The Press Box - Mueller Bombs, the End of Mic, and Covering Tyreek Hill | The Press Box

Episode Date: July 26, 2019

Robert Mueller’s testimony (03:00), the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week (21:30), the end of Mic.com (27:15), how the media covers Tyreek Hill (38:45), and the return of Graydon Carter (51:45).   Host: David Shoemaker Guest: Alyssa Bereznak   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelly, and welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. This week, we're debuting a brand new three-part podcast series with Quentin Tarantino and Amy Nicholson called Quentin Tarantino's feature presentation. Here's a quick trailer with more info. If you go to Quentin Tarantino's new Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, you're going to hear that feature presentation song. And when the movie starts, you're going to step in to Quentin Tarantino's brain. If you own a movie, you own a print of a film, it feels like it's your movie. consequently it's like if people really like the movie and they go wow that movie was terrific you know my response was oh thank you very much it was like i took credit for it because well it

was my print so and i and i put the whole thing together to show it so i actually felt like they were complimenting me this is quentin tarentino's feature presentation a new three-part podcast miniseries hosted by me film critic amy nicholed of unspooled and halloween unmasked before the release of his new film once upon a time in hollywood quentin I sat down to talk about five films that he's programmed at the new Beverly, and we wound up talking about his life, his work, and how this movie crazy kid became a director who defined a generation. Waiting for the lights to go down and no one knows what to expect.

Is this going to be one of those special times? Is it not going to be one of those special times? It's going to be a forgettable time. The first episode of Quentin Tarantino's feature presentation is out later this week. It is the closest thing to sharing a bucket of popcorn with the man himself, so subscribe now wherever you hear podcasts. Alyssa, it was perhaps the most hyped congressional testimony of the Trump age. The stage was set for either proof of Trump's crimes or proof of the vast left-wing conspiracy against him.

It was supposed to be epic, and it was not. When Robert Mueller came to Capitol Hill to testify before Congress, what we got instead with seven hours of awkward accusations and mumbledy demurals that basically just rehashed everything that we already knew at great and exhausting length. What I want to know, since we're talking about rehashing the past and reiterating things we already know, Alyssa, what I want to know from you is what moment from the year 2019

would you most like to relive in a mind-numbing seven-hour congressional hearing? I would say the decision-making behind all four Lil Nas X remixes. You just want to put Lil Nas X on the stand, put him at the table. Just like, what was the brainstorming? process for number two, for number three, for number four. Presumably it would get easier as they went on. Yeah. But then he just starts tweeting ideas and just seeing if people will tweet back.

Sure. I mean, we could even talk about the ideas. In some ways, he has a lot in common with our president. You just tweet out a shower thought and just see what the gauge the response and move forward from there. And then bask in the meta-media commentary of your thought. I would actually, I like meta-media commentary. I would actually go, I would actually go full meta to answer this question.

I want a seven hour, hell, let's just make it like a 40-hour congressional hearing on the seven-hour congressional hearing that we just had. Oh my God. Just break down, like all the congressional. You are a masochist. All the AIDS get called. How did we make this decision? Mueller has to go into his prep work and everything like that.

Trump, you know, the Justice Department tells him he can say even less stuff than he said before. Anyway, I just like, like, the more. The extended universe. The more reiterative and redundant we can be, the better. That's my take. We are the press box, a part of the Ringer podcast network of media podcasts. This is the Press Box, a part of the Ringer podcast network. Hello, media consumers.

Your best friend Brian Curtis is in the field today. I am David Chewaker, joined today by the Ringer's own, Alyssa Boresnack. So much stuff to get to today. We're going to talk about the return of Graydon Carter, the end of Mike.com, the way we cover the Tyree Kill situation and, of course, the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But back to a segment that I'm calling, as I'm sure we've called it many times before, it's Mueller time. On Wednesday, special counsel Robert Mueller testified before Congress to provide information about his report on the Trump campaign and Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and it was not a shining moment in American history. The New York Times kindly called it nearly seven hours of dry, sometimes halting testimony.

there was not a lot of new information. There was a lot of, I don't subscribe necessarily to the way you analyze that. And a lot of, I take your question. I take your question. Republicans tried to demonize Peter Srock and the Hillary Clinton campaign

and Mueller himself, and Democrats tried to pin crimes on Trump in pursuit of proof for impeachment or a PR victory or something like that. And throughout the testimony, Mueller passively demurred from saying anything of any significance.

In a piece written by Peter Baker in the New York Times, Harvard prof, Lawrence Tribe said, much as I hate to say it, this morning's hearing was a disaster. Far from breathing life into his damning report, the tired Robert Mueller sucked the life out of it. Well, this thing happened. Alyssa, I guess what I want to know is,

did the hearing accomplish anything, or was it all just a big distraction? I mean, we should consider that a lot of people did not read the Mueller report. That's just something that we should assume. Yeah. Yeah. I only read parts of it.

I'll admit it here. You read more than me. And I think that if you can have an opportunity to take a very long, boring thing and turn it into a TV show with much easier to digest messaging, then you should do it, especially if you're the Democrats and you need footage for your political campaign, if you need talking. points for the future. And so that's exactly what they did. The only problem is Robert Mueller is not the most compelling star of this entire production. And it showed through.

You know, he had, I mean, I think he was only really compelling in the sense that, like, I got like serious Lucille Bluth vibes from him, which is like, I don't understand the question and I refuse to answer it. Yeah. One question that was asked, the first question that was asked when we were watching it at my home yesterday morning was, does Robert Mueller have teeth? Which I weirdly, which I keep coming back to,

he was just like so anti-expressive and just sort of had the, I mean, the demeanor that we'll get to of a toothless, elderly person at times. I just think that he was so, I mean, I don't know what we were expecting it to be. And I think that you're right, a lot of people haven't read the Mueller report.

