The Press Box - Losing Your Job Because of Tweets and Listener Mail

Episode Date: January 28, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker address the question, can you lose your job because of a tweet? They weigh in on the situations surrounding Lauren Wolfe, Will Wilkinson, and others (3:15). Later, they open some listener mail and answer your questions about QAnon, Super Bowl radio row, podcast fatigue, and much more (29:55)! Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker guesses the strained-pun headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, Marty Barron announced he is retiring as executive editor of the Washington Post in February. What I want to know is, does anyone in 2021 better fit the archetype of newspaper editor as hero? Oh, wow. I thought you were going to ask me if there would ever be another hero, like a newspaper editor as hero. Dean Bekay will get his will get his love when he steps down at the New York Times Yeah For sure

Yeah it's true I mean I feel like Marty Barron might be the last of the sort of breed of editors that You know might have almost certainly had the word Swashbuckling attached to their name When they were in their 30s and some you know insider print journal You know right?

I mean like That's the mandatory adjective for a brave editor is swashbuckling Right you know I know I don't, I find it hard. I don't think we're there anymore. I think Dean Bacay is sort of a new archetype, which is just like a sort of earnest, a serious kind of guardian of the genre.

Does that make sense that like, there was a time where like newspapers were so stodgy, or reviewed it so stodgy, that we wanted our editors to be flashy. And now for the, for the, for newspapers to continue, the editors need to be almost stodgier than the things. They need to be the, you know, they need to be so nerdy, for lack of a better word about their subject.

So, and so protective of it. So, like, grounded in the old school that we might not really see editors of that kind of flash anymore at the big periodicals. It's true, though I never got the sense with Marty Barron hearing people talk about him that he was exactly Ben Bradley strutting around the newsroom. Sure. With that kind of, you know, that kind of, you know, I don't know, Bono Me or whatever it is. I will say this, no matter what genuinely great stuff a newspaper editor does at his or her day job, is it not true that their cultural capital is increased one billion fold when they are played in a movie by someone like Leib Schreiber? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, Ben Bradley was a legendary swashbuckling news. paper editor. But he got played twice in movies. And the second time was by Tom Hanks. Yeah. You know. I mean, that's great. Yeah. So whatever we think of actual Ben Bradley, we also have movie Ben Bradley or movie Marty Barron. Yeah, that's true. In our minds. And they are as swashbuckling as it gets. Coming up on today's podcast, should you lose your journalism job because of your tweets? Plus, we answer your listener mail, including the question, how big a story would it be to find out who the Q in QAnon is? All that more on the press box, a part of the Ringer podcast network.

Hello, media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Schumacher here. David, since we last spoke, we've had a couple of journalists fired for their tweets. We're still doing this. Feels like the longest running story in media criticism or podcasting. somebody had a tweet and their parent company got mad. Well, somebody got mad or performatively mad and alerted their parent company. Am I getting too far ahead in the story to say that? No, no.

I'm glad you brought up that very important clarification. Let's begin with example number one from the last week. Lauren Wolf was a freelance editor at the New York Times. According to the Washington Post, Eric Wimple, who reported on her story, She worked three to six days a week as part of the Papers Live Updates team. I'm quoting Wimple there. On January 19th, this is the day before Joe Biden took office, Wolf tweeted, Biden landing at joint base Andrews now, I have chills.

Tweeted that. Glenn Greenwald, you know him, tweeted in response, if you're in the national press and will be on TV at any point today, and being to feel the need to weep joyously, just hold it in until you find a private place. Nobody is expecting any adversarial coverage over the next four years, but it's just a matter of personal dignity. There were a lot of other people on Twitter that felt aggrieved,

including Britt Hume. Wolf had another tweet, which was also deleted, called it childish for Donald Trump not to offer Air Force One to Joe Biden to ferry him from, Delaware to Washington, D.C. for the inauguration, that turned out to be factually inaccurate. So she deleted that. Anyway, Lauren Wolf lost her job because of that at the New York Times. Mm-hmm. The New York Times disputes that, right?

Well, we'll get into that. This was the Times statement. They said there's a lot of inaccurate information circulating on Twitter. For privacy reasons, we don't get into the details of personnel matters, but we can say that we didn't in someone's employment over a single tweet. Out of respect for the individuals involved, we don't plan to comment further. Yeah.

