The Press Box - Rebecca Traister on John Fetterman, His Recovery From a Stroke, and the Media

Episode Date: October 13, 2022

Bryan is joined by New York magazine writer Rebecca Traister to dive into John Fetterman’s Senate race in Pennsylvania after experiencing a stroke. They break down the health condition of Fetterman, discuss how he's recovering, talk through his status in the current Senate race, and weigh in on a journalist’s responsibility when covering the health of a politician and/or a public figure. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Rebecca Traister Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Yossi Salick, and I'm the host of Bansplain, a show where we explain cult bands and iconic artists by going deep into their histories and discographies. We're back with a brand new season at our brand new home, the Ringer podcast network, tackling a whole new batch of artists, from grunge gods to power pop pioneers to new metal legends and many, many more. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, only on Spotify. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox's final edition, Brian Curtis of the Ringer. here, along with producer Erica Servantes, there is a big and important Senate race going on in Pennsylvania, Democrat John Federman versus Republican Mehmet Oz. In May, Fetterman had a stroke four days before the primary. He's recovering, but his recovery has become a thing of interest for the media, for the Oz campaign, and for Democrats who are anxious to hold on to the Senate.

Rebecca Traster interviewed the candidate and wrote a great story about all these things in New York magazine this week called The Vulnerability of John Federman. Rebecca, welcome to the press box. I'm happy to be here. Thanks. Let's back up to the early part of this campaign before John Fetterman's stroke for people who didn't follow his career. What kind of figure did he cut in Pennsylvania politics? Well, he was a guy who had attracted a lot of media attention and had been singled out as really unusual. And it's very interesting. I'm from Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania has a really sort of depressing history of having elected only white men to both of its Senate seats and as governor. Like, really, there's no, it's pretty bad. It's been a buffet of white men.

Different from each other, but white men. And Thederman was somebody who really gained, he made a Senate run in 2016. And at that point, he had been the mayor of Braddock, a small town in western Pennsylvania, an economically devastated steel town. he'd been mayor there for a long time. But he didn't, the party was certainly having none of him in 2016, and they threw their resources actually behind a female candidate, Katie McGinty. But he came away with, you know, a pretty impressive, I think 20% of the vote that year, and he got a lot of national press attention.

He's a huge guy. He's six foot eight. He was treated by many in the political press, including people who wrote really good profiles, right? I don't mean to diminish the work that was done about him. There were really good stories written about him, but they all focused on how unusual he was, and a lot of it was about his clothes because he's a guy who wears hoodies, sort of all the time.

Like, he famously only has one suit that he wears when he has to be at official functions, because he's now the lieutenant governor. And he wears shorts through the whole. And reading all the coverage of him over the years and all of the people who were like, Pennsylvania has never seen. anyone like this guy? And I'm like, you guys have never met a shorts guy before? Like, I know a lot of shorts guys. But so because he was such a, there was also this interesting thing, which is, you know, if you follow the Democratic Party, you know, they're always seeking,

and I have been critical in the past of this, but they're always, they're always looking for the guy who's going to win them back the white working class vote. Right? And there are a lot of things you can say about this fetishization of those voters, but it is certainly true that Democrats have been bleeding white voters to an ever more radical Republican Party. And Fetterman, you know, who comes from economic privilege himself and has a postgraduate degree from Harvard, right? But really had become a figure who, in his time in Braddock and the work that he had done, done there has had advertised himself and I think really did connect to some of those voters, right? And that's a really powerful figure for contemporary Democrats and one that they're always

seeking out. I mean, there's a version of that that they were seeking out in Joe Biden. Federman's politics are not Joe Biden's politics, right? He was a Bernie supporter in 2016. You know, he, so it's not quite ideologically identical, but in fact, he was like, you know, the argument for Joe Biden, a figure, a candidate who is identifiable as like a white man who could communicate with a white working class in Pennsylvania's Rust Belt and across the state, right? That was the, that's the rap on John Fetterman. And then he ran in, he became lieutenant governor. He ran in this past cycle. He had a bunch of challengers, but the two who were the most notable were a progressive named Malcolm Kenyatta from Philadelphia, who was a black man, black gay man, and Connor Lamb, who is the very politically moderate, much more traditional, buttoned up white guy from western Pennsylvania. And Fetterman

trounced both of them, including Lamb, who I think that, A lot of people in the party were sort of hoping that that Lamb might be the nominee, because again, that's the profile of like the moderate sort of milk toast white guy. But Fetterman won the primary, even four days after having had a stroke, all 67 counties in Pennsylvania. So his stroke was back on May 13th. How did he and his wife, Giselle, described the events of that day to you? Well, this is now four months later. And they, you know, Giselle in particular described it. you know, it was scary. They were in the midst of the last few days before this intense primary race.

