The Press Box - Remembering John McCain, Jemele Hill's Exit From ESPN, and Taking Stock of 'The Athletic' | The Press Box (Ep. 517)

Episode Date: August 28, 2018

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker link up to remember Senator John McCain and his relationship with the media (02:30) before looking back at Jemele Hill's last year at ESPN (15:30). Then they unpack a wild Tuesday for Trump (26:00) before examining varying opinions of 'The Athletic' (39:30). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, it's Liz Kelly, and I am here to tell you about the awesome stuff we've going on at The Ringer. It's Pizza Day on Tuesday this week. We're doing brackets. We're talking about pizza and pop culture, and our staff is breaking down, which is definitively the best pizza. Also, we are launching a brand-new podcast with Ryan Rusillo called Dual Threat. It'll be a weekly podcast focusing on both the NFL and college football. It'll air Wednesdays throughout the football season, and first episode is being released on Wednesday, August 29. So read about pizza on Tuesday. to Ryan on Wednesday and check out lots of other good stuff on the ringer.com. David, Michelle Beatle is leaving the ESPN morning chat show Get Up for other projects at the network. What I want to know is how would you describe the current state of get up in the form of a sports cliche?

Wow. I'm not making out of this one employed. I feel like you mean like a good stats bad team sort of cliche? Is that what we're looking for here? A lot nodding, yeah. I'm not sure if, let me phrase this in the form of a compliment. I really enjoyed get up a couple weeks ago with Rissillo and, who was he with Cassidy Hubbard and Ryan Clark? They were really, really good.

It's a good format, and there's some really good moments. I don't know if there's like a binge mob reference or something like that. I know you're trying to get me to say Ewing theory, but I'm not going to say Ewing theory. Okay, I don't know. Do you have a sports cliche in mind? I was trying to get you to say nobody believes in us because is that? Oh, yeah, there we go.

There we go. That's good. Can you do that in sports media? Can Bill Wolfe, who is the producer of Get Up, stand at the South Street Seaport Studios and say, guys, have you read Richard Dich this week? Have you read Andrew Marchand? I got my bulletin board right up here.

I'll put it up. Go out there and reinvent this show. Prove to those media critics that you got it wrong. I don't know that that happens, but it might be effective at this point. I think that that's totally right. I think that the hype has hindered them a great deal. They need to find that hunger again.

You, friends, are listening to Podcasting's answer to the second night of a back-to-back. This is the Press Box, a part of the Ringer podcast network. The Pressbox is the media podcast where all separations are amicable. We are Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer. Class your Ringer syllabus for this week. check out Jonathan Charks on the Battle for Texas College Football Supremacy, a subject near and dear to both of our hearts, David. Also read Claire McNair's retrospective on the Pokemon invasion of 1998.

You and I knew each other in 1998, and we were not talking about Pokemon. This is like archaeology. And this Wednesday, August 29th, you can hear the debut of dual threat, the new football pod from Ryan Rosillo. That will be exciting. Yeah, big deal. David, I've got four topics for us today. So we can accommodate the deluge of media news.

First, we'll remember the late Senator John McCain and why the media loved him or used to love him so dearly. Second, Jamel Hill, journalist, TV personality, et cetera, et cetera is reportedly leaving ESPN. What happened in her last strange year at the worldwide leader? We'll talk about last Tuesday's nutty even by Trump standards afternoon of news when Michael Cohen pleaded guilty and Paul Manafort was convicted. And finally, the only thing that matters in sports media this week is being mad at the athletic online or being mad on the athletics behalf online. We take stock of recent hostilities. Plus, as always, our overworked Twitter joke of the week. But David, should we start with John McCain, who died Saturday at age 81.

He had been suffering from a brain tumor. If you clicked on Twitter at any time over the last 48 hours, you probably heard this clip from a McCain talking to a voter during the 2008 presidential campaign. I got to ask you a question. I don't not believe in, I can't trust Obama. I have read about him and he's not, he's not, he's a, he's an Arab. He is not. No, no man, no man.

