The Press Box - Kamala Harris’s Campaign Has No Regrets, How We Consume News Now, and a Report From the Cowboys-Giants Game

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

Hello, media consumers! Bryan and David kick off the show with Bryan’s Thanksgiving report about being back home in Texas and the Cowboys-Giants game. Then, they go over the Harris campaign postmortem on 'Pod Save America' (19:18) and discuss how the “snippet generation” has completely changed the way we consume news (36:07). Then, in the Notebook Dump, they discuss the passing of USA Today columnist Rudy Martzke and the Daily Mail’s coverage of Azeez Al-Shaair’s terrible hit on Trevor Lawrence (46:10). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week, Only in Journalism, America’s Softest Target, and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producers: Brian H. Waters and Eduardo Ocampo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, everybody. Chris Vernon here and welcome to a new season of the NBA and the mismatch. And huge welcome as well to my new co-host, Dave Jacoby. I can't wait to link with you twice a week every Tuesday and Friday right here on the mismatch to break down everything that's happening in the league. Who's playing well, who we loved, who we loathed, trade rumors, team dysfunction. We've got you covered right here. So follow us, subscribe and hit us with those five-star ratings on Spotify or wherever you get your. your podcast. And also don't forget to follow us on social media. That's at Ringer NBA and check out the full mismatch episodes with the two handsomest podcasters in the history of podcasting

right on the Ringer NBA YouTube channel. David? Yes. For Thanksgiving, the family and I were down in our mutual hometown of Fort Worth, Texas. Well, okay, mutual by some definition. Yeah. Mutual partial. I went to high school here. Yeah. Okay, that's your hometown or a hometown? The farther away I get from my various hometowns, I kind of feel like I have no hometown. So, you know. I always encourage you to take Fort Worth as your hometown

rather than Louisville. Yeah. Because, you know, then we can share something. We can have something together. Yeah, well, that's a big part of it for sure. But listen, other hometowns out there, I'm available. Yeah. Fort Worth, Louisville.

Yeah, why not? I was in Asheville for a little bit. You know, they got lots of hometown options here. When I was down in one of your hometowns of Fort Worth, Texas, my son Owen and I got to see the Dallas Cowboys play the New York Giants on Thanksgiving Day. And I was in the 400 section, jotting things down, so I could give you a report from the Cowboys Giants game. Oh, go right ahead.

First of all, when, in North Texas, you got to get up early, you got to get in the car with some coffee, and you got to drive down to West Texas. O-E-S-T. Not to be confused with the region of West Texas, but West, comma, Texas. Yes. Because as you know, there's a very special place there, the check stop. Yeah.

It's so good. It's a very special pastry called the Kalachi. I don't know. There was a Kalachi place in Brooklyn. Do you remember this? Very briefly. I think it was after we were no longer living together, but it was in our old neighborhood.

And it was called like Kalachi Mama or something. And I was just like, I discovered it and was just like, what? And like went running there. And they were like closed at 1 p.m. on a Saturday. I was like, all right, never mind. But I don't know. Kalachis are, I mean,

calachis are way up there in the awesomest things about Texas. And that's including Tex-Mex food and barbecue and everything else. Calachis are so good. And have not really successfully been exported. I think as every place has their regional pastry that they don't want to mess with. And when it has been exported, they don't get it quite right. Yeah. Because people don't know this.

The dough of a calachi is almost like a biscuit, a white biscuit you get at a southern restaurant. Mm-hmm. And then in the middle is fruit, and preferably for me anyway, fruit and cream cheese. Yes, always with the cream cheese. But they also do like savory calacchi's too, don't they? Aren't they like, yeah. I might have ordered that as well. Okay.

went down to my got a dozen for the family and then a couple of savories for me for the dry bag. It's like when you go to the Dunkin' Donuts or whatever, you're like, yeah, I definitely want like a Boston cream. But man, do I just want to put a Boston cream rot and empty stomach? Then you got to figure out what savory thing from the menu you want. It all feels like a big, the idea of when you go to a place and they have savory and sweet of equal sizes that can go together in the dozen that you're buying. I mean, it's just magical. Hell yes. But about that Cowboys Giants game.

Yeah. You know, David, I am a Cowboys season ticket holder living here in Los Angeles. So sell all the tickets, but I take my son Owen to see the Cowboys on Thanksgiving every year. This has been a little problem for my mom, both now and historically. When I was a kid, my grandfather, my uncles would come to Fort Worth. And my mom would make this beautiful, wonderful Thanksgiving dinner and then have to wrap it all in foil. And we would be in the parking lots of the old Texas stadium opening the foil to eat Thanksgiving dinner, which my mom just, I mean, just drove her completely up the wall. Yeah.

All this effort had been expended. Now I've solved the problem. But you can't, you can't just have Thanksgiving dinner when you get home? It's like a 330 start. 3.30 central. Okay. It just, you know, so what I've done now is I say, well, let's just do this on Wednesday. Thanksgiving dinner on Wednesday

and then leftovers Thursday and then the game on Thursday. Okay. Everybody wins. And by everybody I mean me and Owen because we get to have Thanksgiving and then the Cowboys. Sure.

And it just makes for a fine week. This particular Cowboys Thanksgiving game featured the four and seven Cowboys against the two and nine giants. Uh-huh. Not the most exciting. matchup possible. Now, Owen is 11, and he's been getting into history, World War II, the Romans, everything

else. And he's at that age where he likes to make analogies between historical events and things that are happening in his life. Oh, wow. Okay. So I said to him, this Cowboys Giants game is like Grenada invading Grenada. It's like an elderly Mike Tyson facing an elderly Mike Tyson. stakes are extremely low.

