The Press Box - Man at His Worst | The Press Box (Ep. 575)

Episode Date: February 20, 2019

The alleged attack on actor Jussie Smollett (03:00), Esquire in 2019 (26:30), and the first real dumb controversy of the 2020 presidential campaign (39:30).   Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, guys, it's Liz Kelly, and welcome to The Ringer Podcast Network. Each day, starting on Monday, February 18th, the Big Picture will be hosting six Oscar preview videos leading up to Sunday ceremony. Sean Fennessee hosts with a variety of other Ringer staffers covering everything you need to know about this season's Oscar race. You can watch these videos at YouTube.com slash The Ringer or catch the highlights on the Ringer's Instagram and Twitter. David, Comedy Central announced that in its post-daily show slot, It is pursuing a politics-free show hosted by David Spade, late of Saturday Night Live. What I want to know is, who is your ideal person to host a politics-free comedy show? Wow.

Well, last time I saw David Spade, he was on Norm McDonald's Netflix show, and I think Norm McDonald should get a vote in this conversation no matter what. Just for sheer, I mean, you can't start. turn away because of the power of his awkwardness. Yeah. If you want to, okay, I love that also that it's a new story that Comedy Central is going apolitical for,

for the, for, for a half hour slot. And there's like just this treasured time slot. I mean, I mean, obviously if you, if you're saying something that's nonpolitical or apolitical,

you got to go like Jerry Seinfeld, right? Or something like even more like family, you could, if you want to go the more like family friendly route, you could say Jeff Foxworthy springs to mind. although he might be even too anodyne for that. Well, maybe the best answer

continuing down that road is the living legend Ron White. Oh, wow. From the blue collar comedy tour. Yeah. Give Tater Salad a 30-minute slot on Comedy Central and the desk every night. I would watch that.

We are the Larry the Cable Guy and Jeff Foxworthy of media podcasts. God help us. This is the press box, a part of the Ringer podcast network. Get her done. The press box. is the media podcast where you're not allowed to tell us how many sheets and towels we should own.

We are Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer. Three big topics for you today. David, first we dive into the media fog surrounding Empire actor Jesse Smollett and his allegation that he was a victim of a hate crime in Chicago. Second, we'll talk about the controversy surrounding the cover of the new issue of Esquire. How's the old Temple of Longform getting along in 2019? And finally, an update on election 2020. How is your average liberal tweeter different than your average Iowa caucus goer? Plus the weekly notebook dump and, of course, the overworked Twitter joke of the week.

But David, let's start with Jesse Smollett. The facts, or at least alleged facts are these. On January 29th, the Chicago Tribune reported, the Empire Star and Performer had just left a subway sandwich shop in Chicago's Streeterville neighborhood in the early morning hours and was walking to his apartment when two men walked up, yelled slurs, hit him, and wrapped a rope around his neck, while yelling, this is Maga Country. The Tribune adds, a chemical, maybe bleach, was poured on him, police said.

Here is Smollett talking to Robin Roberts on Good Morning America last week, after a few doubts began to surface about his account. I'm pissed off. What is it that has you so angry? Is it the attackers? It's the attackers, but it's also. the attacks. It's like, you know, at first it was a thing of like, listen, if I tell the truth, then that's it because it's the truth. Then it became a thing of like, oh, how can you doubt that?

Like, how do you not believe that? It's the truth. And then it became a thing of like, oh, it's not necessarily that you don't believe that this is the truth. You don't even want to see the truth. Over the last few days, David, we learned that Chicago police are now investigating Smolet and whether he paid two brothers whom they brought in for questioning to actually stage the attack. TMZ has a report out that they even rehearsed the incident, et cetera, et cetera. So the first and most obvious lesson here, I think, is don't comment until all the facts become reasonably clear, which we are now going to sadly attempt to do anyway. But here's my first takeaway from this. in the age of Trump, people have been dragging newspaper writers every day because of their wishy-washy language, not calling Trump a liar, right, saying racially charged instead of just saying racist, right?

This case is an argument that there are at least certain times, maybe not most times, maybe not all, certainly not all times, but sometimes when that old, dispassionate newspaper ease is actually. actually an effective language to use, right? Because coming in strong and early, as tempting as it was when this seemed, you know, like an obvious, heinous hate crime, turned out, obviously now with hindsight not be the right move. What do you make of that? I think that the, you know, media criticism that's come out of the reaction of this piece or this story has, you know, sort of conflated. the straightforward reportage that, you know, obviously this is, it's a story that needed to be covered and the immediate reactions taking everything at face value. And I think that it's a tough situation, obviously. This is a really, it's a, it's a wild story. I mean, but I don't think,

you know, obviously covering this subject as it happens is not problematic as long as, like you said, there's, you know, there's a sort of divide. I mean, you're not taking everything at face value. reporting what is provable as fact, right? Yeah, I mean, I looked up the Chicago Tribune stories about the incident, which started, I believe, on January 30th and just read them in order. And if you had done nothing but consumed that, your local newspaper, in Chicago Tribune's case, however, lessened by various forces, you know, you got accounts like Chicago police detectives reviewed hundreds of hours of footage but did not gain any

leads that they found that there was no footage of the attack. There was a pretty cautious column by a woman named Dahlene Glanton who said we should, she did say we should all consider Smolett the victim of a horrible hate crime, but also was very cautious about ascribing too much to it at that early stage. And then, of course, as the investigation goes around, it really was just normal reporting, right? And, you know, I guess the other question of this that sort of came out was when we say the media went all in on this story or when we say conservative critics say the media went all in this story, what media are we talking about, right? What does that mean in 2019? On the one hand, you had CNN's Brian Stelter say, look, bona fide reporters were pretty careful with the story.