But the timing of this was just so, it just felt so, off. We've covered on the show before. I'm sure we've all discussed off the air about how the Mueller report caught everybody flat-footed, but particularly the Democrats who were, who were so thirsting for its contents, that it was like they've been trying to reset it. And part of what part of the problem was the way that the Trump Justice Department was able to frame it before the report even came out. Right. And Democrats ever since have been trying to sort of like like retcon that whole thing and just like restart the like,

restart the conversation on their terms, this is another instance of that. But I think that what we ended up with more than anything else was, it's pretty like in so much as that was the goal, that goal is perceived to have been a failure. And we have basically ended the conversation about the fact that our president's tweets really racist stuff and has people chant really racist stuff at his rallies. And the crisis at the border, I mean, the Trump administration created crisis at the border, I mean, all the things I felt like that were actually, it seemed like we're bubbling up that should have favored the Democrats

as we start this sort of election cycle are now sort of lost in this sad miasma of, like rehashing the past, right? Yeah, I agree the timing was really bad. And I also think that just the fact that this time around, the media has already reported ad nauseum about this report. It's just been repeated over and over again. So the media thinks that they need to. to take a new angle on this. And the new angle is not the actual facts of the testimony or the

report. It's like, was Robert Mueller old and boring? Like, what was his performance? And, like, the debates are now about the performance and who won and who lost as opposed to, like, oh, yeah, like, let's review the way that our president pretty much obstructed justice. So I just think that that's like an issue and it's kind of like a victory for the Republicans. I mean, here I am doing it again. Yeah, no, I think that's right. Conservative media for their part took on Mueller by calling him a daughtering old fool or a senile crank or various other things. New York magazine helpfully compiled most of these tweets very eloquently or very, very beautifully. Eric Erickson, we all know him tweeted

so Bob Mueller is old and this hearing is just painful to watch Benny Johnson who I guess is still a thing joined in by saying Louis Gohmert proves that a clueless daughtering Mueller had no idea that his team was full of vicious Trump hating hacks sort of when Mueller was just like

did his I'm sure said one of his demurals I keep using that word when he was like I take your point it was gleefully perceived by in some quarters of him just like not being aware of anything contained in the question. And I'm sure this joke has been made a million times, but like, do you think David Kekner, you know, from Anchorman, just like every time he watches Louis Gomerd on TV is just like,

please, please run for president. I want to play you. I like, I have to. Anyway, Lindsey Graham tweeted Mueller hearing becoming very confusing and sad. Dinesh D'Souza, who is, who should not be a thing anymore, tweeted, is, is it possible that the Republicans have kidnapped the real Robert Mueller and subsistinging? a mentally retarded look-alike in his place. Yeah, a little insulting, I would say.

He managed to hyphenate look-alike, but didn't reconsider anything else in that tweet before he sent it out. And finally, Buck Sexton, who I quote mostly just to say his name, Buck Sexton, widely regarded host of the Buck Sexton show, was one of many propagating the conspiracy theory that Mueller's demeanor indicated that he was a puppet. A literal puppet. Well, yes, some said a literal puppet. There was a hand up the back of his shirt.

a lot of people on the right the conspiratorial forces on the right seem to be making the claim that because he was so unimpressive during his testimony then that is all the evidence we need that he was just a figurehead put there

put in charge of the investigation so that all of these arch liberal Democrats working underneath him could run it with him as cover does that make I don't I'm just tossing this off Do you subscribe to that theory, Elizabeth?

Do you find anything there? I mean, I would need to be like six galaxy brains out to subscribe to that theory. It makes no sense to me. But, you know, it's like if you want to believe it, that's how you get there. Yeah. I mean, there was a clip that went around, I guess, probably mostly in the liberal sphere of Chris Wallace, Fox News host, appearing on Colbert that night. And Colbert was insisting that,

It was actually a very important moment in American history, that everything there was, it was not a failure. And, you know, Chris Wallace went back and forth with them a little bit. I think depending on where you saw this link, one of the two demolished the other one. Well, I guess it depends on how you watch it. Your mileage may vary on how unimpressive Mueller was. I was not overwhelmed by his unimpressiveness. I just think that when he would say, I take your point or, you know, otherwise just sort of, I think what was missing in Robert Mueller's presentation was like a wink and a smile.

And if he had said, if he had, if he had just like given his non-answers with some indication on his face that he understood the ridiculousness of the situation, when the Republicans were just like, just like, like speaking with it as fast as an,

as auctioneers, just like running down. the crimes of the galaxy brain crimes of the Clinton administration and all the times they had met with Russians. And I mean, if he had just given some indication that he was aware of the dissidents, I think the perception would have been a lot different. Yeah. And I think that he just didn't want to be anyone's political pawn. Yeah. That's just never been his vibe. He is like the most honorable man who like eats, I don't know, wonder bread still. I don't know what Robert Mueller does in his free time, but I'm sure it's very wholesome and American. And so I think that, like,

he was just never going to do the James Comey bit. He was never going to try and become a figure for justice. Yeah, a really good comparison. Yeah, I mean, I think that, I mean, the New York Times newspaper headline was Mueller defends inquiry and says Russia isn't done. Subhead is a halting delivery at odds with a laser focus on the past. I mean, it was, it was a an impossible situation that he was put in. You know, I mean, he couldn't possibly, he, it was sort of a joke, a running joke about how many times he tried to get the page number and paragraph number of reference, to reference the questions that people were asking him.

But really, I mean, there was too much information for anybody to be, I mean, to answer, you know, to be that fleet-footed in their response. And he was determined to be correct, 100% of the time. And like you said, he was, it seemed like his utmost concern was to not make, make news. And inso much as the news is only about his inability to make news, I guess that's something of a success. I guess to me, from the taking the media angle, I couldn't help but think about the fact that it wasn't that long ago in our great nation's history, that our entire, like if they, if this had happened 10 years ago, we would not have watched it. Our entire

interaction with it would have been the New York Times write up the next day. Now we're all, I mean, I don't know about all of everyone in the world, but the people who are listening to this podcast, I feel like we're all live streaming it on our laptops while we're doing our jobs, right? I mean, we're all listening to this. And the Times did a big, you know, a lot of big write-ups about the piece, but the first thing that comes up in the Google search is basically a BuzzFeed listical by the New York Times saying like, the five things we learned, the five big takeaways. I mean, great, that's helpful. But this is just the world we live in now. Are we more informed as a society because we're all live streaming this stuff? Or are we missing out on something because we're responding in tweets in real time

instead of actually letting other people digest it for us? I think it's the fact that we're thinking of it as content, you know, something we can consume. And like everyone is ramping up for it. The New York Times had a write-up the next day. It had a listicle. It had a daily podcast episode. And I think that just like because we treated as like content and entertainment and the headline of that day, we also evaluate based on performance based on how compelling it is. And so I mean, in a way, it just takes away from the facts of the content.

