The Press Box - New Episode, Who Dis? | The Press Box (Ep. 560)

Episode Date: January 15, 2019

Jason Gay joins to discuss millennial media outreach among politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Beto O’Rourke (01:45), 'Washington Post' reporter Chelsea Janes moving from the sports section to covering the 2020 campaign (17:30), and journalists battling over the new movie ‘Vice' (32:00). Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Jason Gay Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelly, and welcome to the Ringer podcast network. True Detective is back, and The Ringer's Chris Ryan and Jason Concepcion are our guides as we navigate the twisting pathways of season three's plots, themes, and characters on the flat circle, a true detective after show. Follow Jason and Chris as they chase down leads, explore each episode's cultural context, and discuss true crime cases that mirror the ones in the show. Join the guys live every Sunday night after True Detective on the ringer's YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook pages. The Pressbox is the media podcast. We are not allowed to quote the Watchman. We are Brian Curtis of the ringer. And filling in for David Shoemaker, Jason Gay of the Wall Street Journal.

Yeah, what a letdown, right? I feel very intimidated. I mean, Shoemaker is so smart. And you guys are so good together. So, you know, my only goal is to make sure the audience gets so infuriated with me that they clamor for Shoemaker's quick return. Next week's episode will be the biggest in Press Box. history. Let me tell you. Well, Jason and I will do our best talking about, first, the millennial outreach among politicians like Alexandria, Ocasio-Cortez, and Beto O'Rourke, which seemed to reach a high

watermark this week. Second, the Washington Post assigned Nationals beatwriter Chelsea Jains to cover the 2020 campaign in at least one... Oh my God. Oh, and at least one political writer person lost their mind. And finally, do America's op-ed writers know dick about the new movie Vice? And was that joke too easy. We discuss, bless is always the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But Jason, let's start with millennial outreach, a subject that fascinates me. Okay. And here I want to start by quoting an I-09 headline directly. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drops watchman fire in response to criticism. What a world we live in. Yeah. The occasion was, and she was actually quoting from watchman number six, apparently, for all of you complete us out there.

She says, she said, quoting Alan Moore, none of you understand, I'm not locked up in here with you. You're locked up in here with me. Yeah. She also had another Twitter moment this week where there was a headline that said, AOC isn't the future of the Democratic Party, colon Joe Lieberman, which is a great headline anyway, to which she responded, new party, who dis? what do you make I just feel like we've I have no moral issue with any of this

I just want to say but I feel like we have crossed a Rubicon does it not where our politicians are talking to us on Twitter as we talk to ourselves on Twitter

or some of us do younger than us anyway Jason right what do you make of all this? Oh I mean and she you know no one more so than her I think that she is

Jedi level in terms of her, you know, not just the wit, but the efficiency of the responses and the way that she has cut some of her critics down to size. I mean, she is very, very fluent in all of it. And, you know, the crab apples will say, well, this is not really what Congress people should be doing. You know, you should be paying attention to nuts and bolts of government. But, you know, all rules are off now, Brian. You know, this is the world. This is the public square.

social media. And, you know, if someone comes in and they're just, you know, gifted at it, let their gifts shine. Yeah, and it's all created by Trump, right? I mean, Trump, Trump is the, Trump was the, you know, flying wedge that opened up Twitter speak to politicians, right? He does it in his strange, misspelled, ham-handed way. And then you get somebody who's actually of the Twitter generation, who's not just sort of typing press release, you know, crazy lines for Twitter. Have you done the Trump mute game yet, Brian? No, I haven't. Oh, this is, someone passes on to me.

I love this. You mute Trump on Twitter and then you follow the reactions of people and you try to guess what he said in his tweet because, you know, you can kind of put it together like Wheel of Fortune after a while just from the where the reactions are coming from and the general level of alarm. So, yeah, I recommend that for folks who are kind of getting bored of it. That is really fascinating. I'm going to have to try that because it's better than the normal Trump game, which is just to read all the tweets and consume them that way. We also had better O'Rourke this week, by the way, making his bid for a millennial-friendly politician of the moment. First of all, he has a beard, a kind of a loser's beard.

A retirement beard in the mode of David Letterman, which got like a billion hits on Twitter, according to NBC's Alex Siteswold. Literally, are you just like being... No, no, sorry. Less than a billion, but lots of hits. Okay. And then Peter, there was a little bit of a controversy because it was said that he had Instagrammed his teeth cleaning

or live streamed his teeth cleaning. And in fact, it was part of a larger Instagram where he was interviewing people about life on the border, according to Peter Hamby. And somebody took a split second selfie shot of him with his mouth open that was screaming. grabbed by a reporter. So you can understand the confusion. We thought Beto, which is, of course, of a piece of the whole Beto political brand. And I as a Texan remember my old pals losing their

mind when Beto was Instagramming his way through the Waterburger drive-thru at midnight after debate with Ted Cruz. So he's kind of got, you know, his is a little more, what's the difference between him and AOC online, what would you say? How would you describe it? he's more careful, I think, candidly, than she is. I think she is, you know, she knows who she is and she is very comfortable with it. I think he's still trying to figure it out a little bit, especially trying to figure out what the national version of Beto is. But can I just go back a second?