they had been going like crazy. Lots of people on the campaign described to me those last days, he wasn't feeling well. And he was saying that he wasn't feeling well. But the attitude was he didn't have COVID, right? He kept testing. He didn't have COVID. And I think that the attitude was sort of gutting it out in those last few days before the primary. And he just kept going. And they were on their way to an event on a Friday morning. And they were together in a car going to Millersville University, they were in Lancaster, and Giselle noticed that he was having stroke symptoms, you know, a drooping side of his face and some slurring of words. And he didn't believe that he was having a stroke, but she ordered the guy who was driving to go to the hospital

instead of the event. And he wound up at one of the best stroke units in the state, for which he's very, he has said repeatedly, you know, he is noted, you know, as somebody who who advocates for better access to better health care. He noted that the sort of life and death differences in his case came down in some regards to geography and the fact that he was 20 minutes from one of the best stroke centers in the state and that, you know, he was with somebody who'd recognize the symptoms. And they removed a clot that day. And then election day, that was Friday. And then he was in the hospital through the weekend. And on election day that Tuesday, they did another surgery to insert a pacemaker and defibrillator to address another, to address another condition,

which is cardiomyopathy, which is a much more serious cardiac condition, which if left untreated, can lead to sudden death. But that is why he has the defibrillator and the pacemaker. What's his recovery been like since then? Well, that's the subject of a lot of intense coverage and scrutiny. You know, the campaign came in for some criticism in those first couple weeks for the criticism was that they were slow to reveal exactly what had been going on. Now, they will say that they were not, that they themselves were trying to figure out what the conditions were

and what the prognosis was and all of that. And so I think that there was some critique in those first days about whether or not they fully revealed the extent of the – it was a major stroke, right? It was not a minor stroke. It was a stroke that could have been fatal. and then the additional surgery to have the pacemaker and the defibrillator to address cardiomyopathy. That's a big deal, too.

A couple weeks after he left the hospital, and I believe in early June, they released a really extensive letter from his doctor, from his cardiologist, explaining not only the nature of the conditions and what had happened and, you know, the precise surgery that he'd had had. to deal with it and the severity of the situation. But also telling a narrative story that was actually very revealing and not particularly flattering to Fetterman, the doctor explained that, in fact, it was in 2017 that he had first diagnosed John Fetterman with a fibriolation, which was the condition that wound up leading to the stroke, had put him on blood thinners and asked him to come back for follow-up. And the doctor also said in this letter that then he had not seen Fetterman until

he had the stroke. And that's five years and said that, in fact, John Fetterman had not gone to any doctor in those intervening five years. And he and the Fetterman's all agreed that, in fact, he had stopped taking his bloodthening medication. And Fetterman released a sort of sheepish statement at the time, saying, like, you know, like a lot of people and perhaps a lot, like a lot of men, I didn't go to the doctor and I didn't take care of myself the way that I should have and I almost died because of it. I should note that one thing that had happened in those intervening five years, even without medical follow-up, is that he had lost a lot of weight, and that had been public, and it had been covered by the media.

There were stories about his weight loss. He had gone from a high of 418 pounds down to 270, which is pretty remarkable. So it's not that he hadn't had any response. It's just that he had taken it upon himself to lose a lot of weight, but not necessarily do the medical follow-up. So after the period in which perhaps there wasn't a lot of... of information released by the campaign. What then came was, I think, a sort of unusual amount of information, including, you know, a story of not having listened to doctors' advice.

So he has this period during the summer where he's off the campaign trail. You write in your piece that his Twitter account, which is very funny and very me-mey, is doing a lot of work for him over the course in the summer. Then how does Mehmet Oz make his recovery into a campaign issue? Well, it's interesting because I had assumed from the media coverage of that Twitter campaign, the social media campaign, and the campaign was widely lauded for its deft use of sort of Twitter and Twitter jokes and really quite vicious teasing of his opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz. I had actually assumed that that was like a digital comms team, that it was some kids, you know, who were hired to take. care of his social media. But one of the interesting things about the nature of Federman's recovery that I learned when I was reporting this story is that, in fact, in his recovery, after he gets out of the hospital, while he was having communicative challenges in terms of auditory processing

and speaking, he could read. The doctor said he was not at all, didn't suffer any cognitive impairment. And he could read and think and understand and communicate via text. And that And so, in fact, that meme campaign and the Twitter campaign originated with him, with Fenerman himself, which was something very surprising that I found, and I think really important, because there was a period where he, because of his communicative challenges, again, the auditory and the speech stuff, he could speak, but he couldn't necessarily hear his own voice. He couldn't necessarily understand what his own voice was saying. These are common after effects of having had the kind of stroke that he did.