We get to AT&T Stadium there in Arlington, David, and had a little problem. I had a favorite pair of glasses that I got from old focles here in South Pasadena. These are appropriately vintagey looking glasses. And they had snapped right on the bridge of the nose, like snapped in half. I know how that goes, yeah. So we were able to super glue them together.

which would have gotten me back to L.A. to get the glasses to get some new glasses. But then I stepped on them the night before the game. And we had to super glue them a second time, which is like glue on glue at this point. And I get to the game with Owen and I pull them out of my pocket and they just fall apart immediately. Yeah. So at that moment, I realized I'm going to have to watch Cowboys and Giants on Thanksgiving with prescription sunglasses. Yeah, well, you wouldn't be the only one there. Well, I kind of would be, dude, because this is not Los Angeles or New York.

This is Arlington, Texas. And when you're walking into a stadium where the roof is closed on a gray November day, Oh, okay. In sunglasses, you get all these people looking at you like, wow, is that a celebrity or more to the point, someone who thinks he's a celebrity? And I want to tell them, celebrities do not sit in the upper deck. Yeah, when you go back to Fort Worth, I know you already have enough of problem with people being like, okay, Hollywood. Welcome back.

Yeah. You left here for... Too good to come by for Labor Day, but you're here for Thanksgiving, huh? All right. How are those taxes out in California, huh? It's really funny because I had all these moments during the game where I was sitting there watching it, I'd be like, I felt like I was watching television where you've switched off the intelligent mode of your TV because you're watching an old movie and you don't want it to look weird. and then you forget to put it on.

You're like, why does a sporting event look weird? I kept thinking that and remembering, oh, you are wearing sunglasses watching this game inside. Always a little bit of an awkward moment when the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders come out. I feel like we talked about this last year. Or maybe not. Any moment of sexuality with your kids is going to be dicey territory. But what about like prehistoric, antiquated, Dallas Cowboy cheerleader sexuality.

Very bizarre, yeah. I don't think the parenting handbook has a replacement as a section. We have different ways of talking about the things that our parents and uncles and whatever talked to us, you know, said to us over the years. But I don't think, I don't know what the replacement for like your uncle elbowing you and saying hubba, hubbo when you're seven years old is. Yeah, this is what I wonder. What do I elbow Owen and say while they are doing a kickline to ACDC's thunderstruck?

And say, look at those talented dancers. Look at those talented dancers. Also, the Cowboys do this really cool thing where instead of having an anthem singer, they have a trumpeter named Freddie Jones come out. And Freddie Jones is in his 60s, I think. He comes out and just does a rendition of the anthem on a trumpet. And it sounds almost mournful, a little bit like taps. Just imagine that some of 80,000 people on a guy standing on the field with a trumpet,

just doing the anthem. Yeah. But we're watching this and it's very moving. And then the camera pulls out and there is a cheerleader standing next to Freddie Jones just suggestively doing the sign language version of the anthem. Yeah. And when I say suggestively, I don't mean sexually, but just like giving it her full, you know, putting her arms into it. And I'm just like, God, this is such a weird scene and completely inexplicable as a person. as a parent.

Yeah. We had a little bit of a fan etiquette emergency at the game. So you don't get this from the host on other leading sports podcast because they don't buy tickets to watch football. They sit in their nice little press box or sit at home watching the red zone. When you buy tickets, David, you find that people are constantly walking in front of you, making you stand up while the ball is in play. Yes.

You've seen that stat where there's like 15 minutes of actual action during a three and a half hour football game. Uh-huh. What are the odds that the moment you asked me to stand up, a Cooper Rush pass will be in the air. Well, it's high if you're at AT&T Stadium because that's the only time people walk down the aisle. Folks, if you're at any kind of sporting event and you want to make people stand up to walk down the aisle, hey, no problem. I'm all for bathroom breaks, food breaks, whatever. Make sure sports is not happening at that moment. You can wait 10 seconds for the play to be over.

Get to your seat. There'll be plenty of time. Sit down and then we can all watch the next play together without being interrupted. John Madden, David, has become a big thing for the NFL on Thanksgiving. Of course, he called decades' worth of Thanksgiving. games for Fox and CBS. The coin that was tossed at midfield had John Madden on one side, that was heads, and then a turkey on the other side, that was tails.

The end zones had the words printed, and this is exactly what it said, John Madden Thanksgiving. Wow. Seems more like a tag cloud than a tribute. Could have just put John Madden right in the end zones, right? Do we need John Madden? Thanksgiving to identify the day. Also, everybody plays that quote from Madden where he says there's no place I would

rather be today on Thanksgiving than right here, right now at a football game. That quote is very true to John Madden. It makes you feel good because you're at home or at the stadium, in my case, watching the game with your family. It is also a really, really strange quote when you think about it. Like the one thing I would like to be doing on this holiday is calling a football game on television. Yeah.

Totally true to Madden. That's what I was going to say. Madden was an odd bird. That's exactly what he would say. But it is a strange holiday greeting. It's kind of him from the afterlife approving of our eternal childhood where nothing in life is as important as football and the men who play football. I always love that.

Fun halftime shows at Cowboys Thanksgiving games. Two years ago, we got to see the Jonas Brothers. Last year, it was Dolly Parton. I'm going to need to bring in the official country music correspondent of the press box, David Shoemaker, to explain this year's show. How excited should we have been to see Lainey Wilson and Jelly Roll perform? I don't know, man. I'm not that kind of correspondent.

