The Press Box - Listener Mail on Janet Malcolm, the Mavericks Story, and Biden and Reporters

Episode Date: June 18, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker are opening the mailbag and answering your Listener Mail! They reflect on the life and career of journalist Janet Malcolm, and discuss how her work has impacted the field of journalism (8:30). Then, they answer your questions about The Athletic's Dallas Mavericks story revealing front-office troubles (24:30), weigh in on President Joe Biden's response to CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins (48:44), and add to the list of “only in journalism” words and phrases (54:50). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline.  Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The ringer's Dave Hill takes you on a journey into the underground lives and careers of six professional gamblers. This eight-part podcast is a unique look into the gambling world that you don't want to miss. Check out gamblers on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. What's on your mind this week? This is a very, very recent one. Does the name Lee Sanderland mean anything to you? Go on. Okay, I'll just read the Twitter moment's description.

You'd stop me when you know the story. journalist Lee Sanderlin invites us along for his 15-hour waffle binge, punishment for a fantasy football season gone awry. He lost his fantasy football league in describing this, and his punishment was 24 hours in a waffle house, but going back to the Twitter recounting, for every Waffle Sanderlin ate, one hour of punishment, was removed from the 24-hour sentence.

This was a Twitter threat about recounting one man's time, 15 plus hours spent in a waffle house trying to eat enough waffles to run out the clock first question for you does the fact that he's a journalist matter for the retelling of the story listen it's funny because if you go to Lee Lee Handerlin is an investigations reporter

for the Clarion Ledger down in Mississippi part of the USA Today Network but a paper with a lot of history his pin tweet is about an investigation into Mississippi nursing homes and their failures during the pandemic, which is a much different tone

than how he is now probably more widely known. He's a very good writer, but I'm wondering if the journalist, if it affects your reading of this Twitter thread, that you know this is a journalist being subjected to this Waffle House punishment. Like in the sense that I trust, the fact that he is eating as many waffles as he purports to eat?

Yeah. Is there a level of integrity here? Do you feel like this is more than just a Twitter stunt? Yeah. It feels, yes, it feels like there's a different level of believability versus your usual influencer at a random place stunt. I just thought it was funny. First of all, I read the whole story before I realized that he was a journalist and I read, I clicked on this, you know, the trending topics thing and the fact that he's being labeled, journalists is in the headline and the first word in the description. And I was like, does that matter at all? I don't care that he's a journalist.

And then I thought, yeah, that's kind of cool. Now, I feel like I know him, you know? Yeah. Part of the family. Also, secondarily, you can tell he was there for over 15 hours, so you can do the math. That means he ate, what, the eight, five, six, nine waffles, eight waffles, probably over the span of time. But I feel like I would, I mean, listen, listen, I'm sure he's a guy with a guy with

big appetite. I would probably, if he ate eight, I would probably, the odds are, I'd probably eat eight too. I feel like I would go into this thinking I would eat 24 waffles and eat them fairly quickly and get out of this. I would, I would have, I would have a lot of courage about how many waffles I could eat. I would have a rat. It would be the irrational confidence guy at Waffle House, to quote our boss. This all, there was a New York Times story about it, um, that, that broke down the number of calories in each waffle and, uh, you know, and then what the butter. and the syrup, which they said he appeared to be eating a lot of bad to it. Which you absolutely need. I'm not eating a plain waffle. No, but exactly. But I feel like with butter and syrup,

I feel like I could just, you just douse them and you slurp them down. I feel like I get I feel like, no doubt I could eat 12, like I could eat 12, I could eat 12 waffles before I thought about it. Is this like the hot dog guy dipping the hot dogs in water so they can eat them faster? Exactly. Oh yeah. What would you do? If you were in this situation and you knew for a fact that using the dipping it in waffle and water technique would allow you to eat more and more quickly. Oh, God.

Would you try to enjoy a single waffle? I think I would enjoy the first one. Because at that point, you'd still feel like you'd have a rosy glow about you. By like waffle number eight, I would not be enjoying it. I would just be trying to get through it. I would say the greatest thing, we could talk about fantasy football forever, but I think the greatest thing about

the world that we'd, I mean, about this coronavirus vaccine that I have, you have, you know, a lot of people around at that is that places like the Waffle House have now reentered the conversation, right? Yes. We talked about this on the show that like the things, like I miss going to restaurants, I miss eating appetizers, I miss being out in public with my family, you know, just being able to go do a thing and sit inside in the heat or in the cold or whatever else. But it ended up the things that I was missing the most, like I was yearning for, or the things

it just seemed like particularly wrong and like bowling alleys and waffle houses and just you know things like that and now you know now we can have this conversation and I can go see how many waffles I can eat. The one caveat I'd put in there is that

I don't feel and you and I are from Waffle House parts of the country I don't feel the Waffle House was really the totem of my youth that I hop and like Denny's were like I feel like I ate a lot more moons over my hammy and Rudy Tootie,

fresh and fruity, than I ate waffles at the waffle. Well, you're talking about, I agree, but you're talking, I mean,

our experience with these, let's be clear about it, is high school and college. And Denny's has a very particular gimmick that appeals to, you know, an 18 year old with a limited budget at one in the morning.

You know, I mean, that's, that's the, that's the Denny's thing. I hop. That's in the corporate prospectus. Yes.