What a statement. We feel that we cannot possibly comment on the record about what led to this dismissal. But wink, wink, it wasn't just this. Yeah. I mean, it implicates Wolf unsuttally,

just enough in like five different directions. that your imagination can run wild. I think there's a very basic question that is a product of my mind running wild, which is like, if this tweet wasn't inciting incident, and they called HR called her, her managers called her whatever, and asked her to explain the tweet,

would her answer matter? Do you think? Do you think if she was just like, you know, I have video footage that proves those were two separate thoughts. One was the plane landing and one was I have, it got dust in my eyes from this, you know, from the plane landing or, or if she was, put on a sweater.

Right. I was cold. I got chill. I literally had chills. Uh, or what if she had? Oh yeah, sorry. It's chills. What if she had chills because she, uh, was afraid for the direction of the country under

Democrat, Democratic, uh, the Democratic presidency? Let me slice the cheese a little bit even thinner here. What if she said, it's not that I had chills because. I love Joe Biden. I'm so happy the Democrats got elected. I have chills because American democracy, which was directly threatened two weeks ago, has been preserved. Yeah. And we are actually going to have a ceremony where one president hands power over to another president. Is that an untimesy thought to be in favor of American democracy? Certainly not. But I think the idea, so I think that the answer is, I mean, I kind of feel like the answer to that question doesn't particularly matter, right? It's less about the way it was what was intended by the tweet and more about how the tweet was received in some quarters.

Let me read you another chunk of Eric Wimple's column on this, which explains the backstory a little bit. Wolf said that an editor at the paper contacted her after she published the chills tweet. The Times couldn't be associated with such a tweet, said the manager, and that her gig with the paper would be ending. months ago, recalls Wolf, she received a warning from the same manager about her Twitter activity. As an example, he cited a tweet in which Wolf says she connected the resistance of conservative men to wearing masks to, quote, toxic masculinity. She deleted that tweet. But according to Wolf, the manager said her posts in general were borderline and that other times staffers had done worse. Last week's tweet was the only reason they fired me, Wolf says.

So, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I don't dispute any of this. And certainly Lauren Wolf wasn't a, you know, a celebrity level employee or something where, which it would take seemingly to get sort of a fair hearing. I mean, social media, forgive me for zooming out. But social media in general is double-edged sword, I guess. I mean, in the journalistic world, I mean, it's sort of a forum where,

to use another turn of phrase where the, you know, the employers get to sort of have their cake and eat it too. They want writers. They want names who have made their name on social media who come with a bunch of followers. Often who tweet provocative and interesting things. The days of you should have written that as a column or miles behind us, right? Keeping interesting online so that people will in turn hopefully find your, you know, know, publication, um, is, is important. But you don't want someone who hasn't, sort of like, you, you, you, you don't want the wrong people tweeting. And, and in this case, the wrong people

seem to be, what, any employee with less than 100,000 followers or something, right? I mean, it's like if you haven't earned your blue check mark, then you're not allowed to be provocative, but if you can't be provocative, and I'm using provocative very loosely here. Yes. If you can't be if you can't be provocative, then how do you sort of earn the check mark, right? I mean, it's a, it's certainly a double standard. Absolutely. And if you're, there's no, there's no question to me if you're a star reporter at the New York Times or anywhere, that your, the scale is vastly different from what you can get away with

on Twitter. I'll also have one more zoom out thought that connects Twitter to the New York Times. In addition to what you just said, have you noticed New York Times reporters, and I'm not going to name them because I don't want to get anybody in trouble. But we'll get on Twitter and have these slashing jokes about politicians written in this wise guy, very jaded newspaper reporter kind of language. Sometimes you're like, oh, wow. You know, New York Times reporter is saying that. Again, not offended.

Just like, oh, wow, given all the, you know, what the paper values. What Wolf did was express an actual human emotion. I'm getting chills, either for Biden or for the fact democracy didn't die or whatever. it's almost like at the times it's okay to you know tiptoe across that line if you're being jaded and if you're being funny and if you're being you know that that sort of you know gimlet-eyed reporter it's not okay if you're being an actual human if you're being earnest yeah yeah i mean the subject matter the fact that she was perceived as being teary eyed over a democratic president Again, chills.

I want to, you keep bringing us to tears, David. It's just mere chills. I'm looking in the mirror. It was me who was crying. I'm not crying. You're crying. The chills, if the chills had been brought about by a speech that Donald Trump had given a year ago, I can't imagine anybody would have lost their job over that.