He's a, he's a decent family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on, on fundamental issues. and that's what this campaign is all about. He's not. Thank you. So, David, John McCain was a darling of the media, and then he kind of wasn't. Should we start out talking about why the media loved him so much? Yeah, that's a good place to start.

Obvious one, war hero, right? Like Bob Dole and H.W. Bush. Kind of an old, kind of a vanished archetype, really, or vanishing archetype of a politician. There's the Maverick thing, even if he was a situational or imperfect maverick. By the way, I was looking up, we talk about like campaign finance reform

or the time, you know, times he back in the early aughts when he was sort of oppositional with the GOP. Did you remember his, his mavericky opposition to UFC from the 90s? Yeah, we did, I don't know if he coined the phrase human cockfighting, but he popularized it for sure.

Yeah. One of his objections was the fact that people were, He says to hit a man when he was down was un-American. That was one of the things like because you were attacking your opponent on the ground. I just love the very, the very, very fine-grained McCain Maverick moments. There was the whole thing about him being a sort of lion of the Senate, quote unquote, and this is Maine Senator Susan Collins said this after he died. She said, the lions of the Senate are gone.

And it's interesting because he sort of appeals to that idea that a politician could be larger than life. And I feel this basically happens every 10 years where we declare that all politicians used to be larger than life and now they're smaller than life when in fact Obama is probably larger than any politician the last 30 or 40 years, right? Sure. There's that's Trump. Yeah, exactly. There's that whole idea that politics is smaller now, you know, sort of the Sunset Boulevard theory of politics. But the other one I think is probably that explains the most is he's so available or was so available to reporters, right? Yeah.

And John McCain once joked that the press is my base. Sure. I was looking the other day through Michael Lewis's book from the 1996 campaign Trail Fever. And it ends, and I hope I'm remembering this correctly, with Lewis and McCain just talking on a park bench in Washington. Like that was, you know, McCain was the kind of senator. You just arranged to meet out in public and have a kind of very scenic conversation with. Well, it's like something out of JFK.

It's like McCain is McCain's own deep throat, right? I mean, he just gets all the McCain information directly into the hands of the press. It really is. I mean, it's like this dream of, you know, political reporter saying, I needed some answers. So I went to see Senator McCain in his office. Yeah. But he had the straight talk express during his campaign, right? Or multiple campaigns where he would just drive around the country, making himself, like, constantly available to whoever was, whatever journalist traveled with him.

I mean, that was his, you know, I mean, there's a big difference between being a, real straight talker and being available to the press. But in terms of the way that it's conveyed, there's hardly any difference at all, right? Because all the press cares about is that you're available to talk to that. Absolutely. But yeah, it's this sort of dream of a reporter's dream anyway, of what civic life ought to be. You know, you knock on the door with the bus, like you said, and there's McCain and Lindsey Graham sitting around, maybe Joe Lieberman, if it's a particularly good day. And, you know, they're there to kind of fill your notebook with colorful quotes that may often, you know, occasionally bash their own party and make people mad and say what's on their mind in a kind of craggy way.

I mean, that is he was, that is a, that is a reporter's dream, right? And it's funny because I see a lot of criticism this week from both left and right, I guess particularly from the left, bet that McCain was a fake maverick, which is, you know, if you want to say that, it's absolutely right. He abandoned his supposedly dearly held values when he ran for president, abandoned campaign finance reform, abandoned. immigration reform, which he'd worked across the aisle on and was a, was a, was a closely held cause of his. Well, and in some ways, I think that's why the Obama moment, sorry to interrupt you, was so, that, that moment in, you know, when, when the woman said that Obama was a foreigner, Muslim, an Arab is what she said. Arab, because that was a momentary return to form, right? I mean, he, because he had, because he was perceived that he had given up so much of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, he, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, he, of. you know, of his closely held beliefs up to that point. And I think that I know I'm skipping ahead a whole lot,

but that's sort of, you know, I felt a lot of the same chorus, you know, singing his praises went during the Obamacare repeal vote. But back to what we were talking. With his famous thumbs down. No, absolutely. No, and it's, it's, you know, people say, well, he was only a Maverick so far and it was such an act.