I hop has a, a limited budget teenager at one in the morning. I think the difference seen iHob and Waffle House, frankly, I don't know why. IHop is running, but IHop was running contemporary marketing commercial campaigns when we were of that age, right? You would see IHop commercials. It seemed like a more vibrant sort of like acceptable place. Now, now if I saw three of them side to side by side in the highway, I would go at the Waffle House largely because of the signage. Like, I'm just like, oh, this seems like a good old timey situation. I'm going to

go there. I completely agree. Completely agree. So anyway, Waffle House invite us. They come advertising the show. We'll go eat your waffles and tell everybody how great they are. Did your addled mind go where my addled mind went when we started talking about this was to the classic old gawker piece by Katie Weaver where she was in a TGI Fridays for 14 hours? Yes. Eating eating all you can eat cheese. What was it? Cheese sticks, fried cheese or something like that.

Or appetizer. All you can eat appetizers. Yes. And I read that piece and everybody else is talking about it. And I could not, the static in my brain would not clear away from, I could, I would be eating so much more than that to actually like digest, no pun intended the piece. So like how, how is it not an abject joy to go to, I mean, just you go. It seems like that, dude. But then after a while, it becomes super, super gross.

You and I did this all the time when we live together. Yeah. We would come out and be like, we're going to eat eight pizzas. And then after one pizza, we're like, I feel like shit right now. I feel terrible. Yeah. But I guess there's, feeling like shit is such a huge part of this. And I know Waffle House is not, I don't believe has a bar.

But like if you're at the Chili's, I would just be drinking those like 32 ounce mixed drinks. And I would not be, there'd be a lot of things going wrong. But like my stomach hurting would not be one of them for the time that I was there. I love how your brain. Like on another media podcast, people would be citing, you know, Frank Sinatra has a cold. And Tom Wolfe on Jr. Johnson. we remember my 14 hours search for the end of TGI Friday's endless appetizers. Oh, man.

That's me and David. Coming up on today's show, we answer listener mail about Janet Malcolm, who passed away, the Dallas Mavericks piece in the athletic that everybody is talking about. And Joe Biden versus the reporters, all that more on the press box, a part of the ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here, along with our producer, Erica Servantes. It's Friday, David, and that means it's time to answer a little bit of listener mail. And we should probably start out with the death of Janet Malcolm. Esteemed New Yorker writer has died at age 86 of lung cancer. What do we make of the legacy of Janet Malcolm?

I'm sure there's a lot of people you would call literary giants that are kind of still out there checking along. But it's hard to imagine us coming across many people that are in Janet Malcolm's sort of category, just in terms of like the name, I mean, the weight that her name carried, at least in, you know, the writing world that we inhabited New York for so long, right? that she was obviously by the time that we were there, not like a flavor of the month by any sort of definition. But, you know, one of the few sort of old guard writers who were still contributing on a regular basis and who would sort of, and for whom the literary world

would sort of grind to a halt when she published something new, right? I mean, there wasn't, I can't, I think we were part of many different sorts of literary circles. All of which, but no matter what party, no matter what club, no matter what group you were going to, if Janet Malcolm had published an essay that week, you would arrive prepared to discuss it. Yes. I saw somebody tweet RIP to a legend yesterday, and I wanted to get mad because I'm like, oh, my God, can we just spare the language of celebrity death for Janet Malcolm?

But it's kind of true. Yeah. It kind of is the right word. I mean, think back to those Paris review parties you and I used to spend way too much time at. Was there a single person there that didn't have the journalist and the murder on their bookshelf? Certainly not. I'd guess zero. Yeah.

I mean, I think if we picked like, you know, we can talk about influence and how good they were and all that stuff. But like, just in terms of, do you have a book that's on everybody's bookshelf at this, at this party of this generation of journalists? of which you were not a member of this generation. I would guess like Joan Didion and her, and maybe we could pick one or two more. How far down the list is sex drugs and cocoa puffs? Because I think top 10. I was going to say, maybe top five.

Yeah. That's our particular generation, but yes. In that moment in time, yeah. We need to make this list, by the way. We should make this list. The Brooklyn Literary Bookshelf. 2004. The nonfiction book show.

Right. Through 2004 through 2010. Yeah. Okay, this is going to be a good exercise. Because I feel Tom Wolfe was there, but he had kind of phased out just a little bit. Yeah, I don't think Tom Wolfe was, I think people would put his name on a list, but I don't feel like he felt as central as necessary to the like modern conversation at that point. And real hardcore reporter types like your David Remnick. though on a lot of those bookshelves were not a universal bookshelf book.

It needed to be somebody a little more in the kind of generalized nonfiction space, which Janet Malcolm was like the perfect, perfect person. And it was always funny. Yeah, before the, before the, before, I mean, before the kind of resurgence of the essay collection that were still in the midst of, right? But before like John Jeremiah Sullivan and, you know, before all the, you know, the, you know, those books were bought far and wide by everybody who wanted to, you know, discuss things that were had been previously published as a new body of work. Yeah, she was very much, she was,

she had such a footprint already established. Yes. So to talk about the journalist of the Murr for just a second, everybody will quote today the first sentence of that book, which is so famous, every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself, to notice what is going on, knows that what he does is morally indefensible. And from there, she proceeds to this cutting critique of journalism, which is based on the relationship between Joe McGinnis and Jeffrey McDonald, who murdered his family and Joe McGinnis, who wrote a book about him and pulled all this information out of Jeffrey McDonald and delivered a book that was perhaps way different than the one McDonald envisioned.

it's funny because you know when she wrote that book she became i mean she was kind of pilloried for it right in the in the journalist journalism world one because of her own previous transgressions and which we can discuss that in a second but two just because i think you know just calling the form morally indefensible got a lot of people's hackles up as one would expect and i'm sure as was the intention of that line and people were very people were very very defensive about it now it's kind of interesting because every journalist, you know, today and even then, at some point has had to say, they, you know, has had to contend with, you know, some sort of someone misreading their work, right? Someone criticizes your work and you say, well, you didn't read past

the first sentence. What's funny is the second sentence of that Malcolm, famous, famous Malcolm book or slash essay from the New Yorker. It doesn't change, it doesn't water down the first sentence, But it does focus it a little bit. It says, as you read, every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice, what is going on, knows it what he does is morally and defensible. He is a kind of confidence man, praying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaming their trust and betraying them without remorse. That's harsh, but that second sentence is a lot harder to deny, right?