But so he wasn't doing rallies. he wasn't doing in-person fundraising. He wasn't doing interviews with the press for a period of a couple months this summer. But the thing that is interesting is that he did find this text-based way to, in fact, communicate pretty directly with millions of people via his Twitter account. And it was very effective. And he got a lot of, the campaign got a lot of good press during this period where there might have otherwise been a lot of negative coverage about here's this candidate who's not on the trail. He and his team had made a really focused message. It was, and it was focused. And it was focused on the assertion that Dr. Oz, who until extremely recently did not live in the state of

Pennsylvania where he's running for the Senate, you know, it really focused on showing him up as a New Jersey resident. And it was a real political messaging coup. And it was, you know, Vetterman was intimately involved with it as he was recovering from his stroke and having sort of the kind of communicative challenges that might otherwise make a candidate, lead to a candidate having an impossible time trying to maintain a campaign, he found a way to do it very effectively. But it was so effective that eventually Oz, who is an actual medical doctor, prior to having been a television doctor, he was a very well-respected physician. And he had taken immediately after the stroke and through the first period of recovery,

he'd taken the high road, the humane approach and wished Fetterman well in his recovery and been kind and professional about it. But at a certain point, I think after getting hit as hard as he had through the summer on Twitter, the Oz campaign took a really mean turn, a really, really tremendously personal and cruel and unusual turn from a doctor, and began to go after Federman directly for perceived for physical weakness about the struggle. And so Oz's campaign, his communications advisor, a woman named Rachel Tripp, said in response to a sort of viciously teasing back and forth about cruditets and vegetables and a grocery store, which I can explain if that helps. But needless to say, it was an out of touch George H.W. Bush and the grocery store style moment.

It was an amazing cell phone on the part of Mehmet Oz. I mean, he had done a video in which he got the name of the Pennsylvania grocery. store wrong and talked about crudette's and talked about the inflation and the expense of putting together a crudet plate, which sounded honestly extremely vile. It was like asparagus and tequila and guacamole. It was like it didn't, it did not sound at all appetizing. But Oz's campaign had just absolutely ripped him apart for it. And in response, Oz's communication advisor, Rachel trip had said, if Fetterman had ever eaten a vegetable in his life, then maybe he wouldn't have had a major stroke and wouldn't be in the position of having to lie about it constantly. And I think, now, that was such a nasty thing to say that in the moment immediately after it,

Alas actually tried to distance himself from it. Like, it was so beyond the pale. However, one of the things that I came to realize writing this piece is that the entirety of that statement, starting with the sort of shaming of, you know, blaming a medical calamity on a dietary, you know, sort of shaming somebody about weight and eating habits and ill health right up through the last part where she said he wouldn't be in the position of having to lie about it constantly. That template actually became one that got taken up, even though Oz himself tried to distance himself from it in the immediate aftermath of that comment, that actually became the framework, not only for the approach that the Oz campaign and the right-wing media world was going to take

toward attacking Federman. But that actually many in the mainstream media have taken up as well, perhaps not the shaming part so much, but this weird assertion that, you know, he wouldn't have had a major stroke and wouldn't be in the position of having to lie about it constantly. that winds up being sort of the dental record for what would become like assertions that there was something he wasn't being transparent about. And that is something that you can see in mainstream press, you know, the Washington Post, the New York Times, a Pittsburgh paper, they've all written suggesting that he hasn't been truthful or transparent about his health. And so that has become part of a mainstream narrative about him in the political press.

We'll circle back to the media in just one second, but you sat down with him earlier this month over Google Meet and you interviewed him for 50 minutes you say in your piece. How did you find him in that interview? I found him exactly as advertised, actually, speaking of transparency. I mean, I'd been watching him. I'd gone to his rallies. I'd been watching all of his increasingly frequent television interviews. you know, I was really struck when actually talking to him myself because I could see his eyes moving on the text.