Wasn't the controversy, so the controversy was this. I'm just asking you questions here so you can explain it for you, man. But, like, that this was first interpreted as vain Beto, narcissist of the internet, like, live streaming his dental checkup, right? And then some media person came forward to say, no, in fact, you morons, you have it completely wrong and you've been played. This was Beto live streaming interactions with people along the border including this dental hygienist.

Did I get that correct? That's right. That happened to include, but that happened to include a quick shot of his thing. But why do you have to have his mouth? Okay. You'd think he could have interviewed the dental hygienist before, right? Before or after. Do you think LBJ would have done that?

And not LeBron. I mean, you know, he texts in LBJ. We're saying, we're saying LBJ like I'm just tweeting from the toilet kind of thing. Like he was, you know, famous right for giving orders with the bathroom door open. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, people think that like, you know, people in public life are crossing some sort of threshold about hygiene. But no, man.

The bar has been low forever. It is amazing, I think when you think of the two of them, O'Rourke and Ocasio-Cortez, how they've, figured out how to do a slightly respectable with this little Beto hiccup aside, a slightly respectable version of, I'm letting you in on my life, right? The one with Akosio-Cortez that stands out was right after she was elected when she was like making dinner and answering policy questions. And now Beto, you know, taking you to the dental hygienist as a way of talking about life

on the border. We also see in this new piece in the Wall Street Journal, which I hear is a respectable newspaper this week that he is planning a solo tour across the country. Mark Zuckerberg. Did you say the Wall Street Journal's respectable paper this week? I heard. I'm sorry.

In this week's Wall Street Journal, I bet it would last week, not too much. This week. This week, who knows? He was going to pop into places such as community college campuses as he considers whether to run for the 2020 Democratic nomination.

So it feels like it's also just a way of running for something, you know, kind of the per, we talk about the permanent campaign, right? Trump famously started his 2020 campaign, the moment he got elected. Yeah. You actually just can kind of run all the time, right? You don't ever have to stop. It's what the restaurants call the soft opening, right? You know, that is what politicians do.

I'm so old. I remember Hillary Clinton's listening tour, which was a pre-Senate race in New York campaign-y, not a campaign thing, right, where she traveled around upstate and looked at cows and stuff. and now everybody does it. She got ridiculed, as is the pattern with Hillary Clinton, but now everyone just follows that lead and does basically the equivalent of that. That's what this is.

But Poppins, do people really want Poppins? Didn't Seinfeld go through all this years ago? I think Beto they actually do, though, probably, right? I don't in the Seinfeldian way. If you're in like Spanish too, you know, and you're sitting there in the community college, do you really, do you mind if Beto walks in and shakes a few hands? and ask you about what's on your mind? They'd be okay with that.

Yeah. There's no fairness doctrine. You don't need to have a visit from like Ted Cruz after it, do you? Who also has a beard, by the way? Yes. So that's a playoff beard. Right. Now, I think it wouldn't surprise no one that I am on the same side of the aisle as Mr.

O'Rourke and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez. It's going to shock listeners of this podcast. But, Jason, do we think people on our side of the aisle are awfully cheap dates about, and And we went through this was Obama and sports fandom about any kernel of pop culture or sports that's thrown to them by a politician. And they go, oh, my gosh, he or she is exactly like me. It's, oh, my gosh, you like Alan Moore, too? Really?

And accepting it as face value. Whereas when Ted Cruz says he likes the Simpsons, everybody gets mad. Oh, you're just, you're just doing that. And by the way, he went to a Buckees, which is, you know, the big Texas truck stop thingy, majiggy. Right. And everybody, I was like, and I tweeted about it and said, you know, we've really, we've really mastered performative Texan us when we're doing both the Waterburger drive-through and the Buckees visit. Everybody said, I got a response as like, well, you know, Ted Cruz really didn't mean it. He's never been there in his life.

You know, I'm sure Beto's getting water burgers every night. That's how he. Yeah. Anytime you can intersect Texas Twitter with food Twitter, like I'm just, I'm there for that. Isn't this just all what social media is now where it's like, you know, this professional class of people who parse it? I mean, look at the NBA. I mean, you work with dozens of people who, you know, spend thousands of hours a week scouring the Instagram for the latest likes and snarky comments of NBA players in the NBA. I mean, it just doesn't seem like it's a political thing. It just seems like everybody in public life now, they're, smallest movements are now open for interpretation. Yeah, but these feel very much on purpose, right? This is not something that was, you know, a picture taken in their home and there was

a, you know, a Malcolm Gladwell book sitting in the background or something, you know, accidentally, right? We are quoting Alan Moore. We know what we're doing here, right? Wait a second. No one has ever put a Malcolm Gladwell book in the background of an Instagram photo by accident. Brian? I mean, this is always, things are always done purposely.

You mean to tell me that LeBron James walked into the, Staples Center carrying a stemless Redo glass of wine as an accident? I mean everything is for show. Or wearing a bedo hat by accident, by the way? Before big wine comes from me, I know it's Rydell, I believe, not Riedel.