That is a very pointed way of defining what I think. even the people who were most offended by it would admit that they do for a living, right? It's not, I think that the, I think that the tough part is, is not actually how she, not really what she's accusing people of, but her defining it as morally indefensible. But when it's laid out like this, it's hard to say, it's hard to call it anything else, right? Absolutely. And as Kit Seeley noted in the New York Times obituary, it is one of those things that seemed so, seem like a shot across the bow at the time and later became sort of almost uncontroversial. Yeah.

By the time you got later, Malcolm told Katie Royfe for the Paris Review today, my critique seems obvious, even banal. It does. You know, and I always find it was funny at one of our mutual friends and I used to joke because journalists would kind of discover the journalist and the murder every few years online. There'd be this big discussion about it. I remember like the gang gray comment section. Like that was like 10 years ago, 15 years ago.

It was like, hey, what do we think about this? It's one of those books slash pieces that just, you know, every generation will get roiled up about it or have a, you know, hand-wringing discussion about it. And it never stops. It stands directly diametrically opposed to the sort of journalist as white knight mythology that we've talked about on this show, right? I mean, the journalist is kind of moral paradigm and of social savior-it concept. Of course, neither of those things are entirely true. I saw a tweet from, I mean, you said this around a lot, but Peter Mansoe was a great writer tweeted about it and said that he taught the journalist and the murderer in an undergrad media writing class and that everybody was horrified. I think that what's important about it is that it's not shocking that undergrads would be horrified by it, right?

Because whatever you're pursuing in college, there's probably a lot of idealism attached to it. And a lot of people go on in their careers to maintain that sort of idealism. But at some point, you have to confront reality. And I think that's what Janet Malcolm was able to do in the piece, is just sort of force everyone, including the journalists themselves, to confront the reality of what they're doing a lot of the time. Jack Schaefer, my old boss and Politico media writer, did a funny thing on Twitter where he just substituted. did something else for journalist. And watch how the sentence still works. Every car mechanic who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice, what is going

on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, praying on people's vanity, et cetera, et cetera. There is a sense that the critique, that critique while so hyper-focused on journalists and so true at its essence is also true of a lot of people in this world, right? Like that, when Jack writes it that way, you're like, oh, right. Auto mechanic does fit just fine in that sentence, which is pretty funny. The other thing about Malcolm that complicates that book, or at least the way we think about that book, and Celie mentioned this in the New York Times obituary, was that Janet Malcolm was also herself,

if I may use an only in journalism word here, embroiled in a lawsuit about her own journalism. I'm going to quote Seeley here. It says a 1983 profile of the flamboyant psychoanalyst. By the way, does anything say New Yorker article more than profile of a flamboyant psychoanalyst? Jeffrey Mason led to a libel suit against Ms. Malcolm that hung over her during a decade of litigation and clouded her reputation even longer. Dot, dot, dot. The journalistic community generally judge Ms. Malcolm harshly, mostly for the finding in the Mason case that she cobbled together 50 or, or 60 separate conversations with the loquacious Mr. Mason and made them appear as if he had spoken them in a single lunchtime monologue.

Now, this is an old, old practice of magazine writing. The subject told me X. I mixed X with hamburger helper and I printed Y. And the quotations may be true in spirit, as certain magazine writers used to say, but they were not deletious. delivered to me in the neat and tidy order that you read them in the New Yorker magazine. Malcolm said this in 1993 during the jury trial. This thing called speech is sloppy, redundant, repetitious, full of us and aze. I needed to present it in logical, rational order, so he, meaning her subject, would sound

like a logical rational person. So here's the person who has the sweeping critique of journalists that is you hit you right in the heart, who is herself taking these amazing liberties with what people say. Yeah. And doing this very old New Yorkery thing of, I'm going to create this perfect paragraph by paragraph, you know,

monologue that was not delivered that way at all in real time. Yeah. I mean, listen, a lot of people will and did at the time of when she published, sure essays call that stand sort of hypocritical based on her own history. I don't think that's there's hypocrisy in there at all. I mean, I think even under the harshest reading, it is a very normal human thing to reflect on things that have, you know, affected you in life in various ways and to have that sort of reflect in both ways. I mean, to reflect on it personally, but also

have those things from your past reflect out into your area. of interest going forward. I mean, Janet Malcolm, if nothing else, was sort of a, how to just, how to say it, like a multifaceted specialist, right? I mean, she returned again and again to certain areas of interest that were a little bit unusual, but there were many different areas of interest, right? I mean, even if you look at her like history of design writing or whatever, I mean, it's a, it is deeply informed by her own taste and her own lived experience, right? So it's not weird that she would, even if you want to draw a straight line from A to B, it's not, it's not strange and it's certainly not hypocritical, that she would have a more deeply thought out opinion

on a subject after, you know, years after it had affected her directly in life, right? And I believe, yeah, I believe, and I believe the journalist and the murder of the edition I have anyway, the later edition, she does talk about that in and afterwards. And she, and she denies it, if I remember correctly. I don't even remember how she wrote it, but I remember her being more and slightly in more denial of it than I would have than I would have said in her position. But the thing I believe that one of the issues at the time was, and again, according to the Times O bit,

