The Press Box - Oscars Takes, Hope Hicks's Exit, and Lack of Institutional Control | The Press Box (Ep. 438)

Episode Date: March 6, 2018

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker break down the handling of the Academy Awards (01:45), what Hope Hicks's White House departure means for the press (22:45), and the FBI vs. the University of Arizona by way of ESPN and Mark Schlabach (35:30). Read Miles Surrey's "The Winners and Losers of the 2018 Academy Awards" here: https://t.co/FR1HeJsNqi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, we're going to talk about the ESPN University of Arizona College basketball, TEDA-TET. But it got me wondering, what would so-called impermissible benefits look like for sports writers? A lot of sports writers, the permissible benefits are why you get into it, right? You get to go to games for free. You get to sit in relatively good seats. Sure. But I mean, I guess if it was like you're sitting in the press box and, I don't know, the home team had like masseuses there's like trying to like butter you I don't know what it would be like what else could

they possibly give you yeah that sounds like the open bar in the 70s I'm thinking like media in 2017 is so skimpy and so you know it paired down that like pens and notebooks and permissible benefits right here's a fax just give us anything without making you pay for it this is the press box on the ringer podcast network the press box is the media podcast where you're not allowed to regard great moments in American life Bowl say are the Academy Awards merely as an opportunity to plug your own content. We are Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer. And for your Oscars Fix, please check out the Ringer's Oscar After Party Postgame show, as I did last night.

Very good stuff. Yeah. And also Miles Surrey's piece on Oscars, winners and losers. But for this show, David, I've got three topics for you. First, our take on the Oscars, because it's a media event, damn it. Second, we discussed the departure of White House Communications Director Hope Hicks. and what that means for the already precarious relationship between Trump and the press. And finally, the FBI versus the University of Arizona by way of ESPN and Mark Schlebeck,

the one-on-one matchup that's roiling message boards out there in real America. Plus, as always, our overworked Twitter joke of the week, which might involve both the Oscars and Hope Hicks. But first, David, last night's Academy Awards was the first to be held in the giant shadow of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Can I hit you with a few topics that surfaced over the course of the evening? for it. Jimmy Kimmel thought did a pretty darn good job. Sure. We talked about how tricky this was before.

I thought maybe his best moment was when he's doing his monologue, and then he cuts to, he's building to the jet ski joke, right? But he says what the nominees could say in their acceptance speeches. So if you do win an Oscar tonight, we want you to give a speech, we want you to say whatever you feel needs to be said. Speak from the heart. We want passion. You have an opportunity in a platform to remind millions of people about important

things like equal rights and equal treatment. If you want to encourage others to join the amazing students at Parkland at their March on the 24th, do that. If you want to thank a favorite teacher, do that. Or maybe you just want to thank your parents and tell your kids to go to sleep. What you say is entirely up to you. You don't have to change the world, do whatever you want.

But with that said, this is a really long show. So here's what we're going to do. Not saying you shouldn't give a long speech, but whoever gives the sure. George's speech tonight, we'll go home with. Johnny, tell them what they'll win. It's a brand new jet ski. So it's kind of like, I'm nodding at all these things that are in the air in the world,

but I'm building to the jet ski joke. Right. Yeah. That's the way to do it, right? Yes. Because you kind of hit your marks, and really the whole key is to be funny, right? Yes. At the end of the day, Jimmy Kimmel is not the one who's going to address the Me Too moment on behalf of

Hollywood in the world. He can nod at it. He can let us know it's in the air. Yeah. But that's going to be the nominees. Sure. And he shouldn't do it. You know, especially, I mean, not just because, you know, he's a straight white man, but because you're exactly what you said. He's the presenter, you know. I mean, not the presenting of awards, but he's the emcee, you know, and he's bringing these other people up who have more particular points of view.

I think this was a good, he did a really smart job at being pointed and acerbic at times, but for the most part, you know, I don't know, playing it safe is the right word, but certainly, like, there was a very comfortable aspect to what he did, you know, relying on bits from the year before, which some people, you know, gave him crap for. It did, it sort of, sort of, you know, soothe the audience, I think, in a certain way. Yeah, my wife, my lovely wife made a good point, I thought, which is she said, so somebody like Chris Rock or a comedian, it's almost like you got to, here's me, right? Yeah.

I'm the star of this show. I'm going to address this. I'm going to wrap my arms around it and deal with it in a comedic way or a serious way or funny way. Jimmy is a comedian, but he's also a talk show host. So he's a facilitator. He's a past first point guard at the end of the day. So he's like, I'm going to throw this to other people. I'm going to.

And just that manner maybe in this extremely tricky Oscars environment for a glamorous award show. Yeah. And I think that, you know, he probably was, you know, wise. enough to see that as the host of a, you know, literal variety show when you're doing a sort of blown out version of that, then you have to provide with the rest of the entertainment's not going to provide. You know, you sort of pivot in a different direction to sort of open the floor for other people to have really more poignant moments.

Yeah, you pivot to jet skis, as it were. Exactly. A couple notes on him, Charlotte Wilder, friend of the pot, tweets, I'm all for men saying that sexual harassment is bad on a big stage, but they're also funny women who know how to host stuff and can say that too. And like, why not put them up there? Very good point. And a bunch of people made it, especially after,

after various presenters went on. The other thing about award shows, you mentioned the bits, right? We're in the bits era of award shows, right? I think this started with Ellen taking the selfie in 2014. I like this when people said, I think people in the ringer universe said they were maybe a little bored by this or was a little bit close to last year. But see, I like this because he went over to the movie theater. We movie fans, including us here at The Ringer, have all these up our own ass conversations about the movies, these highfalutin conversations.