I was going to say, Jelly Roll, previous performer at WWE, at least at WWE event that I can recall, seems to sort of fit the vibe there. Oh, maybe fits the country, the NFL vibe a little bit better. Lany Wilson is great. But this is, yeah, I mean, we're just too old. This is every time there's anything, even including Super Bowl halftime shows where the artists are of our vintage. Just like, I am too old to make a comment about this because I will, I will find a way to sound like an idiot. So, yay, Lainey Wilson, yay jelly roll.

Yay, music and football. John, man, Thanksgiving. Speaking of all, dude, I have never felt more like a middle-aged dad than when I get excited about the efficiency with which we leave the stadium. There's nothing like it. Normally you take a ramp or an escalator down from the upper deck. My uncle, who's the one who bequeathed these tickets to me, figured out this exit from AT&T where you push a door, a closed door open. And the door just has an exit sign. I don't even know if the door has a window showing what is beyond the door.

but you push open this unmarked door and you find yourselves, you find where we found ourselves on this staircase that just goes straight down. It must be for like evacuations or emergencies or something, but it's open. And he figured out this,

like this weekend or he figured out sometime in the past? He passed this knowledge onto me with the tickets. Oh, wow. This is a whole, you know, having a pass down in Curtis family lore. And we've left, the stadium at the same time as 80,000 other people, and there has been nobody but us on this

staircase. As far as I know, it is a secret staircase. So we're going down the staircase. We're high-fiving, you know, each other like, yeah, we figured it out. We used our special secret interest. And we get to the bottom and there's a guy standing down there, goes, guys, this isn't an exit as we try to leave. And we're like, oh, what are we doing? He's like, we'll go through that door. And it's a different door. So we walk through this other door that is strangely being propped open by a water bottle. I'm sure that's an official. Wait, just to be clear, where he says, when he says, this isn't an exit, was he standing in front of what you believe to be the exit?

Or were you like several stories of? Yeah, I think he's standing outside what we believe to be the exit. An exit we use all the time when we use our secret exit. So we walk to this other door and we walk into the AT&T club within the stadium, which is like an exclusive part. It has the white walls like it's from the future. Yeah. So now we've been denied this exit of the stadium,

but we've somehow found ourselves in a more exclusive part of the stadium than we could buy our way into. You got like the white glove waiters, like carving the prime rib in there and stuff? Well, and it was Thanksgiving, so they had the Thanksgiving feast out. Oh, wow. And the nicer liquors behind the bar. So we kind of walked around there for like five miles. Like, let's just take a lap here.

Yeah. Because we may never get back here. But that was a big moment. My other Thanksgiving football thing I have to report to you was Texas versus Texas A&M on Saturday night. as you know I have some investment in this rivalry

Yeah Yeah There was a time We thought this rivalry Might be over At least for You know In terms of real

football significance Indeed It had not been played Since 2011 2011 This is when A&M left The Big 12

To go to the SEC Little Brother Wasn't going to have to deal with Big Brother anymore Mm-hmm And dude That game was played

when I was also back home with my wife in Fort Worth. And we had just gotten married the month before. And I'm watching the last ever or so we thought Texas versus Texas A&M game. And Christine, as you know, not a football person was in an adjoining room. And all she could hear through the wall was ragged breathing and me making noises that sounded kind of like words. And she thought I was having some kind of neurological event in the other room. sure little did you know i was just watching the texas game so they teed up again this year big brother

has now come like a nightmare to the cc with texas a and m they're playing in college station and i have to report to you this is one of the first football games i can ever remember that i could not watch giant chunks of it was emotionally and it was just too terrifying for me to watch the game really i was in there at the beginning I was in there at the end. I would come in and sit down for like 20 minutes and then I would just go and like say, why don't we just sing some Christmas carols?

Why don't we just sit around the tree for a few minutes? I wasn't looking at my phone. I wasn't looking at anything. I just couldn't do it in real time. Wow. Just very not me. The idea of losing that game, of course, Texas wound up winning that game.

Aggies didn't score a single offensive point. Ha, ha, ha. I've never found myself in that place where I just, I can't watch this. Yeah. Because it is so much. But again, at least I wasn't breathing shallowly and, you know, making subhuman. It's a step in the right direction.

Grunts. So my wife did not have to call the cops or reevaluate some of her own life choices. What happened to being in that game, by the way? What was the final score? It was 17 to 7. Yeah. Just wanted to give you an opportunity to say that. Offensive point for the Aggies.

I mentioned that part. All right, coming up on the pod, the team that ran Kamala Harris's presidential campaign and lost has finally broken its silence. How did that go? Plus, a new theory about how we consume news now, the death of a sports media writer and a vicious NFL hit gives us some serious content. All that and much more on the press box.

A part of the ringer podcast network. Hello, media consumers, Brian Curtis, David Schumacher and producer Eduardo Ocampo, who is sitting in for Brian. David and all the after-action reports from the presidential campaign, we've been waiting to hear from the people that ran the Kamala Harris campaign.

It's that old principle of sports writing. The loser's locker room is always more interesting than the winner's locker room. Well, they finally sat down for an hour and a half conversation on Pod Save America. I'd love to report that this is a now they tell us, but in fact, it's more of a now they still won't tell us because they won't admit they did anything wrong.

