The Press Box - Listener Mail. Plus, Peter Kiefer on his Yashar Ali Profile.

Episode Date: June 11, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker are responding to Listener Mail. They answer your questions about Jeffrey Toobin’s return to CNN, athletes talking about vaccines, and “only in journalism” word nominees (8:55). Later, Peter Kiefer joins to discuss his profile of journalist Yashar Ali in Los Angeles Magazine (30:44). They touch on how this story came about, discuss Ali’s role within the media world, and hear what it was like talking with and interacting with Ali. Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Peter Kiefer Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dave Chang is an avid student and fan of sports, music, art, film, and of course, food. With a rotating cast of guests, they have conversations that cover everything from the creative process to his guest's guiltiest pleasures. Followed the Dave Chang Show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. What's on your mind today? Brian, this is hard. I'm finally ready to admit something. Uh-oh. Um, I'm not totally in denial about this, but I'm ready to take. sort of the most pointed point of view on this.

The media world is officially and totally based in New York City and blind to the rest of America. I'm willing to say this out loud. They're even blind to the America that's right outside of its borders. A lot of people have made this complaint and, you know, sometimes we're a little bit dismissive of it, or at least I have been, but I know this to be true now. And I know you're going to ask me how, and here's the answer. there's not nearly enough cicada outrage in the media right now. I'm sitting your recording in Princeton, New Jersey.

Like, I could, you know, take a bus, take a train, take a car to New York City in relatively short order. And where I'm sitting, I'm wearing headphones not just for the recording process, but because if I took them off, inside the, noise, the screeching noise of cicadas in the trees around this room would make it impossible for me to speak. Right? Through the walls of the house? It's so loud in the house that you have to raise your voice. And even when you're in your house, you're like, wow, I can hear the cicadas. This is nuts. And then I was coming out of my garage, like through my house, into the garage, opened the garage door yesterday. And as the garage door opens, just inch by inch, the noise gets

louder and louder. Standing in the backyard, you have to yell. It is the sound, it is the literal sound of a horror movie out there. And like we're out there, I mean, we're trying to, you know, we had dinner out there with our kids last night, like trying to enjoy the season. And I, it's just, it's not that it's made my life unlivable,

although it's really made it bizarre. But I think I'm just so used to, just, I'm so used to like, minor aggravations and grievances becoming our lead story material in this, stay in age that I'm just constantly flummoxed that it's not a bigger deal. And I know the answer is because the cicadas aren't like this in New York City. Crazily enough, they're like this in D.C.

They're maybe not this bad, but they're all over the place in D.C. And you see some of your favorite political reporters tweeting about it a little bit. But if it were like this in New York City, this would be the only thing that we read or talked about for the for like the entire two-month span that it was going on. Because this was happening right now is, a natural disaster like it is like it is there's not damage being done per se

it's like they don't like poison or like eat or otherwise like destroy your trees and whatever else but I have bushes that are dead outside not because they've done something malicious to it but because there's so many of them the bushes have crumpled and died under their weight not a joke or

overstatement at all like it is bonkers out here I have two reactions to this one is, and this would be like if you were writing the cicada rant column, this would be like your fifth or six paragraph, you and I grew up in the South and or Texas. Yeah. So summer bug noise is a real thing. Is not unusual to us. But we also start with a baseline.

So when David is saying the noise is something, he really means it. This is a person who knows about bugs. My second reaction is this. Sitting here in Southern California, the. land of no insects. I kind of thought cicadas were over covered. Like I've been looking at Twitter going, who the hell cares about the bugs again? Can we just get over the cicadas?

But, but I have not heard the experiential wall of sound cicada coverage that you're talking about. Like a horror movie kind of covered. That, that I have missed in my reading on this. It's, it is, it is, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's impossible to describe. Like, I can hold up the microphone to the outside. It doesn't do it justice. We've recorded it, like, with our phones, to send to our families. There's not, there's no way that a sound that you hear on a recording can do justice to the fact that you are literally raising

your voice to nearly a yell to say, like, this dinner is delicious, honey. Like, it's, it is a very, very unique experience. And listen, I have not lived in Princeton, New Jersey very long. Listen to the show will be aware of that, but this is not my first turn at the cicadas. When I was, they come every 17 years, this giant brood, the brood X that we have right now, 34 years ago, I was a young child in Louisville, Kentucky, which is like, Louisville, Kentucky and Princeton, New Jersey are like the two hottest hotbeds of brood X swarm in the entire country. And somehow I found them both. So I've lived through this. I remember wearing the little shells as, you know,

lapel pins when I was a little kid. And listen, my kids are kind of into it, you know? I mean, it's a very, I'm glad that, you know, my baby's not going to live his life just petrified of swarms. He's hopefully, you know, coming to peace with that right now. But I think that just as a general statement about our media landscape, I'm just surprised.

I just, like, you know, the Gawker essays have become our lead stories in so many of the ways that we, that we, you know, interact with media, right? The sort of like, like I said before, minor insightful grievances become the big news of the day, the week, the month. And we have, like, major parts of the country that are just engaging in a, literally a biblical, like, a biblical plague. and it's just like not a big deal. I mean, one, one cicada lands on Joe Biden and like right wingers on Twitter and making fun of it. I was out in my yard yesterday

and was talking to a guy's building me a fence and at some point he just started staring at me because there's like three of them on my shirt at one time. Oh, I'm not even aware of it. It's like weird of the Lost Dark where he turns around and the tarantial is on his back.

Yeah, and what makes this more eerie than anything else is the fact that nobody in New York knows this. It's not even New York. 10 miles down the road. You know, like people. Well, you're calling out the New Jersey media too, not just the snobby. It's not the media.

I'm just saying this is what makes it really crazy is that the guy who was the guy who's working on my fence lives 10 miles away and he has zero cicadas. It's just like in these, in these certain areas, it's, listen, I don't want to. I don't want it. This is a media critique. Star Ledger, get on it. New York Times. CNN. All anybody's doing is talking about eating them.