Like you would just read the facts of the investigation and a New York Times report maybe 10 years ago. And I think like we're just all talking about like, oh, Robert Mueller is kind of boring. And it was sort of like It was like when Jared talked for the first time And everybody was like that's not the voice that I thought that he had Right Robert Mueller's present everyone was just like expecting I don't know just like a gravelly monologue out of a Spielberg movie or something

Yeah he's an SNL character like people have this idea of who they're going to be and Everyone looked to him as a hero and I'm sure he hated that And so this whole thing was going to be a deflation from the lore that has been built up around this dude. The presentation didn't match the jaw, I think is what we're trying to say there. To the Democratic primary candidates who, of course, had something to say about all this. Elizabeth Warren and Corey Booker, at least those two, called for either an impeachment or a vote on impeachment to get people on the record about this whole thing. Beto O'Rourke, beloved figure in this podcast, was not asked about impeachment at a press conference,

but he said in a statement that Mueller's testimony adds, quote, urgency to cause for impeachment. I don't know how helpful that is. Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, said, in America, the law is king. The king is not the law. It is time for Donald Trump to stop the racism and to leave the White House.

Call not call, I guess. And Bernie Sanders, of course. Oh, yeah, he's. said he is not exonerated referring to Trump. And called Trump a racist who's trying to divide the people, the American people up based on the color of their skin and said that, and he specifically called on the House to begin an impeachment inquiry. So, yeah, so there's that.

I think that more than anything, I mean, we don't have to dwell on this, but I think the, you know, we're at that phase now where the Democratic primary is going to be driving Democratic politics, obviously, for the next year plus. And the testimony didn't give anybody any extra ammunition. But it did give a certain urgency to, like Elizabeth Warren said of Congress, now all the candidates have to get their names on the record as well, right? I mean, this is going to be for better or better. For better or worse. For better or worse, this is going to be the Iraq war vote of this Democratic primary, right? Yeah. I mean, definitely. It was, this whole thing was like a greatest hits, you know, like I think everyone was kind of doing the reunion tour

and saying their points like over and over again. And in a way, it just helped each candidate sort of lay out the plane of their political scope in a way. Well, yes, I think that's exactly right. And I think the whole impeachment conversation, as big of a deal as it's been, has been able to be sort of a secondary issue in the campaign so far, or at least not not, you know, so, so central that they couldn't that candidates couldn't avoid it. Joe Biden for his part did his best to sidestep and move to kitchen table issues when asked about it yesterday. And we make fun of that stuff. I mean, I think he's, I think that there's a lot of legitimacy to the argument that like, you know, these swing voters are going to vote on the economy and health care and stuff like that

not on impeachment. And so, and that's, I'm sure that, you know, the argument for not pursuing impeachment. But, you know, I think that the argument on the other side from someone like, Elizabeth Warren is we live in like spectacular times. I mean, not in the positive way. We live in like very important significant times and these sorts of times call for a significant response. But anyway, we'll see where that all goes. Before we leave the subject altogether, we do have to acknowledge the silliness of, and the meminess of some of the things that took place. Without, without any real newsbreaking, we were left to our memes and our other social media devices to kind of commemorate the day.

Josh Barrow tweeted, I think the one thing that this day has given us is I take your question as a way to respond to any question we don't want to respond to. Jonah Goldberg, author of liberal fascism amongst other things,

tweeted, I take your question is the new by Felicia. I'll be looking forward to that hardcover book coming out soon. The director, Peter Ramsey, tweeted, I take your question, I assume is special counsel

for fuck you idiot and someone named Zippy Kaufman tweeted, I take your question equals, sir, this is a Wendy's. Which if he actually just had said, sir, this is a Wendy's over and over again, that might have been the greatest testimony of all time. The internet would have exploded. And speaking of the internet exploding, it is now time for the overworked Twitter joke of the week.

The Overworked Twitter joke of the week, as I'm sure you all know, is the time where all of media Twitter makes the same joke at the exact same time. Lovie Smith, who is the head coach, former NFL coach, now the head coach of, what, the Illinois football, the Fighting Aligni. Fighting a Linae. Gave his first press conference of the season

and emerged with a shaved head and a long white beard. And many people, but most importantly, our good friend Darren Ravell tweeted, Lovey Smith becomes the first person to use new product, colon, face app, live. because he looks really old. That's a thing.

A lot of people, a lot of people tweeted that. Let me see. Oh, a lot of our old friends popping up today. A couple days ago, dear friend Chuck Todd tweeted, on substance, Democrats got what they wanted,

that Mueller didn't charge President Trump because of the OLC guidance, that he could be indicted after he leaves office, among other things. But on optics, this was a disaster. Hashtag Mueller hearings. it was a popular Twitter joke to restate everything that Chuck Todd tweeted,

putting other deplorable historical figures in the place of Donald Trump. Kurt Eichenwald tweeted, on substance, Hitler was a disaster. But on optics, those parades and captivating speeches were winters credited to Chuck Todd's grandfather in 1945. Mikhail Jolet tweeted on substance, it was clear Ted Bundy violently murdered 30 people and deserves a rot in jail. But on optics, he looked good on TV. So who knows what should happen. And Matthew Iglesias tweeted, I don't know, not having watching the hearings,

I don't know how the optics are going, but I'm told by optics critics that on substance Mueller said Trump did some crimes, which sounds like a bad look for Donald Trump. I think that's the appropriate take. A lot of people, Tim Duncan, moving on, Tim Duncan, it was announced as coming back to the Spurs as an assistant coach this year next season,

which is really cool. it was pointed out by Hugh Hopkins Pressbox listener. This is not really an overworked Twitter joke, but so many people opted to write out the Popovich, Greg Popovich's quote about Duncan joining the Spurs, which is only fitting that after 19 years

as Tim Duncan's assistant, after I served loyally for 19 years as Tim Duncan's assistant that he returned the favor. It's a very endearing and appropriately hilarious quote to come from Greg Popovich. But as Hopkins points out, So many people opted just to write out the Popovich quote about Duncan joining the Spurs.