And that is all true. But you know what the press likes when people oppose their own team. Like that's copy, right? And I think, you know, when we talk about all this stuff, like John McCain was the master of the old media world, the old newspaper driven both sides world. Because he knew how to read those people. He knew this is exactly what they want. They want a statesman, quote unquote, who's going to work across the line, who's going to bash his own party, who's going to go out in his own. Like that world of newspapers, he mastered how to make news and befriend reporters in that world.

And I think what now when we look at sort of the some of the obits which are less kind, it's just because the media world really changed. I think John McCain probably changed in minor ways, but the media world around him changed greatly. Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, I think that, you know, I honestly have not paid a ton of attention to his obituary. where he's at least not the screechier sort. But it's interesting that his position as an outsider, as a maverick, you know, it sort of came in waves, right? As you said, and I think, and unsurprisingly, I guess, the loudest voices of opposition to him came in those waves. And it was sort of interesting to look and see who, it was really, it's really, it was really easy to imagine as soon as word came out that he passed, that you would get the sort of old school gawker, like, you know, forget,

this a-hole. He never, he never deserved our praise sort of O-Bit. But you heard that from like the farthest reaches of the right today too, you know, I mean, there was a lot of, you know, some of the cringier figures on the, on the, you know, all right web were, we took this opportunity to grandstand about, you know, or to get attention by, you know, shitting on them. So. And by fringious figures, you mean the president of the United States who. Well, I was skipping him for right now, but yes. But yeah. For the Washington Post, Josh Dossy, Nick's statement about McCain's heroism. And finally put it back out, by the way.

Right before we started recording, he lowered the flags and released the statement, bowing presumably to widespread pressure and condemnation. I mean, listen, congratulations to him for finding some, you know, bit of kindness in his soul, but you can't make that decision to not lower the flags for a passing senator,

especially John McCain, and not be willing to stick to your convictions about it. Come on, President Trump. There you go. I mean, and it's just funny to me that the way this world changes, right? Because it's like now being a maverick against your own party or more specifically being a maverick against Donald Trump, as we know, is considered this great heresy, right? In a bad way. So if you do that, if you do the thumbs down to health care, Trump's going to attack you. He's already attacked your, you know, Trump has literally already attacked you for being a prisoner of war. Breitbart's going to attack you. The federalist is probably going to

attack you. And, you know, it's like when John McCain died, his media constituency, to me, was essentially centress that now very, that very sort of toxic word and newspaper reporters, old school, either either actually old school or old schoolish newspaper reporters. Like that was about his constituency in the media. Maybe Bill Crystal, who once endorsed, you know, the Weekly Standard endorsed him for president back in 2000, he's still on that train. but it's pretty small. And it went from, I think, being pretty widespread

to being a handful of people. I mean, there is a sort of, you know, his friendship with Joe Lieberman, his, you know, dalliance with running alongside Joe Lieberman when he ran for president. That's widely reported and, you know, discussed.

But the Bill Crystal thing, you know, made me think of that, too. There is a sort of feeling that I know there was a lot of, you know, the political landscape has changed so much that people that seem to be on opposite sides of the spectrum

15, 20 years ago, found find themselves in the middle but there's also a little bit of the of the you know aging towards the middle you know you kind of it's at some point we all become at some point we all age into neocons if we hang out in Washington long enough or something i don't but i was going to say please tell me when that's going to happen so i'll be i think you i think you have to really be part of the swamp for that to happen but uh no but i think it's i mean it is interesting to to to wonder i you know i think the i think that that you're what you said at the top was was right that is discussion about

any discussion about his transcendence is sort of necessarily overblown and sort of the self, or not self, but sort of the contemporaneous mythologizing that we all do as part of the human race. But it is sort of interesting to wonder how much times have really changed and how much

you know, there might not be someone like him again just because the political climate has shifted so much. Yeah, I just think like when I look now, it's like the senator who masters the media is like Brian Shats of Hawaii who is tweeting, like skillfully tweeting about Trump from the left. Like that's the guy who gets the kudos. By the way, speaking of sticking to form before we move on, we should salute John McCain, who released a posthumous sub-tweet of Donald Trump. Yeah. Reading, and I saw this first from the New York Times as Jonathan Martin, reading quote,