And I get. Media elites. Nobody, like, why, why? Why does this happen? And the first thing that we ever, the only thing that the local news wants to cover is people dipping cicadas and chocolate and eating. This is, this is, this is wild. This is why, this is the only way we can digest, no pun intended, this sort of stuff

right now. It's, this is big news. Nobody's getting hurt, but this is big news. Actually, there are car wrecks. People are getting, like, cicadas all over their cars and running off the road. But this isn't, like, a natural disaster in the sense that there's, like, dramatic damage being done or, like, lives being taken. But this is, like, a really, really, really.

really weird thing. And I would just, you know, I would just like more, more, I don't even need sympathy. I just need some like sense of like, I just need to be able to like see myself in the news. Now I see what the rest of the country feels like. The non-cicada parts and the cicada parts. You want you want both viewpoints represented. Coming up on today's show, David, we answer some list or mail questions about Jeffrey Tubin's return to CNN and asking athletes about whether or not they've had the COVID vaccine.

plus a press box post-game interview with Peter Kiefer, who just published a very big Los Angeles magazine story about Twitter newsbreaker and power broker, Yashar Ali. We are going to ask him how that story got written. 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 Erica Servantes, and I guess the sound of cicadas in the background.

Let's do some quick listener mail, David. had a few requests to talk about the return of Jeffrey Tubin, the legal analyst who is embroiled or embattled or ensnared or whatever you want to say to CNN. Tubin was on CNN yesterday with host Allison Camerata. Now, I want to play a little sound before we get into anything else. Here is Comerotic recounting why Jeffrey Tubin disappeared from the airwaves. In October, you were on a Zoom call. with your colleagues from the New Yorker magazine. Everyone took a break for several minutes, during which time you were caught masturbating on camera.

Now, I hope you can hear the tone there, the extremely awkward tone. If I am Allison Comerata, I would have been happy to do a pretty tough interview with Jeffrey Tubin before he returns to CNN as the legal analyst. I, however, would have insisted, look, the recap part of this,

where we go over what happened. I'm just going to let you do that. I insist that you tell that part of the story. Because I do not want to do this incredibly awkward thing where I got weirded out by having to say all that stuff on this podcast today. I would have just gone ahead and outsource that to Jeffrey Toombe. For some reason, I imagined CNN like having all like a police lineup where they make you say like, you know, put your hands in the air.

air, like having all the, all of the, um, the anchors come in and say masturbating on camera, just to see who sounded the most sort of, um, uh, kind of appropriate when it, as the way that it, the way that they, they spoke it out loud. I don't know. She was really great. I mean, it, it, it definitely took a little bit of the edge off. It was, yeah, I guess so. And it was just everything is a no pun intended in the story, by the way. We should, yeah, and we should know they're actually sitting next to each other on the set of CNN. This is not one of these, things that you're sitting there and kind of, this is kind of just very, very uncomfortable air about it.

People remember, Tubin was fired by the New Yorker. He wasn't fired by CNN. He went on leave. Now he's back as a legal analyst. He said during this interview a couple of things. He called his actions deeply moronic and indefensible. Did you make it to the part of the interview where he did the kind of apology

MADLibs where he said, I've been to therapy. I've been working in a food bank. Yeah, public service. Yeah, I think working in a food bank is a good thing. I'm not quite sure how that ties into what happened here, but okay, I'm working on a new book about the Oklahoma City bombing. Yeah. Now, weren't you doing things like that before this happened?

Yeah. That doesn't exactly sound like, oh, my time in the wilderness was writing a book about a famous legal case. I thought that the overall, I listened to the whole interview, and I thought that by the end, it felt like, he had gotten to sort of an appropriate place. I think that any sound bite, any one sentence that he said, almost every line on its own seemed like kind of bizarrely damning.

You know, I mean, just, yeah, moronic and indefensible is like exactly what you don't say, you know, is like you're sort of parting shot in these things. But, you know, there's a degree to which having, despite the fact that he didn't have to explain what he did, you know, we left that to, obviously, to someone else,

there's certainly a degree to which appearing on TV, and just discussing it, having being forced to discuss it, represented a certain sort of penance. I don't mean, I mean, we talked about this when it happened, obviously, and it was a, it's a difficult thing to talk about, you know? I mean, it's hard to, I think that we're kind of, we, I landed at the time was, you know, if his, if his coworkers at the New Yorker who were on the call were, I mean, I think, you know, if they were offended by it, if they were sufficient, you know, whatever, then

then that's kind of all I needed to know, you know, in terms of his employment there. But it does seem like in a broader sense, and I really don't mean to make light of it. But, you know, we're going to talk later in the show about other people who kind of lost their jobs and in the media world. And there's a, it's, it's very hard sometimes to wrap your head around the sort of morality and ethics of something, but then also the kind of the employability aspect, especially for people who kind of work in your sphere. it almost feels like getting fired from one super high profile job

and not getting fired from your other super high profile job is sort of like the perfect threading the needle punishment in today's media age. It's like he lost his job at the New Yorker. That seemed very extreme to some, but he keeps his job at CNN and gets to go on CNN and has to explain himself. That feels like both a punishment and a victory for him.

I don't know. The whole thing is very confusing. Andrew Joe Potter, one of our listeners had a question about this. It feels like part of making a good apology in the social media video clip era involves fully embracing the scenic qualities of cringiness. So essentially it was required

what we as a social media society require of Jeffrey Toom is that the interview actually be kind of cringy. And that CNN puts this cringy clip up for us to watch and dissect, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. There's definitely something to do that.