The experience, and we go to critic screenings, or those of us who cover the movies do, the actual experience of watching movies in this year United States is a grubby populist, weird, deeply weird experience. And to go in there and see actual movie fans who had lined up for a screening of a wrinkle in time, which I did not actually know was a. was a forthcoming movie until the bit. I like that. You thought the existence of the movie was part of the bit? I like that. I think that's good. I wish people wrote about movies would grapple with the experience of watching movies.

So I thought that was actually pretty funny. Yeah. I mean, I thought that, I think you're exactly right. Going into the movie theater, you know, I mean, it was sort of an olive branch in a lot of ways. You see, look at the way that, it's funny because it seems like the more, I don't want to go as far as, you know, upper own asses. But the more that, like, highbrow film criticism has permeated the Internet and the Internet, the web that we're a part of, it's weird that, like opinion coalesces around things like Phantom Thread, which, like, nobody's seen. Nobody knows what that is.

Right. Nobody knows what that is. Half the people in that theater had never, maybe three-quarter never heard of that movie. And I think that, you know, Cam, or K. Austin Collins, great writer just posted his Oscars post-mortem. and sort of, you know, gave, I thought, a really thoughtful, you know, thoughtful credit to the shape of water in the sense that it, it, it was exactly the movie that Deltore wanted to make, but it still sort of bridge the gap between, you know, a groundbreaking, you know, sociopolitical commentary and what Oscars voters are comfortable seeing. And that's an interesting way to think about it. because I think Andy Greenwald said on the postgame show last night wouldn't have been nice for a movie like Get Out to win

because it speaks to this weird turbulent moment in American life. I would say, though, that Guillermo del Toro getting up there and self-identifying as an immigrant, right? And a Mexican immigrant specifically. Yeah. That's not nothing. I am an immigrant like Alfonso and Alhandle, my compadres, like Alain, like Salma, and like many, many,

of you. That is also part of this turbulent moment. And though the film is fantasy and, you know, as we say like, you know, kind of speaks to love a film and nerd boy dreams about I'm going to make a movie about fish sex and all this other stuff. There is something. There is, that is, that is part of this moment. That is part of what Donald Trump is talking about. That is part of what we are doing. Absolutely. This moment in time as a nation. And Sean Fennacy wrote about that on the site today, that it's not, that, you know, you can't go so far as to say that this is, this is, of failure of some sort

for the shape of water to have won. I mean, you can argue with it on you know film criticism grounds I guess. You can argue with it like Amanda Dobbins does because she's anti-beast. But, you know, I mean, I love

that movie. I thought, frankly, I mean, I don't know, this isn't even what we're talking about. I think it out should have won because I honestly think that's the one movie of this crew that we're going to be talking about in five years. Oh, sure. A lot of people said that on Twitter, right? They're going to say, wait, what was the movie the one best picture that your get-out came out? I thought shape of water was really good. My hot take on that was that it tripped backwards into uncanny valley territory.

And if that movie had been made, you know, by Richard Linklatter with like a $15,000 budget and all the sea creatures were like hand-drawn animation, it would have won hands down. It would have one going away, you know? Like, I thought it was almost, it looked, it was too reminiscent of a Marvel movie visually. And that was, that was weirdly its flaw. It was too well done. That's interesting. But that's kind of neither here nor there. I do think that there's a certain comfort that that movie exemplifies probably for the Oscar voters that you saw in a lot of the presentation of the thing.

It's just like the jet ski is sort of the parallel to the shape of water. You know, I mean, it's a very comfortable place that we can all sort of agree on and no one's going to complain too loudly. Right. Price is right references. We can all come together as a nation. Also, by the way, as a press corps, do we have to care about the Oscars? Do we have to be invested in who wins in the Oscars? I know the ringer cops are going to come take me away if I say like Oscar content is not. But it's funny to me, I feel the old movie critic line was like, who gives this shit about the Oscars?

Right. So what the best movie the year didn't win? It never wins. And it doesn't matter. These are just random awards, right? Like, you know, fame and fortunate crews on people who win awards. So we want our favorite movies to win, of course. But at the same time, like, do we have to really be invested?

I think if there was anything in the monoculture that could, that would have, had that was able to displace it, everybody writing about the Oscars would be happy to be writing about something else or most people would. But as, you know, our world gets more and more fractured in the media, our media world gets more and more fractured. I know with the ringer, it's a no-brainer. We're going to do a post show. Some of our best writers, you know, dress up and talk about this stuff because they did look

awfully dashing. They very, very dabbing. But, but yeah, I mean, I think that it's, I think that your point is well taken. I also think that there's a, you know, we're talking about overwork Twitter joke of the week. you could have just like overworked Oscar joke of the millennium and just like every year it's the same jokes about the show being too long and the montage is being terrible and it's not even incisive in a way it's like I think Sean actually talked about this in the broadcast but it's a conversation we've had before that it's just like yeah the Oscars is long that's not a good joke yeah you know that just feels like something people just think like this is what I'm supposed to say at this moment right yeah this is what I mean last night it was it was kind of people were doing the counter to point actually I like montages and there was that one really random mom montage that started out being about writing, I think it was leading into a writing award. And it just was like good moments from famous movies. Well, here's something from Jurassic Park.

Well, this isn't written at all. This is just a picture of a dinosaur. I think every Oscar's montage except and maybe possibly including the, you know, in memory of montage. If you start watching halfway through, you have no idea what the montage is. A couple of journalism notes from last night, because this came directly out of journalism. You had that kind of amazing and powerful moment where Ashley Judd and Annabelle. El Siora and Selma Hayek Pinot, who were all victims of Harvey Weinstein, came out together. And Ciora says, it's nice to see you all again.