The close captioning technology enables him to read what people, because he still has the auditory processing challenge. Again, very typical as an after effect of a stroke. It is, he can read what you are saying via text, and then he can respond conversationally. It's just more difficult for him to process what is said, you know, when it's heard as opposed to read. But what that meant is that I was watching his eyes move across the screen in real time. It wasn't a situation where there were pauses between our exchanges. He was reading me, and you can tell from the way I'm talking to you, I speak very quickly and I did not moderate my pace when I was having this conversation with him. I wanted to get a lot of questions in really quickly.

But he was reading in real time, responding absolutely in full, multi-clauseal, often very eloquent sentences with, you know, thought and nuance and consideration and intelligence. And, I mean, it was just completely engaged. And I really marveled at the fact that it struck me that he was reading. That's actually, that's hard to do. I mean, I kept thinking about, could I be reading this exchange on my end and the same amount of time that it takes me to just hear it and respond back? But he was doing it, and it really made me think about the amount of work that must be going on to take this all in via text and then respond verbally. But there were no comprehension issues at all. He does, as he acknowledges in his speeches and as he talks about in interviews,

He occasionally, his syntax gets tangled, right? So words get switched around in order in a sentence. Or he misses a word. Or he has a challenge with getting a word out. Now, I describe that in my piece. There's just a moment where he was talking, you know, in depth and with complexity and said a word that didn't, it wasn't a word. It didn't register. And he immediately, he could, he could tell. that it wasn't the word that he was searching for, and he tried it again. He tried it a couple times until he finally, you know, maybe three times. And he said the word that he meant to say. And he said to me, he said, this is the stroke, right? It was, it's getting a word out. But that happened, you know, that one time that I describe in my story. And a lot of the rest of the time, he was just speaking without pause or any missing words. I mean, you know, and but everything I heard in that interview in terms of how he communicated is visible and audible if you watch his rallies speeches where he's speaking to crowds of thousands of people, you know, for 10 minutes, 15 minutes,

20 minutes. He's giving political speeches. And one of the things I was struck by that I didn't put in my piece, I went to a rally that he gave in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, on September 11th. And it was just a week after there had been, he started to do public events in mid-August. and, you know, that had been the first time since the stroke that he'd been out doing public speaking. And the first couple of forays were tough. He did make some, he'd stammered a bit and he got some words confused. And there were a lot of derisive clips that were circulating on Twitter showing him getting tangled in his public speaking. When I saw him on September 11th, I really noticed. that there was a marked improvement between those clips that I had seen from just a week before

and what I was seeing and hearing in person. He seemed much more relaxed. He seemed much more, you know, fluid in his ability to get the words he wanted to get out in his, you know, his interactions with the crowd. I watched him both give the speech and be out in hallways with a group of people, you know, sort of mingling with them, people who were in a who were going to go to an overflow room because actually 3,000 people had shown up to a venue that only fit 2,700. And then I watched his speech that he gave, I believe, I believe it was two weeks later in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. And not only was he appeared to be even stronger in his speech, the thing I noticed as somebody who's reported on politicians for a long time

is that the speech was totally different from the one that I'd seen just a couple weeks earlier. And when you see somebody leading up to a election, somebody who's giving a stump speech, you hear the same words over and over and over and over again. And I actually assumed that that would lend itself well. I mean, this is my layman's guess, right? That that would lend itself well to stroke recovery because you'd practice saying the same things over and over again. And I was really struck in his Bethlehem speech that so much of it was different from what

said in Montgomery County. It was like a whole new speech. And it was, it was very smooth and fluid. You mentioned how we write about politicians' health and their abilities. We've seen these stories in slightly different form with Joe Biden, with Diane Feinstein, Senator from California, which you wrote about yourself. How do we draw a line between doing our work as reporters and doing the work of someone's political opponents when we cover this stuff? Well, I think that, you know, we seek to be really direct, try to be medically responsible and pay attention to, you know, I don't know, you're right that I did write about Diane Feinstein a few months ago, and I did a lot of thinking, because in both of these stories, I wound up being in a position where part of my job was to

describe the nature of our conversations. There had been reporting when I wrote about Diane Feinstein about her reportedly deteriorating cognitive abilities. And, And so I, in that, for that story, and I wound up speaking to her on the phone, and I had to describe what that was like as precisely as possible. And then reporting on this story, where part of the story was also about communicative recovery, I had to report on what it was like. I will say that I thought a lot about, as I was writing, that one of the major differences between writing about these two politicians, was that in the case of Fetterman,