I mean, there's going to be, a lot of, like I said, a lot of the stuff that he said wasn't exactly what you want to hear, especially line by line, the little clips that are going to be pulled out. But I think it remains to be seen sort of what the sort of memeification of this is going forward or just the general conventional wisdom of what happened, you know? He came on TV and gave a very crinchy interview about it, but, you know, the world moves on is very is a potential is it is certainly you know a potential result of this i will say one thing i would have liked to have heard represented in that interview was the viewpoint of people at the new

yorker yeah tube and mentioned like i've apologized directly to the people who were on that call i have reached out to them spoken with them you know talked about what happened had made that effort and i assume that he has made that effort i would have like in this case, the questioner or the network to say, look, I reached out to those people. I asked them about their experience. And then I, so I can in my questions represent their viewpoint a little bit better, rather than just representing your viewpoint. I would have just liked to have had that.

I'll just say that. Yeah, I would have too. And even just, I mean, as we know from written journalism and, you know, obviously, television journalism by extension, just sort of saying, I reached out to them and they didn't have a comment sometimes goes a long way too. Although, I mean, but I think in this case, there probably would have been a lot of no comment, right? I mean, nobody really, I can't imagine anybody that wanting to go on the record for this case. And, and, and that might be enough, but even to inform, but even to inform the questions, right? Sure. No, but, but I, but I, the, I guess the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,

point that I, that I, that I'm thinking about is that not having, not having, not having that point of might be enough to not publish a written piece on the subject. But obviously this is a slightly different case. This isn't about, this isn't about reporting out the story. This is about paying penance so that your paid contributor can get back on the air. Right. I mean, it's a different media function. And it had the, it had the appearance of trying to like tell the story. And you're right. If they're, if that's what they're trying to do, they should be reaching out to New Yorker co-workers or explaining that they tried. But this is obviously more than just that is going on here.

No, no, totally. But it does when you don't have that element, it turns it into this is Jeffrey Tubin's experience of this thing that happened. Absolutely. These other people's experience of this thing that happened. Camerata and Tubin talked for about eight minutes about what happened. And then they tried to do this thing where they transitioned into talking about general legal issues.

I just want to play this because this is. has got to be one of the more awkward transitions in the history of cable television. Well, Jeffrey, on that note, should we move on to the news? Sure, let's go. Okay. Let's do that. Got anything on Stephen Breyer for us, Jeffrey? Is he going to retire while Joe Biden can still replace him?

What a transition. All right, from Aaron McDade. A question about athletes, David, and the COVID vaccine. I thought this was interesting. Seeing the Montez sweat and Sam Darnold answers yesterday and what's happened with LeBron and some other NBA players, is there much of a point in asking athletes their thoughts on getting vaccinated, especially if they haven't gotten it?

Doesn't seem to be a lot of potential there for anyone to learn anything. If it'll just be the usual, it's a personal decision, and I'm looking into it for myself nonsense. It just means they don't want to get it, but no, they'll be criticized if they outright say that. How do we feel about sports, writers and sports media people asking athletes about the COVID vaccine. Oh, well, I mean, I'm not, I'm just, I don't know, I'm not surprised that people are asking.

I think it's a little bit, I think that there's, I don't know, I mean, it feels like there, you might know, you might have a, you know, verbiage for this better than I can express it, but it does seem like there's a certain sort of line of questioning where if you're not prepared for the answer, I'm not quite sure why you're asking it, I guess, unless just to sort of like get the implication. out there. You know, I think that we're all a little bit taken aback when those of us who are not anti-vaccine, you encounter someone that is, it's a little bit surprising, a little bit hard

to wrap your head around. But I don't know. I don't know. I mean, what do you think? Well, on the one hand, I think athletes, when they sign up for this, kind of enter a zone where a lot of what we would consider to be normally private medical information becomes a matter of journalistic interest. You know,

you're not going around asking movie stars about their health all the time, if there's not a reason to. Whereas athletes, you know, basically after every game, if they get hurt, reporters are asking them about certain things. So I think on the one hand,

you could probably argue that this falls under that general category. But I would say the second thing is there's just a very practical element of this. We just came out of a season where every sports league on the planet had these very intense COVID protocols to keep the athletes from getting sick. And if an athlete gets sick during the current season or next season, they could also, we know, possibly make their teammates sick. So, or they couldn't play, meaning they couldn't play and meaning their teammates potentially couldn't play. So there's just a very practical aspect in knowing, hey, did you get the COVID vaccine because we want you to be the quarterback of the Panthers and not be

sidelined for three weeks. And I know that seems really, it seems kind of strange, but again, that that's the kind of practical information sports writers are looking for on a daily basis. And again, I think you could almost argue it's just we've traded one thing for another. And it does, you know, LeBron, who Aaron referred to in the question, came out and said, that's a private matter, right? Like that was his kind of way of batting the. way the question. And I guess an athlete could say that. But I don't know that I blame a sports

writer for asking that. I don't blame them either. I just think we're in a very weird space right now. We're like if you asked the quarterback of your team or the team that you cover, if, you know, like it was widely reported that you tore your MCL or you getting surgery on that. And the quarterback was just like, no, I think that's a personal decision. I'm not going to get my MCL fixed. I'm just going to go out there and see what I can do without it. Then like, there was a logical follow up to that, right? Which is like, did you, consult with your team doctors? Like, did you not have you like, or do you have any trainers? Does anybody have any, I mean, like, could you be in violation of your contract?

Like there's a, you know, there are follow up questions like laced with indignation that would certainly follow that, right? But like, we don't have the ability to do that in this subject. Or at least the, you know, the people asking the questions don't seem to have those follow-ups ready. So it's a very strange place. Well, it's a different because the COVID vaccine is different than some of the medical things. Sure. Like the teams cannot make the players get the COVID vaccine. This is what we have found out.

And the least can't do it. So what they're doing is trying to persuade the players to get the COVID vaccine. And I think that's also what the journalists are sort of stepping into here. Is it it's actually a decision for the player to make, whereas a lot of medical things that happens in sports aren't really a decision for the player to make. You know, sometimes they say, hey, I can give it a go. I'm hurt. but a lot of as we saw with Anthony Davis the other night, but a lot of it isn't.