And it was this constellation of celebrities and Twitter people that were going in. For example, here is the actress Ellen Page talking to Stephen Colbert. We have a media that's barely talking about it. We have a media that's saying it's a debate whether or not what just happened to just East small. It is a hate crime. It's absurd. The shit isn't a debate. I agree.

What's interesting, you notice about that, David, is Paige is saying that the media isn't going far enough, right? She's criticizing the media for being way too cautious at that early stage. Of course, so that's one opinion that it's mostly celebrities and sort of Twitter types. The other opinion is, no, no, no, reporters did fall for it. I clicked a Breitbart link yesterday. Heaven helped me to see what one of their writers, John Nolte was sort of gleefully saying. And you know what's funny? I would say like the vast majority of tweets about this by the legit press were like people who clearly glanced at the headline.

or maybe the first paragraph of the story and said, oh, this is awful, right? This is awful and hateful and we as a society must do better. So I guess the other question is, one is what does media mean in 2019? And the other is if you are doing kind of a quick glancing blow on the news, which is what a lot of people on Twitter do, right? You know, is that really a crisis of American journalism when you're essentially passing a headline around like that? I mean, I actually don't know. And, you know, clearly I'd rather people not pass around a false headline. But what we, the structure that the media is made up of right now is people read stuff and then they tweet about it, right?

And I don't actually know that we've really hit crisis stage yet when most of the examples you find is stuff like that. Yeah. I mean, I don't think I know the answer either. I think that it's not clear cut. I think that it's easy. I mean,

it's, you can make the case, I mean, it's easy to make the argument that, that, you know, passing along a headline on Twitter and,

and, you know, attaching a cursory comment to it, even if it's, you know, even if it takes everything at face value or comes from an ideological slant, I mean,

there's nothing wrong with that, right? I mean, Twitter, we've had, We've discussed journalists in Twitter many times before. And certainly there is a place, you know, for people to be themselves on Twitter, to be humans on Twitter and not abide by all the same, you know, rules and ethics that guide their traditional printed work. But at the same time, you know, Twitter was how everybody was learning about this story, right?

I mean, people that weren't picking up the Chicago paper were finding out about it via Twitter. and they were finding out about it almost across the board, they were seeing the story for the first time couched within a tweet with someone's, with, you know, someone's commentary above it. So,

you know, that is an interesting question. When you are actively participating in the dispersal of news, you know, does your point of view matter? Now, listen, all of the, in all of this,

it has... Well, it's really, do you have to vouch for the news, right? Right. Just sort of passing around a headline from T, it was TMZ. right was an early report on this too

you know it's sort of an early vector of this it's like the way the way the media has always been constructed is you have a class of people who read stuff who don't report right are prisoners of the facts that they read and then rein on it now that's just a much bigger class of people

and they're often not writing about it in a way that they're engaging with it and maybe would have read some details of the story and say geez does this really sound likely does this sound real but essentially read a headline and kind of essentially, as you say, are distributing it with like, you know, a whip-topping of opinion on top.

Yeah, I mean, for all of this, it has to be said that this story is so wild, that even to report on it as skeptically as possible, it's not ridiculous to have gotten it wrong. It wouldn't be ridiculous to have read the story and to have gotten and to have assumed that everything in there was true because this was such an elaborate scheme, if in fact it was, such an unlikely scheme, you know, situation. that I don't think it's incumbent necessarily on anyone to assume everything their reading is completely untrue, right? I mean, even if you're skeptical, even if, you know, skepticism aside, I think that it's

understandable why one would get this wrong. But you're right, it's the degree to which one engages before they comment. Mm-hmm. So that information was there. I mean, I can tell you, when I first read the story, I was skeptical. And not because there's parts of it that are, that are likely, right? I mean, there's parts of it that are that are utterly believable. And I think for a lot of people, some of that believability is because the story like this

probably deliberately plays to, you know, sort of the ideological angst of a lot of people right now. But the story, but the details of the story, even from the start, did seem really, really just too good to be true. I guess good's not the right word. it just seemed so over the top that this would have been a random crime with all this, you know, all of this preparation at the same time that he would, I mean,

I mean, even the two o'clock subway sandwich run, the whole thing just seemed a little bit put together. And I did have a moment where I thought about that. And then immediately I started messing around on the internet and realized that I wasn't alone in thinking this, but everybody else I saw who thought this were coming from the other ideological side of the spectrum, which is, you know, sort of the alt-right broadly defined, who would have

been skeptical about this, even if it were utterly true, right? To cast doubt on it for ideological purposes. And I, you know, this is one of those cases where they got it right, although I'm not sure that they were operating in good faith on the subject either. You're not sure. From the people who brought you, you know, there really wasn't a racial slur written on LeBron James' house in L.A. Exactly, yeah.