Maybe we need a new category for just like the Twitter press release of the week. Yeah. Thirsty for engagement. Huh? Thirsty for engagement. Thirsty for engagement. Oh, many, many people. I think this is probably the biggest look of the week, but many, I mean, in response to the Mueller report, many, many, many people, as Max Tanny pointed out, tweeted that the book is actually better than the

movie about the Mueller report and reference to him just like basically ringing out loud. Sometimes the book is actually better in the movie. The Mueller book was actually way better than the movie. It's usually the case. The book is better than the movie. I mean, that was a Times reporter that wrote that. I mean, this. But is it really? It's pretty boring, I hear. Yeah, no, the book is really bad. Here's the thing. Nobody read the book. So we can all just pretend it was good. Right. And this is like whenever, you know, whenever they turn like a 800 page novel into a movie, I was like, yeah, the book was way better. It's like, no, you did not read the book.

And finally, from Friend of the Pod, Friend of the Pod, also Ringer writer, Zach Cram pointed out, I think the biggest Twitter meme of the week was definitely, it just happened, was Steve Balmer at the introductory press conference, Clippers owner, Steve Balmer at the introductory press conference for Kauai Leonard and Paul George, as his want was very animated, was very excited, was jumping up and down the screen and screaming and doing everything that we love Steve Balmer for.

It was the overworked Twitter joke of the week to reply to that, video was something to the effect of Steve Balmer hasn't been this excited since the launch of Windows 95. If you made a Windows 95 joke, congratulations. You've just made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, Alyssa, before we move on, let's take a quick break. Today's episode is brought to you by Luminary, a new podcast subscription service with some of the best content around. I'm excited about Luminary because it's the only place you can listen to the newest show on the Ringer Network, which is Break Stuff with the story of Woodstock 99. This is, This is an incredibly good podcast hosted by Stephen Hayden.

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Luminary. Dot link slash press box cancel any time terms of class. All right. And now to the notebook dump. We had a lot, a lot,

a lot of notebook dumping to do today. We're going to start off with, shall we call this one mic drop, I guess? This is, just this week,

the Huffington Post published a lengthy piece on the fall of mike. com. which was for a time, the sort of trailblazing millennial news website. And then the next thing we knew, I mean, it was kind of expert in all forms of media. There was videos.

There was, of course, the written word. It was social, very adept at social media. It was growing and growing. It was a startup as much as it was a media company, if those things are separate things in 2019. Or whatever the year we're talking about here is. It was launched in 2011. But as it seemed like overnight, it went from a very central part of our media consumption to literally gone. What, Alyssa, did we learn from this piece?

I think the most important takeaway for me was just that media companies should never pitch themselves as like these innovative tech companies that deserve millions and millions and millions of dollars in DC money. It just seems like it's the VCs are always going to expect this huge investment that they get on actual tech companies. Yeah. And they never get the return that they wanted. Yeah. And because usually a successful media organization is, uh, is successful for boring reasons. They hire good reporters and they are diligent journalists. Yeah.

And, and this was not the case at Mike. They kept trying to jump from one trendy thing to another, whether it's a Facebook. algorithm or whether it's pivoting the video. We've all heard the sound bites and it's all just a way to ensure your future is very frail. So in that in that Huff Poppies, I guess to that point, there is a good quote from Esther Bergdahl who at one point was Mike's copy chief and she said journalistic institutions need to be institutions. They need to be able to grow in a healthy and steady way. When I think about things that grow wildly and successfully, I don't think of a media company. I think of cancer.

Yes, she was a very good quote for this source. Great source of this entire thing. She's also the one who said something about the not wanting the custom-made Nike's, but a 401K instead. There wasn't a quote attached to that, but that's an interesting part of the story that just kind of goes to show just the sort of startup wackiness of the whole thing. It says when Mike passed out,

they had custom-made Nikes, I guess, with the Mike logo or something on them. They were made for every employee of the company. This is in 2015. The company had already raised more than $30 million, but had yet to set up a 401k. system, multiple employees said. There was a lot, you mentioned the, you mentioned the social media engagement and pivoting to video and everything else.

I mean, we've talked about that so many times in the show, but it's been a while. I mean, the pivot to, pivot to video is going to go, is going to, you know, be on the mass tombstone of this media era. It was just like, there was a, in media, here's another quote from the piece. In meetings, this Jake Horowitz, one of the founders, was known to ask, who's sharing this? New employees received a 45-minute training focused on shareability. When a headline construction shared well on Facebook, Mike relentlessly published stories that fit that blueprint. Another former employee said that it felt like the analytics team ran the newsroom.

We've seen this many times. Sure. We've seen this in places that we've worked in places that are friends. Gawker Media started that way. They had a leaderboard in the main editorial office. Yeah. I mean, it's like something out of a, you know, like out of Wall Street or something like that where it's just like they're, they're, they're, ranking people on a dry erase board and saying who can get the most engagement.

Sure. At some point, Gawker, maybe not formally, but decisively sort of segregated that part of the, the sort of clickbait part of what they were doing off from like the quote unquote, like real journalism part of what they were doing. And I think that probably was to encourage people, I mean, well, probably to, you know, be solved to some hurt egos, but all, you know, because some of the best writers weren't necessarily the best, you know, aggregators. But also I think that that was an acknowledgement of the kind of the bigger point that you're

getting at, which is this you can like clickbait will get you hits and get you ads for next month. But like sustainability is based on quality. Exactly. Like no one's going to continue coming to the site if all your headlines are. Like you won't believe how this white woman destroyed this other white woman in a racist tweet. Or like, you know, like, who knows?