And this is that weird kind of space sort of half in between, here's something I have to do and here's something that I can elect to do. It's an interesting question. David, we were absolutely swamped with entries for our only in journalism word list. Not sure anything we've ever done on this podcast has gotten this much of a response. Our only in journalism list is a list of words that you will. see written in a news article, but you will never use in real life. You will never use with a friend.

Would you like to hear a few more nominees, David? Please. All right. This is from Alex. Staved. Staved. In sports, he writes, you can stave off elimination or stave off an electoral college or an electoral challenge, excuse me, and absolutely nothing else.

Stave is absolutely and only in journalism. Oh, yes. I got another one here from the sports world from David Pat, Moribund. He writes his moribund word only used in journalism. He quotes the athletic. One or two additions might not be enough to transform their moribund offense. I would also submit Moribund franchise. You hear a lot.

You know, until Kevin Durand, Kyrie Irving got to the Nets, they revived a moribund franchise. I think just as a general rule, if when you hear somebody say a word, out loud as I just did and your reaction as mine just was is, is that how that's pronounced? Then probably, then probably is that a word, is a word that's used only in print. I remember when I was a young sports writer and words like more abundant staved, I would sit down and I would start to type it out. And then I would think, one, I don't am I sure even know what this means totally. And then I would think, why am I using this? And the reason I was using it is because my whole life I had been reading other sports writers using it.

Yeah. And that seemed to make it okay. It's a very, very funny process with these. It is. And that's a good, that's really good advice. I mean,

a really good signal that you should probably stay away from it too. I mean, far be it from me to tell anybody how to write their gamer or whatever, but, gamer advice with David Shoemaker. No,

but I, but, you know, if you, it's like, it's like, oh gosh, it's like legalese,

right? And I'm sure there's some brilliant legal minds who lives in this podcast. You write incredibly good stuff. I used to work at a law firm long ago, and you just read this, read these things that are, we're not talking about the Supreme Court, right? We're talking about regular law firms or just people are writing in basically dialect, right? You're just like basing

everything that you write off of things you've read before and it ends up just being like almost entirely illegible, you know, and there's no reason for it to be eligible. And it's, and that's because you, there's a lot of more buns and staves or whatever the legal versions of those are that, you know, are taking the places of words that, you know, human beings can understand. A couple more for our only in journalism wordless from fame and Roberts, plot it's, plotts. He won, plotts.

That's a really good one. From Michael Tatarsky, suggesting at loggerheads as in addition to the phrases nobody used in real life. We are at loggerheads. Absolutely only in journalism. This is from camera.

By the way, unless by at loggerheads, you mean you're at loggerheads bar and grill in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Then yes. Oh, there we go. I don't think anybody. I don't think anybody actually talks about. We have a carve out for Lake Charles Louisiana residents there.

You may use the word loggerheads. This is from Cameron Wilson posting his W's renewed calls. It's a great newspaper term. Sparking renewed calls for that. Yes, that's a really good one. We also got a nomination from Rob Joesbury. Another journalism only word, Royal. R-O-I-L,

Royal, especially in headlines. He's right, and I think the headline part is key because it's short. It's a short verb, and often you need the short verb for the headline

to make it fit in print. So a lot of people are royaled. I have absolutely never used the word royal in my normal speech. Yeah, some of these. There's also a certain category for words like that

that are, I mean, this probably applies to a lot of the words we're discussing. The meaning is sort of specific, and yet when something is so associated with journalism, you know, it's just sort of seeing them in headlines, it does have a sort of like implicit ambiguity to it, not ambiguity, or just sort of like, a weakness to it.

It's sort of diluted by the fact that we see it all the time. And so like, where you would feel, you might, you might hesitate to use the word annoyed in a headline because it really implies something about the person who's being annoyed, right? Or like, but you could say, you know, they were royal. You know, you could say, I mean, you could say that, you know, a party was royal, whatever. You can use royal because there's just a sort of dilution to that sort of usage. I can't remember this as we sit here and talk, but the New York Times, whenever Donald Trump would say something crazy and the stock market would get roiled, they had a different verb for it.

And it wasn't it wasn't spooked the markets. It wasn't royal the markets, but it was something like that. I'm going to look that up and figure out what that was because I swear the New York Times used this constantly whenever Trump made one of his crazier proclamations. Really going on here from Knox Harrington, David, Lodestar. Load star. Hulk Hogan was young David shoemaker's Lodestar. Absolutely no way you're ever going to say that. No.

In real life. No. Absolutely not. And a final one that I actually thought of when I read Lodestar. How about mantle? Mantle. Like took on the mantle? Yeah.

War the mantle, right? Took on the mantle? Absolutely. Not the mantle where you put the picture of you and your spouse and your kids. He took the mantle from somebody. No one actually says that. No one actually says that. But I have written that.

No, yeah. And why did I write it? because I read other people reading it. That's only in journalism word. All right, David, let's do the overword 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, always gratefully received. I've got a tweet here from the Washington Post from Wednesday. Quote, nobody has been killed by lightning in the United States this year. The first time the nation has made it this far into the year without a lightning death. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write, did Lightning write this. We would have also accepted, do not tempt Zeus. Thanks to Sam. By the way, the same day that Washington Post story was published, a man in New Jersey was killed by lightning on a golf course.

I mean, everybody on Twitter was having this great fun time party. And then it was like, oh, oh, God, that's awful. Is it just because we were inside for the whole year? It's a good question. I don't know. now we weren't out in the rain as much. But golf was a thing. Golf was still a thing during the pandemic.

