up, you know, is now out the window or at least 5% out the window or something.

That clip is awesome. Because the Bill's linebacker just seems generally confused. And the reporters are asking her just like, what? What? I have no idea what happened. That's so good. You also sent me note this week on the Strange Saga. of Josh Gordon,

Cleveland Brown's wide receiver, has this amazing, insane touchdown catch in week one against the Steelers. And then he gets mysteriously cut right before the Browns lost yet another heartbreaker this time to the Saints. What did you make of the whole Gordon situation?

First of all, not cut. I'm sorry. Almost cut. They announced that he was cut. It was almost as if they were using, you know, football media, Twitter to gin up interest in it.

him or something, you know, or whatever. But the last thing we heard was that he was, he might be headed for the Patriots in a trade. I mean, listen, I'm a Baylor grad, as is Josh Gordon. I don't have a lot of sympathy for a lot of what remains of the Baylor football program in the time since I graduated that place. But I do have a ton of sympathy for Josh Gordon, who seems like a guy who's, you know, has legitimate, you know, personal issues. Demons is what they'd call him in the pro wrestling world.

And as far as we know about the story, it seems like his biggest sin is sort of is self-medicating, you know, and he's certainly a very good player. It's been a while since we've seen him play with any, you know, in any kind of consistent stretch because of his series of suspensions and his problems with substance abuse or use, but it's a weird story. And I will say that the level of, I think maybe more shocking than anything else is sort of the level of sympathy for them that I feel amongst just about everybody I talk to about football, including the ringer staff, hopefully not, you know, betraying too much. You know, it's easy for a certain set to make jokes at his expense, but I know we're going to talk

about Kaepernick in a minute, but there's this sort of like, it does feel a little bit like Josh Gordon, if he's not the best, if he's not the best spokesman for a cause, that he's sort of the beginning of a much more significant conversation. And there's a lot of sympathy for him just for being kind of out in the spotlight on this count. I do think there's a lot of sympathy for him, but here's what I would say. I see these tweets that are like, you know, I wish Josh Gordon the best in his battle with addiction, if that's what this in fact is, if that's the right word to describe this. This is a fight bigger than football. So that out of way.

But then immediately see people say, but all that said, I don't want him on my team because there's this weird, like, narrative head-on collision here that's on the one hand, you know, someone's struggling, someone in recovery and how bad people tend to feel for them. On the other, this weird obsession with personnel and fantasy football that where people sort of. to kick into the mode of, well, I don't want the Dallas Cowboys to sign this guy. I don't want the Patriots to sign. So, okay, so you're simply, you really, really want him to succeed, but you just don't want to succeed with your team. I saw this. I feel this as a Texas Rangers fan, I saw this with Josh Hamilton, who was when he arrived at the Rangers, this guy who had overcome, overcome is again the wrong word. He'd been badly, he was an addict, as he admitted.

He had, you know, was in a good place in his life. And he became this great baseball player, won the AL MVP. And then he relapsed, which if you were listening to him was something he had said all along, right? I'm in this fragile state. This is not my life. I am not well, quote, unquote. But as soon as he relapsed, I saw lots of fans just turn on him immediately. Like, I just can't trust this guy.

Just can't trust it. But no, no, but that's the whole story is about that, right? Yep. The whole thing is about that. So, again, there's not like a, there's not a neat and easy solution to that problem. them. But it's just one of those things where I feel like two distinct kind of ready-made sports narratives just collide at the same time. And you just watch, it always happens. It always happens. And it happened again this weekend. Yeah. I think that the sympathy is, you know,

well-placed. And I hope that the teams, you know, whatever team decides to wherever he ends up, I hope that they, you know, are interested in his well-being as they are. and his touchdown-catching ability. Let's talk about the Colin Kaepernick Nike ad, which we haven't gotten a test. First, let's listen, actually, to the Colin Kaepernick Nike ad. Believe in something,

even if it means sacrificing everything. So don't ask if your dreams are crazy. Ask if they're crazy enough. Kind of an amazing throwback, by the way, isn't it to the 90s? When Nike ads were just, like, transfixed the public? It's just everybody was, I feel that that,