Like that combination of words in a headline is just like meant to get you to click for three seconds, but it's not meant to engage. And I remember when I worked at Vanity Fair's website and we had just gotten like a live analytics tool, there was a lot of conversation about how Vanity Fair articles had like long engagement on them. So we could feel, okay, maybe we didn't have the traffic that Gawker or BuzzFeed did, but like people were actually reading the stories. So I think that that's like one thing to think about in all of this is like no one was actually caring if there was people interacting with the content in a good way. Yeah. And like we said, I encourage everybody to read the piece. It was a very interesting window into the modern media world that we live in. A couple other quotes we've got to get through at some point. Then publisher Corey Haake was during an all hands meeting was asked about the low morale on the staff. And his response was that low,

morale was normal in newsrooms, which made me true, but doesn't sound like the sort of thing that your EIC should be saying out loud. And then, I mean, just in, separate from just the journalistic issues that are, the journalism issues that are raised by the existence of Mike.com, it's a great moment in journalism, great moment in getting quotes and in capping stories. They got Horowitz, they had a Horowitz quote to end this whole thing where he says, as it turns out, it doesn't take much to trick a New York media reporter into writing a story about how great your company is. To go back briefly to your point about venture capital and journalism, I mean, we're going to have to get to some point in the world where those two things can coexist in some way, right? I mean, it's got to be whether or not that venture capital broadly defined understands the necessity of quality.

I mean, it kind of seems hard to imagine we'll ever get to that point. but more and more of our money in the world is coming out of like VC, right? Sure. And it's almost impossible to start up a new business, especially one that's housed on the internet that doesn't get, you know, that doesn't, well, I mean, it's not impossible to do without venture capital. But it's just, but it seems like. I mean, I think part of what it is is when venture capital is getting into journalism, you don't need to as much kill the venture capital part of it. but as much as the, you know, what's cool, not a million dollars, a billion dollars idea, right? Like here, Mike launched from nothing.

In 2014, they had an offer for Twitter offered to buy it for 90 million. They said no. They thought it was worth hundreds of millions in 2017, and then it sold for $5 million last year. Yeah. So it's clear that they just, they thought they had something that they didn't have. You're chasing this tale of Facebook, and like we've covered before, that Facebook changes their algorithm or changes their priorities and you're just absolutely. screwed if you're at I mean they're to to be serving two gods you know to be there you know to be

serving two masters to have Facebook you know on one side is basically your only way out in the world and then venture capital on the other side that's in these VP VC people just demanding growth yeah destroys your identity yeah what yeah you if there ever was one it's absolutely gone speaking and I do not mean this awkward segue to be at all a commentary on what's to follow But speaking of venture capital in journalism, the athletic is still hiring everybody. They're embarking on a sort of quick-sighted quest to take over a lot of the territory

of the UK soccer world, as Brian Curtis has written about on the ringer.com. And they just hired a bunch of new NFL writers. I mean, just like the paragraph of who they hired starting with Mike Sando is, just incredibly long. Our own, my dear friend, Chuck Mendonall, who wrote about MMA in the UFC for the Ringer for a long time, is over there now.

They just have a whole, you know, a big swath of MMA writers and our, and dear friend, former Ringer, I mean, former Grantland cohort, Rafe Bartholomew is over there covering boxing now. But there's, I mean, that's at the end of a lengthy list of other hires. You know, there've been a lot of reports on how many people they have. subscribe to the site. According to this piece on the big lead, they had at some point crossed the 100,000 subscriber threshold, but clearly they need several times more than that to endure. Awful announcing reported that after they just raised $22 million VC, they hit a total of $100 million

raised. I had Almeda doing some back of the napkin math yesterday, and he ran out of space on the napkin. But it's clear that they're that that, you know, if they double the number of subscribers that they had. In that big lead piece, it says that they need to get to around 50, 560,000 subscriptions. So like if they multiply it by six. And I think that that's based on, you know, that that's based on a subscription rate of $60 a year. And everyone's on a discount. And everybody, everybody's on a discount. This seems concerning to me. I just think that it's what We've talked about the Atlantic, I mean the Atlantic, we've talked about the athletic on and off mic, and with some confusion about what the business model is,

it sort of like seems like they're setting up a too big to fail thing, which is a really interesting gambit in the modern media landscape. A lot of people are saying, you know, or a lot of the naysayers are saying they're kind of constructing this company that they will eventually sell to, I mean, the question is who? I mean, does like, does Disney come in and say, we will give you, X number of millions of dollars is because ESPN can't afford it. Right. I mean,

it has to be the parent company bidding on this. But even if it's whoever, whoever's offering this money, like I don't know, like does anybody need 100 college football reporters? I don't. Does anybody that is interested in publishing, publishing,

personally I do not. Does anybody that's interested in publishing this content need this volume of reportage? It's a really weird thing. It seems like if it ever, if they actually got sold, they would be selling based on the backs of their, their biggest names,

they're the highest, I mean, they're writers who get the most clicks, and then everybody else would kind of be left adrift. I don't know. I hope that this works because it's a really cool site

and it's a lot of, a lot of really good writing, but you kind of look at these numbers and it seems like they're, like, it's... You feel like the crash has to be coming. Right. Well, I think the perception

is the crash was always coming. Now it looks like the crash might be coming sooner than we thought. I guess that's the fear. Yeah. Check in with Elizabeth Warren about that. That's a really good point. Now, moving on also in the world of sports journalism, this one is a touchy subject, and that's

sort of the point of the subject. It was just announced this week that the NFL will not be suspending or otherwise punishing Kansas City Chiefs receiver Tyree Kill. Please jump in and correct me if I'm wrong, Chris. But like this story, as it's most recently told, he has a history of domestic violence against his partner has confessed or has admitted in court to the crime of domestic violence. There's been a lot of other accusations swirling around him. No formal charges brought, I don't think, since the first one.

But then this story came out that he may have broken the arm of his two-year-old son. But the police chose not to prosecute that. They couldn't find any proof of it. Or a recording emerged of his partner saying, accusing him of that. Right. And he was threatening his partner. And in that same recording, yes, he threatened his partner. Mina Kimes, a friend of the ringer, who wrote a big piece on how hard it is to report about this story.