There you go. Thank you for clarifying that. We would have lost our non-existent sponsor if you hadn't. I mean, I find AOC's Ascension just incredible, not just because she's a New Yorker and because of the upset nature of her victory, but freshman congresspeople, you typically get

as much attention as like a junior varsity basketball game. They are not people who get followed, especially in the first couple years of their career. And obviously, she inspires people. People feel drawn to her. And she's incredibly good at it. But the other side of this, which she is, I think, kind of brilliantly starting to harness is that she understands that the other side of the aisle views her as a threat and views her as some way to move the needle for them. And that is a crazy power for someone to have, you know, as such a newcomer to political life. Absolutely. And she's become, you know, those sort of full employment act of Fox News, right?

There's no, there's sort of no way that, you know, you'll never lose a segment as long as you're talking about her, right? That's, you know, and you and I have been around television enough to know that nothing happens on television out of the goodness of anybody's heart. It's always driven by numbers and audiences. And if they didn't know that it moved the needle, they wouldn't do it. it, period, full stop. Just wouldn't happen.

So it must work. And that's fascinating. Speaking of moving the needle, who was, who besides me was waiting for the Ocasio-Cortez versus Kurt Schilling Twitter feud? Is that on your radar? I was not. I was aware of the Kurt Schilling dust up with BuzzFeed. I caught that where Kurt Schilling tried to pull the American population on the news legitimacy

of BuzzFeed and lost. terrifyingly or lost terribly rather not terrifyingly but I didn't know he that's a true thing you're making that up or is that true it's a true thing um it apparently started it was there was a there was around this week but apparently started to believe in December um he has like a Twitter avatar now that makes him kind of look like Andrew Breitbart weirdly yeah a lot more facial hair going on yeah um he tweeted out her in December no you're being to her no you're being scrutinized and treated with suspicion she had been implying double standards because every time you speak, you say something more stupid than last time you spoke. You were a college graduate

and likely the most unintelligent person, man or woman in our government, et cetera, et cetera. So that's happening. Just to put that on your radar. I want you to know. She, you know, this is power for her, don't you think? I mean, this all goes back to Ben Shapiro, does it not? Who is the, you know, Socrates of the intellectual dark web, I think. but he challenged her to a duel, right? It was a one-sided challenge to a duel, which kind of fell flat. But the boys are coming for her. You can't help but notice that.

It's just, it's comical. And I think she would have taken that. If you'd offered her that as a possible future scenario in some kind of, you know, Alan Moore, you know, some universe where you said you're going to get elected. A walk-on part? Yeah, exactly. You will become the face of Fox News. You know, they will be amplifying your ideas. They will be constantly talking about the green, you know, New Job and Green New Deal and, you know, Medicare for all and stuff like that. Constantly, she would have absolutely taken that. Absolutely. The thing that also, we neglected to mention that she really surfed over very easily this past week was, I believe it was political, had a story about, you know, the Democratic establishment.

He's worried about Alexandria. And that, again, you know, it did nothing. It did nothing. She gets it. She gets something. She gets something. Yeah. You know, I hate to use a sports cliche, but maybe she's just ready for this now, right?

You know, the idea that she's got to be a backup congressperson. You know, maybe she's just built for this. Praternatural, understands the language. Are you saying the moment isn't too big for her, Jason? Is that what you're trying to say in your sports regularly way? Talk about the moment, Brian, and tell me. Yeah. All right.

Jason, it's now time for the Overwork Twitter joke of the week. We celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. You know how this goes, right? You're a listener of the Pressbox podcast. You've heard this before. Yes. A lot of Beto jokes. One big one was, God, I hope Beto O'Rourke doesn't need a colonoscopy anytime soon.

That's from John Thomey and Gabe DuVorge sent that one in. Thank you both. A lot of people, including Trevor Noah, Jason, took the photo of the bedo teeth cleaning and wrote some version of this joke. Someone didn't understand what an advisor meant by all the kids are flossing these days. Oh, thanks to Tyler Touraville for that one. Trevor Noah, but it could have been, it could. It's like Trevor Noah meets Jay Leno, right? There's a little bit of a little bit of an old kind of old man zing to that one, doesn't it?

Just snapping off one-liners. And finally, I know you follow Jason the news of the Jeff Bezos divorce this week. Huge news. A lot of intellectual dark web going on there too. But there was an overworked Twitter joke to write Jeff Bezos files for divorce as soon as he realized he was in a union. Thanks to Don Steele, Snarky Ginger, and Ryan's name is this for that one. All right. Topic number two.

As a sports writer, I don't know if you've heard this, Jason. But the Washington Post assigned a sports writer to cover the 2020 presidential campaign. Her name is Chelsea Jane. She was the Nationals beat writer. And here's how renegade right-wing economist Bruce Bartlett responded. Washington Post assigns its top sports reporter to cover 2020 presidential race because the horse race is all that matters to the major media. No need to discuss candidates, policies, ideas, proposals, truth, accuracy, etc. I don't think we can really describe.

this is a mass freakout, right, about, about James' assignment. But what did you make about the mini freakout by people who say a sports writer can't step in and write about policy? Can I have a mini freakout of my own? Sure. Can I just give a brief word in defense

of my sports writing, brethren? Yeah. You know, I have seen this before. This was not the first time that somebody in the political tribe has made a joke about politics being written like sports. And I think, you know what? you should all be so lucky.