It's been a while. And we found out in one of the Ronan Farrow, excuse me, New Yorker pieces, that she was essentially blackballed from the industry after having been allegedly assaulted by Harvey Weinstein because people told her she was difficult, quote unquote. Hi. It's nice to see you all. again. It's been a while. So, you know, her sort of reclaiming the stage and then I cut to that video that, you know, was really interesting talking about everything. Francis McDormann. So talking about sending us all to look up the phrase inclusion writer.

Yeah. Another one in that thing. Emma Stone talking about Best Director and saying these four men and Greta Gerwig. And she introduced. I love that. And then also, you know, just the presence, the direct presence of journalists in the audience, Jody Canter and Megan Tui, I believe Emily Steele too, The New York Times were actually in at the ceremony and photographed with Ashley Judd, right? Yeah.

They have become a part of this story and a part of this Oscars as much, you know, really as much as anybody. Yeah. A lot of that was really compelling. Actually, I think, you know, I don't know if this is a, if this counts the hot take. I mean, we're sitting here doing meta commentary on the Oscars right now. And, you know, the Ringer has a lot of great posts up. And there are a lot of great writers who have sort of broken down what happened on the show. But this is, this is the Oscars in some ways, especially.

on a night like last night is a sort of defense of aggregation media. You know, I mean, it's all you really need, all you really needed to take away and get the, you know, get the vibe of what last night was, was like, you know, seven 30 second video clips. You're good. Yeah. I used to feel guilty about when I hit the 30 second video clips if I hadn't watched the movie. And I'm just utterly grateful. Yes.

Because I haven't seen any of the movies. You basically except get out. So I'm just like, oh, thank God, you know. Thank God now I have at least some idea of what this is. By the way, speaking about graduation, there's like, you know, the New York Times does that about us in the front page or the second page of the physical paper now. There's kind of a little thing in there. They were interviewing one of their social media people who was saying, you know,

when the Oscars come on, I have a lot of our old content ready, like our reviews and some of the pieces we've written about these actors and directors ready to tweet out, you know, when appropriately. Yeah, thanks for that. Thanks for the insight. That's great. You're the only media company that's tweeting out of your content when somebody wins an Oscar. Should we talk about Kobe Bryant for a second?

Oh, I don't see why not. So in Saturdays, LA Times, there's this column by Robin Abkarian when she talked about, you know, raise the issue that I think has been raised but needs to be raised again. It's like, so you kicked Harvey Weinstein out of the academy. A James Franco nomination was a no-go this year. But Kobe Bryant, who was arrested in charge for sexual assault in 2003, charges later dropped, reached a settlement with the alleged victim. won an Oscar last night. And, you know, that's funny because that happened in the old media world, right? Yeah.

Where somebody like Kobe could say, this has been settled out of court. Yeah. I don't have to talk about this anymore. This is old news, right? And one thing we've said during this Me Too movement, journalistically, is it's not old news anymore. You don't just get to wave it away, right? You don't say, oh, well, that's all in the past, right? but, you know, I don't think, I mean, when is the last time anybody, anybody seriously has gone in on that story?

I mean, you see tweets about it. I mean, we certainly hear people, you know, around the office talking about it and stuff. I don't know, you know, so going in on it is a, is a, rehashing it. Yeah, to rehash it. I don't, I frankly don't know the answer. You know, it's, it's really tough. It's really tough. I mean, certainly, you know.

one would, I mean, from what we know, you know, there's a, there's a chasm between, you know, Weinstein and everybody else. Sure. And that was, you know, shouldn't be a point of distraction, though. No, and I think, I think one thing that this moment in journalism and in Hollywood and an American life is that you can still talk about this stuff, right? Yeah. Just because it's old news, quote unquote, doesn't mean you can't talk about it. I mean, I was struck by Kobe's statement at the time, which was although I truly believe this encounter between us was consent. I recognize now that she did not and does not review this incident the same way I did.

I now understand she feels that she did not consent to this encounter, right? Which is similar to a lot of the language we've heard. Yeah. You know, it just happened in 2003 in a very different part of American life. Also, I was struck by the fact that he referenced the shut up and dribble, Laura Ingraham comments in his acceptance speech. Yeah. The impossible is possible.

I don't know if it's possible. I mean, as basketball players, we're really supposed to shut up and dribble. But I'm glad we do a little bit more than that. Thank you, Academy for this amazing... And you and I, of course, are an incredibly dim view of the Lori Ingram comments. I'm pretty sure, though, when she said shut up and dribble, she wasn't saying basketball players

are not allowed to make documentaries about themselves. That was not what she was cutting off basketball players from doing, right? So that's okay. By the way, one last one before we leave the Oscars, there's been so much news in the last 12 months that I'd kind of forgotten about the Oscar Best Pictures grew up from last year. Yeah. This is not a joke.

Moonlight has won Best Picture. Moonlight. Best picture. Like I needed to be reminded that there was this magic enormous moment of television last year. Yeah. Until Kimmel brought it up

and then came back to it with Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. And Warren Beatty at the end. I just was almost like, oh right, that happened. Well, and there was, yeah, I mean, and after, you know, just talking about the new movies for so long, you forget about all that stuff.

You know, it's not just national media, And I think you could see that in this presentation. I think it was 50% like self-deprecating in-joke and 50% like reminding us that that thing happened so that then the joke would make sense. Yeah, exactly, right? And that was the best stuff they had. You know, it was great fodder for humor. But you did have to explain it a little bit. All right, David, now it's time for our overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious.

Yeah. That all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Should we just have a blanket category for Oscar? gags last night. That's fine by me. Like Kobe Bryant won Michael Jordan Zero. Yeah. For the Oscar.

Anything about Kobe, you know, on his way to the Egot? Yeah. I'm just going to say that right now. We don't even need to go into those. All right. All right. Our first runner up this week involves J.R. Smith throwing a bowl of soup a Caves assistant coach Damon Jones.