We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries. We weaken it when we hide behind walls rather than tear them down when we doubt the power of our ideals. So John McCain apparently directed a statement to be released after his death, which pretty much stands as a repudiation of the Trump regime. That was read by Rick Davis, by one of his closest friends who read it was a statement that McCain wrote before he passed. And yeah, it was it was even more poignant read through, you know, his choking. back tears. It was, I mean, it was quite a send-off. Let's talk a little bit about Jamel Hill. First reported by James Andrew Miller, the ESPN and Everything Else reporter on Saturday. He described it as an amicable parting

and something that came after she had requested a meeting with newish ESPN president, Jimmy Pataro. Hill has a production company with Kelly Carter, who's right with the undefeated. She'll presumably do projects based on that. Fascinating thing about Jamel Hill. who you and I have now talked about half a dozen times. She's definitely on the Mount Rushmore of Pressbox. Is, you know, her, that couple of months last year was now in retrospect, such a not only a defining period for her career, but a defining period for ESPN to me. Because that was the moment.

You know, we're talking about like ESPN showing the national anthem and how Trump willfully misunderstands the policy, et cetera, et cetera, all this stuff now. That was the moment where ESPN semi-officially or however officially you want to say decided we are not leaning into the Trump era. We are going to go screaming in the other direction. When the White House, the current administration suggests that our employee should be fired, we're not going to be an opposition to the president. we're not even going to put Jamel Hill on the air to talk about how she feels about the situation. We're just going to pretend it didn't happen and move along. And that's it.

And that just, I mean, that is so, again, that, people say, well, the simplest way for ESPN to cope with the Trump administration is not to talk about it. Okay, if you consider that simple, fine. But man, that is the place where they started tying themselves and knots about this. and it continues today. Yeah. I mean, I think the original not, you know, was going forward into this era without a plan in the first place, right? I mean, for, I mean, as, as poorly as this situation has been handled. And as much as I wish that Jamel Hill had a platform for her voice on ESPN or wherever so, she, you know,

chooses to voice it. Like, you can't have... The fact that this, like, snuck up on ESPN, I think, was sort of the original sin, right? I mean, the whole thing seems like it could have been avoided a little bit more deftly if they just had a little bit of foresight about where the world was going. Yeah, I mean, I have some sympathy because I think it's just terra incognita for everybody. Sure. And no one knew what the Trump administration was going to look like and no one knew how their

employees were going to tweet about it and feel personally about it. And they certainly didn't know, couldn't, I mean, wouldn't have been able to gauge the reaction ahead of time. I mean, that she would have become such a target for everybody in the media and on the Internet. Oh, absolutely. I just think it's made. What, can we name one other television network that when your personality who you've invested in, who you employ, who you reputedly like, has become one of the biggest newsmakers in America over like, what, a 72-hour period or more in her case last year? that you would not put them on television to talk about it. But even from a scummy ratings grabbing perspective,

you wouldn't just be like, I think Jamel should sit on the set with Michael and talk about what this feels like to be targeted by the administration. Sure. Just therapeutically or just to see how she feels or to get the story from her or anything. That's shocking to me.