So I've got a question jumping off of this, and I saw a few people wrestling with this on Twitter, which is, okay, let's say you are the hypothetical David Shoemaker-like person. You feel that Trump and his allies have created a climate of hate or strengthened a climate of hate in this country, right? You read a story like this and something strikes you as off about it, but you're not somebody who's going to dive into it. deeply and report about it. Do you air your skepticism on Twitter? Well, that's the trouble, yeah. I mean, what do you do? Because that's a quite, I mean, ideally you'd say, well, of course, you know, do it.

But like, and we've seen people do this, right? Sometimes they've come up and they've turned out to been right, right? There were people that cast out on the Rolling Stone Jackie story, right? Which eventually fell apart under scrutiny. People on not people, reporters the Washington Post, who also did it, but people on, on Twitter blogging about it in an early stage. But what do you do? Like what's your, you know, what is your, I don't know if responsibilities right where, but

what's your move there? Well, I mean, it's the easy, I mean, the easy answer would be, did not say anything for the same reasons that we, you know, would argue probably shouldn't editorialize without knowing all the facts to begin with. I think what you saw with the Jackie story and some of the, and some other examples were people cautiously, very cautiously, um, taking issue with some of the journalistic practice in that piece without, you know,

and not and avoiding addressing the subject in any sort of direct way, at least until more facts came out. And in this story, it was that's actually hard to do because the journalism, like you said, was mostly not problematic.

It's the source itself was the problem. So I'm not quite sure what the, I mean, it's really hard. It's something that I've wrestled with just trying to at the time, but also just in preparation for this podcast, I'm not quite sure what the move is other than like, you know, I mean, personally discussing it with people. I'm not, I don't know what with the, with, even if, even if I were 99% sure that this had been a fraud from the start, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not sure that I would have, you know, gone, gone, gone public with it because I'm not, I don't know really what the. upside. No, well, and also like, look, if you go public with with doubts like that, then you're discouraging people from coming forward to report hate crimes, right?

Exactly. We've had those versions of this discussion with Me Too, right? If you go and say, this is not, this is bullshit. You were doing that. I mean, I guess the best answer is privately discuss it with your colleagues and then say, look, if this is really, this is something we should invest some reporting muscle in. If we don't think this adds up, then we should invest actual reporting muscle in figuring this out, right? Or doing something about that.

And again, that's going to be a fairly small percentage of the journalistic world. But that seems like the only logical place to stand. I don't know what else you would do, you know. I don't know how else you can really advance a conversation. This is also a particular story that deliberately or no was created. in such a way that it played specifically to celebrity media

you know the morning talk shows a TMZ that sort of thing his colleagues at Fox right on empire right yeah exactly and and celebrity in general and also in Twitter as we've discussed yeah I'm not sure if the if the you know first reaction

I mean there's certainly going to be more interesting from like just to name an outlet from like New York Times reporters commenting on it on Twitter then there will be you know editorial you know an editorial decree to go go wall to wall

with investigating the story from the from the newsroom you know I mean this is a a local story with national you know with with national repercussions because of his relative celebrity but it's not you know it's

there's it's just it's a story that it's going to that's going to make more noise and and kind of spill out more quickly in the non-streetfortly journalistic quarters of the internet than it is the traditional ones. And so it's it's tough for the facts to keep

up with the to keep up with the reaction to it. I mean, from what Ellen, and like we played the Ellen Page quote, I mean, she was wrong, but she was also right. I mean, what supposedly happened was indeed a hate crime, right? I mean, she was commenting on what she believed to be true and it was a hate crime.

It was just looks to be a fake one. Yeah. So, I mean, it's sort of, it's it's it's hard to to kind of cast particular aspersions at people who are reacting to things that they believe to be true and I think in the end we end up with this conversation about journalistic ethics you know or like what the role of the news media is in sort of like snuffing out of fire before it explodes yeah I mean I just think like I said earlier I would love it if people sort of commented less on stuff like this as it as it sort of trailed across the wires, but I don't think, I just think right now journalism is set up essentially to be a giant

wire service, right? Like everything from something really serious like this to Florida man does X, right? And it's a picture like of, you know, somebody in jail in Florida for doing a bizarre crime. And for people to then just weigh in on all these things. And that's just seemingly what people do all day is weigh in on stuff they see like that. And race to weigh in on it too. Yeah, I don't know like structurally. You can say, don't do that anymore. You know, take five minutes, take a day, take a week. If it, if it read the, actually read the story and if it feels a little weird, back off.