Because as much as sports is a trifling topic, and it is a trifling topic when compared to the management of the free world, it's also covered today with this really pretty impressive combination of intelligence and counterintuitiveness. You think about it, like sports, they're interpreted totally differently than they were just a decade ago. You get the data there, you have writers who understand data, and what goes away when you have people who understand data and can support an argument are the raining bullshit of easy hot takes. And I turn on sports TV

and you see people arguing still about who's best and who's not. But you also see debates that are framed by real information and commonly accepted facts. If you're not willing to consider these things, Brian, you're going to get roasted in the social media arena.

So there are still a few hot take artists out there in sports. Don't get me wrong. But it is harder than ever to go on TV in 2019 and talk about sports if you have no idea what you're talking about. Whereas 90% of the people I see talking about politics on TV

seem to have no idea what they're talking about. It appears to be a job requirement in cable TV to have no idea what you're talking about. So what I'm trying to say is if political journalism woke up one morning and sounded like modern day sports journalism, it would be the best day in the history of political journalism. Rant over. I love it. That was amazing.

And I agree with you. It is weird that the hot take bar is different, isn't it? In the two of them. I always see this bit where people say cable news now is following, you know, the structures of sports television, right? Cable news has become first take. And I'm like, we all realize that Crossfire was a big thing, right? Way before first take. Like decades before Skip and Stephen A and Max Kellerman were arguing on television.

Crossfire was two people arguing on CNN, right? Sure, but also, like, I think that there's a self-awareness now in sports television that just does not exist in politics anymore. I mean, or never as existed in politics, I should say. But there still is just mass acceptance of this idea that after a political event happens, that you have to have 19 people sitting at a table on a cable news outlet to talk about what just happened. I mean, we mock like five-person panels in sports. Politics thinks nothing of the 18-person panel.

I mean, it just is remarkable. So, you know, I'm sensitive because I'm a sensitive man, Brian. You know that. I do. But I just think this is ludicrous, the notion that somehow knocking political writers for coming up from sports or for, you know, sports as being the problem or sports style. as being the problem what political writing is absurd.

It is true. When Greg Olson was on Fox NFL Sunday this week, people were making fun that there were too many analysts, which was like six, I think, five or six, if I'm miscounting. And that would be a slow day on scene. Right, right.

That would just be like nothing's going on day 25 of the shutdown. What I love about the CNN panel is not only is Jeffrey Tubin off in there, but there's this guy who looks like Jeffrey Tubin. Do you know what I'm talking about? There's a guy who looks almost exactly, exactly like him, but is not in fact Jeffrey Tubin?

Is that just like another person? I don't know how to pronounce his name. Is it Chris Kaliza? No, no, no, not him. He is yet another one. So you're still naming different people. But there's a Jeffrey Tubin looking guy on there. And I'm like, oh my gosh, CNN has so many else.

They have people who just look alike. That's kind of a moment, right? Where you're just like, I don't know who this is anymore. I just turned to see if Gergen's on. And if Gergen's on, I've seen enough and I move on. You're all good. I'm good. You've had your dose of flinty conventional wisdom you don't need any more?

Let me tell you what happens straight down the middle, people, without offending anybody. What do you think is the difference? So let's say your average sports writer got put on the 2020 campaign. Not even, you know, just it doesn't have to be the, you know, trying to get news out of the Trump White House. That might actually be the easiest sports writer ever did, especially they cover a team like the Patriots. But got put on any of the campaigns. gets put on Kamala Harris or Julian Castro, whomever. What do you think operationally would be the difference between covering sports and covering that?

It's a really good question. I mean, I think the biggest difference, of course, are, you know, it's the audience difference. And I feel like there's, you know, less self-awareness. And I feel like there's less, there's so much more severity in politics now. And there's just so much more high drama and anger and racism and just, you know, awful stuff. I think that that's, you know, not to say that those, you know, things don't exist in sports I do all the time, but I just feel like they're, they've so bubbled to the surface now of just ordinary American public life that, uh, I, I think it would be a melancholic, the feeling.

So your mentions, you think would be just a dumpster fire more in politics than sports. RIP your mentions, Brian, RIP your mentions. Alexandria Kazzo Kosef is definitely not going to tweet that because she's, she's way too cool. for that. Do you think she checks her mention? Oh, she does, of course, because she has responded to some of her mentions. Ferreting out news, things like that, trying to break news, trying to understand changes

within an organization. Do you think that would be fundamentally different from covering like the San Francisco Giants to going over to one of the campaigns? Well, you know, this is not some sort of like uncharted territory. There are a number of people who have come from sports backgrounds into politics and vice versa, actually. But yeah, I mean, you know, look, there's

source greasing that happens. There are is, you know, exchange of information. You know, the people who are kind of the, you know, the newsbreakers usually are some sort of like, you know, two-way distributor. They're giving as well as they're getting. I do feel like in politics, it does seem that television wields a higher power than it does in sports. And by that, I mean that the cycle of the way that political journalism seems to work is that the prints break the news, then they get called up to the cable outlets to talk about it at night. And that's how the cycle happens. And so in some ways, that encourages a little bit of fealty by the print people towards the TV people. Whereas in sports, these things are kind of closed

ecosystems. Like ESPN does not call up like random newspaper reporters to talk on ESPN. They have ESPN people do it. And so it doesn't sort of exist in that sort of like, you know, cohabitation that it does in politics. By the same token, it does liberate you as a print reporter. It's like, you don't have to suck up to any those TV people. Right. Yeah, that's true. It is interesting. I mean, the same

basic structure of print person breaks news, opinion, person spends day talking about news. Ad nauseum and in a really strange, highly interpretive, shall we say way. And I say that as an ad nauseum opinion person. Let me ask you a question.