It's hard to compare ESPN to anything else. I mean, because I mean, I can't imagine that happening on Fox Sports, FS1 either, but like, you know, if she were on the Today Show or if she were on any talk, if she were on the view, I mean, that would have been, that would have been three weeks of ratings for them just milking it, right? Just having her, you know, discuss or discuss how it felt to her or going in or going in on it, you know, like either way. Yeah. And I don't, and I'm, I'm not

ever a person who wants to suggest how ESPN should get viewers, which is not my job. But I was actually interested in how she felt about it. Yeah. And, you know, what she made of that. You know, she's a person who is really, really tough and who, since her days as a college journalist, was happy to say exactly what was on her mind, even if it brought everybody down on her. And she was not, she wasn't afraid to do that. But this is a different, that was a very, very different level of that. I'm sure her, she made a joke about her mentions yesterday. I can only imagine what those were like. You can only imagine what they're like. You know, I imagine what they're like on a non-Trump day. So it was just interesting.

Also, by the way, when this story came down, I always forget what an avatar of hate Jamel Hill is to the right-wing media industrial complex of the United States. That it's like a big Fox News story when Jamel Hill is leaving ESPN, that there's this kind of conservative end zone dance that's happening when she leaves. And it's just, she's just become this, you know, two, two, people on that side of the aisle, she has just become this sort of figure, this divisive figure. And you're just like, oh, man, how did this, what, you know, we know how it happened. But that just, that never ceases to astound me.

Yeah. I mean, I feel like we shouldn't be taking unnecessary shots, but I don't think we're going to be hearing President Trump complaining that Fox News was covering Jamel Hill instead of the important things he's been doing in his administration. But his revised NAFTA deal, you don't think he's going to be mad that they spent a segment on Jamel Hill. It's a sad day. I mean, just that it didn't work out, but just in the way that it's being covered, you know, the way that the conservative media is only covering it now but hasn't been talking about her,

she's been largely off the air for so long. You know, this has been, the sad story has already taken place, you know, and her moving on is just sort of the last stands in it. It'll be really interesting to see what she does next. Absolutely. And what kind of platform? Because ESPN, for all the limits it put on the people who talked on its air, is still a huge platform. And where is she going to go to have a comparable platform to speak to people, even if she can speak her mind without censoring yourself?

All right, David, now it's time for the Overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. David, we have an all-Trump crime edition of Overwork this week. Oh, great. Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen, I see you no doubt saw last week, pleaded guilty. And by the way, the AP style book Twitter account lit it up this week. Quote, it's plead, pleaded, and pleading. Please do not use the colloquial past tense form pled. So don't you dare use that on this podcast, David.

Donald Trump's former attorney, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations, bank fraud and other crimes last week. It was an overworked Twitter joke to say that MAGA, make America great again. and now stands for my attorney got arrested. Now, that's not particularly funny, but I just wanted to put that in here because remember when acronym jokes were a thing? Oh, my God. Remember Waco, we ain't coming out?

Remember that during the Branch Davidian crisis? I can't even say the NASA jokes for my childhood. No, no. I purposely wrote down, do not say NASA joke. Oh, my gosh. We're not going to do the NASA joke. The acronyms need to make a comeback.

This is fantastic. Acronym humor is truly something. It's like the line of the, the Senate, something truly lost in America life. Thanks to Paul Bosson and Andrew Graning for that one. All right, David, a joke made by people ranging from comedian

Andy Kindler to Conan O'Brien, also about Trump. Quote, Mexico has volunteered to pay for the walls closing in on Trump. That's thanks to Scott for that one. This week, yeah. You knew that we were going to eventually find the path from Mexico pays for the wall

to walls closing in. And finally, listener, Scott Porch, directs us to an entire category of David Pecker jokes this weekend ever worked. Pecker, who, as you know, is the chairman of the company that publishes the National Inquirer, got an immunity deal from federal prosecutors and could cooperate potentially in the case against Trump and his allies. Are you ready for some pecker jokes? Let's do it.

This comes from Michael McKean, who inhabits the character actor you kind of remember who has reinvented himself as a Twitter account, Corner of American Culture. McKean writes, Mr. Pecker does not appreciate all the childish jokes about his name signed American media spokesperson Fanny Goblincock. That's a good one. Sam Stein of the Daily Beast tweeted, I guess you could say that Trump failed to

wrap pecker up and Haley Figueroa O'Reilly tweets, well, I guess Trump has two little peckers to deal with now. If you made a joke about Trump's leaky and or disloyal pecker, congrats.