Like, that's all great advice. I just don't know structurally how that would work in journalism right now. By the way, my other theory of all journalism is there are no new journalism scandals. There are only old journalism scandals that have been tweaked slightly. Yes. And this just strikes me as a relative of, remember, every time. there's some kind of breaking story or, you know, terrorist attack or whatever. And there's crap news put on Twitter. And everybody reacts to it, including some of our conservative friends,

right? Like, oh, it was a, it was a Middle Eastern man who carried this out. And it turns out it wasn't. Meanwhile, there were 19 blog items written in 10 Fox News segments, right? Yeah. That is, that is an old problem. And that problem is not, this is the same problem. It's just, It just has the patina of Trump and race and hate and celebrity and everything else on it. But to me, this is just exactly the same thing we deal with in various iterations. Yeah. I mean, certainly this was a, if it was contrived, it was contrived to appeal to a very specific audience. That said, the reaction to it, the touchdown dancing, the everything else that's coming from the conservative side is no more pristine somehow just because.

you know this turned out to be untrue or at least as it looks to be I mean denouncing a hate crime is not a problem I mean it's not a liberal there shouldn't be a liberal position right I mean the fact that it's even a question is it is a think of a symptom of more problems than anything we're dealing with in this and the and the as terrible as this situation is from many different perspectives if it turns out that it's that it just didn't happen I'm not quite sure who has like to be aggrieved, with the possible exception of the president, because he was, you know, his... Because he was tricked into expressing concern. Yeah, but he, I mean, and also just the story, I mean, that the story was that they were, you know,

that the attackers had some said, make America great again or whatever they, you know, whatever the story was. But, you know, let's not worry too much about President Trump. He's got a platform to defend himself and has shown no, no, you know, hesitation in doing so in the past. If your agreement is that it looked like, you know, a hate crime existed and that, you know, is problematic for your like arch counterintuitive cause, then, you know, that's on you. All right, David, now it's time for the overworked 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.

I have a tweet for you from the highly reliable media entity, The Hill, David, which read U.S. drops to eighth place on best countries list, which is just I love that. Speaking of stuff that just gets passed around, right? I mean, what list? Like, what? But okay. U.S. drops to eighth place on best countries list. It was an overword Twitter joke to say the U.S. is now in danger of missing the playoffs. Thanks to Pete Blackburn, Jake, and blue shirts breakaway for that one.

A scoop in the Washington Post last week, David, told us that President Trump has installed a $50,000 room-sized golf simulator in the White House. Yes. It was an overwork Twitter joke to say Trump is the first gamer president that was self-reported by our pal Chris Sullentrop. By the way, I was thinking about this, and I say this sitting in the ringers podcast studio in L.A. right now next to a cardboard, life-size cardboard cutout of white men can't jump from the movie. But the room-sized golf simulator, even a little too much for the Ringer, right? we sort of work in a Dave and Busters here and even that There's a golden tea on the lot somewhere

There's a golden tea but even the room size golf simulator I think even too much for us Wasn't it reported in that story too That he hadn't used it at all That it was that it was just Or do we believe that to not be true Was it sort of like the no I didn't commit that crime I have committed crimes in the past

That no one knows about Yeah I can see him just kind of not getting around to that It's not like he hasn't spend time at the golf course either, right? This was like during the shutdown, he kind of couldn't leave Washington, right? They had to solve a problem. Like, how am I going to get some golf in? The $50,000 golf, room-sized golf set up doesn't have an omelet station.

So I guess that's a problem. Finally, David, the big news last Thursday in media slash local news, New York world, was that Amazon is no longer building its headquarters in Long Island City. Yeah, wow. A lot of action here. It was an overword Twitter joke to say, why I'm leaving New York by Jeff Bezos. In fact, there was a whole item in New York Mags website about that.

Overwork Twitter joke. Also, Bezos to New York dropped dead. That was flagged in advance by our paler, Rafe Bartholome, by the way. Predicted that was coming and boy did it. And finally, I'll give you this Amazon telling people you're going to Queens and then bailing is one thing New Yorkers can relate to. Yeah. Thanks to skirk rambus, Jeff Heckleman, Maxine Builder,

Mr. Bones and Tom Fountain for those. All right, Dave, before we talk Esquire, let's pause for a quick break. Clean up your remote control clutter with Control Center by Kavo. Control Center simplifies your home theater so you can control everything connected to your TV with one easy-to-use remote with voice control.

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with promo code Press Box. That's 5995, 40% off the regular Pricing of 99.95. Service plan required first 45 days free. Control Center is available at C-A-A-A-V-O.com and best buy Control Center by Kavo, one remote that does it all. David, if you're doing a cover story on a normal American teenager, it might be a problem when your teenager looks exactly like the guy in the Prada ad a few pages after the cover. If you missed it for its March cover, Esquire, decided to do one of those normal person profiles and picked a high school senior name Ryan Morgan, who lives in a very red county in West Bend, Wisconsin. The cover lines read, an American boy, what it's like to grow up white, middle class, and male in the era of social media school shootings, toxic masculinity, Me Too, and a divided country.