was that that was not disclosed at the time. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, when you're talking about, and again, I don't think Janet Malcolm says is sparing herself from the Uber critique of journalists. But it does seem fairly germane to this issue if we're talking about Confidence man, et cetera, that a different form of that is what this

person is accusing you of. And that you are saying, look, I did this. I just, I did this because I believe this is the way to make this a single, you know, a more readable substance than actual human speech. That does seem like, it does seem relevant to the larger case. It is. It is certainly relevant. I don't know what the formality of her, I mean, it does seem by her kind of afterward in

that addition that she wasn't inclined to include that sort of disclosure in her piece. I don't know what the, her editor at the New Yorker would have said if she had attempted to disclose it midpiece. It does seem like, it does seem slightly unlikely based on the time, but maybe I'm wrong. Also talking about the time period. I mean, listen, I don't even, I don't, I insist that you don't respond to this just for whatever reason. But like, I think, I think that the, that what she was accused of doing and in cobbling all those quotes together. And again, even under its worst reading, I think that, most journalists out there can see a little bit of themselves in what she was accused of doing.

Whether or not they've done it to that degree, to that extent, to a problematic place, whatever. I think everybody's done some stuff that when they were doing it, they wondered to themselves silently if they were doing, if what they were doing, you know, past a certain threshold. It's funny, though, when I think about it, because I do think that there's, that she was, you know, she's writing in this sort of new journalism, post-new journalism world. she's not really a part of the style. Well, I mean, she's certainly a more expansive writer than she could have been an earlier generation, but she's not like a new journalist by any kind of cliched definition. All that's to say, it was an evolving form, but she would have been a lot, I think, freer in 2021 or even in 2000 to, to, you know, footnote which, literally footnote, which quotes came from which

interviews, you know, to, there are like, you think she could have put a link? That's, that's, yeah. I think that, I think that there, I think that there are formal ways that you can sort of play around with this, you know, with, with, with, with the problem of combining multiple interviews that you wouldn't have ever considered doing then. Well, and the subject would have a lot more recourse now. Because they would say, hey, all that stuff, I didn't say that. Yeah. It was hard to do that in the old day, short of, you know, going to another publication, which may or may not care or just filing a lawsuit. Yeah. It was hard. It was hard. It was hard. And by the way, the New Yorker was not big on disclosures back in the 80s. Right. And before that, there's this whole history of, you know, articles that shall we say, you know, fell short of the bar that were kind of buried in, you know, this mountain of words and New Yorker style. It's very interesting. Shall we switch gears abruptly from Janet Malcolm to the Dallas Mavericks?

Yes, absolutely. A subject as far as I know that Janet Malcolm never covered during her esteemed journal career. Yes. I thought about you the other day as soon as I saw this piece come out. Because the other day on the podcast, you had talked about this particular tradition of NBA writing. An NBA team gets eliminated from the playoffs.

And then the shot clock starts while their beatwriters are trying to write the here's what went wrong behind the scene story. So we saw the team lost, lose on the court. And then the beat writers are going to tell us, okay, here was the. you know, secret history behind the scenes in the front office or with the two stars that hated each other or the trade that didn't get made or went wrong

and they deliver this very, usually very satisfying journalistic product a few days after the season ends. We sort of got the mother of all what went wrong stories this week. Yeah. We sure did. On Monday, Sam, Amick,

and Tim Cato published a story in the Athletic about the Dallas Mavericks. Now, if you are are not a sports fan follow along here and then david and i can i think make this interesting to you haralibus vulgaris known pretty universally as harolabob was hired by the dallas mavericks a couple of years ago he is a gambler and what would you call him sort of a quantitative research yeah i mean he was sort of a before basketball twitter was a was a you know term of art he was a basketball twitter personality he was known around he was on bill simmons our boss's podcast a bunch and gambler i feel like

gambler has been used pejoratively a lot in the past week in reference to him. Don't we all gamble now? Yeah, I mean, but he was a, he gambled legally on professional basketball based on incredibly in-depth statistical models and analytical models that he built. And then he eventually, I think, had a giant staff of people contributing to these models. He was that successful. And he was betting, he just figured out, you know, you know, inaccuracies or, you know, just kind of holes in the ways that the casinos were running the lines.

basically and ways to, you know, earn money time after time. He was, and he was incredibly successfully doing it. And so he became this sort of basketball media personality. And then just, you know, years after he kind of rose to fame, finally kind of parlayed that into this position with the Mavericks. Which, as you can see from our Cuban would be really enticing. Hey, this really interesting basketball mind. Oh, he'd been, I guarantee he had been offered jobs a billion times before and whatever. convince him whether it was money or opportunity or just the, you know, timing to accept this one,

you know, is probably pretty incidental. The complication is the Dallas Mavericks, like every other team in the NBA, had a president of basketball operations, Donnie Nelson. They had a coach, Rick Carlyle, both of whom have won an NBA title. So then Haralabob comes in, and his addition to the staff created what Kato and Amick called dysfunctional dynamics within the Mavericks front office. He was suggesting starting lineups to Carlisle, which we would usually think of as something the coach sets, though less so here in the analytics era. He became a kind of shadow general manager of the Dallas Mavericks who is making draft choices. Anyway, all of these revelations were collected in this athletic article, which was quite good. It comes out and on Wednesday,

the Dallas Mavericks president of basketball operations Donnie Nelson, aka the guy who's part of his job had been usurped by Volgaris, left the team. Wait, wait, wait, wait. One quick thing to interject. Immediately after the piece was published,

as the internet world was sort of, well, as the internet Twitter was a titter about, you know, this piece, Mark Cuban, owner of the Mavericks, replied to the two, I think Cato, I don't remember whose tweet it was about the piece. He's opening out saying this is bullshit.