over the course of the weeks that I was reporting on him, there was a visible, almost daily arc of improvement, right? Which is what doctors have said is likely in terms of stroke recovery that he was getting better. He was getting better in a way that was unquestionably apparent to me over the, you know, sort of six weeks that I was carefully watching. You know, his interviews were getting stronger. His public speaking was getting stronger. You know, that's a very different situation than was somebody like Diane Feinstein who very rarely gives interviews and there was not very rarely

is doing public speaking at this point. And for whom the concerns are not really about, is it going to get better, but is it getting worse? And I think that's a really important distinction. And so when we describe these situations, I think we have to, you know, keep them in context of what is, you know, what are the conditions we're potentially describing here? I would say that I saw nothing, and I wrote this in the piece, watching him do public speaking in our interview, watching him with crowds, I saw nothing that was at all at odds with what he and his campaign were saying about. his condition. And I think that's really important because there has been this insinuation of hiding something or deception. And I think that that was exacerbated, actually, in the NBC interview, even some of the phrasing around, you know, there was the NBC interview that aired after my piece was published, where some of the language that was used made it sound as though it was a

revelation that he had, for example, trouble communicating before the closed captioning technology went on. And it was sort of phrased journalistically as this was something we discovered, you know, journalists, we reported that, you know, he couldn't speak or he couldn't, he couldn't, process what was being said. And I thought that that was a funny framing because that's, that's not a sort of journalistic discovery. That is precisely what his campaign and what he himself says about his current status. You know, it absolutely matches with what the campaign says. That's why he requires closed captioning. I mean, the interview they did on NBC showed that he in person was still using closed captioning to have the interaction with the reporter, Dasha Burns. So the fact that

prior to the closed captioning going on, there was a communication difficulty. To me, I mean, it matches. It matches everything he says about the current status of his health and his communicative abilities. So that really struck me is that a thing that I would have been looking for is, is there something about how he's communicating that's different from what his campaign is claiming? And in my case, over the course of the weeks that I was reporting on him, no, everything matched up. it was precisely as advertised. I thought about that watching the NBC piece. And part of this may be just the structure of a three-minute piece on the nightly news.

I know they posted the full interview online, but not only matching it to the claims made by the campaign, but just offering context for stroke survivors. You know, is this, you know, what stage are we in recovery? And just that kind of context about where we're finding him in that moment. I thought it could have used a lot more of that. Well, I also, I've been interested because Dasha Burns, the reporter who did the interview, has come in for criticism for some of the ways that that interview was framed. And I was reading a response that she gave and she said, and I actually have it in front of me because it sort of has

this undertone in it, in response to, you know, questions about this that was posed by Savannah Guthrie, she said, we did find that in small talk before the interview without captioning, it seemed it was difficult for Federman to understand our conversation. Now, it's so subtle. but it's really important in terms of how we use words. She says we did find that in small talk, which again suggests that this was a journalistic investigation, right? That we found this thing to be true. That includes a suggestion that it was something that was in any way covered up,

whereas my experience is that that was exactly what the subject himself was saying about his condition, that that is precisely why he needed closed captioning, that that's not something that has been turned up by investigation. You know, she said it seemed it was difficult for Federman to understand our conversation. Well, yes. I mean, I think that it's also the use of the word understand. This is about processing.

I think there's some question about is that trying to suggest that there's a comprehension problem, which certainly in my experience, and I gather in hers, it was not about comprehension. is about auditory processing, which is exactly what the campaign says. But it can be subtle things like that that give the impression that you're sort of digging around and finding something that the campaign doesn't want you to know. But in fact, the entire setup of that interaction was he requires close captioning, which is a standard accommodation for those who have hearing challenges or auditory processing challenges.

This is basic accommodation. and the sort of exoticizing of that accommodation or the casting of even subtle suspicion around it. Like, is a very, for me, a troubling choice journalistically, especially when what the call is journalistically is we want transparency. Transparency to me does not seem to have been at issue here at all. One last question I had about your piece when I was reading it,

purely out of curiosity. What did the Oz campaign make of you as a reporter? Well, I mean, to be very frank, I think it was an excuse to get their talking points out. You know, we, I called the Oz spokesperson and asked a bunch of questions, and there was a lot, you know, he just kept sort of saying repeatedly that Federman was a pro-murterer candidate. Like, there were some talking points. He just wanted to get out over and over again. And then the wonderful fact checker with whom I worked on this story, Alice Markham Cantor sent follow-up questions. was fact-checking the piece with Oz's spokesperson.