Because I've thought about this a little bit. You know, we've seen some of the, you know, more extreme examples of a political television reporter, press conference, you know, dust-ups and all that kind of stuff. And some of it's been insane. I think I often, what would that be like if it happened in sports? I mean, I feel like in sports, the tolerance for TV people going wacky is a lot lower. And there would be quicker. to call it out. I don't know. What do you think? It's a great question. I mean, it's a little weird because, you know, I think if we had seen that during the Obama, during Obama press conference, people also, the tolerance would have been probably pretty low. That's true. And the reason we're kind of tolerating,

you know, Jim Acosta and Jim Acosta kind of gets, you know, cast as a hero is largely because of Trump. But I think you're right. I generally think you're right. I think if, you know, you had one of those press conferences after an NBA playoff game, James Hardin or Kevin Durant's up there, and sort of blows off a question or talks around a question and, you know, I'm trying to think of who would be, you know, who the

ESPN reporter would be who's like, uh-uh, you know, we're not, we're not Tom Rinaldi or somebody going, uh-uh, we're not, I'm not taking that, Kevin, you answer me. You know, you tell me the answer. I think everybody would, I think people might start booing. I also think those press conferences in

the, in sports, tend not to be nearly as confrontational as your as your political press conference, even the non-Trump ones, right? Because, you know, again, I just think, I don't know that political news is necessarily, by the time it gets transmitted, any more adversarial than sports news or than your average sports news, maybe a little.

But I definitely think press conferences are more adversarial. I think there's just more of a, hey, you're lying to me. I want some answers. And I think sports ones tend to be. pretty chummy, you know. It's usually the player that decides to willfully misinterpret a question and get mad. But, you know, I think you're also maybe giving Trump credit as being all politics. I mean, your average political press conference is pretty, you know, milk toast. Trump is just such a one-off and such crazy theater that it feels like, you know,

representative of a much different world than sports. But Trump is his own thing. I mean, there's just no comparable to it. It's like a Hal McCray meltdown every time. Yeah, that's a great, that's a good metaphor for it. I'm just trying to picture, you know, when you see on TV, you know, a bunch of reporters standing around the hall of Senate, like talking to Mitch McConnell. Or, you know, a couple years ago talking to Harry Reid and what the tenor of those were like.

Is that, are those like the winter meetings, you know, like you just kind of wander the halls and you grab people, you know, in the, to the elevator. Scott Boris stands up in the middle of... Right, but they're both really accessible, right? I mean, that's the other funny thing about this. I think when you're on the presidential campaign, you sort of go behind the screen a little bit and the interviews are doled out.

But, you know, there is a kind of locker room aspect to it where you can just kind of walk up and ask somebody a question. And it'd be really fascinating to sort of know, and maybe Chelsea James can answer this after she's done it for a couple months. but you sort of like, is it harder to get, you know, a famous senator walking down in the hall, or is it hard to walk up to somebody's locker after game on average?

You know, but I think both would be, as rich and powerful people go, probably pretty accessible, right, in the whole realm of journalism. And I think that athletes and politicians do share this thread of, they are acutely aware of the fact that anything they say at any given moment could just blow completely up in their face in a way that they never even imagined it would. So that does not encourage great loquation. Who has better cliches? Politicians or athletes?

I'm going to go with athletes for now. Because I feel like politicians that feel a little empowered by Trump to go wacko. Like I feel like they feel that it can say what they think more. I don't think like Steve King, or maybe I'm wrong about this, Steve King gives that completely cuckoo interview to the New York talk. in the manner than much he gave it, sort of unrepentantly before Trump. Yeah. But maybe I'm 100% wrong.

I'm sure people in Iowa will say, no, no, no, he's been doing that for his entire time in public life. Maybe I'm wrong. I interviewed him one time during my political reporting days, and also he was fairly offensive in the interview, but he wanted to do it at like 7 or 8 o'clock in the morning. He was like really revved to go. I mean, he was, he woke up in character. Let's put it that way.

By the way, I want to close the segment by reading a quote from. from the boys on the bus, which I love, where a political reporter says this about the two disciplines. Hell, political reporters, shit, they're like sports writers. The job's a lot the same. It's fun to do, and the quality isn't very high. Anybody can be a political reporter or a sports writer, which I truly love. Because it's not saying that political writing is better than sports writing.

It's casting them both as completely pathetic figures. In the grand scheme, with the exact. I find that to be a lot. more common crowd. We have a lot more in common than we do differences. So I think that's nice. That's 100% true today too. I mean, what do you need most of all as a, you know, beat reporter, both politically for a campaign and also on a sport? You need endurance. You need energy. You have, you need the ability, maybe a notebook. You need the ability to be a travel ninja, right? You need to be able to like have both the home and away hotel booked before the last out is recorded. So you do not miss that.

flight to whatever it's that you're supposed to be going to next. Yeah, this is a similar kind of skill set. Let's move on to our third topic, Jason, which is the debate about the movie Vice, which you and I have both now seen. Yeah. I feel this often happens. I think this may be a more sophisticated version, but I feel when a movie comes out that's about a real thing, a true story, as the little disclaimer, a very funny disclaimer, is before Vice, journalists sort of jump into willfully misunderstand what historical fiction is and just sort of beat these movies over the head with explainer and fact check and op-eds that sort of be like, you know what, it really didn't exactly happen like that.