Because there is a perception that the media in times in particular have as a liberal bias. and this kind of tweet is grist for that sort of online, whatever, argument. Person to get aggrieved and say, look at the liberal New York Times. Exactly. It's not, listen, I mean, I guess you can't totally separate this from James Bennett getting fired from the, or whatever, taking leave of the opinion page and Barre Weiss's complaints, et cetera, et cetera. but because there were certainly liberal left-leaning people who were asking for them to resign or be fired. But this tweet in particular doesn't really have any stakes if it was just like a random, a random New York Times editor who said something mildly pro-Republicate.

There would not have been, she would not have lost her job. Wesley Lowry had a good tweet about this. He said this. journalists should be judged by the fairness of their work, not a random tweet or passing comment or private email in which those human biases are expressed. Gutless and reactionary responses to bad faith online outrage are more embarrassing to and undermining a perceived integrity of a media institution

that whatever the staff are tweeted. Every bit of that is right. And I always hate suggesting like what the proper, you know, penalty should be short of losing their job because I don't think any penalty should be. I don't want to be that person because, but isn't there a happy medium here where you say, hey, look, can you just not tweet for a couple of weeks? Because you know, if the times or whoever feels that that is off message on Twitter, isn't that, isn't that the right thing to do? Like, if you're editing is exemplary, if you're doing a great job with us, we want you to keep doing

that great job. Yeah, listen, I don't, I don't, I, I, I've almost never. think that someone losing their job, especially someone who's kind of working in the trenches, is the right thing. I mean, even a lot of, you know, writers, I'm sympathetic to people who kind of get in ideological situations and get in trouble for them. But I can imagine a world in which,

if there were other tweets like the Times HR memo intimated, if there were other issues or whatever, I mean, listen, there's a big difference. Just in a practical level, which I'm arguing with myself from earlier here, but there is a practical difference between, you know, someone with longstanding and a big reputation saying something in the exact same thing coming out of the mouth of, like, a low-level intern or something like that. I mean, there's certain people or someone who's a problematic employee, this could have been

the third strike or the 100th strike or whatever. They could have been specifically told, don't use the word chills in a tweet, or you will be fired. And so, you know, the hand, the hand was forced here. But I think that even if you assume something wacky like that was true, which I don't believe it is, but if you give the New York Times every benefit of the doubt, what's happening here is like the two different ideals are budding up against each other. One is don't express your political opinions in public for fear that we seem biased. But the other one, which they should be why, which they should take very seriously, is don't

let is is is don't let the the the bad faith argument political arguments of any side affect your coverage and your employment right they should the more important ideal for them in this instance should be or the should be them saying no we will keep her employed specifically because people are faux outraged about this there you right it's a different world in which It's a different one from some of these things we've seen before when like Mike Sernovich got James gun fired from Guardians of the Galaxy and all that kind of stuff where it was you could go to their Twitter accounts

and see how deliberately and performatively bad faith that was but what they were doing was assaulting I mean literally like like you know Gamergate tactics like mass assaulting an unwitting PR department at a media empire who had never dealt with this stuff before right? I mean they did they no one knows what to do are responsive. Anytime anything like this had happened before, even closely approaching it,

is just to fire somebody and put out a press release and that's it. They caught them unaware. The New York Times should not have been caught off guard by this. They covered these stories, right? They know the sort of bad faith that is going on here. And to be so preoccupied with their own image at the expense of what in this case should be the more valuable, the more valuable ideal is the real mistake. Absolutely. Absolutely right.

The mission of the paper is to find something like truth then in these situations you should be finding what is truth and what is bad faith Twitter performance. Absolutely.

And listen, and listen, you should be allowed to say I woke up unhappy today or I'm sad because my cat died or I'm impressed with the speech of this president without having anything to do. I'm not saying, that there two things are separate, right? I mean, there is going to be some overlap and some rules

that apply on social media and that kind of thing, but you should be able on social media to say innocuous human things. And this shouldn't have even risen to the level of like it crossing an editor's desk. Wolf now has a substack newsletter, which is called, wait for it, David, chills. Chills. That's so good. That's so much better than whatever pun I was going to put on it. fantastic. Brings us to the case of Will Wilkinson. Will Wilkinson, I feel, is one of the OGs of the political blogosphere. Oh, yeah.

He was kind of, he's in the team picture with Matt Iglesias and Ezra Klein and all these people who have grown up to be such big parts of our lives, David. Will Wilkinson worked at the Niskanon Center, which is kind of the reasonable Republican think tank. And on Twitter, on inauguration day, he made a joke. The joke was, if Biden really. wanted unity, he'd lynch Mike Pence. The joke

there is that obviously liberals don't like Mike Pence and Trumpy Republicans don't like Mike Pence because he didn't help Trump cheat and win another term. So everybody dislikes Mike Pence. Well, yeah, the protesters who stormed the Capitol were chanting Lynch Mike Pence.