You may be overworked Twitter joke of the week. Do you have something you'd like to add? I just want to say, I just want to shout out Michael McKean on Better Call Saul. He's fantastic on that show. I'm sorry. That's right. Back to the bad jokes. All right. Brian doesn't watch enough television. Exhibit A, B, and C. All right. We will talk about the Trump News deluge right after this quick commercial break. David, everyone knows about the risks of drunk driving. You could get in a crash. People could get hurt or killed. But let's take a moment to look at some surprising statistics. Almost 29 people in the United States

die every day in alcohol-impaired vehicle crashes. That's one person every 50 minutes. Even though drunk driving fatalities have fallen by a third in the last three decades, drunk driving crashes still claim more than 10,000 lives each year. Drunk driving can have a big impact on your wallet too. You could get arrested and incur huge legal expenses, even lose your job. So what can you do to prevent drunk driving? Plan a safe ride home before you start drinking.

Designate a sober driver or call a taxi. And if you know someone who has been drinking, take their keys and arrange for them to get sober ride home. We all know the consequences of driving drunk, but one thing's for sure. You're wrong if you think it's no big deal. Drive sober or get pulled over. Learn more at nitsa.gov. That's nhtsa.g. All right, David, let's talk about a topic I like to call Trump News o'clock. I believe it was the 4 p.m. Eastern hour last Tuesday. When Donald Trump made a lot of news, or people around Donald Trump made a lot of news, I should say, let's listen to the president. talking to Ainsley Earhart of Fox and Friends on some trouble he's been having around the office.

Did you know about the payments? Later on I knew, later on. But you have to understand, Angeley, what he did, and they weren't taken out of campaign finance. That's a big thing. That's a much bigger thing. Did they come out of the campaign? They didn't come out of the campaign. They came from me, and I tweeted about it.

I don't know if you know, but I tweeted about the payments. But they didn't come out of campaign. In fact, my first question, when I heard about it, was did they come out of the campaign? Because that could be a little dicey. And they didn't come out of the campaign, and that's big. But it's not even a campaign violation. If you look at President Obama, he had a massive campaign violation. But he had a different attorney general, and they viewed it a lot different.

Does it ever strike you as obligatory laughter after? Fox and Friends clip. Does it ever strike you as weird, David, that people are now in America rooting for news to happen? That we're just sitting by Twitter and saying, I want scoops to just drop out of the sky, that I'm just rooting for things to happen that will appear in Twitter in my social media account that I can just get excited by. I'm not even talking about reporters. I'm just talking about people. Yeah.

I think Chris Ryan in our office coined the phrase scoops o'clock when Maggie Haberin just seemed to be dropping something at four o'clock every day for West Coast time during the first, you know, during like a six-month stretch of the Trump presidency. But yeah, I mean, it's a weird, it's a weird feeling because it does seem like the thirst for news, for the occurrence of news. breaking is more significant than the thirst for a specific outcome. I mean, certainly on like the, you know, there are plenty of liberals that are that are awaiting the day that Trump gets, you know, frog marched out of the White House to borrow a phrase. But like, in the absence of that ever happening, it's this sort of like addictive need to, to,

you know, it used to be that, I guess, back, back when we were young, you would spend your day is, I mean, spend your, you know, while away the hours waiting for, you know, Andrew Sullivan to file a blog post so that you would have something to read on the subject that you were interested in. Now you're actually waiting for the specific news to break. That's true, right? It's like we interact now that kind of lots of people subscribe to newspapers online, which they might not have the same way, like 12 years ago. Mm-hmm.