Such an obvious joke target that it got a whole ESPN.com roundup of Twitter jokes. So we can say them to get. The Cavs are a super team. Yeah. Yeah. Or simply invoking the Seinfeld line, no soup for you. By the way, you have scraped bottom truly on Twitter when you're just doing Seinfeld lines. Thanks to Corey Seidman for sending that one in.

Our second runner-up and also in soup news, you might remember, David, that last week President Trump announced he was seeking to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum. I remember. And Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross went on CNBC the can of Campbell's soup in an attempt to argue that tariffs were no big deal. A lot of jokes, including a picture of him holding the soup and saying, got any weekend plans? Also, a lot of people quoted Lucille Bluth from Arrested Development saying, I mean, it's one banana, Michael. What could it cost? $10? You know, just out of touch person.

Thanks to Russ Zimmer of the Asbury Park Press and Danny and Gleasy for sending that in. Thank you, Jens. That's great. Also, last week by the New York Times, we learned that Joshua Harris, a co-owner of the Philadelphia 76ers, quote, met on multiple occasions with Jared Kushner. The two men discussed a possible White House job for Mr. Harris. Then Harris's firm lent Kushner's firm $184 million. Yes.

That doesn't seem right. A lot of people made jokes about Jared Kushner trusting the process, right? And it really wasn't a joke, you know? It was kind of people had point A and point B there. Couldn't quite agree around to it. Journalist Matthew Zitland, who sent this in, noted that none of the jokes were actually funny or even made sense. So thanks to Matt, who was by this point.

It kind of deserves a title, I think. Can he be editor at large of the press box? You have a fake title on our podcast? That sounds good to me. All right. This week's runaway over a Twitter winner. Also involving potentially legally vulnerable members of the Trump administration. Yes.

Came when the New York Times reported the upcoming resignation of Hope Hicks. So this is a group award for anybody who made a pun referencing Hope Hicks's name. To wit, Hopi-Changey? That's by a barry-wise. another subject of this podcast. Wow. Hope Abandon. Hope Hicks is resigning to spend more time with her Mueller.

I think the best perhaps comes from Cleo Chang's Splinter headline. Hope you had the time of your life. That's kind of an overwork, too. It's actually funny, right? Yeah. Yeah, sort of. Thanks to Jeff Houser and Joaquin Nagel for that. All right, David, before we talk about the aforementioned Hope Hicks, let's take a quick break.

Hey guys, I'm Mark Titus. And I'm Dave Frazier. We are the host of One Shining Podcast. It is March. Check your calendars. It's true. March Madness is coming up. We're here to talk about all things college basketball.

If you like FBI investigation, if you like teams that are on the bubble and think they belong in, even though they have like 16 losses, come check out one shining podcast. If you like buzzer beaders, Buzz Williams, being buzz watching basketball, those are all three things you can do and you can listen to us. We're going to talk about everything that happens in the NCAA tournament. It's going to be great. We're going to be here all month. Please subscribe to One Shiny podcast. Check all of our stuff out. Tate has done some very disgusting things for money in the past.

And he is desperate for more to come. For more subscribers so he doesn't have to return to his old life. So please, please, please, subscribe to our pod. Check us out. We're having a lot of fun this March. You can get us wherever you find your podcast, Apple, Stitcher, SoundCloud. I'm a Google Play guy. Google Play doesn't get enough love when people do this list.

And Spotify. People are on Spotify now. So go check it out. Our second topic today, David, is let's call it hope for the best. Is that pun been done yet? I think it's safe to say all of the puns have been done. All right. It's been done less than the other.

So I'm going to go with it. Last Wednesday, Maggie Haberman of the New York Times broke the news at Hope Hicks, who is Donald Trump's fourth White House communications director, is leaving. She's been with Trump longer than any aid or confidant in the White House and was the source of moral support as much as anything. She was also someone who helped grease the wheels with the White House press corps. So, Hopix leaves. Does this change anything fundamentally, do you think, or not fundamentally, about the turbulent relationship between Trump and the press?

I think it will. No one's mission statements changing, obviously. I don't think, you know, and certainly, I don't think there were, you know, people went easy on Trump or on Hopix because of her existence. But I certainly think that there was a degree to which she was. the closest thing to an avatar or a sort of, you know, novelistic protagonist that was in the White House for a lot of people. I mean, there was also, there were numerous sentences of, I mean, she literally provided access to Donald Trump on it for many journalists. And so there was that, you know, like I said, very literal way in which he, you know, allowed them a way in. But I do think that, I do think that there was, I think for all of the sort of slack that,

The fire that she takes on Twitter, I think there's a large amount of sympathy for her as mysterious as she is. You know, people are looking, I think in some sense, people are always looking for the explanation, the thing that explains Hope Hicks in a very sympathetic way. Yeah, so let's talk about how she has cultivated consciously or not that air of mystery, right? She has, I believe Brian Stelter said this week, never given a television or radio interview about Donald Trump. when Olivia Nuzzi goes from at that point with GQ goes to profile her last year. She, Hope Hicks will not talk to Olivia Nuzzi on the record about Hope Hicks, but she will usher her into Donald Trump's office where Donald Trump will talk to Nuzzi about Hope Hicks with Hicks sitting. With Hicks in the room.

That's a great scene. It's amazing, right? She reminded me of those. Remember when he was still doing The Apprentice and it was Carolyn and John. George, who were his like functionaries, who brought out, like, she was like the perfect self-effacing aid, right? Uh-huh. She didn't want attention. Yeah.

She just wanted to work for Donald Trump. She wanted Trump to be his own spokesman. Yeah. And that's got to be a source of why he liked her as much than it. Because there's so many people, obviously scrambling for a book deal, CNN deal, whatever. Yeah. She wasn't. No.