Right. With that little undercutte. Take him up on their offer or whatever. That was the joke. Wilkinson later tweeted. He sort of deleted the tweet and screenshot it, which is by the way, a very admirable thing to do when you do this. It was sharp sarcasm, but looked like a call for violence. That's always wrong, even as a joke. It was especially wrong at a moment when unity and peace are so critical, I'm deeply sorry, and vow not to repeat the mistake. However, the Niskanin Center said,

we draw the line at statements that are or can in any way be interpreted as condoning or promoting violence. As such, the Niskanin Center has with a heavy, hard parted ways with Will Wilkinson. We thank you for his valuable contributions to the organization, et cetera, et cetera. The Twitter response to this, speaking of Twitter response, was genuine outrage from everybody. For people that agree with Will Wilkinson politically and people that disagree with him. Elizabeth Spires tweeted, we appear to have achieved a small marker of bipartisan unity. No one of any political stripe thinks Willowson should have been fired. yeah now his is a different variety of tweet that set off people's radar right on a one case genuine human emotion

in this case sarcasm as wilkinson put it sharp sarcasm he is clearly not calling for violence but he is making a joke about that right he is taking all the all the shitty things that happened in Washington, D.C. in the last month, and he is doing a, doing a joke. Right. And while one can actually see, you know, if you, if you, if you, if you are, if one is so inclined, one can imagine a corporate edict that this would run afoul of, right? I mean, you could imagine a world in which there was really a big meeting that was called, is that anybody that uses the word lynch or it promotes anything resembling violence jokes about violence, you know, on social media will be fired.

And if he did that, then he'd be fired. I guess the problem with that is as reason.com pointed out, Jerry Taylor is the president of the Niscannon Center, has also tweeted about, you know, punching people in the face and various other things, right? I mean, he's, no one is, no one is free of accusation, you know, and these kinds of things. We've all, I mean, we might not have tweeted that exact tweet, but I think the problem is them acting like they had some sort of standing rule when clearly they didn't, right? It's that sort of disingenuous argument when probably they're just covering their own asses from again being, hearing it in good faith or bad from people who didn't like that tweet.

Yeah. And Wimple brought this up in his piece about Lauren Wolf and this comes up every time we have one of these controversies. There is no way you can draw rules for this stuff. Right. So if you're, if you're Jerry Taylor or if you're, you know, Dean Bacath,

the New York Times or whomever you are, there's absolutely no way you can draw up a set of rules that doesn't last 10,000 pages to try to police, even if, even if you have a very good faith Twitter policy says, we want our, we want our writers and employees to be out there and doing it. We want them to be funny.

We want them to be edgy, all that stuff. There's just no way to write any of this stuff. down. There's no way to make rules about this. Well, and at the way and at the rate that, you know, these things, whatever, I mean, that, that media is evolving. Even if you somehow got it perfect, if you wrote the, you know, 10 commandments and there was no objection, they'd be outdated in 15 minutes. No. So there's like, everybody's like, well, what's the standard? Well, there's no standard. There can never be a standard to try to like put rules on, on tweets and

memes and whatever. Like, how would you even start something like that? So that always comes up. I love this tweet from Adam Surr, where this week alone, people were fired from the New York Times, the Niscanon Center, and Fox News for making conservatives mad. At Fox News, he's talking about Chris Steyerwalt, who was the political editor, got famous for calling Arizona for Joe Biden very early

in the election night slash election week saga back in November, which meant that Fox News was saying, before almost any other network that Joe Biden essentially had won the presidency, because after that it became very hard for Donald Trump to win the presidency. He is now out at Fox News. So, and I don't know if we can group him into this trifecta, but to server's point, there is a certain commonality between these people. Well, you know, we talked about the bad faith complaints, indignation, whatever, and certainly I'm sure some of the people that complain about Wilkinson And frankly, the people who complained, you know, about Fox News did it in good faith,

the misbegotten or, you know, misguided, idiotic good faith. But I think what all the thing that ties all these together is not just that it's conservatives that have been made angry, but it's that people have been made angry. I mean, this is like, you know, some of these headlines are referencing cancel culture. I mean, this is, every one of these people's was fired because someone was felt aggrieved or pretended to feel aggrieved. And their employer felt the pressure of those people's feelings, right? It's very unlikely. We don't know everything that happened.

It's incredibly unlikely that any of these would have been, any of these people would have been fired strictly because of internal HR issues. Performance at their job. Yeah. The actual carrying out of their job. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I agree.