People on Twitter were mad at Esquire for having this guy stand in for the more diverse. more liberal Generation Z for going on another Trump country safari and for telling non-white people that this this guy is your sort of typical teenage existence in America. Here's my first take.

At some level, isn't this just like a basic magazineing failure? The editor's note by Jayfield and by the way in our era of shrinking pages, you should definitely do a full page editor's note. That is a valuable use of space in a magazine. The editor's note by Jay and says, then in fact, the magazine was going to do black, LGBTQ, and female versions of

this story. But it chose to put this one first, or this one wound up coming in first, however it worked. But if you're the editor of Esquire and you are truly doing a four-plus story package, don't you do that one? Don't you do one of the other ones first? And it is in it, in fact, a better magazine cover if you say an American boy, girl slash et cetera and have a picture of somebody who is not a white teenager yes isn't that isn't that isn't that the isn't that the I mean we're not we're not talking about you know George

Lois in the 60s here right I mean that just seems like that seems like the the pretty obvious move if you want your magazine to get attention yeah setting aside the wisebred critique that this was a really bizarre look for black history month. Yes. And that your suggestion would have presumably quelled some of that, if not all of it. Yeah, even in a vacuum, it would have made a lot more sense. It would have been a much stronger, you know, move to do one of those other ones first.

And even if you were intent on doing this one first for whatever reason, even if it's something as, you know, Blase is, this is the piece that was done and threw, you know, the copy desk first or whatever. it's not just that he didn't get to the he didn't say anything about there being other pieces in the series until paragraph the end of paragraph seven of this edit of this editor's letter and you're relying on your readership to read your editor's letter to understand that I mean it's a messaging problem right I mean if if you're mad that people don't get the point of a multi-part series when you launch it that's your fault right I mean and this and it's not this is not a specific this is not a a critique specific to this piece. Every journalistic outlet has been too far in the weeds or more colloquially

too far up their asses to see what to, I mean to have the same point of view that the reader is presumed to see right? We expect a lot of our readers to somehow magically having, you know, magically go back in time and sit in our editorial meetings to understand

why we're publishing these things half the time. Yeah. And you and most time, most of the time you get it right. the time you project the right thing with the headline with the you know with the with the with an editor's note with you know just the general position with the with the artwork you know whatever else but it's not uncommon to just get it wrong you know even successful pieces are probably frequently read in a way that the editorial team didn't necessarily expect or intend yeah but this is just but but to but to be for for for him to have been out there and listen that all of the all of the

the critique of this piece, you know, from a, you know, a racial point of view was not helped by the fact that photos of field and were floating around Twitter as just like the paragon of white privilege immediately upon the, you know, the, the, the criticism of the story occurring. But yeah, I mean, you have to, you have to be able to, you have to be able to project that better. It's a really simple thing. It's not, it's not loaded. And if you're out there defending your piece, you know, online with with guns ablazing as he was or as he seemed to be, you know, you can take a second. She'd be like, we could have done a better job of this.

Yeah, I mean, I just think if you're a magazine that are packaging the story is kind of the big part of the job, right? Yeah. You get credit when you have a great cover. So if you have a cover that sort of leads everybody astray, you also have to take the L for that one. It's interesting because the magazine historical marker here is Susan Orleans' 1992 cover story in Esquire called The American Man age 10. And she was asked to write a profile of McCauley Culkin. And she said, no, I won't do that.

But I will write about a, quote, normal American boy, as in this case, a normal white middle class American boy. And what was interesting to me is reading, going back and rereading her piece and rereading Jennifer Percy's piece in this issue of Esquire is that the Percy piece feels like it's really just getting started. I like parts of it. I just feel if you want the full sweep of what it is to be this guy, this kid, you really need to hang around with him for a long time. or sort of drop in and out over a period of months, you know, almost do the full William Finnegan cold new world treatment. Because it just feels like,

you know, you want to see him sort of change. You want to see him sort of move through time in the Trump era. And this just feels like a very, very glancing blow that is sort of standing in for, here's what this guy's life is like, right? And again, I understand magazine deadlines,

you know, money everybody has not i totally i i get all that but it just it didn't feel to me it felt like it wanted to be a grand statement by the life of a about the life of a quote unquote normal american and it sort of got halfway there yeah and i again i think that's an editorial i mean that that that's an editorial issue right i mean that the piece was was well written um and we should say that jennifer percy is a fantastic writer who's won numerous award and and you know has been relatively quiet through this whole thing except to say that she did not have that you know that the packaging that you know the head the titling of the story and the

and the cover was she was not involved with any of that and sort of disagreed with the presentation um but yeah i mean again this feels sort of like a story that sounded good at the pitch meeting and and that the editorial side was kind of blind to the fact that it didn't actually achieve what they all kind of thought it was achieving. Can we talk a little bit about an Esquire in 2019, which I think is kind of a fascinating subject? So I picked up the issue. I bought the issue. I am not judging a magazine by its cover. I am judging it by the write-up of its weekend bag, a man's ideal weekend bag on page 23. I'm just kidding.