And certainly Trump, I mean, Trump must like that sort of thing, right? I mean, just look at the, he. Yeah. Those two people you mentioned are the only, like, B-level stars on a major reality TV show that no one ever said, let's give them a spin-off. You know, I mean, these are the sort of personalities that Trump courts, you know. But yeah, no, I think that she, you know, you can say that she had remarkable restraint. But, I mean, I think part of it was just that she knew exactly what, you know, she knew what she needed to do to get by in that White House in a way that some people were either were unaware of her incapable to do. incapable of doing.

I mean, if you would ask Steve Bannon, he would have answered, he would have told you that the Hope Hook's playbook was the way to go. And then he can't, you know, he couldn't resist getting in front of every microphone or accepting every, you know, glowing profile that was, that was in his way. Yeah. Oh, yeah. They had totally different approaches. So some of the Hopicks backstory, she was an SMU grad.

Mm-hmm. According to the New York Times, as a young model, she appeared on the covers of young adult paperbacks, including It Girl. As a former book cover designer, I am very familiar with that part of her biography. Worked for Ivanka. It goes into the Trump organization and then later to the Trump campaign. Sam Nunberg, who's in the news today for being in trouble, called her a hoopsicle. You know, there was a, did you see the SNL sketch this week where she was kind of saying goodbye on weekend update?

Yes, I did. It's kind of a ditsy person. You know what? I really am going to miss all my friends from my semester abroad at the White House. So if you wouldn't mind, I kind of want to read a statement I prepared. Oh, sure. Some people dance into our lives and quickly go, but they always leave footprints on our hearts

and fingerprints on Russian documents. Oops. To Kellyanne, you taught me that a strong woman can run a campaign and win, and you showed me what I could turn into if I stick around too long. You're like the human version of those pictures of black lungs on cigarette boxes.

It's funny because I think there's point, her departure points out something about Trump White House, especially with its relationship with the media. The Trump White House is not a professional place, not a professional environment, right? It was, you know, filled with hangers on and pals and stuff like that.

And so what they've attempted to do is fill it with professionals. And the question is whether it's better if you have a president who is like Donald Trump, to have people constantly trying to professionalize him then he tries to fire or humiliating the national press. Or if you just have the Hope Hicks model of somebody who's like, I like this person, I'm not threatened by this person, this person basically lets me do whatever I want. Yeah.

And so we're just going to roll with that. And I don't know what the answer. I don't know what the best case scenario for Trump slash America is with those two models. But obviously they're in the midst of a transition between those two and trying to figure out what POTUS will tolerate in which model he'll actually roll. And yeah, I mean, it was the kind of reporting that surrounded Hicks, you know, announcing her resignation, I thought was sort of, I mean, was, it was very interesting. Obviously, there was the story of her testifying before Robert Mueller and professing that she had told some white lies along the way. Right. Yeah.

Which I'm sure did not get the response that she was hoping for from the, from, you know, other. from lawmakers and the media at large. And there was one report that her resignation was immediately preceded by Trump reaming her out about saying the white lies bit to the Mueller investigation. And that she was in tears and one could easily imagine something like that leading to your resignation. One's resignation. But, you know, I mean, it's it does raise a lot of, you know, necessary questions about what's the best way for this White House and this country to function. It's fun in a certain sort of like Twitter jockey sort of way to see, you know,

to watch dysfunction played out in real time in just about any play, you know, whether it's the White House or a rival, you know, website or something like that. But you do sort of get, it does engender a certain anxiety when you actually sit down and start trying to figure out who, as Saturday Night Live joked and weekend update as well, like who actually is working at the White House right now. Yeah, and the Moller thing is interesting, right?

Because part of the reason she survived for so long with Trump is that she didn't have to go out and publicly do things, right? Right. Like, Sean Spicer has to go out and humiliate himself about the crowd size of the inauguration. So he immediately loses all credibility. He becomes a laughing stock and you just know he's not going to be in the long. She never has to speak publicly or she decides not to speak publicly. So now then she goes in front of Mueller and makes a mistake, at least in Trump's eyes. Yeah.

And all of a sudden it's like, uh-oh. he can hold her to something. He can be mad. And that was just an interesting thing. I also just to put this in perspective of where we are with Donald Trump right now, Washington Post piece last week where the paper said, Mr. Trump is now a president in transition at times angry and increasingly isolated. He fumes in private that just about every time he looks up at the television screen,

the cable news headlines are tripping in another scandal. So concerned are those around Mr. Trump that some of the president's old of friends have been urging one another to be in touch. friends are increasingly concerned about his well-being, worried that the president's obsession with cable commentary and perceived slides is taking a toll. Pure madness lamented one exasperated ally. Well, that's the sort of the second act of the thing I was just talking about with him reaming her out. Is it after you put in her notice? That's when like the tariffit announcement came out, right? I mean, he was just like after between that and, you know, the Jared stuff.

and he just sort of was determined to, I don't know, make a splash, change the conversation. I don't know what it was. It is striking, though. The one thing that Jared Kushner and Hope Hicks have in common is I feel like I see their faces so frequently and have no idea what either of them sounds like. I actually Googled Jared. I did a YouTube search for Kushner last week just to hear his voice and was totally caught off guard. You know, I mean, it's amazing that. What did it sound like?

It's just very sort of reedy, very high. It's a very, I mean, not, you know, it's not a terrible voice. It doesn't sound like James Earl Jones or something like that. That's exactly what I was imagining James Earl Jones. But it was just, you know, it just not what I was expecting. When you see somebody's face so many times, you sort of have to imagine a voice where their real voice should be. You mentioned the terrorist bit. So to back up, that's on Thursday.

Everybody shows up at the White House. This is just to give an idea of what it's like to be a press representative for Donald Trump. nobody knows his position on this, according to the New York Times. Then he goes into this meeting and is asked by a reporter, hey, what do you think about this? And then he just blurts out. It'll be 25% for steel. It'll be 10% for aluminum.