And if you want to read something interesting, Will Wilkinson, who also has a substack, it's called Model Citizen, wrote this really good, subtle story on quote unquote cancel culture. Because he had been very skeptical of cancel culture. And then people say, ha, look, you got canceled. Look what happened. You're a victim of cancel culture.

And he wrote this very, very good piece, which I recommend people check out. All right. time for the overwork Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag. That was so obvious that all of media, Twitter, made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod

where they are always gratefully received. David, have you been following the GameStop saga? Yes. I didn't really have a choice. So as best I understand it and jump in here because neither one of us are especially literate in this kind of thing. the residents slash denizens of Reddit and Discord started placing option bets on GameStop, GameStop being the place at your local strip mall where you go buy video games.

They wound up driving up GameStop's value from $2 billion to like $24 billion. In the process, they screwed with a hedge fund that had shorted GameStop. Am I saying, am I factually accurate so far? Yes. Yeah. Okay. A bunch of great Twitter jokes, David, about this story. The traders on the web are seizing the memes of production.

Another one. From here, expect GameStop stock to go up, up, down, down, left right, left right, BA start. Children of the 80s, we'll appreciate that. And finally, a share of GameStop stock is currently valued at $344, which means a GameStop would buy it from you for $12.75. You and I haven't played video games in a while, but we get that. I get that one. We get that one.

From this very same topic, David, I draw your attention to this paragraph in the Financial Times. Quote, one user with the moniker deep fucking value. Deep fucking value on the popular Reddit forum, Wall Street Betts, posted screenshots Tuesday showing how he had turned about $50,000 worth of GameStop call options. into nearly $23 million this year. It was an overword Twitter joke to write looking forward to deep fucking value being the protagonist of the next Michael Lewis book.

Thanks to John Gets, the Laundry, Michael Jones, Ken Barrett, and Russell Jackson. Before we get off this subject, I would just want to, there was a lot of conversation on this show but also everywhere else about what, like, Twitter was going to look like in the post-Trump era. I don't remember President Trump doing anything.

I'm sure it happened. But I don't remember it. Usually when he would do something absolutely evil and terrible, there was this sort of like urge on Twitter to also talk about other things. It's like, oh, this bad thing is going on. So please let's just talk about this reality show or like, you know, we got to just change the subject. Maybe it's just my feed.

I cannot ever remember a moment where Twitter was so single-mindedly obsessed with a thing as it was this GameStop story. Did I see Kevin O'Connor diving in on this baby today? Kevin, yes, as Mina Kimes, I believe, called him, Kevin O'Cupy Wall Street. I saw another Kevin O'Colectivism. Yeah. Yes, everybody was into it. By the way, before I even fully digested what was going on, there were tweets from

like major celebrities saying, like, can we please talk about something else? Or can someone explain stocks to me so I can enjoy what's going on? Like, even the biggest names on Twitter could not duck and cover get away from the story. It was just amazing. This is where Michael Lewis comes in. I can't wait for deep fucking value

the money ball style treatment. It's going to be amazing. Finally, David, and in a very different subject, did you see the new ad for the movie Godzilla versus Kong? I did. Coming out in March. It was an overword Twitter joke to write the big twist in Godzilla versus Kong

is they both find out their mother's name is Mothara. Thanks to Nick Field. Yes, if you reminded us of a plot point from Batman versus Superman that the coronavirus had made us blessedly forget. Congrats, you made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. Should we have a whole list of really stupid things

that happened from like 2016 to March 2020 that we've just kind of forgotten because we've been pretty preoccupied over the last year? I think the whole bit about Superman and Batman's moms being named Martha would be in the top five of that list. Yes. That was so dumb.

It's sort of like we just had the baseball Hall of Fame. It's sort of like coming out when they came out of the PED era and they had to sort of retroactively figure out who belonged in the Hall of Fame and you're sort of like digging through table scraps a little bit. This is what we're doing. We need to figure out which parts of our culture over the past four years deserve to live on even though we've all been like, you know,

memory block to remember any of them. A Hall of Fame voting somehow survived. I just, much to my chagrin. All right, David, let's do the notebook down, but let's do some listener mail, which we have not done in a long time. All right. We're pretty busy. We've had special shows.