I don't know. In that same vein, David, there was an op-ed in the Washington Post with the following headline. Think twice before changing the tax rules to soak billionaires. Soke, by the way,

pretty good, only in journalism word. Underneath the headline about not soaking the billionaires was a picture of billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos. Don't soak the billionaires Jeff Bezos in the Washington Post. It was an overworked Twitter joke or maybe just a good joke to write.

Did a billionaire publish this? Oh, oh, wait. It was in his paper. Thanks to Travis Barnett for that one. And finally, and also about Jeff Bezos. Wow. I know you saw this. CNN reports Jeff Bezos will be flying to space on the first crude space flight of the New Shepherd,

the rocket ship made by his space company Blue Origin. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write, Standard Delivery should have Bezos return to Earth within three to five business days. Oh, that's good stuff. I like that. Thanks to our pal Matthew Moore. If you discovered a new frontier in Bezos humor, congrats. You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, we've got another press box postgame interview today

where we treat the author of a much-talked-talked-about magazine story like Tom Brady after he just won the Super Bowl. And we've got a special guest today. It is Peter Kiefer, who just published a story in Los Angeles magazine that lit up Twitter yesterday. It is called The Curious Rise of Twitter Power Broker, Yashar Ali. Peter, welcome to the press box. Hey, guys, thanks for having me.

This is really, this is a real post game. I feel like Peter has the towel around his neck with still sweat running off his forehead. This is all anyone I know could talk about right up until the point where I just pressed record. So thank you for being here. Yeah. Yeah. No, it was pretty wild. I was, I was anticipating a pretty big response, but this one actually widely exceeded all expectations. That's great. All right, Peter, here's our standard first question. Was the Ashara Lee story your idea, or was it the magazine's idea? It was my idea. And I say that with a slight caveat. Mayor Roshan, the editor of L.A. Mag, he had also been curious about him. But I had sort of

started poking around trying to figure out who Yashar was for a while now. Not with the intention of publishing anything, but I was just sort of asking around because my curiosity was peaked quite a while ago. And when I mentioned it to mayor, he was all in on it. So just for anyone that might be listening to this that doesn't know, who is Yashar Ali and why is he important enough to have written the story about him? Yeah. So Yashar is a, independent journalist now is what you would, I think, technically call him. He's somewhat of also a media figure. And he came out of the political scene. For years in the early odds, he was working as a fundraiser for a variety of California politicians. And then he did some work for Hillary Clinton,

presidential campaign in 2008. He then was hired by Gavin Newsom. who was then the mayor of San Francisco and sort of became a switchblade jackknife political operative and built this pretty impressive network of politicians, political operatives, donors. And from then he part laid that into this sort of Twitter personality. He started writing freelance for Huffington Post. And then he started doing a bit of work for New York Magazine. And then when the Me Too movement kicked off, that's when I really took notice of Yashar. He started breaking a string of stories, real, like legitimate scoops about Harvey Weinstein, about Les Moonvez.

And then actually was doing stories that were tied to the Black Lives Matter movement a few months later. So he was really kind of riding this cultural wave that was going on when journalists were really trying to ferret out bad behavior by sort of bad actors. And that's really how he came to prominence and came across my radar. And I'm guessing most other journalists radar. But what was interesting was that I had never heard of him. And I've worked in journalists for two plus decades now. And it's very hard to have the impact as immediately as you shah did. It takes years and years to learn the craft, learn the craft, to, you know, understand the ethical boundaries and guidelines that we try all to follow and to build the sources.

And Yashar just seemed to start breaking these massive scoops really quickly in his quote-unquote journalism career. So that alone was worth investigating. And then it became a real local story when he started writing about L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti. And that was really what prompted the magazine to sort of go all in on the story that came out two days ago. So he comes sort of out of left field. Where is he a sharp publishing these big scoops? Well, initially he was publishing them mostly at the Huffington Post. He did a few stories at New York Magazine, but most of the big scoops he had was at the

Huffington Post. And, you know, he did stories about a Netflix exec who he got fired. He did follow it up with a story about an ABC News executive, Barbara Fadita, who then who got fired. hired. You know, most recently he did, he did a story on Sharon Osborne, but that was not actually published at a, the news organization. He launched a substack newsletter now, which he's now become his primary mechanism for breaking the news that he has. So obviously there was a lot of reasons to get into the story, as you just explained. Was there a point when you were,

when you were reporting the story where you had was there an aha moment where you realized how big how important the story was going to be or significant it was going to be or when there was a real story there how big it could be yeah there definitely was there were several um that the i i wrote um a big feature on um vice president camilla harris for l a magazine in the fall and then i followed that up with um a cover story about uh california governor gavin newsome and the sort of troubles he was in with this recall movement. And when I was reporting out those stories, I realized that a lot of the sources I was talking to, they were all, they all knew Yashar. They all worked alongside him. And I sort of just like, when I was done with my chats about the vice president

and the governor, I would just sort of ask them about Yashar. And they all like, I mean, so many people just were collectively like, you have got to do a story about him. There's just so much more there that people don't know. And one conversation, as you guys know, one conversation led to, you know, three more conversations. And I realized that he had this, the aha moment for me, at least, I think came when I realized that there was this pattern where he would get close to very powerful and wealthy women, patrons, basically, and start out as sort of a confidant and friend. And but in all three instances, everything went south. And all three of these women ultimately felt totally burned by the guy. And that's when I was like, okay, something's fishy here. And then it got

like even weirder and weirder when I started actually got into contact and finally got his notice. And that shifted the profile away from a right around to an actual participation from the subject. So that added a whole new dynamic to the piece. Let's hold Yashar's participation for one second. I do want to ask you about that. But go back to that patron idea. One of these patrons is the comedian Kathy Griffin. Tell us what happened between Yashar and Kathy Griffin. Right. So yeah, Kathy got into real hot water when she posted that photo of her holding a severed head of Donald Trump back in 20, I think it was 2016, 2017. And she had like the PR meltdown of an epic proportion. She was just toxic. She got fired

from CNN. You know, everyone was canceling her shows. It was a total mess for her. And that was the moment when Yashar entered the picture for her. She actually reached out to him and they struck up this online friendship. And very quickly, Kathy, who had, she had, who I think would probably tell most people she had lost most of her friends. No one would talk to her, no one would touch her. And she was at a very weak and vulnerable moment and enter this relationship with Yashar. And he really tried to help her out. And he did.