So anyway. Total bullshit, I believe was the phrase. Yes. He said, total bullshit. And then in sequence, Donnie Nelson leaves the Mavericks. The Athletic would later report that he had been fired. And then on Thursday yesterday, the head coach of the Mavericks, Rick Carlyle, whose job had also been, you know, sort of eaten at by Volgaris, left the team. So I do want to get to that Mark Cuban now because I want to talk about covering Mark Cuban.

which is, I think, in the background of this story and a lot of stories. When I saw Mark Cuban say total bullshit, here's the first thing I remembered. Last year, Sports Illustrated had an article about a Mavericks executive, an investigative article. And if you followed what has happened in the Mavericks front office over the last couple of years, you remember. The Mavericks had a strenuous objection to that article.

A very, you know, let us say, sort of, aggressively worded response that got passed around on Twitter. Then this year the Mavericks fired that executive. Whoops. Guess it wasn't total bullshit on that one too. So when he said that, I immediately went like,

there's no reason to believe this guy. There's absolutely no reason to believe this or aggregate it where somehow that gets to the top of the aggregation pile rather than these obviously researched revelations, I guess, for lack of a better word

that Cato and Amic have come up with. Yeah. And I saw this on like, there was a Dallas Morning News story about this and again, an aggregated story. And I don't think the morning news

was trying to pour cold water on the athletic, which is their competitor in Dallas. I think it's more like, you know how when you do aggregation, you're looking for the, the best headline that will sell. And Mark Cuban does fill in the blank.

Yeah. is a much more exciting headline than report outlines dysfunction in the Mavericks office. But there was a there was a news story that said Mark Cuban blasts athletic. And I'm like, can we not do this? Yeah. Billionaire, billionaire business owners blast every negative story about them. They're never going to be like, it's all, you're right. It's all true.

Never going to say that. And yet within a day or two, it was like, oh, they were right. He was not right. Yeah, I mean, I suspect that there was probably enough, you know, enough sort of minor quibbles around the edges for Mark Cuban that he felt slightly justified in saying that it was total bullshit. There were many tiny instances of things that he considered. Total is an interesting word if you're picking it details. No, no, no, you're right. You're right.

I think that the statement is calling it total bullshit is obviously wrong and probably deliberately a lie. but I think that he probably saw. I mean, Tim McMahon was on Zach Lowe's podcast today or yesterday talking about this. And, you know, Tim's a Maverick's writer and had a lot of insight to it. And I thought that they sort of, they broke it down in a pretty informative way. And there's a lot of people that I saw kind of making kind of broader assumptions about the piece, even giving it the benefit of the doubt, that, you know, ways that you can look at things to make it, you know, make a little bit more sense if you were disinclined to.

believe it all. But yeah, I mean, there's really no real way to read it then not only that the athletic piece was right by and large, but that like it sent the Mavericks into a tailspin because, I mean, there's no, there's no, there's no, there's no way to read what what has happened to the Mavericks organization since the publication of the piece other than reacting to the fact that it is true, right? I mean, there's, like if it were in fact full of shit, if it were a total bullshit, then the reaction to that piece would not have been to fire Donnie Wallberg, sorry, Donnie Nelson and Rick Carlisle, unless you had verifiable proof that they were the sources of the piece. And by the way, Tim Cato said that Nelson was not a source for his

piece. So it, you know, it sort of bore out to be true. I'm not exactly sure what the, I'm not exactly sure what Mark Cuban thought he was calling bullshit at the time because it doesn't really make a lot of sense. No. And by the way, Kato has an outstanding invitation to come on here and do one of those press box postgame interviews with us because I'd love to hear about this piece as soon as he gets finished breaking all the news about the Mavericks this week. But you do hit an interesting point, which is, and I want to ask him about this, is like when a piece like this comes out and then two people leave an organization immediately afterward, was that going to happen anyway?

Or was the fact that this was published, did that speed up a process that perhaps was going to happen anyway? Or would Rick Carlyle maybe have remained with the team under some scenario if the piece hadn't come out? I suspect almost all works of journalism like this are reflecting something that was about to happen, right? if it had gotten to this crisis point. Oh, man.

But it is really, there is an interesting relationship, right, between what's published and then what actually winds up happening. Well, if you want to look back at our discussion of Janet Malcolm, that question involves a deeper moral question, right? If you feel like the pushing publish on this piece is going to affect somebody's job security, then does that affect what you do? I mean, presumably no, but if the question is, does it affect,

does it actually change the course of history? I mean, that's a deeper question, right? I mean, listen, the, it's a lot of times, you said that, you know, we talk about how these pieces run every season, right? About multiple teams. A lot of times when you read them, the most interesting sort of dance that's going on behind the scenes is how much to disclose from the information that you have

from semi-verified sources, right? There's somebody, like, things that you know reliably to be true, but you don't have exactly sourced out in terms of, like, you don't have Mark Cuban on the record agreeing to this, right? Or you maybe only have it from one person on or off the record, but you know it to be true. And then to how many bridges are you going to burn in the process of publication, right? What is it worth to give away in terms of what you're going to, in terms of the damage you're going to do to your own relationships going forward? All this is kind of happening at the same time.