Yeah. And this is like some of the most frustrating 90 minutes of podcasting I have ever listened to where I'm like, there's, dude, there's not one thing. Not one little thing you regret that you'd be willing to tell us a couple of weeks after the election that you wish you'd done differently. Yeah. People involved here are Geno Malley Dillon, who ran the campaign and also ran Biden's campaign four years ago. David Plough, Obama guy who came in after Harris became the nominee, Quentin Fulks, deputy campaign manager and Stephanie Cutter,

who did messaging and comms. They sat down with Pod Save America's Dan Pfeiffer. You and I should begin by noting the irony here. We did a few million segments about how friendly podcast had replaced actual news interviews with mean old reporters during the campaign. Well, here is the team of the losing campaign running back to a friendly podcast rather than talk to a mean old reporter about why they lost. Yeah. I mean, how just grimly and richly ironic is that?

I mean, listen, this isn't like, it's not a one-to-one for Kamala Harris or President Trump, President-elect Trump. choosing their media opportunities just in so much as like these campaign staffers are not public figures in the same way and are not in some kind of broader journalistic ethical way

like obligated to tell us their story so they understand why you'd you know the big going on POTTA of America is a more appealing and in some ways appropriate environment than you know a 60 minutes sit down or something something with the lights, the shadows all over your face and the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, we're

had to have, uh, of all time, just all time rankings, right? I feel like it's really hear the screams of journalists. He never has makes no claims to that. But every time the Biden, or excuse me, the Harris people would be like, look, Biden was going to get blown out. We managed to get the race somewhat close to a tie. I'd be like, can we just follow up on this? Because that may be true

and that's certainly like somewhere high in the power rankings of why Kamala Harris lost the election. It was also the most flattering possible answer for the people that ran the campaign. Sure. Without us, it would have been a blowout. I'm like, hey, Gen O'Malley Dillon, you were also running Joe Biden's campaign. Yeah.

Before Harris got into the race. Yeah. So maybe this is a slightly complicated answer for you, about all those headwinds you were supposedly facing. Mm-hmm. And to me, the obvious follow-up there was just, do we think this was a winnable race for Kamala Harris at all? Given Biden's unpopularity, given the way incumbents across the, the world were going down because of inflation, was this winnable for Kamala Harris?

If the answer is yes, and I suspect all those people would say yes, what would you have done differently in retrospect that could have gotten you across the finish line? Mm-hmm. What? Anything. What emphasis?

Because while Fyfer brings up everything, you know, the anti-trans ads from Donald Trump, erosion of support among Latinos, caller daddy and how much that set cost, Joe Rogan, everything. There's no, there's no regret. There's no, well, you know, in retrospect, maybe we should have done this differently.

Yeah. Maybe we should have put more emphasis on this. It's just stonewalling that we ran absolutely the perfect campaign and lost, meaning it wasn't the perfect campaign. Sure. They did say some interesting things about the media, which I wanted to play for you. talked about how Donald Trump seemed to outflank Kamala Harris in terms of getting on podcasts and getting his message out to people who are either low propensity voters or voters that would turn out the polls for him.

Here is Jen O'Malley-Dillan on that. I do think we had a lot of support in a number of, you know, athletes and others that were just not super interested in getting their brand caught up in the politics of this campaign. and I don't think he had the same problem. Now, he wasn't talking to the kind of folks that we were trying to get, and these are big names, that their reputations would be tied into it. But, you know, he, I think certainly was able to tap into some cultural elements in ways that we couldn't. And I think that that had an impact on us, that there were places that we knew we had support, that we desperately wanted to go and have a conversation that we thought would be interesting and relevant and fun, and we couldn't get there. Isn't that fascinating that there were pro-Harris people in the universe who were like, I don't want to get mixed up in politics? Yeah. But the pro-Trump people had no such inhibitions? Yeah. Sounds like a really elaborate way of saying LeBron James.

Did he tweet about it eventually? No, he did tweet about her. Yeah. No, it's an elaborate way of saying the rock is what it is, by the way. Oh, yeah. Yeah, these are really big names sort of shortens the list, I guess, one way or the other. Yeah, I mean, this was, I mean, I think you could feel it.

And you can feel it, I mean, you know, maybe outside of, you know, Manhattan and parts of L.A. or whatever. I mean, you could feel it all around. It was, this was a, this was an election that people were, in some ways it feels less, like slightly less of a, shock, I think, for me, because I felt not only like, I mean, I always have known Trump voters and am surrounded by them at times, but I also just felt like by and large, people were, even on both sides, we're in a slight more like live and let live vibe. Not exactly an upbeat

one, but more just sort of like we're all kind of like keeping our heads down a little bit. It doesn't shock me that celebrities and or athletes sort of caught wind of that, you know? And I think that, I mean, regardless of who you thought was going to win, Trump had won before, you know, and so you certainly don't want to be in the position of, well, I can't tell somebody what they want. It is, it might be unnecessary to put yourself in the position of being, you know, catching flack for your politics. You know, that's not, you know, it's, you know, Republicans, Republicans buying 10 issues too and all that stuff. It was one, one of the pods they talked about was the hot ones.

And Fifer makes the point that never was there a candidate in history that would have been a better guest on the hot ones for multiple reasons than Kamala Harris. And that podcast was just like, we don't want to get involved with politics. Not us. No, thank you. So again, could have been a big pod, a big moment for her. But they were not interested. There's a term in politics and elsewhere earned media.