And she would say that. And he was providing guidance on trying to rehab her career. He was making introductions to journalists for her. And he ended up writing this glowing profile. of her in New York Magazine. But shortly after that piece came out, he moved into her house and ended up living with her from anywhere from, he says, six to seven months. She says it was closer to nine months.

And after, you know, after four or five months, things started to get weird, at least from Kathy's point of view and from the people who were around Kathy's point of view. I think they felt like he was definitely overstaying his welcome and that the relationship had gotten into a very strange territory that people were growing increasingly worried about. Wow. There's a lot of these relationships that are sort of separate from his public career now. You know, there was a suit was filed against him or I'm going to get the legalese wrong by a member of the Getty family who he had borrowed something like $170,000, $80,000 from and hadn't paid back and still hasn't paid back, according to your reporting.

And then, I mean, there's a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of insinuation that, you know, that, or I guess the question is, does this, does his past sort of apply to his present, right? And I, and, and I don't know, I feel like we're all, it's, I feel like it's, I feel like it's just part of like the, the age that we're in, that we all are sort of caught flatfooted by this, right? There's a great, one of the most compelling paragraphs in the piece is when you start asking Jake Tapper, or Maggie Haberman people, how they know you, Charlie, these are people that claim to be friends with him, and they don't, none of them

remember how they met him. I think you reference a talented Mr. Ripley directly in the piece. But is this something that, I think, is this something that we're all sort of guilty of, that we all just sort of, you know, you toggle over somebody's name on Twitter and you see, you know, New York magazine editor at large or something,

and you just assume, I should know who this person is, and so I am assuming that I know who this person is, right? Is that the world that we live? live in now? Yeah, and I tried to really, in the stories, it started out as a profile of this guy, but then it kind of evolved into something larger, and it grew to this sort of commentary on the state of the modern world, modern media, the state of journalism, and how social media and technology has impacted the way we go about our work and the way we go about our work and the way

we go about our personal lives. And so that was definitely a part of it. I don't know if we're all necessarily guilty of it. I think, you know, it depends on your relationship with social media, I think. And mine, I've always approached it with a real healthy dose of skepticism. And, you know, I'm on Twitter. I'm not very reactive. I've ultimately decided that it's a very hard medium for me to to find any comfort in, at least as a participant. So I don't know, you're right. The interesting thing about, um, yshar was that on the, there was a whole thing of duality that we tried to explore in the story, um, which was that, you know, he was, on the one hand, he shared everything about his personal life. He was his open book on his Twitter feed. Yet when you actually

approached him and trying to figure out who he was, he was like ridiculously guarded and secretive, to the point of almost being paranoid. And so we were like, huh, that's peculiar. You know, on the one hand, he's this sort of ruthless journalist political operative who just like toppled, you know, all of these titans of various industries. And yet he'll, like, within minutes of meeting him, he'll start crying about elephants and orangutans. And he wears his, like, his emotions just very openly on his sleeve.

So that was another weird sort of conflict of this guy. And then the final one, which I think addresses your point. point is you had a group of journalists who I know, who all of us would speak, you know, we talked about Yashara and we followed him. And we all sort of like, on the one hand, marveled at some of his incredible scoops. But then really were sort of kind of left uncomfortable by some of the stories he broke and how he seemed to be taking this position of this, I don't know, Chancellor in chief was how somebody ultimately describes him to me. His form of journalism was very much of this moment when people were being, you know, rooted out and castigated

for past indiscretions or mistakes that they've made. And Yashar has become, that's sort of his stock and trade. Now, a lot of the journalists that I know were very skeptical of it and critical of the methods that he was using and some of the stories he published. But on the other hand, you have these incredibly successful, incredibly intelligent, a journalist who I admire and who I think most people admire, all of whom were just saying, I don't see anything wrong with what he's doing. You know, he's a great guy. He has, you know, impeccable credentials. And he has, you know, I ask them point blank. You don't do any of the stories he's done make you uncomfortable. And they all said no, which was just a weird thing for me to have really competent journalists in one camp

going, this is totally dodgy and sketchy. And then also equally as powerful and competent journalists going, I don't see what the problem is here. And that kind of, all those conflicts ultimately led me to think that this guy was just an absolutely fascinating, unique character. It's so true. And to David's point a second ago, I think I started taking him more seriously because I saw Maggie Haberman retweeting him a lot. And you have a certain idea of Maggie Haberman as a reporter. And I think just in my mind, I thought, okay, well, she's retweeting him. She's not just retweeting anything.

So that must mean that he is a serious journalist, at least in her eyes. Yeah. And I heard that from so many people when I was reporting the story. And how people who knew you, Shah, from the political world, they brought up the fact that they were like, I just don't, I don't, and these are people that are very skeptical of Yashar. And now, again, I will leave it up to the reader to decide how they ultimately feel about Yashar because I think he's, like again, he's complicated. There's some good things he's done and he's obviously made some pretty horrific mistakes and exhibited questionable behavior in the

past. But what came up often was, you know, people going, why is Maggie retweeting this guy? She's providing him with this veneer of respectability. She and, you know, Jake Capper, when they would sort of send him DMs or retweet him, and they weren't the only ones. There's a lot of traditional, well-regarded award-winning journalists that were engaging with Yashara in a way. But I think you're right insofar as they gave him a new level of legitimacy in the eyes of people who don't work in the industry and may not know. exactly how, you know, how these stories come out and how to break down the nuances of one story versus another one. I think they definitely, they definitely gave him the air of being a legitimate