It still happens to a degree, but we're 20 years from when, like, one of these would come on, you're just like, oh, my gosh, right? This was like, I don't think we had water coolers in our, in our middle and high schools, but like, it was the equivalent of water. It was lunch, cafeteria line talk the next day. What did you make of Nike embracing Kaepernick and by extension his causes like they have? I think that it was, I think it was probably a really smart move on, I mean, listen. Of all of the different ways that we are going to call businesses and publications and media outlets stupid over the lifespan of this podcast, for some reason, and maybe it's just, you know, the crass capitalist in me, I'm going to trust Nike's front office to know on whether or not this was a wise business decision. I think they probably knew exactly the demographics they were pushing this into and that they were, and that this was a, it was going to be really good to, make noise and it was probably going to be really good audience-wise. It was going to, it was going

to, you know, push more shoe sales than it was going to, uh, then it was going to, uh, then it was going to, to stop. And listen, for better or worse, this is, I mean, this could be just a crass economic decision on their part. Uh, does it, what, what are the non-crass economic decisions that Nike carries out? I mean, it's possible that Phil Knight or whoever is just like, I truly believe in his cause and I'm going to make him the, um, face of this campaign, whether it's going to, you know, even if that means tanking my entire company. I don't think anybody really assumes that's the case.

I was what to say. That would be the first in capitalism. I don't care what happens. You take the whole company. I guess that's what makes what I'm the weird place here is like you can be, if you support what the kinds of issues that Colin Kaeperning is talking about and the means that he has gone to to bring attention to them. and he and other NFL players

and you are happy for him that he's in a Nike commercial and he has this platform to talk about this still there's the squeamish angle of how do we feel about Nike getting what does Nike want with this right is it just one thing that they've decided it's good for their bottom line so

it all comes out in the wash right hey yay more people pay attention to Colin Kaepernick more people buy stuff more people are into this kind of thing or just is that just weird in a way. Well, Nike also has an economic financial relationship with the NFL, so that's, you know, they were, there was some, you know, at least low-key risk of sacrifice on their part by doing this. I mean, I think that they did it in a really safe way. If you, I mean, it's for all of the,

all of the noise that this is created, and obviously it's, that does not come as a surprise to anybody, no matter what you think about Kaepernick's cause or his tactics, I mean, the, the catchphrase is believe in something even if it means sacrificing everything, there's nothing, there's no opinion in that statement. Yeah. And it's also contained within this broad sort of thing about, you know, people who want to be skateboarders or people who want to play football, right? And that's kind of, you know, it's about, it's not, it's not explicitly about the pursuit of social justice. No. No, no. No. No. You know, reaching, reaching your peak, right? Just doing it in the, in the Nike formulation. Sure. I mean, and there's not, I don't think even the, I don't even think the, the, the,

you know, Colin Kaepernick's most ardent detractors. I mean, I don't think there's anyone that doesn't think he would be employed somewhere as a backup if he hadn't, you know, taken the stand or the,

you know, taking the knee when he did. So, I mean, it's, like I said, it's factually correct. I mean, and I think that that's part of the, I mean,

I'm sure that's part of the game plan for Nike, you know? I mean, there's a phrase that gets passed around in pro wrestling circles a lot, you know, in the modern era when someone is like,

online is irrationally mad about something that happens on a wrestling show, when people will say, like, you're getting worked, bro, which is basically the way of saying,

like, yeah, the whole point of this was to make you mad, was to make you irrationally mad, and that's the way we recreate the old style of, like, people being really mad

at the villains in the ring. And I think there's some extent to which Nike was just, like, very, I mean, very deliberately just stoking the fire, the flames of resentment here. Which is a fantastic segue,

by the way, to Clay Travis, which we're going to talk about next. In terms of wrestling villainy, he calls for a boycott Clay Travis who whom you might know as

speaking of speaking of Twitter presences and now on an FS1 show called for a not called for a boycott essentially announced

he was boycotting Nike upon the news of their embrace of Colin Kaepernick had the phrase get woke and go broke which by the way

the grammar of this headline is just just prickly enough that it just bugs me to know end. Why I'm boycotting Nike colon get woke and go broke? This feels like it should. This is like...