One, it's always kind of amazed me that so relatively little attention was paid to the day Esquire died in 2016 when David Granger was removed as editor. The people seemed to pay way much more attention to the day the New Republic died like a year and a half earlier. Like you had this thing that was regarded as the Valhalla of Longform. and Chris Jones and Tom Juneau and Scott Rob and Johnny Tritchson, all those guys. These are the elect, right? These are the guys. And then it just kind of all went away. Most of those writers scattered to the winds.

And it was kind of, everybody was kind of this giant collective shrug, which is interesting. It probably says something about Longford that we can get to another time. I looked through Esquire. A couple of interesting observations. One is the old Esquire's problem. which also would have played terribly in 2019. What is it? It had this horny, hetero, Hugh Hefner view of sexuality, right?

Yeah. Women we love that notorious column about women being bad at sex. All that stuff is gone. Like, I mean, or I'd say, I'd say 99% gone. They have, they have happily fumigated the place of that old vibe, which I appreciate it. number two, there's a piece by Dwight Garner in here. And to me, that's just fabulous, right? And I will read anything by Dwight Garner.

So I'm happy that he has a regular presence here. And he actually, he refers to, he's writing about white male apology culture. And he refers to American men of the honky persuasion. So we needed more thinking like that when we designed the cover of Esquire. The other thing, David, is I didn't realize how much I'd missed the language of a glossy men's magazine. Yeah. You know that voice I'm talking about? Mm-hmm.

I think when you and I were living in New York in our early 20s and reading it, I always thought, you know, I'm just too young. But someday I'm going to kind of, you know, go into the cocoon and molt and come out and I'm going to be this guy, this guy who cooks, right? You know, who can who can wake up on a Saturday morning and whip up that perfect omelette and has a weekend bag and, you know, has a watch. All this stuff, right? watch. And here I am. And I'm, I just now have realized, and I say this, wearing a, you know, a shirt that needs to be ironed as I do this podcast, I'm never going to be that guy. I just, and now I read this and I'm like, why did I ever think that? How did I ever think I'd ever get there? Culturally. Yeah, the great, the greatest trick all those magazines ever pulled was

convincing you that they weren't aspirational. They were, that was actually somebody's life. There's a piece in here about, uh, traveling to Jamaica, climbing up into the blue mountains on snaky roads in an old land cruiser. You see the city of Kingston shrinking to your left, to your right, tree roots are at eye level, punching through walls of dirt, right? That sounds like a men's magazine, does it not? Oh, yeah. The weekend bag thing I mentioned, there's a piece about recipes.

There's just this language of, you know, sort of, you know, being a guy. How do you, how does that, is it weird to you that, I guess, I don't even forget whether this works in 2019 or not. Is it weird to you that that was ever a language that this was that it was sort of a Bible of how to be a man encased in a glossy package?

Am I surprised that it ever existed? Yeah, that it was just that that was ever a thing. Now looking back on it, I mean, look, I thought it made perfect sense at the time. But now looking back, I'm like, wait, that really happened? Yeah, I mean, I guess it's not that. I guess

to me it's not that shocking because your competition on the newsstands all i mean so much of it is is you know kind of functional is it you know there's there's a lot of there's a lot of you know instructional or very or magazines with a very very specific audience right and to a certain extent you have to you have to you have to create your own your own identity in doing so create your own audience obviously that you know esquire was in the sort of min's magazine you know esquire and the other magazines of its ilk. It was sort of wild that, you know, they existed as a block. But, you know, I mean, we're not that far removed from like every website having a really

specific voice, even if it had multiple writers and, you know, or at least every blog. And it's, I guess it's just sort of amazing that Esquire was able to continue for such a long time with the level of, you know, undeniable talent they had there and the number of great stories they produced while sort of maintaining that that that uniform uh you know voice what i don't even know how you define it it's like the the culture the cultured dude or the cultured bro or something but it's it is it is a sort of spectacular achievement in a weird way i looking back at the susan or lane cover the line above uh the words esquire are luca's 93 predictions so that's just a just a little time capsule there all right david let's get on to topic number three 2020

and the election and what we've learned in the last couple of days. First of all, I think we have our first bona fide dumb controversy of the 2020 presidential campaign. Now, you might think all of it is dumb. You might think parts of the Elizabeth Warren and Native American stuff is really dumb. No, no, no. We've now hit real dumb. California Senator Kamala Harris, who of course is running for the Democratic nomination, this week tried on a jacket on the campaign trail and Brigham got mad.

Harris was in Columbia, South Carolina, when a reporter suggested she'd try on a jacket at a shop called Styled by Naida. Britt Hume, who is, of course, works for Fox News, tweeted, this is just embarrassing. So now journalists are going shopping with Harris, helping pick out clothes, and then putting out glowing tweets about it. Does anybody grumble electronically quite like Brit Hume, David?