What was really revealing about this piece in the athletic by Amick and Kato was that they kind of just sprayed the lighter fluid and wrote as they wrote, you know, wrote the truth that they saw it to be, right? And that's impressive. And it's also, frankly, slightly unusual. Normally, we don't see this sort of, this sort of, well, these sorts of flames, unless it's like, you know, like Simmons will always joke about what the Boston media does to a coach or GM after they get fired. or a player after they get shipped out, right? That's when you really... That's the now they tell us. Yeah, that's the now, but that's when you really unload the note, like, dump the notebook

with no fear of repercussions. Usually you don't see that happen when the subjects are people who are continued, who continue to be on your beat, right? They continue to be sources that you're going to cover. And this, and that's what makes this one slightly interesting. Maybe that, maybe that goes to reinforce your suggestion at all. all of this stuff was already in motion, right? When the writing began to the point where there was a less trepidation on that front,

but I don't think that makes it any less bold to do, I mean, to publish this piece. Yeah, when I say in motion, all I mean is dysfunction being in motion. I don't necessarily mean that Donnie Nelson was about to be fired or something. Who knows? You know, again, that's kind of part of the part of what I'm just interested in in the journalistic backstory here. I will complicate what you said just for a second because there is a genre of this organization, is dysfunctional pieces that we read fairly regularly. Kevin Arnivitz has written a ton of them for ESPN.com that are very good.

I remember one about the Sons a few years ago and they were speaking, you know, about the ownership and the way players are chosen. Seth Wickersham has written a ton of the NFL versions. I remember Cleveland Brown's one pretty clearly a couple years ago. I think what's interesting about this one is that Mark Cuban himself is such an available and appealing media personality. And so when I heard the reaction to this story on Dallas Sports Radio yesterday and elsewhere, you know, journalists who have enjoyed Mark Cuban returning their emails and hopping on their

podcasts and coming on their television shows are kind of like, uh, yeah, because in a certain sense, Mark Cuban has been a very successful NBA owner. He admirably pushes against the status quo. he is admirably available to be interviewed. I support all those things. You and I are Dallas Mavericks fans. So we support him being a good winning a title in Dallas. On the other hand,

there had already been this accumulation of things that Mark Cuban had failed on. We talk about the culture within the Mavericks front office that led to all these, you know, stories over the last year in Sports Illustrated. We talk, we can talk about the fact if you just want to do pure basketball metrics, the Mavericks have not won a playoff series. in 10 years, then you get this, a dysfunctional front office setup that one winds up with two people

leaving the franchise and two, and this was the big revelation, pissed off the Mavericks really big super duper star Luca Donchage, at least to some degree. So I just feel it's one of those things when you have somebody like Cuban who is so interviewable and so likable, then people go, it's easier to do with the guy who owns the Browns, or the guy who owns the Sons. But when, I just feel the reaction to this is very, very interesting.

Yeah, I completely agree. It's a, I mean, the Mavericks are just a little bit off of, you know, the big media market NBA radar to the point where this is, this drama is not playing out on a week and week out basis on first take or you know whatever so it does so so when you do kind of pull back the curtain there's a lot of intrigue there you know a lot there's a lot ready to be mined for this sort of storytelling and i mean listen the piece got a lot of traction produced a lot of interest

certainly it's got the fact that you know carlyle and nelson left the organization immediately thereafter have amplified the story and the reporters and I mean, to such a degree that it's kind of unfathomable. I mean, you almost never see this sort of thing happen, especially if, I mean, you listen, you do frequently see stories about dysfunction. You frequently see reporters break stories about impending breakups in an organization, whatever. But this is just, I mean, this is a pretty significant cause and effect, or not cause an effect, but like A, B sort of situation.

I don't know. It's incredible. I mean, listen, you can, as a Mavericks fan, I'm reading between the lines. as if it's my job, right? I mean, like, I was trying to talk myself in and out of various parts of this even before Nelson and Carlisle left. You know, I think that there's a...

I think that there's a pretty... I think that there's, you know, a way to read this that... Well, there's a lot of ways to read this, right? I mean, my initial reaction, when they, when the piece came out, or when Nelson was removed of his job, everybody pointed to the story,

my mind immediately went to his first... You know, where Nelson immediately after the Mavericks were eliminated from the point. playoffs. His first comment was that Luke needs to learn how to share the ball. And I was like, well, he's going to get fired for that. Because that's like the last thing you want to say about you're the only good player on your team, you know, after they get, after he gets like drag kicking and screaming out of the playoffs. And, you know, the Carlisle thing is, I'm sure the story had a direct relationship to Carl. I mean, a direct effect on Carlisle leaving, right? I mean, there's no way that

you can read that story and have, and if you're Carlisle and not feel like my job is insecure, even if they invite me back next year. And I don't, and I'm too. I'm too established to have to deal with that shit. But I'm sure there was a cause and effect involved. And I don't know. It's pretty crazy. And a measure of pride too.

Yeah. Like it's one thing if this is happening and I'm kind of swallowing things. I don't want to swallow behind the scenes. It's another thing if everybody knows this is happening. Yeah. I just think that's a normal human emotion. and I wouldn't be shocked if that's mixed up in some way. The one thing, the one caveat that I'll say to this whole story about dysfunction,

it is dysfunction by any definition. All the stuff that you mentioned, the front office just catastrophe that the Mavericks had been dealing with the past few years is probably chief among them. But I mentioned Tim McMahon's appearance on Zach Lowe's podcast, and McMahon makes the point which they make, you know, Cato makes the piece. And I think that it's, but it deserves to be repeated, is that Mark Cuban, who has way too much on his plate, is the general manager of the Dallas Mavericks,

but not by title, but practically. And so the whole, the entire history of the Mavericks under his watch has been a question of who has his ear. And I think that the real narrative is that Donnie Nelson was, had lost, you know, had lost Mark Cuban's ear.