You know, it's one of those things we've talked about this in various iterations, but it's just, it's hope Hicks probably solved a problem, which is it's impossible to be a press representative for Donald Trump, right? You don't, you can't spin his. message because you don't know what his message is. Right? It's hard to have good relationships with the press because he is railing against the press. But what she figured out at least was able to survive or get along by doing during the campaign is Trump is contemptuous of the press but also sort of weirdly available.

At least he was until the Russia thing really heated up. So, you know, somebody calls up and she says, here, I can get you into the office right now. I can put you in the fun. I remember this. I was just thinking about this last night, but like I did a piece last year on Trump and Sports. sports in April and just sent, you know, the courtesy email to the White House, you know, the, before the piece went up. It might have literally been info at White House press office. I have no idea.

It was just to send piece like, you know, you want to talk about anything. I'm happy to talk. And like an hour later, Hope Hicks called. Wow. The ringer. Ed was just like, you know, hey, you know, let me, let me hear what you got, you know. Okay. Well, you mentioned availability.

I was like, okay. That's great. That's insane. You mentioned available. I mean, it's wonderful for relationships with the press. You mentioned that Trump has sort of available. That would be one of the, you know, the part right before the conversation you mentioned in the Olivia Nuzzi profile was that they, she, Hope Hicks led Nuzzi into the Oval Office. And Trump was, no, no, this was Trump Tower. This is before, right?

It was before he won the election. And he was sitting at his desk with, you know, no computer, no papers, no pen. nothing and he just sort of looked up and said oh well right and then they went and did this thing but you have you yeah exactly but you have you imagine that like you know it's it's sort of little wonder that that that people in hope hicks's job get just keep getting you know drummed out because imagine just the level of work and management it takes to uh i mean if your boss is literally doing nothing unless you're in the room asking him what he's doing you know or like directing him to do something else that what like i don't know it's that's got to be a lot

lot of work. It's really amazing. It's the only president of the United States who just was his own, is his own spokesman and has always been his own spokesman. And the only key is just leading people into the room and then here we go. I have no idea how long this interview is going to be. I have no idea what he's going to say.

It's like Barbara Streisand the other day, you know, the clone dog or whatever. Once you get in, you're who knows what will happen, right? Riches away. All right, David, our final topic. Let's call this one, lack of institutional control. The story is Now, it's so complicated.

I'm just going to read from the deadspin item written by Patrick Redford last Thursday. Quote, last Friday, which is February 2030, ESPN's Mark Schlaeback, reported that Sean Miller, Arizona's basketball coach, had been caught on FBI wiretaps discussing $100,000 payment for DeAndre Aden's signature. After the report was published, Schlaiback went on Sports Center and said the call took place in 2017, though after Arizona writers and fans raised concerns about the timeline, ESPN issued a correction, and stated the call took place in 2016. And then this went through various things. And then ESPN issued another correction backtracking on their February 25th, correct.

And saying, no, no, no, the call was in 2017. This is all important because DeAndre Aten committed in 2016. Right. So the call, then all of us said. Anyway, SI's legal anise, Michael McCann now has a story citing a source close to the investigation saying that, in fact, ESPN reported incorrectly in the calls. Don't involve DeAndre and the Sean Miller didn't do anything wrong, at least in this case. I think there's like a five-foot view of this. Yes.

And there's like a 30,000. So let's pull back the controls and take this plane up to 30,000 feet. Yeah, steer away. Let's start with a question posed by Redford's deadspin colleague Barry Picheski. Who gives a shit, right? Do we care about NCAA scandals? And if you write about an NCAA scandal, shouldn't there just be a paragraph, the mandatory paragraph near the top of the piece? It's like, this is why this is important.

This is why rule breaking in this case. lot of rule breaking in the world, right? A lot of crimes in the world, too, right? But, like, this is why this is important and these should see the light of day in a highly pushed and publicized piece. I think that's a really good way to look at it. I mean, on the one hand, I would say the vast majority of people who are reporting on this situation, well, maybe not the vast majority.

I would say a healthy majority probably would tell you if pressed that they believe that college athletes should be paid or should have some sort of compensation. I don't know. You don't know if it's a majority, a chunk of them will tell you that. The people who are actually breaking the news? Sure. I don't know. I think it's maybe 50-50.

I might travel in some, you know, two left-leaning circles then. But I, but I, you know, there are a lot of those people. The point I want to make is that the story, the story on its face is about a coach paying $100,000. to land a play, you know, this top recruit, right? But the story beneath that, the real meat of the story, and I think this is what you were getting at, if this story was told, you know, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, the story is this coach is breaking these insane rule.

I mean, this coach is denigrating the game, right? This coach is, and this players. Corrupting the spirit of college athletics. Yeah, and this, yeah, exactly. Of amateurism. And that's the big one of amateur. Man, I mean, amateurism, if you have a, you know, New York Times log in

just go look up the word amateurism back in like the just the early 20th century it is a hilarious line of op-ed sports related arguments but the but the new story I mean the story now is

look at this symptom of a terrible broken system right wouldn't you say I mean wouldn't you that's that's the way that I think when Barry says who gives a fuck that would be I mean that would be the argument for giving a fuck So, yes, that's correct, but I think there's a lot of intellectual confusion on that point, right?

I think if you want to find that point expressed really well, you know, go to Mark Titus's column here in the ringer last week, where he says explicitly, I'm rooting for all the scandals and dirty laundry to come down because that will force the NCAA to say we cannot have a system where players are not paid, right? And then we have to start paying the players. But I'd say that's a fairly unusual. I'd still say that's a kind of an outlier attitude in this thing. I think there's a lot of people. See, the problem with NCAA scandals from a sports writing point of view is there's always a lot of cognitive dissonance because everybody hates the NCAA. Yes. But in my journeys on the message boards of America, I find that half the people hate the NCAA because they think the players should be paid.