That's his reason for boycotting. No, it sounds like the title of a country song, but grammatically, get woke and go broke should be in parentheses, you know? It's there, or vice versa. I want this. I want this. I want get woke and go broke the country song, by the way. Oh, I would absolutely love that. Can we commission that? Anyway, so what he's implying by that, of course,

is that when Nike did this, there were going to be bad financial repercussions. It turns out, according to CBS on Friday, shares of Nike reached an all-time high, which set off,

you know, the Chaudenfreude siren on on woke Twitter, which was so happy to throw this back in Travis's face. I was struck by this.

Remember when Jamel Hill mused about a boycott of the Cowboys in the midst of all the sort of crackdown on the protesting NFL players

and she got suspended? And then Clay Travis announced a boycott and he got his own show. that was weird yeah yeah funny how that happened in that exact order but yes

yeah pretty much or at least it was announced in that order yeah that was funny yeah no funny that it worked it is funny how those things work out sometimes all right david let's move to topic number three here

which is the fact that we're going to talk about storm coverage two storms tropical depression florence uh over the last 24 hours have been menacing north carolina and parts of the southeast as of monday morning at least 16 people had died. And on the other side of the planet,

Typhoon Manget has killed, again, as of Monday morning, 59 people in the Philippines. There were all kinds of amazing details in New York Times report today. The casinos in Macau were closed, which was, as the Times put it, the first time ever that that's happened, a thousand plus flights delayed in Hong Kong, certainly more deaths across Asia. I walked by a television today,

and I saw something that has the shot of, of, you know, a waterlogged American city with people in boats moving or moving around or rescuing other people. That just become like this sort of iconic cable news shot, I feel, of the last 10 years. Mm-hmm. Should we talk about that first? Should we talk about the Trump tweets? I know.

It's always a point of like, do we talk at what point does this all, do we take the bait? Speaking of getting worked. Let's see how long we can hold off Trump for this podcast. guess. Okay. We'll make a record of it. What is a storm coverage to me, it's like, it's certainly an important story. It's, it's just become, it's interesting how it's become this.

Just all of American news goes to battle stations for these things. You have the print, you have cable news anchors down there. You have the weather channel, which we're going to talk about in a minute. It's like this, this becomes the singular focus, almost singular focus of a nation for a couple of weeks. when in instances like this. Yeah, I was watching MSNBC at some point as the storm was rolling in, and Ali Valshi, who is the,

who is absolutely unparalleled in terms of just kind of like, very like intel, like smart guy's stream of consciousness monologuing about the thing that is happening at the very moment right now. Mm-hmm. Was out there in South Carolina,

I think, somewhere on a beach and his like North Face Parker and he just offhandedly said I mean he literally will just say everything because the point

is just to continue talking you know and so at some when he was like and of course the beaches are all completely shut down the roads are shut down you know the

they're not letting anybody out here at all except for except for you know life saving you know firemen or boats or whoever and you know

we media and it was not there's nothing wrong with what he's said, but it was just this weird statement of fact that like, yeah, there is a, there is this, you know, perhaps the most important special dispensation for the, nobody can be out during a hurricane is the like 500 members of the media who are dotting the beach at that very moment. Yeah, I mean, that's, I guess that's part of what I'm saying. It's sort of like the, the story of

the recovery of the, the storm hitting of the recovery of death, of all those kinds of, you know, of the years-long process it takes to come back from a serious storm like this is obviously a 100% legitimate story. Then there's a shot of the news anchor being blown around on the beach, which is, I mean, that sort of falls into sort of halfway between newsworthy, certainly, right? This is happening. There are people who are, you know, the newsman, newswoman are, you know, is representing that are being affected in this way. But then there's also just like, here is, you know, here is newsman being blown around the beach. Yeah. As just kind of this like stock image of

of cable news. Yeah, that's like the storm coverage as like, you know, shark week or something. You know, we just like we're interested in the, and anything could happen at any moment on live television.