Did you think grumbling was possible in Twitter form? No, but it's impossible. I was going to comment on you reading it in his voice, but then I realized there's no other way to read it. So, yeah, I think you got that right. As it turned out, the owner of the store had once lived in poverty, and Harris said these are incredible stories of women who were in foster care, who understood what it meant at a very early age of struggle,

but who also had dreams about what they could be. So I guess you could also read the boutique story as a tramp of capitalism, too. There you go. The other thing I wanted to bring up to you is, something I read in a couple of pieces this week, which is the sense that the conversation we're having on Twitter about the 2020 Democratic nomination is very different from the convoy that actual voters in the early primary and caucus states are having. Yeah. Peace by New York Times as Aestead Herndon said in interviews over the last month with about three dozen Democratic voters, almost all of them expressed far more interest in Elizabeth Warren's policy ideas than her ancestry and said they were exhausted or uninterested by the. storyline. They described it as overblown, et cetera, et cetera. Also in Dave Weigel's very good and

latest edition of the trailer newsletter, he says, if any theme has emerged, it's that the Democratic electorate showing up to meet its candidates is far less ideological and skeptical than the one that lives on social media. Some days, the gulf between the discussion on Twitter and the discussion at campaign events is a mile wide. He points out that Kirsten Gillibrand has only gotten one question about her role in encouraging Al Franken to resign. Kamala Harris has received no questions about her criminal justice record. And Corey Booker has received no questions about his vote against non-biting legislative language to crack down on the pharmaceutical industry. So it sort of brings up an interesting question to me, which is what is the conversation on

Twitter about and what effect do you think that's going to actually have on the nomination as it's decided at the ballot box? It's a great question. I think that I mean, I think that part of what you see is that the commentary on Twitter is just so snarky and skeptical that they, you know, were kind of skipping past the first step in in in candidate evaluation um i i think that the i think that it's that you know the the i think that what weigel describes is is a very natural chain of events right you find out what someone's what someone's platform is what someone believes in um which is a good thing to

try to find out because with the exception of you know i mean i don't even know with the I mean, Elizabeth Warren has been very open about her platform. I think there's a lot of questions about just about everybody else when it comes to an actual governing platform. Yep. But you find that stuff out. And then at some point, you do have to ask yourself if you believe that this person is going to follow through or has any, there's going to have any, you know, problems, background or otherwise that will prevent them from being an effective leader. And I think that what you see on Twitter is a lot of people who have skipped past the first part and are just going into the going into the sort of mudslinging territory. Yeah, they're sort of vetting them, right?

I mean... Yeah, but they're vetting them. I feel like they're vetting them because vetting is the only game, right? They're like, no one, there's not a ton of interest. With the exception of maybe Warren and, you know, Bernie Sanders, who's just announced that he's running, that, you know, where the platform is sort of so,

so audible that, you know, people seem to have commentary on it. I think more than anything else, it's that, you know, there is some, you see some critique of the lack of a platform. or the, but I, but I don't, but yeah, I think that it is, it is a sort of vetting, you know, and I think that there's a value in that. I just think that, that, the most important sort of vetting you could do now is actually like, force people to say what they think about things. Yeah, try to pin them down on the issues in other words. Yeah. I mean, I do think it's interesting because I think the conversation on Twitter in a way is anticipating, one is how the Democrats will attack each other, which is why goal notes has not happened yet. We're sort of in the tombio. phase of the primary at this point. The other thing is they're sort of anticipating, of course, how Donald Trump will attack the candidates. So if the media seems more interested in Elizabeth Warren's Native American ancestry controversy, they are in a way knowing that Donald Trump has gone there and will go there, right?

It may not matter to a person who shows up in Iowa, but it will matter in the sense that the media will talk about it, and Donald Trump will talk about it during the campaign. But it is interesting. I mean, I think when I read stuff, when I read political Twitter now, everybody seems incredibly low on Joe Biden all of a sudden. Yeah,

partly because of nowhere, sure. Yeah, partly because of Biden's, you know, record from the 90s and how that plays in Democratic politics now, et cetera, et cetera.

And again, it seems more like they're judging, pre-judging his electability rather than pinning him down on issues or anything like that. And again, I'm not not standing up for Biden. in any particular way, just that it's funny to me that reporters seem very, very down on him. And I don't know if, I don't know if what they're trying to say is we don't think Joe Biden can win

the Democratic nomination in 2020. We don't like Joe Biden. We're tired of Joe Biden's weird fan dance about whether he's going to actually run for president, which seems to be going on and on and on. I don't know. But I do think that conversation is very different from person in Iowa what they think of Joe Biden at the moment. Yeah, absolutely true. I mean, I think there was this sort of presumption.

I think there were a lot of people who were sure he was going to run, but there was also, you know, the point of view that he was frankly too old. And I think that, you know, people have sort of decided whether or not they are interested in someone being part of the process right now. So, you know, it is, there's a lot of, it's a little bit hard to parse, but you're right. And of course, the noise that we in the media make about these candidates will affect voters, right? It's not, the voter is not going to be like, I don't care what you say. I saw I'm on the stump in Des Moines and he seems like a great guy. Like that will penetrate voters because it'll penetrate cable news.