Always funny to me because that just actually means media or what we think of media, meaning a reporter interviewing you. Yeah. Outside of the bounds of a financial transaction or an ad you buy. This is Stephanie Cutter talking about the earned media that Kamala Harris did. How do you feel about the utility of some of that earned media stuff? Is it now feel a little bit like we're just starting our own people all the time? Yeah. And not even the, well, in terms of who the targets were, the persuadable voters, which were largely young men, they're not watching the evening news. They're not watching cable. They definitely do not watch 60 minutes. So older voters, you know, maybe that's why vice president did a little bit better with senior citizens. Look, our background is doing lots of earned media through the course of our careers. Does it help in where we stand now? You know,

If you're a candidate with a limited amount of time to get your voice out there and define yourself, you kind of have to do everything. But did it screw with our narrative? Not just in getting shit for not doing enough earned media, but getting questions that we knew voters weren't going to care about. And their myopic mindset on certain issues was not what the race was going to be about. So at a certain point, we had to decide, is this helping us or hurting us? What do you make you that answer? From the sort of, you know, abandonment of earned media, of regular media that she's hinting at there to the fact, to the idea that the journalists, the reporters weren't asking the questions she thought they should have asked? It feels like, I mean, I can't follow her on the facts or at least the facts that she sees them.

I can totally imagine that conversation, the conversation that took place occurring just as she described it. But it seems like it's just a sort of gross miscalculation. I mean, listen, they said their, you know, that their internal polling was worse than what we saw, right? It kind of missing the force for the trees. Kamala Harris, in retrospect, at least the most difficult thing, you know, one of the biggest problems that she faced was distancing herself from the Biden administration to actually be a candidate of change when she's been.

part of the presidential administration for the previous four years, one thing they had going for them was the sort of being the standard bearer, whether or not people were excited about it. There's no downside to just doing media because people earned media because people, you know, presidential candidates do earned media. You know, there's a, I think that you can run on two tracks with that stuff. You can, you can distance yourself and also still push yourself as a sort of institution. And I think they really dropped the ball on the institutional aspect of it. And they certainly dropped the ball on the agent of change aspect of it. Like, I just can't imagine you may get to this, but, you know, looking at the numbers that they saw and thinking that

any of her responses about how she was different than Joe Biden were sufficient. I mean, having nothing, I mean, they should be, they should have been out there pushing media just to try to recharacterize her aside from just being, you know, doing media because you do media, you know, and it just, it seems like you're just trying to play it a, play, play, you know, playing it safe when you don't have a margin that allows for it. I completely agree. It's interesting you mentioned the distancing for Biden because that's one of the few issues that Fifer really pushes on here.

And the answer from the Harris people is one, if she said tried to carve out some room between her and Biden on, let's pick an issue, Gaza, the economy, whatever it would be, we felt like we would get four or five days of follow-up stories about, wait, you were in the room when this decision was made. What did you say at the time? Why didn't you raise your hand? And they thought in a short campaign, that was just going to be such a distraction that it wouldn't be worth it.

But I think the real answer they get to in the spot is she didn't want to do it. Yeah. Whether out of loyalty to Biden, whether out of political calculation, she did not feel comfortable going there and opening a real divide with him. And as you say, you knew you were going to get asked about it in those interviews. It was from the view, you know, these were not hostile questions. Yeah.

And she didn't have a good answer for it. She didn't even have a good fake answer for the question. Like, oh, you know, we have a, you know, a slightly different approach to tax rates or whatever it is, right? Like, she just had nothing on that. Yeah. That was a really, really interesting one. And I agree with you. If you're, if you're rerunning this, I think you're probably, if anything, having her do even more interviews to get her out there.

And you're having her just open up interesting sort of lines of inquiry, whether it's a split from Biden or a policy position or whatever it is, to make her seem like a dynamic candidate that is addressing things that people are worried about. Yeah. There was just a lot of safety first. I mean, just from, yeah, just from a, you know, a 10,000 feet perspective, like, it's good that the people who worked in the campaign are doing this interview, right? It's good. This is good for history. This is good for just our general edification, I guess. But in so much as their public figures on their own, you know, it's, listen, we're past the point where you could be an anonymous political advisor, anonymous campaign staff, right? These names are all known. But you do, it does seem like there is a, there is a huge advantage, or not advantage, there'd be a huge motivator if you're working on a campaign to sort of mitigate damage and be able to explain it away post-election rather than actually try to win, even if it risks, even if, because when we think about, oh, what if Kamala Harris did a terrible interview

and that torpedoed her campaign? In retrospect, it's like, well, so the, fuck what if she did a terrible interview? that wouldn't have changed the outcome. She lost, right? Knowing that now, right? Knowing that now, right? But at the time, it's not even just about Kamala Harris looking good or looking bad. It's about the decision.

Now, the people that are really be raked over the colds, if she had done some, she had done Rogan and it had gone poorly, are the people on this podcast who advocated for her doing Rogan and put her in the position to do poorly. You know what I mean? And there's just a, it feels like the, I don't know, I didn't get quite as worked up about this podcast as I think some people did, but at the same time, I listen to it. I'm just like, you know, you've already answered all these questions for yourself and into an almost unhealthy way, unhealthy degree. You know, it's like there were problems. And if you don't, and the fact that you can just sort of hand wave or shoulder shrug or, you know, whatever physical, you know, body part metaphor you want to go for there, it's, it's, it's, it feels like, your skin was in the game in a slightly

in the wrong way. I completely agree. And the people, you know, that I sort of feel a pang for when I hear this podcast is people that are, that we're covering this campaign and talking to these people, probably behind the scenes.