member of the immediate elite. Peter, I want to return to the idea of your interactions with Ali. How do you reach out to him when you start out this story and what's his response? Yeah. So I, um, when he broke this first story about, um, um, um, um, Eric, Garcetti, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti's political aide Rick Jacobs, I immediately emailed him and said, we are super interested in doing a profile of you. I don't know what length. I don't know what style, but like clearly you are like this powerful figure. You've sort of upended the career of, you know, the mayor of Los Angeles. You know, you're a fascinating subject. Can we do something? And I sent that to him two or three times via email and he never got back to me. So I just kept reporting the story,

anticipating that he wasn't going to participate and it would be a right around. And then actually, it was kind of a weird turn of events. There were so many weird turn of events in the story, but I started doing some reporting on his Venmo fundraising. During the COVID pandemic, he sort of shifted. He's been a sort of avid philanthropist in raising money for various causes over his career as well. This comes out of his time as a political fundraiser. And so he's raised money for a variety of things. His favorite one is wildlife conservation. But during the COVID pandemic, he put out this call to his 800,000 plus followers saying,

you know, so many people are suffering. If you send me money, I will look at the tweet. that I get from people who are in need, and I will dole out the money to these people in a very transparent way. Now, at this point, I'd known that he'd had these financial problems in his background, and a lot of people knew that he had these financial problems in his background, and they were all, like, calling me going, this is crazy? Like, is this okay? Is this even within the ethical guidelines of Venmo and Twitter and all these places? So, anyways, I reached out to a significant, well-known public figure who had given him money to his Venmo campaign.

I will resist telling you the name, but it's a very well-known person. And I texted her, and she basically saying, hi, I'm Peter Kiefer. I'm doing this thing about fundraising. I saw you gave some money to Yashar's campaign. Can I talk to you about it? 20 minutes later, Yashar reached out to the editor of L.A. Magazine. So clearly this individual forwarded on my request to Yashar. And it was at that moment that he sort of sprung to action, reached out to Mayor, my editor-in-chief, and they had a conversation.

And clearly he wanted to know what we were working on. And that was the moment at which he decided that he was going to participate in the story because he knew that we were going to go, we were going ahead with it anyway. So that ultimately got him involved. And then it became this huge sort of, you know, a rollercoaster. of trying to get him to sit down, talking to him. And so it was, yeah, that's how I ultimately got him to participate. That's fantastic stuff. I mean, the story, the story of writing the story turns into the story,

and that's part of what makes it so good. You know, you close, or at the end of the piece, you're leaving the hotel where you had your meeting with him and sort of looking back over your shoulder to see him sitting there, you know, scrolling through his phone. I guess, you know, despite having said that he needed to get out of there, whatever else. But, um, and you touch on his current, the current state of his Twitter account, which we don't have to go into too much detail on, but, but it did sort of seem like,

it's, it seemed like the story could have kept going. So, you know, one thing we ask on here is how much longer could you have worked on this? Um, if there, if you had all the time in the world. Oh. Oh. I mean, honestly, I was so emotionally exhausted, um, by just the interactions that were required to get us over the finish line. That I don't, honestly, I don't know how much more energy I had. I was pretty afraid at the end of it. But, you know, there was, I left a lot of stuff on the cutting room table. And there is more to the story.

And I think people will be doing follow-ups, is my guess. But I, honestly, I was, I was sort of toast. I was, I needed to get this thing out there. I had worked on it for quite some time. we, we, Shar had asked us to delay it, which we agreed to. So we pushed it and pushed it and pushed it. And, you know, I mean, again, we don't need to get into too much of it. But some of the stuff he was putting on Twitter in the weeks before we published really kind of pitched us into like a real ethical quandary about the story and when we do publish and is, you know, what's what's what's, how do we

move forward? Because we were never going to kill the story. Um, but obviously he, he, he's, he's, made it very, very challenging and added different dynamics to our decision of when to put it out. And we took all that stuff really seriously. But ultimately, I think that we felt like we had granted him a lot of opportunities that I don't think he grants to a lot of people he writes about. So I'm sleeping well at night now. But honestly, I was done. I don't, I didn't really want to live in his head for too much longer. So your decision was essentially. we need to publish this at some point. And we've given him a chance to respond.

And even though there's all these Twitter messages out that you talk about in the piece and you go through in the piece, we're going to go ahead and publish it. That was the point you got to. Yeah. I mean, the story for the print edition comes out in a few days. And that was shipped, I don't know, a couple weeks ago now. So that, I mean, at that point, the story was locked. And it was going to come out in print.

The question was, when do we put it out online? There was a lot of pressure from sources and from other media types who were eager to see the story. It was actually one of the first times the magazine has put a story out so far in advance of the print edition. And there was a variety of reasons why we did that. We held off actually for a bit, but we always knew we were going to put it out early. But yeah, it was a pretty harrowing a few weeks just because of all, everything that was sort of, going on surrounding the story. And I'm just glad it's out there.

I'm glad it's out there. I'm glad it's been well received. I do feel like we were fair to you, Schar. There was some hard stuff in the story. And it's never fun to have to talk, you know, to tell him and walk him through all those, the sort of troubling aspects of the story. But I know we did our job and we gave him ample opportunities to respond. He might dispute that.