We've had the whole democracy and America falling thing. It's been busy. First up from Jody Canada. A question about QAnon. What news value does the true identity of Q have? How do they compare and contrast with other famous, the, another a famous anonymous source deep throat well i mean my my immediate instinct is it doesn't have much currency at all there have been a lot of people who have been suspected of being qan on and

those and those suspicions are sort of voiced openly there doesn't need to be a lot i don't feel like we need a second and third source because well for a lot of these people it doesn't really matter unless it turns out to be stephen miller at his you know on on a on a you know, secret iPhone or something. I don't really know if it's just, okay, a lot of the people who have been named are people who were involved in the sort of cue or message word world in those, in the early stages. And I think that everyone sort of lived with, everyone who cares is sort of lived with those possibilities and decided they don't care much about it, right?

I mean, it wouldn't really make much of a difference. So unless it's, unless it's someone who matters separate from the story, or unless it's, you know, actually someone in the intelligence community who's, doing it, we say this a lot of this episode, in good faith, then I don't think it matters at all. What if Q wrote a medium post that was along the lines of why I'm leaving New York

revealing their true identity? Did you read that? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Can you, if there's a thing. It was kind of like 20 or 30% too long. You know, really needed a good at it. Why I'm leaving the alt-right or whatever?

Is that where they're going? Are they actually moving to a new city? I have another question. if there is a if there's a if there's a if there's a if there's a pseudonym like this out there and no one's taking credit for it are you allowed to take credit for it is there anything are you like if if in the months following primary colors i had released another book very similar also by anonymous would there be some sort of lawsuit that could be filed against me right so like a lot of people stand up like that old game show or whatever claiming to be claiming to be

Q. I like that. I'll write Q's memoir tonight. Let's just do it. Book publisher's getting in touch. In other listener mail news, we've been alerted David to a Larry King plagiarism scandal. Oh my God.

We talked about the now deceased talk show host with Jason Gay on Monday. Well, back in 2001, Larry King printed the following lines in his USA Today column. Drempt is the only English word that ends in the letters MT. Almond's are a member of the peach family.

Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur. Well, Alex Gordon, who was then of the Hockey Digest, revealed that Larry had gotten a number of lines from forwarded emails. Oh, my gosh. And that those had gotten into his USA Today column. This was Larry's response to the San Francisco Chronicle when asked about this. I don't know anything about computers. I've never sent an email.

This is taking journalism to its. end idiocy. This is berserk. The more I think about it, the funnier it gets. If you find out who was the originator of Maine as a one syllable is a one syllable state, I'll print his picture and apologize on CNN. Larry King, ladies and gentlemen. This one is from Moe Egger.

Since Brian wrote the piece on Super Bowl Radio Row, has COVID killed a sports radio institution as we know it? And how do Joe Thaisman and Jerome Bettis spend next week if they're not going around to radio shows to plug cholesterol pills and restaurant chains. That's a fantastic question. And I think that we won't miss Radio Row, but I particularly like the second part of that question. The second part I think answers the first part. I think that I think that Radio Row killed itself.

I think that like the marketing, the whatever, the modernization of Radio Row, I mean, there was nothing. I mean, we, listen, everybody's had a guest on their podcast or on whatever. else that a publicist is hooked up and you you know you hopefully want to talk about the subject that the publicist publicist is pushing but if you don't you can let them get a plug in or whatever but the procession literal procession of people going down a radio row on superlowe weekend you can't listen to a radio show or TV show or anything without hearing over and over again well you know Wes Welker you're here because of the hair plugs that you got you want to talk a little bit about your doctor that's just i made that one up or whatever um it's just it you're you

It's crazy. At the one time of year when sports talk radio guys don't need to be filling up their shows with 90% fat and bullshit. The one time of year where we really care about what they're saying, they're filling up half their show with like unpaid advertisements. It's crazy. And it was always the worst sports radio. Yeah. Like if I'm listening to Dallas Sports Radio, which I do quite often, I don't want to hear Jerome Bettas. No.

That has no relevance to my life. No. I want to hear the hosts I like talking to each other about the Super Bowl. Or I want to hear news about the Mavericks and the Cowboys and when the Mavericks are going to have a full squad again. I don't want to hear, I don't want to hear random NFL celebrities or pseudo-celebrities. By the way, you mentioned the whole thing where the player comes on with the doctor. That is the weirdest one where you have to take both. Yeah. It's a package deal. We're going to talk about all the Super Bowls you played and then we're just going to go to this guy.

he's going to tell us some great new nutrition news or something. That's that's always a guess. From Thomas Mooney to borrow and rework a rewatchables question in 2021 is into the wild a book or a podcast. Also, do you see crack hour style being an early influence on serialized podcast? Interesting question. I think it is undoubtedly a podcast. You know, I mean, now as you're asking me the question, I'm scrolling back to see if to look at that,

see if I have a copy of the outside magazine article that it was, that it, that originally told the story in my files here. But, just to actually to see how it ended.