Mm-hmm. And again, it's like, it's like, it's not completely unworthy because it's like you do, when you see that, you do understand like, wow,

this is not a rainstorm, right? This is something. This is a, this is big and this is deadly and this is something. But it's also, there's also a certain kind of ceremony to to this point.

Speaking to Donald Trump, hours before Florence was going to make landfall. Are you going to talk about the guy, the guy who was acting like the wind was blowing? Sure. This was the weather channel. The weather channel had an incredible sort of PR U-turn in the middle of the storm. They were praised for this amazing sort of graphic work they did with the storm surge

and graphic showing this is what could happen in the American South East. and then they had this video of their reporter Mike Seidel in Wilmington, North Carolina, who appeared to be leaning to his right into a gusting wind as if he's about to be blown over. Like he has to kind of go at a 45 degree angle because otherwise it'd just be blown across. And then we see two guys walk behind him in the parking lot. Just Virgins, just like they're walking to 7-Eleven to get a big gulp or a slopey. You're like, wait a second. Very little resistance.

Wait a second. a spokesman for the weather channel says it's important to note that the two individuals in the background are walking on concrete while Seidel tries to maintain his footing

on wet grass and then the spokesman got on and I suspect this is the actual answer to say Seidel was exhausted after reporting on air until one of him, right? So you're down there you're an extremely chaotic situation

you were mindful of how you look on television I suspect at some point we were looking We were trying to find, I felt this is every, every storm has this moment. We grew around on YouTube today, found the Today Show canoe situation, whereas Matt Lauer, back when he was hosting the Today Show and Katie Kirk threw it to a correspondent who was in this kind of dramatic shot in a canoe and then two rescue workers walked in front of her and the water turned out to be ankle deep. That was, it turns out, you probably did not need to be in the canoe. to get this shot, but, but man, it looked great. I spent some time, by the way, at the Weather Channel last year.

People down there were incredibly lovably nerdy about storms, and you have all these, you know, extremely highly credentialed meteorologists down there. So I think the Weather Channel probably, of anything, airs on the wonky side of storm coverage. And, you know, it's the rest of the cable news universe anyway that that's on that. Just, just saying that. Yeah, and it was, I mean, it was a really funny. clip. I think that the weather, I mean, the weather channel was certainly not the worst example of the sort of natural disaster porn that has taken over. It's not just the media coverage,

although there's a lot of that. But, you know, my family's down in Charlotte, North Carolina, which is thankfully, you know, out of the, out of, you know, the most dangerous at parts of the hurricane. And they're far enough inland that it's never really a huge concern, although, you know, I was alive for Hurricane Hugo, and it can, it can get bad. But I was calling my mom, calling my dad, and then I just googled to see how Charlotte was doing on Saturday afternoon, and the first thing that came up was like a YouTube video of like houses with trees falling through them and stuff. You know, I mean, it's like this stuff is all around. But anyway, I'm sympathetic to the Weather Channel.

I mean, you know, I've been on camera before and we all, you know, suck in our gut and try to stand a few inches taller. I don't think there's anything that bad about leaning 45 degrees to the right to pretend the wind is blowing really hard on occasion just to make a point. Come on. We've all been there. Yeah. And then we have Trump. Hours before Florence made landfall, he tweets 3,000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the island after, all caps after the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths.