Back in 2017, when it was first sort of Akron was on Dan Levitard's radio show this week, trying to explain her anxiety about everything that's happening right now. Let's listen to some audio of that. which he denies not only that he abused the child, which he has been consistent on from the beginning, that he did not do it. And I think that played a role in him not getting suspended. He also denies the 2014 incident that I just described the police report.

That he denies that even though he pled guilty. Yes. And like Dan, you know, people plead guilty all the time to things they don't do for reasons of money or not having a lawyer. There were some lawyer issues. But there was also a police report describing pretty graphic physical evidence that I think people do not know about, which is why I wanted to read that.

Anyways, I'm not surprised necessarily that the NFL didn't suspend him because of the abuse allegations because it, obviously there, I guess, wasn't conclusive evidence. The cops didn't pursue it. I thought they would come down on him because of the verbal threat, given the fact that this is a woman he has a very disturbing history with, right? The history that I just described. So given that context, for him to come out and threaten her, which is what that was, and that's something. that the league has suspended players for before, Jimmy Smith on the Ravens, I am surprised they did nothing. That whole clip is very strange. I love Lebitard, but there was a weird dismissiveness. I mean, this is sort of beside the point, but not for nothing, but he ends with talking about

how the NFL is incentivized to punish Tyree Kill because the media, the Twitter backlash only works in one direction. To me, it just sounds a whole lot. I mean, that reminded me of the the wacko notion that scientists are incentivized to say that climate change is real when it's really false? I mean, that's from the point of view that. No, but like the idea that you're incentivized to punish him when you're so clearly not. I mean, you're incentivized for your most exciting players to be on the field, right? Yeah, that's their M.O., yeah.

You're incentivized to not piss off the owners if you're Roger Goodell. You're incentivized to make money for your sport. You're not incentivized to worry about what Twitter says. If they're incentivized to punish him. them, they would have punished them. It's pretty, pretty simple. Yes. Well, but I think that that's, in an inverse way, that's the question that we're getting at, right? Because as Mina said in that interview and as many other people have brought up in writing this week, the biggest question is not, you know, why Roger Gerdell didn't arbitrarily punish him for child abuse when there's no proof that he did.

I mean, because that's an old Roger Gadell thing to punish somebody for the perception that they may have done. something wrong. But it does seem like they should, they could have and should have punished him for threatening his partner on that audio tape. Especially given the history and this existing police report that said that she was roughed up.

And I think that that's what it all gets to, which is that like if you want to be an ad hoc police force, if you're going to take it upon yourself to be the moral arbiter for every player in the lead, then just like real law enforcement, there is a necessary aspect of transparency,

You have to, people have to be able to see how you reach the decision. And if the answer is like, there is literally nothing to any of this and that entire audio tape was like, you know, an audio deep fake or something and I didn't. I mean, if that's true, which I clearly don't believe it is, like that has to be available for us to know. So we're not just throwing her hands up in dismay. Yeah, like there's not some dark boardroom meeting with a bunch of powerful people who are just making this decision, which I mean, that's what I'm imagining now because we, have no transparency in how the decisions are made. I mentioned the 2017 piece that Mina Kimes wrote. I do want to break down one specific quote because it's, it goes to the dissonance of

reporting on this thing because it's really hard for sports report. We talked last week about how it's important for sports writers to be able to touch on political subjects and bigger ideas than just the game, right? But it is also difficult to touch on this when you're working from the standpoint of someone that's covering a sport and you're not just like always zoomed out. You're not always looking down from 10,000 feet. So this is from her 2017 piece, Meena Kimes wrote, over the past two months, I've listened to my colleagues and peers struggled to talk about hell. It feels wrong to praise him for his gifts while ignoring his flaws, but it also feels strange to intermingle

talk of jet sweeps and screens with casual reference to domestic violence. I co-host a fantasy football show, and I can't imagine working the subject into our usual conversation. And this is an imagine quote. Tyree Kill is now averaging double-digit points on a weekly basis, making him a great flex option. And by the way, two years ago, he pleaded guilty to domestic abuse by strangulation. She acknowledges that dissonance, but that dissonance is everywhere. I just, you know, just combing through briefly coming through news reports after this happened.

I saw Mike Freeman at Bleacher Report. the headline of his piece was NFL's clearing of Tyree Kill opens road to potentially historic chief's season which is which is interesting especially because he actually

in a parenthetical paragraph in the piece gets to that point that we were discussing earlier he says it's remarkable to me how a player who on tape is physically threatening a woman and isn't suspended for that act alone but this is a debate The end of that is, but this is a debate for another day. And then the next line is, in other words,

the Chiefs have the makings of what could be a historic offense. I mean, it's just, like, this is, it's, this is what we're, this is the struggle that every sports writer deal, you know, covering the subject deals with. Joel Corey at CBS Sports quotes Andy Reed, the coach of the Chiefs, who went out of his way to open his first press conference of the season, I believe, by saying, let's talk about Tyreek. I know that's a hot topic.

the law enforcement side of it, there's been statements on that. There's been statements made by the chiefs. There's been statements made by Tyreek. And with all those, we're obviously, we're comfortable with Tyreek coming back here. And then he basically ended by saying, and that's all I'm going to say about that. So he was like, I want to talk about this thing up front that you guys all want to talk about. And my statement is that we're not going to talk about it. It was very impressive performance.