This movie didn't. The real events weren't exactly like this. And then, and this is my favorite part, they always have a sentence and said, this would have been a better movie if they had just stuck to the facts. That's always in there. And the facts turned out to be really complicated and, you know, prolix and all this stuff. And you're like, no, no, no. You are not a screen.

You are accusing this person of being a bad, essentially truth teller, a journalist. And then you're trying to be the screenwriter. And you don't actually know what you're talking about. This was probably the best version of events or an easier version of events. Anyway, we are there, I think, with Vice. Let me ask you first of all, though. What do you think of the movie? Did you like it?

I did. I enjoyed it. I can get why it riled people up. I can get why it throws you purposely a few times. It is by no means a conventional biopic, but as somebody who thinks that conventional biopics are among the most loathsome forms of art imaginable.

I'm fully in favor of shaking it up, and I applaud Adam McKay for doing that. But in terms of the criticism of the film, I believe, Brian, this was one of the rare rollout criticisms where you occasionally saw op-eds that said, now I haven't seen the movie yet, but... Always a great way to start, right?

Which was just an incredible thing for people to be flying off the handle before I actually see. I'm a big believer if you review the book, you should read the book. I know that makes me old-fashioned, Brian, but... At least half of it, okay?

You know? Yeah. I mean, it's funny. A couple of things are funny. One is that Adam McKay, who is the director and the writer of this movie, making a movie about the great evil boogeyman politician in the age of Trump. And it's not Trump, right? So that was funny. And he has a quote to the Daily Beast where he said he was actually, the Cheney was actually worse than Trump.

The quote was, don't get me wrong. Trump is dispiriting and upsetting. We've essentially shot a drunk orangutan into the White House. But it's nowhere near the damage that these guys did. These guys were smart and they knew what they were doing. That was his quote about that. So one is it's kind of funny to play against that. The other thing, though, is I think the argument I've seen among writers, there was a James

Mann piece in the Washington Post. There was Fred Kaplan, who writes about foreign policy for Slate, had a story about it. And both of them sort of wrote about how basically they didn't capture what made Dick Cheney evil correctly. That's what they were arguing. It wasn't like, you know, Don Rumsfeld in the guys of, or Steve Karell and the guys of Don Rumsfeld never would have said this or that, though they did have a few picks like that. Mostly it was, they didn't find Cheney's evil or Cheney's badness or loathsomeness

convincingly explained, which is kind of an interesting way to go about it. That is interesting. So they're like walking out of the theater being like, and they didn't even get the evil right. Yeah. I think they were arguing that he was essentially the same guy at the beginning of the movie that he was at the end of the movie. So there wasn't. That the Christian Bale, Dick Cheney, okay, had not changed. And these reporters who had covered Cheney, as it was explained, said that the guy who was George H.W. Bush's defense secretary was very, very different than the guy that was George W. Bush's vice president.

And so they didn't think that change had been adequately conveyed the movie. And by the way, without having covered Dick Cheney in either Bush White House, I did sort of agree. It didn't seem like I quite understood what it. happened. And it's not to say that one was good and one was bad. There obviously versions of the same guy, but I didn't feel like I understood his motives quite correctly. There's a famous, there's a scene in the movie that got a lot of criticism where Don Rumsfeld, aka Steve Karell says, Cheney asked him, what do we believe in, right? And Rumsfeld just starts laughing. What do we believe in? What do we believe in? At the time they were working for Nixon, right?

and yeah Nixon was behind closed doors with Kissinger talking about the bombing of Cambodia in this

version of the film right and a lot of people wrote about how that sort of winds up playing down Chinese conservatism

Chinese ideology Chinese motives and essentially saying he just wanted power for its own sake interesting I mean look

this is the riddle of the film right how do you do biography of a famously inscrutable man and you made

mention of the sort of passing reference at the beginning of the film, which basically cops to this and says, look, this guy is one of the most secret of human beings on the face of the planet. Like, this is the best version of this we could possibly do. You know, the thing that I enjoyed about it was, candidly, how hard McKay worked to make the case. And a case is being made here, obviously, to give it some current context, obviously to make you

feel you're not just watching some sort of, like, you know, fossilized relic of Dick Cheney's career. And there's a lot of funny gimmickery in it. And there are a lot of like totally whack-a-do moments. And there's, you know, a couple of them that I don't want to spoil anything, but they're just a couple of left and right turns, no pun intended, that are, you know, wickedly inspired in a couple of cases. And it reminded me, and this is going to sound really journalistically nerd body, so forgive it. It reminded me a little bit of what it's like to right these days. You really do have to kind of grab people by the collar and say, this is why this is important now. This is why you should be reading this story about climate change or, you know,

immigration or why, you know, what's happening in Turkey matters and giving people context to their individual lives that just wakes them up from whatever stupor they're in. And that's really the kind of way that you have to present information in 2000. 2019. And I think that this film is coming from that school. And yeah, it probably, you know, creates an opportunity for, you know, fabulous that just invariably happens in any kind of biopic. Of any, and there have been very, very, very, very conventional biopics that had, you know, issues like this. But I saw more parallels with just sort of the way that journalism is going, frankly. That's interesting. I did feel, you know, how some magazine pieces when you read them,

And they have this, you know, very silky internal structure where you're not even sure, you know, you're just kind of ride along. And you feel like, oh, I'm just, you know, I got from beginning to end. I didn't really feel like what the author was doing. And then there's these others who are like, this is my device to tell you the story. I am using devices here. This felt like the second time. They literally say that. Right, right, right, right.