As time went by, it did not go up by much. Then a long time later, they started to report really large numbers like 3,000. This was done by the Democrats, blah, blah, blah. This was, as a tweet, I don't really have much to say about that. I thought it was interesting, though, in exchange on Twitter between Benji Sarlin of MSNBC and Maggie Haberman, when they're talking about the fact that, like, there was this theory for a long time, kind of a working theory even, that Trump would do things like this to change the subject or to try to capture, you know, his wackiest tweets would be things that were trying to arrest the narrative, like, oh, you got a Russian investigation. I'm going to just tweet something else totally outrageous and get everybody looking over here. that's actually not the case according to Haberman and if you watch if you look at something like this like why would you why would you change the subject to hurricane denialism right before another

storm hits like that just makes no sense so i thought that was interesting um and also just like you know this was just one of the most mind-blowing trump tweets though i think of all because death denialism is is a very even by his standards is a very very very very very very very very strange and icky place to go. It's a very specific form of conspiracy theorizing. I mean,

it's, you don't want to, it's, it's, it's, don't even get close to that. I mean, it's so crazy.

Apparently, and also, it's apparently on Twitter, the lot of Trumpologists think he actually really believes that, you know,

there's also, like the, and again, believes maybe heard on Fox News and don't have any reason to doubt them, but that he actually

thinks that, that's the case. And that this whole, you know, sort of workup of all the people who died because it wasn't power because they didn't have easy access to medicine and food and clean water was something that was cooked up by the Democrats.

The wildest part about it, at least, you know, maybe this is too, from a sort of meta point of view, I mean, one, you can make the case that it's, it's symptomatic of his remove, of his lack of just general comprehension that, you know, as soon as the storm was over, that no one else is going to die. And there's a certain privilege in that, that like, okay, that might be true in a, and, you know, whatever resort town you're living in, that like, you know, there's enough EMTs and various other rescue workers around that the, that pretty much stems the tide as soon as the storm is over.

So for him not to be able to wrap his mind around it, you know, is, I think, like I said, symptomatic of something. But the bigger issue, I mean, that's not the bigger issue, but, but sort of the more salient point when it comes to Trump is just like this was there was no need for this. He wasn't exactly. There was no political. No one was attacking him politically on this front, at least not to any, not in any sort of, you know, overwhelming way. And this, and this was again another, just an, like an easy opportunity for him to say, to him for him to be presidential to make, just if, if, if you'll allow me to dumb it down, you know, to.

the most basic way. He didn't need to make this a... He didn't need to come out firing at this because it just didn't... Because it just was totally unnecessary. Yeah, I mean, turning down easy opportunities to, quote, be presidential,

to do things, to go through this kind of ceremony that the rest of the media will eat up, whether you mean it or not. And we saw this with John McCain's funeral, you know, not lowering the flags and then finally lowering the flags and not coming out with a statement, saying John McCain is an American hero and blah, blah, blah,

even if you don't mean it. His refusal to go through with the kind of media ceremony of the American presidency, again, one of the strangest and most striking things about him. And, you know, people, I think I saw, I think I saw, what's a Woodward? I forget who was telling Trump. Somebody's, somebody's Trump's, oh, it was Mark Leibovitch in his book, Trump was talking about tweeting and how much he tweeted. And Mark Gleavich is, no, no, please keep tweeting because we want an accurate record of your mind. This is something we never, we don't get with politicians a lot of the time. because it's buried under ceremony

and it's buried under the kind of statements I hope everybody's well and safe tonight blah blah blah blah blah in the hurricane we Trump declines to do that so perhaps we are as seeing a more accurate reflection of his mind as strange a place of territory as that is all right David that's the press boxer this week

thanks to our producer Jim Cunningham thanks to Chris Almeida for helping us with research back next week with more hot takes about the media see you then David See you later, man. Porn lawyer. Yeah.

Toying with 2020 run. It sounds like the title of a country song. I agree. We've all lost the plot on romance. No. There's a phrase that gets passed around in pro wrestling circles a lot. You know, in the modern era when someone is like online is irrationally mad about something that happens on a wrestling show, people will say like calling my mom, calling my dad. Get woke and go broke.

I don't know. What do you think? A big fat editor's note. This is self-pitying and routine. ridiculous? Yeah. This is Curtis Country. Yeah.

That production of Zorba from the early 70s is still talked about in his hometown? Um, I mean, listen. No. I don't think anybody really assumes that's the case. Man, I was trying to find a million different ways to work troll into this.