The thing, you know, I used to, I've made the joke on this show and I've made it in other places too. That a podcast is like, the narrative podcasts

are unpublishable stories with a lovely shoulder shrug at the end. I mean, there's so many, of these podcasts that are now like the canon of podcasts that don't actually end they just say you know it's like a it's like a Morgan Freeman voiceover he's like that's like that's all I learned about that you know we're like and and and actually into the wild is as incredible as a book as a

story as it is did in fact not end right I mean they they told I mean there was a there was an ending of the story but the substance of how McCanneless died evolved over time right I mean that that changed and it kept going. It does sort of feel like a podcast in that way. Also the kind of deeply personal aspect of it. It feels closer to podcast than quote unquote journalism. Now, you know, I don't think that disqualifies it from being a book, but it does kind of feel like instead of the expansive article that it was, it kind of feels like a 1500 word post on a site like the ringer or something and then it expands into a long form podcast. Well, I would say that a particular element of that book is that he's going out to try to figure out who Chris McCandless is.

We found this body on a bus in the wilderness and now I'm going out into the country to track down these people that knew him and they can tell me what his life was like and what he was doing and why he was doing this at all. And I, and I, that part to me feels very much in the grammar of narrative podcast. It's going to set the template for him. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. This is from John Yeager or John Jager. Love the show fellas. Your music tends to have a light irreverent tone. Have you considered a slightly more somber version of the same music when discussing more serious matters such as the capital break-in?

Think of the more muted Fox NFL music when going to a commercial when a player is injured. Do we need the Fox injury music for the press box when we have a serious story? I just want like the Undertaker's theme song to play every time there's something sad. that we're covering. Oh, that would be good. Or we could just get that. Or I go get one of my kids like Cassio keyboard and we could just do like a pipe organ dirge. But it's actually, it's the same music that our show opens with just the slow, sad, dirge version of it.

I like this one from Aaron McDade. Not sure how many podcasts are in either of your daily or weekly listening rotations. But have you ever experienced any form of podcast fatigue? putting off listening to a specific episode of one you like because of the subject matter or guest or seeing an announcement of a new podcast and just staring into space for a while thinking about the prospect of having to add a new one to the rotation. Certainly starting a new podcast takes a lot of effort because you listen to so many podcasts sort of lazily. You know, you're not giving it 100% of your concentration. So for a while, I would just sort of put all these aside, like link myself or write myself notes or whatever if I'm ever the next. time I'm when I was living in Brooklyn, it was always the next time I'm about to embark on like a

30 or 45 minute walk through the streets. I'll give this a shot. But then there's always other stuff you want to listen to and you don't really do it. The real podcast fatigue that I, that I personally have experienced is when there's certain podcasters, I don't even need to name any, who just, you know, podcast three times a week, sometimes more. And that is a very compelling model and it sucks you in. If you're interested, if you, in the subject matter and the voices, whatever, you can, you, I know why it works. You're a part of that world. You're, this is, you know, Kevin Smith becomes your new best friend in life and everything. And then, and, and, and, but then there comes a point where either they say something or just fatigue, just straight up fatigue, where you're

just like, all right, I think we should see other people and you got to kind of tap out for a bit. I mentioned sports radio a while ago. And one of the things I've always liked about sports radio is I'll listen to my favorite shows, sometimes on a daily basis. And then I'll just kind of, you know, piece out on it for a while. And I'll just go away and I'll miss lots of shows. And when I come back, you know, a couple days later or a week later, a month later, they're still there. My friends are still where I left them. And I think the only difference is that radio feels so disposable because it just goes out over the air and that's it most of the time.

Whereas in podcasting, you're not. you have this shaming thing that comes up on your phone all the time. Yeah. You're reminded when you miss it. Mm-hmm. And, but I think it's very natural to just to have fatigue for any, for any of these things. Yeah, for sure. And for a million different reasons, too.