But I feel like, we handled this as well as we could have. I totally agree. I mean, there were, there were points in the story where I think somebody else or another publication would have gone in a little bit more pointedly, and I thought it was handled really deftly by you and your editorial staff. But you're talking about the feeling that you had a pressure to publish from some places, and obviously dealing with Yashar was a, was part of the kind of the negotiation to get it out there.

but there had to be some conversation between you and the magazine where you're worried about blowback, right? I mean, you're writing a critical piece about somebody who's ended careers. That's why he's significant to a large degree. Or was that a part of the deliberation at all? Oh, yeah, totally. I mean, almost from the get-go. I mean, I'll tell you that when I, I mean, like eight out of ten sources that I spoke to,

I mean, so few would go on the record, which I say in the story, everyone, there was. was a there was a real sense of fear surrounding the topic. And that was communicated to me by dozens of people I talked about. You know, one source I got on the phone, and he's a, you know, he's a, he's been around the block, we'll say, for quite, for many decades. And he says, oh, Peter, you're a very brave man. And I go, why? Because Ashar is the biggest bully I've ever encountered. And I was like, oh, God, what am I getting into here? You know, um, but. But, But, you know, yeah, we did brace for some blowback. And we were ready for it.

But we really picked through this story. We spent so much time on trying to get the tone right. We really, I was in constant contact with Yashar. Our editor, Mayor, was in constant contact with Yashar. We walked him through all the hard stuff. We really included as much as we could from him to try and, you know, get his point of you out there. He didn't make it easy on us at all. And so it was, it was, it was, it was challenging. I'm, frankly, I'm surprised that there hasn't been more blowback. I'm not, I'm knock on wood.

I hope it's, it still may come. But I, yes, I was prepared. And, but it was never going to stop us altogether. You can't let that stop you, you know, it's just, it's not that that's, that's, that's just allowing bad behavior to go on and on and on. Someone needed to write this story. If it wasn't going to be me, it was going to be somebody else. And so I'm glad it's out there. But yeah, I'm ready to move on to the next project. A couple more we like to ask people who've just published a story, Peter.

What was the grand total of your expense report for this piece? Well, I'm a freelancer at LA Magazine, so I keep my expenses pretty low. Uh, no, I mean, other than a few meals and some coffees, I mean, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, a lot, it was done during the pandemic. So, you know, a lot, it was just like, I don't know, cell phone bills, a few coffees here and there, but, you know, I think in a, in a, in a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, minimum. The author William Volman once ended a book with anti-acknowledgements, a list of all the people who did not help him write the book. Who was the biggest name who stiffed you for an interview in this piece? Oh, God. You know, the funny thing about the story was people would

go on, people would talk to me. Everyone really wanted this story to come out. But as going back to my previous comment, everyone was so scared about what could happen to them. And I think that is, that's reflective of a number of things. One, it's reflective of, I think the bullying, some of the bullying nature of Yashar's actions in the past. You know, he has gone after people and he has sicked his followers on people. You know, Allison Roman is sort of the classic example, the New York Times food columnist. So most, but it's, it's also, it's also reflective of this moment in media where people are worried about getting canceled. I don't know about you, I'm getting tired of the word cancel, but I don't know what else to, what other term to use. But I think generally,

the feeling is, I don't know how much longer we can go on when writers, academics, teachers, public figures are all walking on eggshells for everything they do because they worry that a person, maybe not necessarily Yashar, but someone like Yashar might come along and, you know, misconstrue something they say and use it as a bludgeon to get them, you know, canceled or fired or impugn their character. So anyways, to get back to your question, there's not somebody that just blew me off. The really challenging part of this story was that I talked to all the right people, and so few of them could summon the courage to go on the record. And I understand why.

And I went back to them repeatedly being like, look, it's really important for this story to have the impact. I need as many people as we can to go on the record. I know it's frightening. Let's all just hold hands and jump off the clip together. I promise you, I'm not going to burn you. And some of them did, but I was disappointed in a number of people. really want to share their names. But that was the most disappointing element of it because it's just sort of a sad state of affairs when everyone is is so scared of these online

Twitter mobs coming after them. And I think that's a sign of sort of a sickness in the online culture that I hope corrects itself at some point. All right. This is what the last one, Peter, we always ask us on a scale of one to 10, 10 being I just wrote my own version of Mark Leibovic's piece about Mike Allen and Politico, and one being I went to Ralphson, L.A., and hid every issue of the magazine I could find near the checkout aisles. How do you feel this story came out? I am, honestly, I think this is, I've never been prouder of a piece that I've published than this one. So I'm going to go nine and a half, 10. I'd like to think I could do something better down the road. I don't know if I have in my past. So I'm hesitant to say 10. But based upon the outpouring of

congratulations and support. I'm feeling like this. For me, it was a real personal triumph. And so I'm going to go nine or ten currently with the caveat being, I'm not ruling out another one in the future. Peter Kiefer, his story, The Curious Rise of Twitter Power Broker, Yashar Lee, online now in print form in a couple of days.

Peter, thanks so much for coming on the press box. Guys, thanks so much for having me. All right, it's time for David Shoeaker. your guest is the strained pun headline. Yeah. Delayed reaction. David's still, David is still haunted by the cicadas.

Monday's headline about the closure of a North Carolina rug factory was the silence of the looms. We got votes for cutting the rugs. Oh, that's good. Very good. Also, end of an area, like an area rug. Pretty funny. Today's headline comes from Mr.

Paul Feinstein. It's from the New York Times. It's about a new mini trend, David, of very immersive multimedia exhibits of Vincent Van Gogh's work. So you're not just looking at Van Gogh paintings on a wall. You're walking into a room with a soundtrack and animated projections and it's really, it's almost like going to the IMAX. Now, to help you really get into Vincent Van Gogh. One New York Museum is even thinking about putting in an absinth bar an absinth bar absent is going to be your keyword here what was the New York Times

his strain pun headline at like the absinth minded professor what I'm like okay you've got you've got the right punded okay what what does what other what other absence

phrases could we play with here oh um no uh leave a Absent. Absence. Absence. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Okay, so here we go. Absinth. Absinth makes the ear. The heart grow. Absent. What are you waving at? Makes the art, art grow fonder. Would absinth make the art grow fonder?

Wow. Terrifically tortured. That's really, really good. Pun headline. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis, production magic by Erica Servantus. We are back Monday. The more lukewarm takes about the media.

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