And Haralabob had sort of filled that vacuum, filled that void. And, and so it's not necessarily like a game of throne situation. so much it is just like the person sitting on the throne has a wandering eye, you know? And this is finally, and maybe there's some good that'll come out of, you know, the inner three, you know, two thirds of the inner circle, the two thirds that are being ignored actually being, you know, shown the door so that he could, so that there's some sort of a functional power structure

now. I will. I'll steal a point too from Bob Stern on Dallas radio. He made a couple of days ago, which is that. Jerry Jones, who owns the Dallas Cowboys, takes for himself the title of general manager, which everybody in the NFL has spent the last 25 years making fun of. Like, oh my gosh,

you are really think you can be the general manager of this team. Mark Cuban, it appears, does exactly the same thing functionally, but does not take the title. Donnie Nelson, a much-loved executive in the NBA, has the title, has that title or president of basketball operations, whatever it is. So Mark Cuban is,

almost distancing himself from the critique of this owner is meddling in everything, doing everything over his head because, one, he has a fairly recent title, I guess it's a decade ago, but two, he just doesn't actually have the job on the business car. And it's interesting how much slack that has earned him. That's totally true. It's really, really fascinating. All right, David, let's do the overwork Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that All of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time.

Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received. David from the you'll never look at the 90s NBA the same way again department. Ben Collins, you know Ben Collins, a reporter on NBC covers Q&ON, all those things. He found an anti-COVID vaccine video. And it stars. John Stockton. John Stockton, the all-time NBA assist leader says in the video that he has, quote, done a significant amount of research about COVID-19. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write.

Even in retirement, John Stockton is still willing to pass up a shot. That's great. Wait, can I do a brief aside here? I would just like to, I would like to, first of all, Ben Collins, I saw I'm tweeting about the Mavericks for novice dysfunction. Ben, if you're a Mavs fan or a Dallas guy and I don't know it, please come on the podcast. Let's talk about it. But second of all, I would like to acknowledge that he was formally, he might already be there, but formally inducted into the club of journalists whose faces have appeared on Fox News with a damning Chiron underneath them this week. It was, there was a caron

of Fox News that said NBC reporter claims angry parents fighting CRT in schools, because critical race theory are being funded by dark money groups and his face was like drawn on a giant screen. He replied to it politely saying they basically got his story right. Thank you. But yeah, that's as Fox moves fully into the media criticism vertical, it's just that's got to be a badge of honor to be on there. It is truly a weird, a weird outcome when Ben Collins and Brandy's a draws near like the number one subject on Fox. I know. What? It's so funny. elsewhere in overword Twitter jokes

David we got a very weird quote from Russian president Vladimir Putin this week here is the quote in life there is no happiness there's only the specter of happiness

the quotable Putin in life there is no happiness there's only the specter of happiness would you like to hear some of the funny responses uh yes please from the Russian president uh wait does Putin write for

nihilist Arby's this is like your college friend who got super into Russian lit after taking a long drag. Is there a 76ers game tonight? And my favor, check on your dictators, guys. The pandemic was hard on everyone. That's great. And finally, David, according to deadline, Disney Plus is planning a Beauty and the Beast prequel series. What?

After they already remade Beauty and the Beast as a live action movie. I don't know if this is like Cruella style where we find out that Gaston's family was actually killed by beasts. Because I've always wanted to know what-the-em-o retelling of the Beast's backstory. Yeah, this could be really interesting. I've always wanted to know what Gaston's motivations were for being so anti-beast in the original story. So I would love a long multi-season series that explains it to me. What is the over under on Ron Perlman being given a token role as like one of the like the parents of one of beauty or the bell or the beast? Every young ringer reader just just completely didn't get that.

That is that is very funny. It was an overword Twitter joke, David, to rework the lyrics of a beloved Beauty and the Beast song to reflect the Beauty and the Beast series. Are you ready? Yes. It's a little early on the West Coast here for me to sing, but I'm going to do my best. starting. Okay. Foo. Three, two, one.

No one spins like Gaston, cashes in like Gaston, fills out plots that are probably thin like Gaston. He's especially suited to synergizing seven bucks for Gaston. That was fantastic. Like I said, it's early on the West Coast. Call me Disney Plus. I'm available. If you made me sick a song I know by heart, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week.

Those lyrics are courtesy of CNN media critic Brian Lowry, by the way. Great stuff from Brian there. All right, let's do a little more before we get out of here for the weekend. This is from Notchester Lemon, who writes to us, we spent four years railing on the orange one for his treatment of the press. How do we feel about Joe Cool,

that is Joe Biden, getting snippy and then apologizing? he is referring to Joe Biden in Geneva, David, who had this back and forth with CNN's Caitlin Collins about the aforementioned Vladimir Putin. Listen to this. Why are you so confident he'll change his behavior, Mr. President? Yeah, I'm not confident. What do you do all this?

When did I say I was confident? I said, I said, what I said was, let's get it straight. I said, what will change their behavior is that the rest of the world reacts to them and it diminishes their strength. to the world. I'm not confident of anything. I'm just stating the fact. And then he storms away.

If you don't understand that, you're in the wrong business. I thought, well, listen, the combination of parts A and B add up to just a more situation that I'm glad the president apologized for. I think that as many people pointed out in Biden's defense, it is, it is significant that it does seem that he was responding. Less to just a question and being asked a question on, you know, an impromptu question by a journalist and more to being misquoted by a journalist, right? I mean, it seemed like he was more interested in the fact that she had, she had presumed to say that he had said that he thought Putin would change his ways. But it did, but listen, he blew up. It was really, it was, it was, maybe it was not a great look. I mean, it was certainly not a reaction he should have had by my estimation, whether or not it was a good look in terms of the way he will be perceived. as a fighter or something, I guess, is a different question.