And half the people hate the NCAA because they don't think the NCAA is enforcing its amateurism rules harshly enough. Right. These are the opposite argument. Yes. They are totally the, they don't, like, these people don't agree on anything other than they hate the governing body. Yeah. And I sort of think that's in this, too. Everybody's like, look at this. This is unbelievable.

But I don't, I don't know that there is a, I don't know that there is like an agreement underneath it. I just don't know. I haven't, and again, that's part of why I say this. I don't, I haven't heard the people who are writing this stuff really address this. You know, Pete Thammle wrote that huge Oklahoma State series in SI a couple years ago. Yeah. There, you know, there was, again, where's the paragraph at the top saying this is why it's important that Oklahoma State players may have gotten benefits or whatever. Well, last week or the week right, but I mean, very, not long ago, Pete Bamlin, Pat 40 wrote this piece for Yahoo Sports, detailing that, you know, former NBA agent Andy Miller and his associate Christian Dawkins were sort of, you know, they had all these, they had the Excel spreadsheets basically that just outlined every.

$15, you know, loan that they had given to various pre-collegiate athletes. Presumably in the hopes of, like, you know, courting good favor so that they might be able to represent them someday. But, you know, it was funny because when that story dropped, and again, there are varying points of view even in the ring or office, you know, when that story dropped into Slack, you could feel, you know, this like, you could feel everybody breathe in, you know, we We were like ready for this big thing. And then immediately people are, everyone's just asking where the story is.

Like where is the there that's supposed to be there or that's implied by the headline? Yep. I think that, I think that, you know, I don't want to get too conspiratorial, but they're, you know, for this and the ESPN piece that has had, they've had so much trouble just verifying the reporting. And you can, by the way, just a quick aside about the ESPN piece. The ESPN did not respond to questions about, you know, the sourcing in a way that made it sound like any of them had heard the audio of this phone call. And that's, I'm not saying that's a problem in report. That's a journalistic, you know, error. But that's problematic when you're getting basic dates wrong.

Yeah. Well, it's, yeah. And it's, I think if we looked at some of like, you know, straight news stories about investigations and stuff like that or, you know, or emails that have been sent and the person that the emails have been described to the. the reporter rather than seen. It's not totally unusual. It's not totally out of bounds. Sure. As people on message boards,

would probably tell you what it is. You haven't seen the emails, but you're walking out on a plank, right? You better really trust the person. You're opening yourself up. And I think that, you know, the one thing that the Yahoo, I mean,

one of many things that the Yahoo piece and the ESPN piece have in common is that the source is clearly, I mean, not clearly, the source is likely, you know, on the investigative side.

And you've got to wonder why these things are getting leaked out the way they are. Is it just because they know they don't have much of a national case? Or is it because, you know, they really want to, I don't even, I don't know what the, with the kindest way to look at that is. I don't either. I think the motives thing, and Titus raised the motives thing too, like the motives of the leakers, it's something really interesting to think about.

Yeah. It's also pretty unanswerable at this point. Absolutely. There are lots of reasons. Some of them may be like altruistic or at least the person's thinking they're doing. Some of them may be, you know, payback or whatever. It's very hard to say. Of course.

I'd say the one thing when you talk about the way this thing landed in all of our laps, both in actual slack and the slack of the world. Picheschi asks this. What is the purpose of any straight college scandal reporting other than shaming players are trying to earn a tiny fraction of the money they're earning for their schools in the NCAA? Here's the answer. Career advancement and has been forever. And we as readers of sports news have been conditioned to read NCAA scandal bombshell

stories because that gets reporters raises. It gets you out of the press box and into the courtroom, right? It makes it a more quote unquote serious story. That's exactly it. That's what these guys are surfing off of, right? This is big stuff. We joked around the office about 4 p.m. being scoops o'clock. That's the time when like Maggie Haberman would drop her Trump, you know, her Trump breaker

of the day or whatever. But there is a sort of larger conversation about the sort of scubification of journalism right now. It's nothing new, but the way that Twitter and, you know, exclusivity drives profit. The commoditization of the scoop. It's a thing. It's a scoop. And, yeah, to be able to put a little scoop, you know, to put the scoop sticker on your football helmet or whatever, that's a big thing for.

All caps. Colan, right? But, yeah. And certainly there's, I mean, that's, I mean, that's, you feel that permeating all of this reporting. Absolutely. And has been for our whole lives. Sure. I mean, you know, growing up in Dallas, by the way, people forget the old Southwest Conference.

Everybody remembers the SMU thing that was the 30 for 30. Yeah. Six out of the eight schools in the Southwest Conference in the 80s were on some form of probation. Six out of eight. I mean, that's incredible, right? More probation than winning actual bowl games, it felt like. And I remember the two Dallas newspapers just going after each other to break the latest NCAA scandal. Yeah. That was the red meat. That was a scandal. Chris Mortensen made his career partially on breaking an NCAA scandal.

Yeah. His was interesting. I'll talk about it. I'll say George Dorman, we could just name so many people who that was a career advancement moment because it showed they were real reporters, even if they went on to become insiders or whatever that manifests itself. So I read Mort's book when I was writing about him last year, two years ago now. And what was interesting about his is he found the guy who was giving loans, quote unquote loans to the players may have had mob ties. So in his case, the answer to why is this matter was, well, if this. these guys owe $100,000 to the mob.

Yeah. And then they go into the NFL or the NBA in this case. Then that could be problematic because like, oh, I can't pay you back. Well, says the mobster. Let me show you how you can pay me back. Just drop that touchdown pass. Yeah. Right.