Right. Like, this is like a magazine, you know, a trope here. I'm sitting in the restaurant with Jennifer Lawrence and we are eating a salad and she is picking at her salad. And I should say she's picking out her salad. said, I'm going to tell you why she matters in 2019. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And there's a second section with somebody else speaking, and you're not quite sure with their motives. Like that was this movie,

right? It was very self-consciously structural. Yes. And as you say, maybe some of that is you know, McKay. I mean, it also felt to me like a movie that where McKay was, it felt like there had been a lot of sweating to find out a lot of information. You know, he's a guy who's obviously, he was on the BS podcast last week. He thinks about politics. You know, you can tell

somebody who thinks a lot about politics, but he's also somebody who had to clearly do a lot of research for this movie, right? Yeah. Yeah. He read Barton Gellman's book, Angler, Jane Mayer's book,

The Dark Side, things like that. But it was like, you can tell it was somebody that was showing their work in a lot of ways. Like, I've read this. I know this. I'm not just some

Hollywood filmmaker who made the big short. I read all these books and I understand this about Dick Cheney. And that kind of rule breaking, as it does with, you know, writing, irritates people, I think. I think there's always a person

who's saying, oh, you're writing too much in the first person or like you're breaking it up or you're, you know, showing your work, that kind of stuff. I think also the other part of it is he had did this to, you know, real success with the big short, which was probably an even more dense topic, you know, the idea of trying to explain the financial crisis in a Hollywood film is just crazy. But there were all those funny cutaways, I think Margot Robbie and Hot Tub and stuff like that. I mean, just all this stuff to explain, you know, the inexplicable.

and that's effectively what he's doing here with advice. Yeah. Can I bring us around to a meta-media point about the Bush White House? I love a meta-media point. I'd sort of think the Bush White House has mostly evaded all filmmakers and TV people. I don't think anybody has quite gotten it right. I like this movie less than you did. I also didn't like Oliver Stone's movie about George W. Bush that he did.

I thought it had some moments in it. And I wonder if the reason for that. And I thought, by the way, Sam Rockwell's Bush in here kind of reminded me of like the Bush you get at the local sketch comedy troupe, you know, Esther's Follies in Austin, right, more than an actual like movie portrayal of George W. Bush. I feel almost that, you know, the Bush presidency was the time America just sort of the internet swallowed us all. And we just know so much and we watch those guys talk so much. And there is this whole, you know, Cheney in the Bunker secret history that has only partially been revealed. But I just wonder because we saw them so much that it's just really hard to capture them convincingly on film. And that it's just, it all feels, and Christian Bale does a fabulous Dick Cheney impersonation in this movie that I think a little bit carries over into an actual interpretation and a kind of moving.

but he certainly gets the way he speaks and his carriage and all that stuff down very, very well. But I just wonder if we've seen these guys so many times it's hard to do them. And it was harder than Nixon, right, which got a pretty good Oliver Stone movie, that old Robert Altman movie Secret Honor and all this stuff, great historical speculative fiction. Do you ride with me on this at all that we just know too much about these guys and they become, they're such media figures in our lives that it's hard to get them down? It's also, in all likelihood, too soon, right? I mean, just, you know, the George, the great W movie is out there waiting to be made.

Who knows if it's going to be made in this generation or generations from now? You know, look, darkest hour. It took them, you know, a solid 50 years to nail Churchill, Brian, you know? Give me a break. There you go on from people. But I do feel like you're always going to benefit in a nonfiction film by having an unknown subject. even something like social network, where you had this massive, massive, massive story of Facebook

and Mark Zuckerberg, whose name was recognizable. But to most people was this cartoon or just this picture of a kid with a sweatshirt. And Jesse Eisenberg's performance was so, I don't know, so good that it basically became Mark Zuckerberg's personality in real life. But that's a completely opposite challenge because you don't have to live up to a character because people didn't know who he was

or didn't know what he was like. Right. So it's like, it always helps to start with the guy who we haven't heard talk for hour and hour and on. There's also like, you know, the other part of this,

and I thought Vice walked this line, you know, you could play this movie completely for camp. And I think that like, there was like a musical number I read somewhere, got cut from the film, which was probably a good decision.