And then we're going off and writing articles about, hey, this campaign is knocked on 20 billion doors in Pennsylvania over the last 24 hours. Yeah. Like, that didn't work. It just, it didn't work. And it doesn't mean that it was the wrong idea.

It was somewhat convincing at the time that you have this ground game that Donald Trump doesn't have. I was not standing on a soapbox talking about that. But so what happened? You know, what, what's the difference? What do we do? What do the, what do the Democrats do next time to try to fix it? And just as you say, the almost seems like they've answered these questions in their own head to a point where you're just like, okay, so that's just it.

You know, that's what this is. Related story for you. We've had a bunch of pieces that have come out about how we consume news now. I wanted to talk to you about one by Erica Pandy and Axios, which is called the snippet generation. Yeah. It's always good when you have a think piece if you can name a generation. It sure is, yeah.

She did that in this piece, and it's really interesting. She writes, long form entertainment is out, and snack-sized media is in for the next generation of kids, teens, and young adults. Smartphones, social media, and constant internet access have changed the way we think, and that's eroding young people's willingness to focus. Bortem comes much easier now, says Bonnie Nagel,

a behavioral neuroscientist at Oregon Health and Science University. Dot, dot, dot, dot. Pandy continues, all of us, including kids and teens, have a world of entertainment at our fingertips, and we can just keep scrolling if something doesn't grab us. there's an adaption of our attention to require rapid content change or really exciting content, Nagel says.

I think that's pretty self-evident, but I did want to ask you about how this will affect us in the journalism business. We've already, you know, you and I already work at a place where you make podcasts, and then oftentimes when the podcast ends, you go, okay, what's the clip from this show? we've just talked for an hour we've hopefully had a fairly deep and wide-ranging conversation about whatever it is now what's the 30 seconds

or minute-long thing we can put on Twitter yeah to get people to listen to it most do you think snippeting if that is a verb does to journalism generally well I mean it puts a lot of emphasis on headline writing

and we all know that that's a complete that's a increasingly fraught part of the business, right? I mean, there was sort of a over, I mean, a deliberate, like an open push to make headlines grabier through our professional, you know, the past 20 years to compete with the blogs and social media, you know, places that would just be repurposing the original content to begin with. But accuracy, I think, becomes more and more, more significant.

but that doesn't but again that doesn't solve the problem I just mentioned of other people repurposing other people telling the same stories with much you know headlay there's nothing you can really do about that to some extent because there'll be other people out there with with crazier headlines in terms of media I mean in terms of you know video and audio I don't know what you I mean it's it's really an impossible situation you know I mean it's true there's not just it's snippets are I mean you're talking about how we how we interact with the news. But you're not just competing with other news sources.

It's not like you're taking, you're not strictly taking away, these aren't taking away from the long-form pieces, not just long-form, the full articles or whatever. But in some instances, this is social media totally replaced it, right? I mean, I know I was talking to some family the other day, and like, you wouldn't believe the degree to which, like,

you know, TikTok videos of Kamala Harris in interview situations or giving speeches and stuff, like, impacted their opinion of her. Like, like, deliberately, you know, out of context or just little snippety things. The way that I think a lot of people on the left, I'm mad to think when they think of Trump, right? It's just like the silly dance or, like, him saying the one really, like, offensive thing out of context. Like, that's an incredibly, like, just an incredibly compelling piece of the way that we consume news. And I know this is news sort of broadly defined, but that's the way a lot of people are doing it now.

I don't know. What do you think? I mean, just in terms of media, like, what? How do we, how do you, how do you account for snippets? Well, there's those two ways to go, right? There's this idea that you're going to somehow bring people back to the pre-snipit universe. Or you're just going to have your own snippets. So when I look at the New York Times now and there's like a big piece by Maggie Haberman or Jonathan Swan or one of their big time reporters and they have a little TikToky looking 30 seconds where the reporter just explains the piece.

Yeah. online. And like right now at this moment where we sit somewhere between these two generations, it is like the funniest thing to see because I'm just like, you're looking into a camera and

giving a 30 second account of this article. Like, that's just funny to me every time I smile every time I see it. Yeah. But I don't blame them for doing it. No, I mean, listen, and that spills out of like writers taking it upon themselves to do like Twitter threads of their big articles, you know, and like giving away

as much as they can for free. I think that part is incredibly compelling. I remember joking around in the early days of the ringer about just having like just the complete, like just flinging the doors open when there's breaking news. And you just like, you know, you post the headline, post the headline with no content,

then post the, you know, the lead. Then we'll get to the rest later. Then post the podcast. And then like, you know, just like let it just sort of put timestamps on stuff and let it go up as it goes up. I think watching writers sort of like in their process is not a bad thing. And having the writers themselves explain the piece is not necessarily a bad thing either.

I mean, there's obviously other ways to tell the story. There's, you know, the daily or whatever. It can do a podcast episode about the piece or whatever, but that's not only delayed slightly, but also that's sort of long form in and of itself. It's just doing the same thing for a different audience. Yeah, I think speaking directly is the way to do it. And, you know, listen, I think we can overestimate how much people are suddenly not reading the whole article, right? I mean, the idea that people were indulging in every last word of every, you know, A1 New York Times story five years ago or 10 years ago or 20 years ago or 30 years ago is ridiculous, right?

You get your abbreviated versions different ways, either through a headline in skim or from what the guy at the coffee. Sharp was talking about out loud or whatever. But I do think that as many different ways as you can give people entry points to, you know, the information that your article contains, the better. You know, it's funny. When I, when we

look at Twitter, I always get enraged. When I see somebody summarize an article or take a couple of things out of the article, they get like 1,200 retweets. And then in their own reply to the initial tweet, they link to it. Yeah.