I do think it was probably... Nobody in the public cares at all. I do think it was a culmination of the normal sort of mind field that you walk in whenever you were doing a sort of public readout of a conference such as this, especially with a sort of uneven adversary, like Vladimir Putin, right? Like everything you say is fraught. There's an only in journalism word. uneven adversary. I love it.

Well, I mean, it's just that, yes, thank you. Everything that Joe Biden said, this was by far Joe Biden's most impressive public speech, you know, public question and answer session that he's ever had to do, because the implications of every answer that he gave were so significant, right? Everything, every word that he said was

studied and deliberate to a point that his head was probably about to explode. And besides that, there's probably this layer on top of it where he's being where everyone around him knows that whatever he says is being measured against his predecessor right that like whatever response he gives is going to be weighed against the way Trump did it and so you have this like you have this palpable anxiety by the way he was very cool and all the answers that he gave but when he was behind the microphone but built into it is this really ridiculous level of anxiety and just like I said it's a minefield and so when he

walks away and the first response is someone like almost seeming to his mind willfully misreading what he said. His response is basically, I tried so hard to say that in such a deliberate way. And you just asked me a question that seemed to not have heard anything that I said at all, right? He shouldn't have responded that way. And it sort of would have been so much more effective even as like a deterrent from people doing that in the future if he had just been, if he had been comical about it, right? But he were, but I think that the most significant part about it is that he apologized and that Caitlin Collins, who is incredibly good at her job, responded the way that she did by saying he doesn't have to apologize.

He just responded to my question, you know? And I think that's sort of the end of the story right there. Yeah. I mean, my take was that if we do the proviso of yes, but yes, yes, yes, yes, Biden is not Trump. These people don't like us reporters. Yeah. They're not, you know, just because you have replaced and. you know, abhorrently anti-media administration doesn't mean that the new administration likes the media.

They don't. Jen Socky, you know, maybe, again, you know, you don't have to say like she equals every single other person who has stood behind that podium. But those people like the media when they are helpful to the Biden administration. I have never seen. Does Joe Biden perhaps have a side of him where he's joking with reporters off camera and kind of doing all the thing? I'm sure he does, like almost every other politician. but I have never gotten a whiff that Joe Biden likes the media. No, there was another quote, I think, from the same day where he sort of like half seriously said,

complained that the reporters never asked him a positive question, right? Which was sort of like the Trump critique and a microcosm. But there's a huge difference between sort of making a crack about it like Biden seemed to be doing and like semi-seriously trying to rally mobs of people against, against, you know, journalists that are physically nearby. You know, it's a whole different thing. Absolutely. What you saw there was like a fairly normal, intense journalistic interaction.

It's just that those now are on Twitter instantly. So it's, aha, something's happening here. Something's happening here. Yeah. Happens all the time. By the way, before we go, speaking of famous reporters, you know, Shane Harris of the Washington Post,

writes about national intelligence. He was on Twitter this week, warning people away from making a particular joke, less they wind up in the overworked Twitter joke of the week feature. Don't do that. We're going to have to end the segment. If everybody tweets originally, then what the hell are we going to do?

I'm just, I'm flattered that we're that feared. I really am. The second worst thing as a journalist is for Ben Smith to email you. The first, the absolute worst is to wind up on the overworked Twitter joke of the week. Well, I'll take that. Just want to just want to avoid. that at all cost. By the way, the only in journalism words of the week, fracas

and beleaguered. Fracas and beleaguered. Nobody says those words. I thought it was fracas. I guess that just goes to the point. Yeah, you never said it. You never said it. It's time for David Chumacher guess is a strain pun headline. Yeah. Monday's

headline about a now scrutinized story of a whale swallowing and then spitting out a lobsterman was Moby-Ick. We can maybe talk about the the doubts that have been raised about Moby-Ik some other time. Today's headline, David, comes from Luke O'Connell. It's from the Harold's son down there in the beautiful city of Melbourne, Australia.

All right. Back to the land down under. They are so much material. I've been waiting to go back to the land down under. Let me tell you, when these COVID restrictions, I'm going to be there as soon as possible. The Victoria State down there, David, like everywhere else, is figuring out how to reopen safely. now that we're hopefully at the tail end of the virus. According to the Harold's son,

there's an especially onerous rule for ski resorts. Ski resorts. According to the ABC, travelers from Greater Melbourne will need to have a COVID test within 72 hours of departing the city and show the negative result on entry to the ski fields. So if you go skiing near Melbourne, you have to have a COVID test three days before

and then you've got to show your negative COVID test before you get on the slopes. I'll also leave you with this. Boy, has this rule made these ski operators angry? What was the Melbourne Herald Sons Strainpun headline? Oh my gosh. It's like COVID, COVID test skiing downhill. Yeah, we're looking for ski words here.

Slope, T-bar, lift. David and I are, you're not a skier and neither am I. do you know an alternate word that's used for ski run if you get off a ski run you go off I have no idea do you know the word peace P-I-S-T-E no never heard never heard that and certainly would not have known it was pronounced that way if I read it David David is from the warmer climbs ladies and gentlemen so peace that's your key word here piece of burden Peace to Uh,

um, Beauty and the Peace just to tie it back to the Disney Plus series. Uh, peace. Oh, Um, remember they're angry.

Everybody. Yeah, they're pieced off. Peace off. Peace off. Yeah. Put us out of our misery. He is David Shoemaker.

I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. David, we're back Monday with a very special guest. Oh yeah. He's that? It's Chuck Todd. Oh.

Yes. I cannot wait. Moderator of Meet the Press. Here for a full 30 on Monday. Have a fabulous weekend. Catch up on all your reading and join us for more lukewarm takes about the media.

See you then, David. See you later, Brian.