And he replied to her with a question about recent reporting that had been done on Jezebel about Columbia University having been fined for Oz's research team, having tortured and reportedly killed more than 300 dogs during his time at Columbia University. She followed up with him to see if he had any commentary on that reporting. And his response to her on the record was, imagine you're the stupidest person on earth. Now imagine you're a New York magazine reporter, you know, but I repeat myself, which is, you know, a very sophisticated Mark Twain reference. But it was interesting, it's striking to me because the turn that the Oz campaign made

toward real cruelty about Federman's stroke and medical challenges was exceedingly Trumpian, right? There's the moment that Donald Trump makes fun. There's the famous moment where he makes fun of physical disability, right, and does a terrible, cruel imitation of somebody with disability. And so there had been the echo there of that in the Oz campaign already with sort of just digging in on just uncut, malevolent cruelty about medical challenge or disability. And then in this sort of quip about how stupid a reporter is, by the way, also, you know, directed at me at Alice, my colleague and a wonderful reporter and fact checker, there's the Trumpian, performative dismissal of the press, right?

The anti-media element is also very clearly an undercurrent in that campaign. All right, last one for you, Rebecca. Next month, the movie coming out based on the reporting of Jody Canter, Megan Toey, in The York Times, she said it's going to come out. So we're doing a countdown of the best movies about media or journalism. Do you have any favorites that should be nominees for this list? I have two that are real favorites of mine. One is the classic, His Girl Friday, you know, which is a cinematic riff on the front page. But then I have to say that, and I love that movie.

It's wonderful. It's Rosalind Russell and Carrie Grant. And, you know, it's a terrific and classic movie that everybody should see a very, you know, fast-paced romantic comedy. But I will say that emotionally maybe my favorite newspaper movie is The Paper. And I don't know how many other people. I feel like a lot of reporters, especially New York reporters, or I'm no longer in New York, actually, but I was for 25 years. Love the paper. And, It's just about a tabloid. It's about a New York tabloid. It reminds me profoundly. I was not ever at a tabloid, but I was at the New York Observer. I started my career there as a fact checker and then a reporter there. It reminds me so viscerally of my time at the New York Observer and my friends who were at tabloid reporter, who were at tabloids at the time and afterward. And it's just, I actually think it's a beautiful movie. It's a funny movie. And it really for me, capture. is actually what that period in my journalistic life was like. It's a fantastic cast, and I got to rewatch it. But my only issue I remember the first time I saw was, how are like 900 things happening in the two hours before deadline? And when is deadline? Right, right.

No, no, no, it is. It's an incredible movie, and it's sort of theme is time, but it also has one of the great lines in the world about it's also a movie that kind of, I mean, it's the inverse of she said probably, and that it has a lot of disregard for the New York Times, which if you've worked at a New York newspaper that is not the New York Times will be a very familiar sentiment.

And there is an incredible sort of showdown between the tabloid editor and a New York Times editor that is like one of my very favorite movies, movie moments, you know, of all time. Rebecca Traster, the piece is the vulnerability of John Federman online right now. Thank you so much for coming on the press box.

Thank you for having me. All right, it's time for the second weekly edition of David Shoemaker guesses the strained pun headline. All right. Monday's headline about the unexpected success of a Patriots third string quarterback was don't worry, be zapping. David, not impressed by that one. Today's headline comes to us from listener Austin George. It is about a famous Hollywood star, David Marilyn Monroe. You've seen this Netflix movie blonde about Marilyn Monroe.

I've not seen the movie. I'm aware of its existence, yes. Well, this is the AV clubs subhead here. The blonde team sensed Marilyn Monroe's ghost on set. So making the movie about Marilyn Monroe, they sensed Marilyn Monroe's ghost on the set. We're going to think of famous Marilyn Monroe comedies here. What was the AV clubs, strained puns?

headline. Um, I don't know if I've ever seen a Maryland in Role movie. Hmm, what about a Maryland remote plus Jack Lemon? Um, seven year, I mean,

I honestly don't know who's in his case. Some like it hot. Oh, okay, okay. Oh, that's it. Some like it. Some like it.

It's a ghost on the set. Like it. You're sensing this. Some like it. Oh, you're just shorten that, just a tit smidge for it. Some like it haunt. Some like it haunt.

I don't think that's good, but I also know that, like, if that someone suggested that to me, I couldn't turn it away. Absolutely not. He is David Schumacher. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. We are back Monday. More lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David.

See you later, Ryan.