So all of a sudden, you know, the actual play of the sport is corrupted in a way. You're putting it in different hands. Like there are reasons in the world where we might not want players paid by certain people in a certain way. Yeah. Totally. I mean, I just think that's totally,

I just think that should be explained better. Now we're in a place that that should be explained better every time one of these things hits. Yeah, somebody, before we get too far away from Sean Miller, I mean,

we should, I mean, there could never be a more sort of, like, just perfect villain for this story too, which makes, the reporting, you know,

necessarily a little bit, like, skewed. He was our overwork Twitter joke last week with a sweat through the shirt. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I mean, and that's,

I mean, and he's, he's, you know, he's got a reputation, you know, whatever. But regardless of that, he seems like the sort of guy that would be handing out big checks or big bags of cash to basketball players to come. It was like great, there was like Great Patino. Everybody was a lot of Sean Freud. I mean, one of these, you're right.

And my, you know, one of my, I'm not a huge Sean Miller fan just as a college basketball fan, but like, you know, there's a part of me that just watches press conference and I was just, and I just kept thinking, you know, in 15 years or 20 years, he's going to be. our sonny Vaccaro. You know, he's going to be, he's going to come, he's going to open up in the future about all this stuff that happened, and we're all just going to kind of welcome him back into the family and just give him big hugs for being a truth teller. I mean, I think that someone at the ringer asked whether or not someone was just going to, it was just going to open up about it. You know, the best way, you know, the best way forward would be just sunlight on everything.

Yeah, we pay players. Now, let's figure out a way to make it okay. I think it'd be really, really difficult to do, not just because, I mean, I mean, not just because it was, it's problematic for you and possibly illegal some of the things that you've done for you. But by saying everybody does it, you're sort of implicitly implicating everyone you've ever worked with. Yeah. And that is, I mean, that's what makes, that's the real, that's what makes being Sunny Vaccaro really hard. There were all these downsides.

Yeah. I mean, Sunny, Sunny didn't have worry about anything, right? I mean, Simmons and Titus mentioned this one on the BS podcast the other day, which is that like there's this omerta among play. Players shouldn't care, but they do care because they don't want to get their teammates in trouble and they don't want to go get their college programs in trouble. I remember one of the famous guys was Hartley Dykes, who was first round pick in the NFL, was a white receiver at Oklahoma State. And he's literally been written out of the Oklahoma State program as Reggie Bush was at USC. Yeah. Like he didn't exist because he got them in trouble.

And, you know, there's just like, there's all kinds of dumb downsides to this. I think these stories, I think this one, let's call it in motion and we'll see what, you know, what is the actual. story, what happens with the FBI investigation, what happens with the indictments and everything like that. But so many of these are going to really like so dumb in the future. I mean, the one about the Ohio State, about Terrell Pryor selling his Alamo bowl ring for a tattoo. I mean, like, give me a break. I mean, that just does, I didn't care at the time. Can anybody, will anybody care in a year, five years, 10 years? I mean, they're just so silly. And they're all in the players as everybody says they're underpaid in it. I don't, I mean, we could draw, we could draw direct lines to any number of political debates that we've

discussed on this show before, but the whole, I just think for the NCAA, their argument is just there's no respect for logic in it, right? I mean, they're so determined to uphold the status quo for fear the whole thing will be crumbling down that you can't, something as easy as like letting a football player monetize his YouTube channel just seems like, do they have to act like it's beyond the pale for the sake of keeping everything else strung together. I like that we just bring in Condi Rice when we need to fix something too. She was on the college floor playoff committee.

Yes. Give me Condi Rice. Yeah. A figure of probity. Yeah. She'll figure this out. Yeah. We can circle back around ESPN one more time, which is we mentioned this right before we came on

the air. But they're in a really bizarre situation. Like Scott Van Pelt on the night that Sean Miller had his press conference to announce his return was forced to just sort of throw up his hands, you know, and just be like, well, I guess we just have to wait to see what happens. I guess we have to wait for the truth to come out, which is very bizarre. Very bizarre.

I mean, I don't think that any journalistic entity should ever be in the position of having to show their work. You know, I mean, if it's not, if, if. To a point. Yeah, to a point. Well, reveal their sources anyway. Yeah, but this, this feels like. But you got to be right. Yeah, they need to be right.

It was like this with more, you know, with the flight gate. You know, it's like it was. And it's funny because I think, you know, I think Titus even to compare this. to deflategate a little bit, where you're going to be, and by the way, college message boards didn't need deflategate to just think all national journalists whenever they mention, all they have to do is talk about the program disparagingly on air, say like, you're not that good and you're evil. Right.

I mean, you are the worst person in the world and you will never be forgiven. So even to go to a scandal, takes up like 100. But it's like, you know, with the more thing, you know, everybody goes to it's an agenda. It's all the stuff. really it's just, it's, it's probably an honest mistake. If it's a mistake, it's an honest mistake. And the lesson at the end of the day is just be right. Right.

It's not, it's not all these other things, the background noise, right? It's like, just be right. Absolutely true. And you'll protect yourself from that. But yeah, that's, I mean, knowing Dick Vital a little bit, having written about him too, the two things Dick Vital cares about maybe more than anything. On the one hand, the sanctity of the old school sanctity of amateurism in college basketball. And on the other hand, basketball coaches of which he considers himself part of the fraternity.

And that just pulls him in opposite directions in this case, right? Sanctity over here, Sean Miller over here. Yeah. Also, am I the only, do I reveal myself as a child of the 90s when I remember Harrison Ford and Patriot games going, where is Sean Miller? I think that's that. I would like the FBI investigation to end like that. Oh, that's fantastic. All right, David, that's the press box for this week.

We're back next week with more hot media takes. See you later, buddy. See you, man. Welcome back, by the way. Thank you.