So it's like, no, no, I've vacuumed up. You know, I put a, put a hose in and a vacuum cleaner in and just vacuumed all the good stuff out of this for me. Oh, by the way, here's a link. That has five retweets so that you won't actually go read the article or even know where this came from necessarily. Yeah. But then you saw that. But they got that information out there. Yes. And they did.

But you saw this tweet from Elon Musk in the day. It was like, this is what you should do. I don't like linking in the initial tweet. Like the whole thing. is about creating a snippet. You know, that's what he wants. And then, and you see journalists doing this now. They put their, they put their summary, their snippet up top.

And then the link comes later if it comes at all. Like that is, that is weirdly the world we are tilting to even to ourselves. And I totally agree with you. We have, the idea is not to sit here and be like, we must get people to read 800 word news articles. That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard. It's to go and find ways to give people information in the ways they're getting information. Whether that's a podcast, whether that's David looking at a video screen and being like,

here is why Sid Vicious was important. Please read my article. Whatever that is, I will take it. But it's funny. And of course, this is funny that this comes more than a snippet, Brian, more than a snippet. It's also funny that this comes from an Axios piece, which their idea of how to solve the problems of modern journalism was just to write the snippets. Yeah. It was to take the take out the entire article. You know, I was raised, you know, back at slate.com 20 years ago. And the radical idea Michael Kinsley had was, hey, you know how in a magazine article, you have a nut graph that's like four paragraphs down that tells you what the article is

about? What if we just publish the nut graph? Yeah. What if we give you that essential 800 words in the 5,000 words? And that's the thing you need to read because you're a busy person. now we've defined that down even further so it's like let me give you the sentence the prompt the thing the snippet

and again it's a problem journalism has to solve we can sit here and be big babies about it and be like wow I wish everyone wrote like gay talese or was allowed to write like gay to lease but who gives a shit that doesn't matter that's not the world we live in all right coming up at 30 seconds David a sports media reporter who seemed to break every story but first let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week

where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious. All of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always, always gratefully received. Big news in the Civil War in Syria over the last few days, David. Rebels took the city of Aleppo and the regions around it. It was a very overworked Twitter joke to write, Bashar al-Assad should have gone on Rogan.

Thanks to Nick Field, if you have a... a feeling that we'll be hearing that joke about geopolitics for the rest of our lives. Congrats. You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. A couple quick things for you in the notebook dump. Wanted to say a goodbye to Rudy Martsky. Rudy Martsky has died at 82. He was, as you know, David, the sports media writer at USA Today.

Ben Strauss wrote a nice goodbye for him in the Washington Post where he compared him to both Nikki Fink and Politico's playbook, which is a very artful way of describing both Rudy's relentlessness and how small bore many of his nuggets and observations were. He came along at the time when sports pages had a very weird relationship with television. Yeah. First they all thought, oh my gosh, and they were correct about this, television is taking away a lot of our livelihood.

They're showing things and eventually showing highlights and all these things that you used to have to come to the paper to read. So then the sports page is wised up and said, I know we will cover sports television. Yeah. We will cover the transactions. We will make fun of the announcers. That will give us in print some power back over these people in TV

that make more money than us and are taking away some of our business. So for a time in America, every sports page had a Rudy Mardsky. Barry Horn in Dallas, Jack Craig, and Boston, Larry Stewart out here in Los Angeles. There were Rudy's everywhere. But Rudy Martsky had USA Today. Yeah. So he had, other than maybe Richard Sandemere and the New York Times, the one national thing that everybody could read. And sportscasters are an itinerate class of people.

So they're going into their hotel and what are they doing? There's that copy of USA Today dropped on their front doorstep or in the lobby. And they're opening it up. And they are reading this column about themselves, about their own industry. It's also a weird time because, again, we're talking about the 80s and 90s here. There was no social media. So if you think about announcers, what was their power base? Well, they didn't have a Twitter account.

They didn't have a website. They didn't have an Instagram account where it's like, look at me holding a microphone. the only way that they got their job was the whim of the network. Yeah. And one way you convinced the network that their whim was correct or incorrect, if you wanted a better job, was to have these clippings from the papers. I remember Marv Albert telling me one time that there was a PR agent

that a bunch of these announcers hired that would go to like the LA Times and be like, hey, David, do you want to write about Marv Albert and would set up an interview? and then Marv would get a nice clipping in the LA Times. And then when the contract time comes, hey, look at all these newspapers around the country that think I'm really good at my job.

Yeah. And that would get you the raise of the next contract or whatever it is you want. That was it. I read Rudy Martsky when I was a kid in USA Today. I'll go to the Pascal High School library and, you know, page through it to find him.

knowing me as you do, I would skip over the rating story and the, you know, here's the toughest comment from the CBS pregame show and just go to the profile that he wrote. Because that's what I found interesting. He had an enormous amount of power.

Jack Buck, father of Joe Buck, got to call the World Series for CBS in his 60s. And Rudy just relentlessly mentioned how old Jack Buck was, especially when Buck made mistakes during those post seasons. in his column. Jack Buck was furious about him.