I mean, for just avoiding talking about something altogether. I don't know. What do you do, Alyssa? I know you mean, you don't write about sports on the regular, but like, how do you, how do you, how do you, how do you do this? I think deep down, it's, it, the, the sort of lack of ability to sort of just spend some thoughtful time about, like, what those allegations mean. It has to do with maybe the diversity of people who cover these sports. It's not surprising to me that Mina was the one who had to be serious about it on the La Bittard show. And I think that, like, you know, there were moments in that video where they're like, cut to the top gun video or like describe the top gun video as she's looking up the court documents. And it's like, maybe we could just all be silent during that time. Like maybe we could all consider what it means to be a victim of domestic abuse. Yeah. I think that like that is just the issue here. And you see it in almost every industry. You see it in tech with sexual harassment allegations. You see it obviously in the entertainment.

industry. You see it everywhere. It is a little bit, I mean, I mean, this might be just my own naivete, but it is a little bit easier to report on imaginary tech company.com and when mentioning their CEO to have an aparenthetical that he was accused of sexual harassment and no charges were ever filed and then continue on with the story. Because I think that in some level, the audience is to some degree more open to that. And it's maybe part of the broader narrative in a way that people go to fantasy sports websites and going to just ESPN.com or like actively upset when, you know, the chocolate touches their peanut butter. Sure, sure.

Like there's, you're actually losing a player who might mean like something for your team or something for you, the entertainment you experienced that year. And if you're reading a piece that's just like about the chief's offense and how great it could be. Yeah. Right. You're losing a member of a team who could be valuable as opposed to like knowing, I mean, truly cares if Mark Zuckerberg is fired or something like that, even though he hasn't been yet. And he was never accused of sexual assault to be clear.

I'm just giving example. There was one piece, let me see if I can pull it up. There was one piece that I apologize for not knowing who wrote a bit about that talked about how the chiefs could structure Tyree Kill's next contract to avoid getting in an awkward situation if he ends up going to jail. I mean, these are things that like, but it's weird because of the sports fans, these are the things that people want to know on some. Like you want to be able to Google that like someone's got to win that SEO race

Or maybe not maybe they don't maybe that's just it But it's it kind of reminds me of the conversations around Louis CK Everyone's like well I really liked him as a comic and Like can he does he have to be punished for this one thing? I don't know it's sort of like if we did a top Wait with the ringer ranked a bunch of TV episodes don't even remember if Louie made the list But like if but if you ranked the top TV shows of the 21st century or something like that do you have to say? I say the if you're if you're if you're if you're if you're if you're if you mention the show do you have to go into a a dissertation about his accusations against him yeah it's a great question yeah the frame of that

says to me maybe not because it's like it's like two sentence explanation it's kind of hard to deal with yeah it's kind of hard to deal with the level of like autobiography and introspection in that show particularly without getting into it but this is you know I think that there's it's it's easier to separate it's easier it's maybe maybe it's easy to separate a real person from the person in the uniform with the helmet on. You can't even see his face. He's just fantasy numbers. Sure.

And I think that that's what makes it. I mean, but that is really uncomfortable. And it's really hard for us as sports writers, but more importantly, sports fans, I think, to balance that whole thing. Tara Sullivan at the Boston Globe wrote a good piece called the NFL. The NFL system of justice is an inconsistent mess. And she talks about the fact that it did, I mean, a lot of personal. experience that you were mentioning before and how, well, this is just from the end of her piece,

I'll just read it. Percentages, and this is just talking about like, you know, are national averages. Percentages guarantee behaviors ranging from antisocial to criminal. That's just a sad truth of society. I mean, she's saying there will be these terrible people that make up NFL locker rooms because statistics tell us that. But what feels so mind-numbingly the same is the NFL's inability to deal with these incidents with a hint of consistency. Any shred of credibility or even one iota of accountability and i think that's what we keep coming back to is that the NFL wants to lead they want to be the moral arbiters of the sport but they leave us in the state of just like utter confusion every single time and um you know there's a lot of times

where like law enforcement doesn't do what we perceive to be their job Jeffrey Epstein which is going on you know this whole thing that's going on now that was an example of that for a long time for a lot of people for sure but at least you can complain to law enforcement, at least you can tweet about it. At least you can be an active, you know, you can actively protest the situation with the NFL. It just seems like you're screaming into the abyss. And even if Roger Goodell or whoever heard you, like, it doesn't make any difference at all. They're not abiding by any rules. Anyway, there's no rules for this in general. And I guess we're going to leave that subject at that until we deal with it again.

One more thing before we get out of here. Graydon Carter. Former boss of mine. Former boss of yours, the great Gregon Carter. One of the brains behind Spy Magazine, of course, and the editor-in-chief for years of Vanity Fair. He left Vanity Fair in 2017, which is unsettling that it was that long ago.

It seems like it was a couple months ago to me. But anyway, he's back on the scene with his new project, which is an email newsletter, I believe. called Air Mail. If you ever wondered, if you ever missed the Gregon Carter era of Vanity Fair, wondered what parts of Vanity Fair are most central to Graydon.

Well, Air Mail is here in full, high-flown form to remind you with pieces like faulty towers, the chateau that ate province. Also, that is where Graydon was hiding out this whole time, province. FYI. There is a hashtag Me Too takes the stage. Subtitle, in London,

Mamet's new Weinstein play repels critics but delights audiences by John Larr, of course. And first scam on the moon. Apollo 11 was one small step for man, one giant leap for some German philatelists. This is really interesting stuff. Oh, also, sorry, thanks for throwing this in, Chris.

Instagrown, The End of Silent Suffering by Kazi David. That's Larry David's daughter, FYI. She was an intern there. Yeah. I mean, attending this kind of reemergence was a, of course, a New York Times interview with David Marchese where Carter sort of has to face the music about, well, a subject we just mentioned,

but we covered recently his, the Vanity Fair profile of Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein, yeah, and their inability, their unwillingness to sort of go on the record about the accusations against him at that point. And also just more generally his sort of hobnobbing with the rich and powerful and the perception that that,

that that affected his editorial's, his editorial decision making? Is that, is that right, Alyssa? Yeah, I think so. I think it's more like, so you were friends with these people, were you really in position to cover them? Yeah. Overall, Graydon is, I would say, dismissive of those charges, to say the least. There was a lot of, like, journalism was different back then.