It'll penetrate everything. And, you know, it will become part of the story. Can we do the notebook dump quickly? Because I got a bunch of stuff I want to hit you with. This is where I hit David with a bunch of things he doesn't know about. David Aaron Sorkin says a tweet from something called Digital Spy is in conversations to bring back the newsroom. This is the most snarked about media tweet of the week. What do you think?

Dead silence. As someone who only ever watched the pilot of the newsroom, am I falling down on my, am I going to get fired for admitting then? I don't think so. I think you may, I think you may get a raise. I thought it was, I thought as with most, you know, kind of modern Sorkin television projects, it was, it was a show with a lot of potential. That sort of didn't seem to add up to the sum of its parts. And, you know, who knows? Maybe there's maybe a, maybe a reboot will, maybe a reboot will serve it well.

That said, I mean, it seemed like a show that was just, you know, made to get attention. And it did get a lot of attention and that didn't really translate to people watching. But maybe, you know, who knows? Maybe in a, maybe in the modern digital age, they can find the right audience for it. David, let's play, guess the celebrity profile headline. Are you ready? Wait, by the way, let me jump backward one second. Please.

Maybe there's an over-the-top streaming service that just plays to the MSNBC lunchroom. In that case, that would be an ideal home for the reinvigorated newsroom. It was in the supermarket the other day, David. I saw a headline. I came to you. All right? You have to guess. I'll give you the broad outlines of the piece.

Vanity Fair's soul-bearing interview with Laura Dern. Vanity Fair's soul-bearing interview with Laura Dern. with Laura Dern. What was the cover headline? Oh my gosh. I'll give you a little hint. Think of a recent project Laura Dern has been involved on

on television and just subtly tweak the title of the project. Oh my gosh. All right, you give up? Yeah, you got to tell me. Laura Dern's big little truth Oh no, that's terrible. Laura Dern's Big Little Trues.

It's also a Vanity Fairpeace profile headlined, It's good to be Regina King. Celebrity, that's your... I guarantee that it's not the first time that someone's written that headline about her, and by all means, keep writing it. That's good. I was very depressed to see a note

about the Alliance of American Football, which we've all kind of enjoyed as fun spring programming to say, we're not a football league, we're a data business. That's the moment I'm out, right? I just don't know. No, I wanted a football league. How dare you bring a data business into this?

Oh, my gosh. I love there was a piece in the New York Times, you know, where they do these things where they write about their own writers, about David Marchese, who was over at New York Magazine. Yeah. Yeah. The interview thing for the Times Magazine. It's an interview with him. The Twitter headline, at least, was how a celebrity interviewer creates rapport with his big name. subjects, the interview in what could only be a meta exercise did not succeed in extracting or even

really asking of Marchezy about how he gets material out of his subjects. So you sat down with a master interviewer, right? But you didn't ask how he does his master interviews. You just never got to it. Was that just like some something I'm not understanding, right? Is that some, is there a wink there that I'm not getting? Right. Surely that. It is very. very strange. I mean, you almost, you kind of, wouldn't you rather see Marchesey just interview himself, just some to do some sort of like dialectical or something? There is how I would extract me, right? I read this and I would, I would probe on the, yeah. I think that's a better way to go. Next time let's do that. We are sort of in a golden age for the, for the, for the, for the, for the, the interviewer, right? I mean, this is like the, Isaac Chotner. Yeah. I mean, I think right before in the, in the month leading up to him moving to the times, Marchezy just had taken on this outsized. personality or not in personality like he was he was chasing it down but every time one of his interviews popped up online everybody was just like just you know tweeting it retweeting it with exclamation parts and heart emojis i mean it's it's it's a it's quite a time we're living

in i think he's i think what part of that is i think there's probably a lot of reasons for that but part of it is that he's discovered or or we've collectively as a society have discovered that there are certain subjects that you want an interview form more than anything else yes meg Ryan this week. Do you want the giant 3500 word profile of Meg Ryan? No. In Vanity Fair titled Big Little Truce. I mean, maybe for the right writer, but really you kind of want the interview, right? Quincy Jones, which was one of his famous ones, recently.

Like, in a way, I think there's like every, every subject has this sort of ideal piece. And he's been really good at finding subjects for whom the interview, at least at this moment in history, is the ideal piece. in our podcast obsessed culture, this is sort of like the slow food version of that, right? It's like, we're still back in the printed word. Yeah. Actually, like, you know, being precise about things. All right, David, that's the press box this week.

He is David Schuemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Producer is Jim Cunningham, research by Chris Almeida. Back next week with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, man. David was in the supermarket the other day, David. What do you make of that?

Dead silence. what do you think dead silence this is just embarrassing dead silence etc etc so the first and most obvious lesson here I think is this is bullshit

dead silence something I'm not understanding right is there a wink there that I'm not getting dead silence okay maybe I win deaf okay let's say you are the hypothetical David Shue-Maker like person.

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