And Joe told me one time that he had a clipping, because I believe he was in college when this was happening, a clipping of one of those Martsky stories, and he just kept it in his wallet for years. Because that's how much power this guy had. And when somebody's writing about your dad like that, and your dad is so bothered by it, it became just this thing that Joe carried around with him

for years and years and years. Oh, my God. That's hilarious. Yeah. I was thinking whenever I look at insiders in any category, whether it's football or basketball or whatever, I'm always like, wait a second, don't you want to pair the insiderdom with an intense knowledge of the thing that you are covering, whether it's a sport or television, with passionate ideas about how you think this thing should be done? And if I ever had any sort of gripe with Rudy, who I went to visit actually a couple of years,

ago in Orlando because I was down there and wanted to meet him. It was that I would read that column and I'd be like, what do you think about any of this? Yeah. I know you like Bob Costas. I know you like Dick Aberstall. I know you like all these people. I know there are certain people you don't like. What is what is it that you think about any of this? What are your ideas? What are your gripes? What are your big theories about this thing? He wasn't that kind of guy at all and didn't seek to be that kind of guy. But that was Rudy Martsky. Dead at 82.

A strange and amazing character in our world of sports media. Yeah, for sure. You saw the big highlight, speaking of sports over the weekend, David, Aziz Al-Shayir, linebacker, the Texans, nearly decapitating the Jaguars Trevor Lawrence

while he was sliding. The Daily Mail did some amazing work on this story, and by amazing, I mean, hilarious. Here's a headline. Texan star Aziz al-Shayr breaks his silence after brutal tackle. Okay. Here's another headline. Trevor Lawrence breaks his silence to give update on his health.

That is also from the Daily Mail. And then another listener sends us this one. It's a daily mailed tweet. Trevor Lawrence's wife, Marissa, speaks out after brutal Aziz al-Shayr hit. Wow. So we had this covered three different ways. A lot of work being done there, yeah.

Yes, thanks to HotWired on Blue Sky and Ping 33 for that. America's softest target, David, this is a subject that journalists can feel comfortable teeing off on with no professional repercussions at all. I'd love to nominate the Chicago Bears organization. Oh. If you're an NFL reporter that's not normally opinionated or a little worried that this may hurt you with sources. Feel free to tee off on the bears.

Not only did they fire Matt Eberflus, who was a bad coach, they fired him the wrong way, apparently. Go for it, folks. A lot of good, a lot of good stuff to be gained from that. We got some only in journalism. These are words you hear all the time in news stories, but never hear in human speech. Trump has appointed a raft. of controversial cabinet nominees.

Oh, he sure has. Even typing this out for the Google Doc here, I was like, that looks so weird when used as not like a raft, like in the movie Castaway. Yeah. We hear that all the time. Listener, Jason Rothman gives us wrangling.

After long wrangling, Anthony Blinken is going to testify in Congress on Afghanistan. And our favorite bookseller, Zach Marconi, He sends us blood and treasure. This says McKay Coppins dropped it this morning while being interviewed by Jane Koston-Rei-U-Kraine. Blood and treasure.

That sounds like it was in a news article written by Stephen Crane. Yeah. And finally, media piss test. This is where reporters say a thing that is say, excuse me, a thing is like another thing, except that it's on steroids. This comes from our excellent yacht rock document. Oh, yeah.

Hope you got to enjoy that over the Thanksgiving. So good. Yeah. So good. I mean, they got everybody. It's just that is a rollicking good time. Even for someone who does not know much about or didn't know much about Yacht Rock. Michael McDonald, David in the dock is described as being like a sole Pavarotti on steroids.

The idea of the actual Pavarotti using steroids is just funny to me. Thanks to Ralph Horowitz for that one. And now it's time for a feature that is always steroidal, that is always juiced within one inch of its life. It's time for David's Shoemaker guesses, the strained pun headline. Yeah. Monday's headline about the release of Giants quarterback Daniel Jones was dropping a dime. Dropping a dime. Still a tad awkward.

Still so bad, yes. Today's headline comes to us from Valerie in Toronto, who sent it to us over on Blue Sky. By the way, I fixed our blue sky messaging feature on that app. So now you can actually DM us. My apologies, folks. It comes from the Toronto Star. Did you get dragged to the movie Wicked over the Thanksgiving holiday? I did not, no.

I didn't either. And part of the reason I wouldn't let myself be dragged was finding out that Wicked is two hours and 40 minutes long. and that it's only part one. Yeah. Meaning I'm going to be required to watch five hours of Wicked to get the entire story. Sure, yeah. So that's, you know, I got a lot of story to tell. That's an on-tiv movie while I'm doing something else.

Yeah. Needless to say, Wicked is long. And I also want you to know that the big song in Wicked or a big song in Wicked is defying gravity. Defying gravity. What was the Toronto Star's Strained PUN headline? Gravity. Defying. Defying brevity?

Folks, David has come back, refreshed, and rejuvenated from Thanksgiving. There you go. Define gravity is the headline. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Productive Magic by Eduardo Ocampo. Coming up Thursday, Joel Anderson. Boy, do I have some college football topics to get him fired up about?

including the announcers, turning into ethicists in front of our faces about all those midfield celebrations. Like the ones after Ohio State, Michigan or the one that nearly happened after Texas, Texas, A&M. Yeah. A lot of finger wagging and condemnation.

There was a lot of, I feel like there were a lot of headlines coming out of rivalry week that were, you know, if you just blacked out the nouns, it would have felt like you were talking about a military conflict overseas. or just some sort of civil unrest.

Yeah. If you don't want a rival army planting their flag in your town square, don't lose the war. Yep. Don't get your butt kicked and then whine about it afterwards. Indeed. Then Shoemaker and I return Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David.

See you later, Brian.