It's weird that we've had to kind of confront these idiosyncrasies about ourselves. I mean, like, I've had for the first, God, however, some years of podcast being a part of my life, I had a really hard time listening to my dear friends do podcasts. it was just like it felt invasive in a weird way, you know, to really be able to imagine someone's face while they're having these conversations was strange. But then the flip side of that is the sort of obligation of having to talk to them next, you know, like you're, if you're, if you don't listen to your buddy's podcast, then like you might, you know, you always read your friend's pieces, right? Your friends articles because you want to be able to talk to them. Are you obligated to listen to all their podcasts so that you don't walk in and ask them a question they've already answered in their reader's mailbag? I mean, I mean, I mean, listeners. mailbag. I don't, it's, it's, it's tough. I've had people tell me I call you less because I hear you twice a week. I really have had that. I hope. I hope that's my parents' excuse. I haven't heard

from them in a while. No, but that's what happened because I say, well, you know, I, I hear you. You know, it's like you, it's like you called me twice already. Why would I call you a third time this week? By the way, David solved his problem of listening to his dear friends podcast by just doing a podcast with his dear friend. Nice solution. That's true. That's correct. This is from our friend, Lindsay Thornton. Hello, Press, Hello, Lindsay. When are you jumping on the merchandise bandwagon, a water bottle or laptop cover-friendly sticker with your logo,

and I think that's right, at the bottom, are needed. Hopefully you think that's right, sign Lindsay in San Francisco. Yeah, we should do that. I'm like nominally am connected to the Ringer merch department. We're not, I don't know, the Ringer did not just go down the path of being a merch. we're not we're not a we're not a we're not a we're not a we're not merch first and content second you know care about the content but uh yeah we can do that we should we should at least do something that we can like give away to people yeah give it like some kind of prize or something like that sure

i i think that's right to quote lindsay thornton there and finally this may be our most important piece of listener mail david from bill larkin and scott clayton way back i believe this was last year and in 2020 maybe our last podcast at 2020, David claimed that he lived in the pine barons. Well, Bill writes, dear David Shoemaker, if you live in Princeton, you don't live in the Pine Barrens. You barely live in South Jersey. And that depends on if you believe Central Jersey exists or not.

It's the Mexico and North America or Central America, North America thing. Yeah, that's true. That's true. I mean, I could, part of the book, the Pine Barons, I mean, people, people, that I was talking about, part of what he writes about in the beginning of it is how much more expansive the Pine Barons were at the, you know, before industrialization came and tore them all down. And they took, they were an enormous swath of the state. But you're right.

Princeton's not in. And Princeton is, you know, kind of a couple of counties over from the northern reach of the original Pine Barons. I apologize for the miscommunication or misinformation, fake news. I believe this came up in the first place because a reader asked us what you and I were reading. Yeah. I've known you since we are 14 years old. I can, you often surprise me on this podcast, but you rarely shock me.

And your answer to that question was, I'm rereading John McPhee's The Pine Bearer. And I was just like, wait, what? Nothing against John McPhee. I think I got levels of the game here off to my left. now. But if you told me like, I'm reading Elmore Leonard the 14 time or B. Traven, you could have, you could have given me a hundred names. I'm rereading John McPhee's the Pine Barrens. That staggered me. I was like, what? David Shoemaker is be reading the Pine Barron. Anyway, it's time for David Shoemaker guesses the strain pun headline. Yeah, let's do it.

Monday's headline about Ted Cruz and the Paris Climate Agreement was Cruz Scorns Paris Climate Pact is shown no mercy. No mercy. Today's headline comes from Jacob Geiger. It's from the economist. It was atop a graph, David, showing the national GDP of countries that had coronavirus lockdowns. Now, as you can imagine, GDP generally went down when there was a lockdown in these countries. Then it went back up post-lockdown. Okay. Okay. Here's your hint. this headline puns off a song released in 1997. 1997, also known as David and Brian's glory years.

What was the economist's strained pun headline? Oh my gosh, there's so much information here. Okay, it's for the graph. It's the headline of the graph itself. Yes. Down,

uh, lockdown. Remember, that's what we're, yeah. Down lockdown goes down. Down post lockdown goes up, down up. Oh, he's dancing around it.

Post. Here we go. Lockdown. 97, man. Oh, my gosh. I'm so mad at myself right now. What? What?

Dun, dun, dun. Oh, I get knocked down. I get knocked down. I get locked down, but I get up again. There we go. I get locked down, but I get up again. That's fantastic. Wow. Great work by the economist. He is David Schuemaker. I'm Brian Curtis.

Production Magic by Erica Servantes. Don't forget our upcoming show. How to cover the Senate. Coming out one week from today. We're excited about this. Somebody tweeted at us a minute ago, David. Is the senator that's coming on the show, Josh Hawley? No, no, absolutely not.

we did we did not settle for josh holly when we were booking the show guess again we'll be back monday with more lukewarm takes about the media see you then david see you later brian