And I think that that's true. I mean, there are a lot of ways that the industry, has changed institutionally. But, you know, there were a lot of very pointed questions by Mark Chazy that made you sort of want to read into that saying that he knew more than he was saying out loud, et cetera. But my favorite part of the whole thing was when in the middle of this discussion about hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, the New York Times runs, I believe, a Getty

photo of one of the Vanity Fair. Is this one of their Oscars party? Yes. We're Graydon is sitting with Barry Diller and a Skiddy Scott Carter, Mick Jagger, and Franley. I love Mick Jagger and Franley was just sort of thrown in. There was a waiter behind Greg and Carter. It does seem interesting that the guy who founded Spy Magazine,

you know, just became part of the culture that he ridiculed. And is he unaware of that now? Or just in denial of it now? Or is it just part of it? I mean, maybe it's as simple as like admitting it would not be part of the brand. He has to just proceed. He has to continue as if none of that is true. He was clearly very counseled by whoever his PR person is to just tow a really straight line and say like, yeah, I was part of a system and I followed the rules of the system.

And in hindsight, with the Me Too movement, now I realize maybe that system kept other people down. And that's the most he was willing to give the interviewer. I'm not sure he really even admitted that much. He kind of was just like, I was part of this system. And yeah, like, I don't know. He doesn't seem apologetic about it. I think his answer about diversity and hiring the most talented writers was really lazy. I think we've heard that time and time again.

We heard that from the Atlantic editor-in-chief very recently that he was just hiring the most talented people to write cover stories. And it's pretty obvious that those most talented people were his friends or people who was connected to who happened to be like from privileged, well-known families who, who were white old dudes. You know, like, those are the things they all had in common. He played a gatekeeper role in this instance where he was letting in talent that he thought

would be good for the magazine. And that just happened to be the voice of, like, wealthy, rich white men. Yeah. It was reported, I think, in Daily Beast, that he, the reason why he left Vanity Fair was that he was going to have to fire a lot of those people. They were going to have to cut, you know,

the payroll pretty dramatically. and a lot of, you know, his great old friends who were writing, you know, who were on the masthead as contributing editors and writers and stuff like that were making way too much money. And they, he left rather than ask them to take a pay cut. As someone who sat next to the accounts person, I can confirm that. I heard like insane salaries while I was there. You know, some of the best parts of the interview were the parts that the answer was so brief that you can imagine that Carter assumed they weren't going to be published at all. that's the way that Marchese rolls and it's usually a very effective way of doing it.

He tends to interrogate. Yeah. And you know, you know what you're getting into too when you go in with them, although he seems to find a way to surprise you each and every time. But he does kind of go right from the Vicki Ward

Epstein story to just the general story of celebrity and wheel greasing and whatever else. And those two things are connected, certainly. I mean, wheel greasing happens. It's not the end of the world. to say like, you know, I scratch your back, you scratch mine to get access, right? Yeah, I mean, the things that he was asking about definitely happen in the magazine world.

Like, the fact that Graydon Carter just denied all of that stuff altogether, like, I guess he could deny it because he was never involved in the, like, dirty negotiations of his magazine. He got to do all the fun stuff. And he didn't want people to present, like, the gross underbelly of the magazine to him. He was at such a removed level. I mean, like, I was an intern there first, and I, like, just saw the way that interns were basically used to do his own personal bidding, like, pick up dry cleaning. And, you know, like, there was a whole book project where I think they were just having, like, a bunch of books signed for his son for his birthday or something. So, like, you know, these are things that, like a super celebrity editor-in-chief, like Anna Winter or Greaten Carter can get away with within the Condi Nast organization. And I just think. that like having that kind of outsized power and sense of importance, there's no way you're not going to understand that that translates to, okay, we're going to make exchanges because we have cultural power here too. And we know how to get ahead based on connections.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that that's right. I mean, I think his main defense to all that was that, was that the Vanity Fair was too, was so elite they didn't need to do any, make any tradeoffs. Maybe at the beginning of his tenure, that was true. I just don't. Well, I don't think it matters if it's true or not, because I think that's sort of an admission that those things take place, an implicit admission that it would happen at Vanity Fair if they needed it to. Right. But anyway, I mean, that's all kind of beside the point. I think that it's good for all of us and net positive to have Greg and Carter back in our lives.

Airmail for all the joking I was doing is, was a fun read. I'm glad I now know that Italian women do not like Elena Ferranti. Oh, God. I that's it was news to me in front of me there's a big it feels like there's a big gap between like NBA writer Mark Stein's weekly

newsletter and what Greg and Carter is trying to do here are we moving into an era of everything being newsletter being email I will say website formatted you could just tell he just doesn't have a mind for the internet in a lot of ways like he's still really attached to like magazine type formatting that doesn't necessarily make sense

for like SEO reasons that is isn't grabby that won't do well on Twitter. And, you know, these are things that I think the web team when he was, it was working with Graydon Carter and when he wanted to translate the magazine online, always sort of struggled with. Because you would always want something like, let's like do like a napkins worth of cocktail party notes. And like let's like, like, you just find a way to make that look good online. And it's like, the answer is that that is not something that should exist online. So I think like in a way, airmail is like a great. example of that consistent vision of his and I really enjoy it like I don't think there's anything

wrong with it but but you know it it can be entertaining as someone who's worked the content mills on the internet for a long time well that is the end of this week's internet content mill I should say formally that David Schemaker guesses the strain pun headline will never exist as long as Brian Curtis is not here I refuse to indulge but it will be back next week presumably. Next week we are on a kind of special schedule. We're covering both of the Democratic debates. So I guess is that Tuesday and

Wednesday night, we will be recording late night, late night shows. And those will be up either late at night or first thing in the morning. So you can check back in what is there. We'll be talking about the debates, but we'll also be talking about all of the regular fun stuff. So please keep sending in

over Twitter jokes. Keep sending in I guess train pun headlines. If you have them, Alyssa, thank you so much for doing this. Glad to be here. Thanks to our producer Jim Cunningham. Thanks to Chris Hameda, our researcher and third voice in the room. We'll see you next week. I want to talk about this thing up front that you guys all want to talk about.

Your best friend Brian Curtis is upset when the chocolate touches their peanut butter. Brian will be back next week. And my statement is, fuck you, idiot. That's all I'm going to say about that. Who's sharing this? I take your question. Does anybody need 100, call you? college football reporters.

I take your question. Fuck you, idiot.