But like, you look at like, a couple years ago, what, 18 months ago, we had both the, you know, Oscar winning OJ documentary, but we also had the, you know, whatever seven or eight part, Ryan Murphy, American, whatever story of OJ

with David Schwimmer playing Robert Shapiro and all that stuff. Or no, he played Kardashian. He played, yes. Robert Cardassian, that's right. Yeah. And, but that's just played completely for camp. I mean, you're not watching that for some sort of credible rendering of what happened to the OJ guys. You're just kind of like, this is great. Nathan Lane is chewing the screen as

Flee Bailey and you're holding yourself to a different kind of standard and I think that we have this kind of

august expectation for biopics candidly because so many of them are Oscar bait you know

like they oh here it comes Lincoln got some Lincoln coming here you know like no one's making a summer

popcorn Lincoln movie right so we are holding it to a different kind of standard

I think that's right. I also think it's weird to see our own lives in the movies now, you know, having grown up seeing, you know, Richard Nixon and my parents' lives in the movies. And now it's things I actually remember in some cases clearly, obviously the Bush administration more so than OJ, though I remember both quite well. I think that's weird. I also think it's weird when these movies, and OJ is a great example of this too, you have the kind of like device where here's a famous, person who's going to do a walk-on, like a famous figure of history, which, by the way, in this movie, it's Don Rumsfeld or David Addington or somebody like that. I remember this, like reading those gorvidal historical things where a carriage opens and Washington Irving

steps out. Oh, Mr. Irving, Bard of the American experience. How are you, sir? And then it's this little, he does his little bit and then moves on. All these things kind of suffer from that at some point because they become, they all become, you know, look who's here. It's, it's Condi right. She's sitting down, oh, look, there's Colin Powell. Right. Right. And it's very hard to get out of that. And I wonder if those people, again, if it's those people are just too familiar and the real version is too familiar. And unless you give them all, you know, a real part and a real kind of humanity rather than a walk on, they just seem like, you know, cameo cartoon. They seem like the celebrities that used to be in Hollywood Squares, you know,

Like, oh, hi there, you know, famous person. How are you? Tell us a joke. Can I ask you another movie question, which is a little bit of a digression, or is a full digression? Sure. We saw that Susan Zorinski was just named the president of CBS News. Yes.

Big, widely admired hiring for CBS or promotion at CBS News. I remember reading her name for the first time because she was the inspiration for Holly Hunter's character in Broadcast News. Yes. And I want to ask you if you've seen Broadcast. podcast news in the last couple of years. I have. If you did,

did you think it held up? Because I, you know, privately behind the scenes, I have Nag Simmons a tiny bit that it could be a rewatchable. It might get four people listening to it, two of which would be myself and yourself. Right.

But I do feel it holds up, but just your thoughts. It would add 20 years to the rewatchables median listener. Let's just put it that way. That's right. You and I are old men. And at that point, and at that point,

let's just do the Maltese falcon, Right. I mean, but I do feel it holds up. It holds them incredibly well. My first job in journalism was, or first, you know,

real job was a intern at the Ted Cople Nightline still hosted by the hairdo himself. Yeah. And I watched that movie after that summer was over. And I was like, oh my God, this is it, right?

And Nightline was still, you know, tromping around Kosovo for a week of, you know, chin scratch. programs at that point in history. So you were like the Joan Cusack character running through the newsroom sliding under like, you know, file cabinets to deliver the tape to the studio?

Dude, it was totally right. There was like a, there was like some shooting. You come on at 1130 at night. And I remember the camera crews had shot all this B-roll, right, outside the scene of the shooting. And of course, they're just trying to pick up, you know, bereave people and stuff like that. And somehow a camera followed down, a dog as it walked all the way down the street. and then the dog just lifted its leg by a light pole.

Now, we see this when we're trying to cut the opening of the show right now. Everybody just kind of laughs. And somehow we finish the show early, finish the open early. And so somebody cut a fake version of it. And I was in the edit room, like, you know, looking over this, cut a fake version where Ted says, it's a tragedy in America, and the dog walks across and lifts its leg.

That was a fake version. And I showed it to a couple of other producers at Nightline, and we got a nice laugh out of it. And then one of them took me aside and said, Brian, if you value your career, you will be holding the fake tape in your hand when Nightline goes to air tonight. Because if that somehow wound up on ABC News, you will be done and we will all be done. And that will be the end of all of our careers and lives in this business. So I was holding it in my hot little hand, sweating bullets in the manner of what's his name in broadcast news when the show went on that night.

Albert Brooks, yeah. There you go. All right. That's a press box this week. Jason Gay, thank you for filling in. Come fill in soon. Thank you. We don't want to send David away, but we love you.

We love having. No, no. This is a perfect show, and consider this just an aberration. A producer of Jim Cunningham, Chris Almeida, helps us with research. Back next week with Meshua Shoemaker and more hot takes about the media. See you then. Irritates people. Right.

So it's like, it always helps to start with the guy who we have. haven't heard talk. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, America. BARD of the American experience. How are you, sir? I'm sitting in the restaurant with Jennifer Lawrence and we were eating a salad, and she is picking at her salad. What do you think operationally would be the difference between covering sports and covering that? Let me tell you what happens straight down the middle, people, without offending anybody. Who has better cliches? It's a really good question. I mean, I think, The biggest difference, of course, are the audience difference, and I feel like there's... Uh-uh, we're not... I'm not taking that, Kevin. You answer me. You know, you tell me the answer.

I think everybody would... I think people might start bullying. Can I have a mini freak out of my own? Sure. You know, I'm sensitive. Sure. Because I'm a sensitive man, Brian. You know that. I do. Shoemaker had a baby.

He did. Do we know what the child's name is? Erwin R. Shoemaker. That's incredible.