You actually interact with the news rather than the obligatory blog post summary of the news, which I guess that seems like a, That seems like a step forward in American life. I do think, I mean, there's an agreement of anti-Trump forces about what they want to happen, generally speaking, right? Trump resigns, Trump is impeached, Trump is frog marches, you can say out of the White House. But I guess the Trump administration sort of allows you to believe that so many things could possibly happen this afternoon as we sit here and record this podcast. Yes. That you could accept literally anything popping into your Twitter account.

You could accept that a tabloid publisher is going to turn on Trump, that Trump's personal attorney, that the White House counsel will cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller, seemingly violating attorney-client privilege, but that Trump's own legal team won't care that he's, you know, violating attorney-client privilege. It's pretty incredible. And I guess that's just the scope of the news we've been reading that allows us to believe that all those things are possible. Yeah. I mean, it's certainly, I mean, there's a huge aspect. of it that it's like a, you know, a serial thriller, you know, I mean, you're waiting for the next thing that could possibly have him because you're right. That means so many of the things that could have. I mean, I don't know, I can't speak for the rest of the world, but I think that like, I don't, I was not expect, I was not, I was not assuming that David Pecker was going to get drawn into this story by, you know, let's say like conventional means. Um, he, you know, I, he, I, he, I assumed he'd be, you know, he's more of the sort of guy that would like,

pop up on a lefty blog, you know, but not necessarily be part of the, like, the real narrative. He's blogging for Daily Coast or he was being written about on Daily Coast. Being written about. Yeah. Turns out to be a diarist. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's like, it's like he's, he's not the kind of guy who's going to be like, I'm not talking and I'm going to prison, right? I mean, he's the most flippable media person on the planet. I mean, this is like when, when Trump has made a bargain allegedly with the guy who published was the National Enquirer. That's slightly different than making an off-the-record bargain with like a New York Times reporter. So that in a way is not surprising. By the way, you as entertained as I was, and I wrote a little piece about this last week, about how we tweet about the news in exactly the same way now with every Trump scoop. There was, I mean, I was just waiting for the this changes everything tweet last Tuesday. And sure enough, Jeffrey Tubin of CNN and the New Yorker came through. This could be it. This could be the day that the Trump administration changes forever.

Do we, do we, aren't we past that this changes everything day now? I mean, maybe it will be. I don't know if we're past it or not, but I don't think pointing it out makes a big difference. And more than anything, it's just this like, just this immediately disheartening feeling that we need, that it's, that it necessitates pointing out again. And yet we know that nothing will happen. I mean, it's, it almost is, it almost ensures that it will not be the pivotal moment because we're out, where someone's out there yelling that this is the. pivotal moment. Sure.

Who knows? I mean, I guess this past week, I mean, it's, it's fair to say there has never been a day in the presidency like the one that we just had, you know? I mean, it's, it's a, it's a pretty significant, pretty like mind-boggling sequence of events. Yeah. And that's, I guess, why I'm a little, I'm a little, um, forgiving when I see a a journalist, uh, political journalist tweet that there's too much news.

You just roll your eyes saying, no, this is good, right? Oh, yeah. You'd rather be, you'd rather be, you know, covering this than the, the, the failed campaign finance reform effort that never gets out of committee. Like, this is big. This is you. But I do like feigning that there's too many things happening at once. You know, it's like, no, no, no.

You'd kill for this, right? You didn't want to be. You'd rather have this job right now than at some sleepy time late in the Bush administration. This is, this is it. This is where you want to be. Oh, you're right in the middle of everything. And by the way, it's like when Duncan Hunter gets, you know, gets taken to task or, you know, whatever. and he's trying to blame everything on his wife

and everybody's complaining that, you know, that's too much. Like in another era, sure, that would be a big story. And it's just getting completely, you know, subsumed under the shadow of all the stuff going on with Trump. But like, you know, I presume, I don't, that's a complaint that I'm a little bit. I get the, I'm with you that that's too much news. But I think it's, you know, I think if you work for a major news outlet, you can, there's enough separation of duties that you can have somebody cover that

and somebody else taking on Michael Cohen or David Pecker or whoever. Yeah, I mean, Duncan Hunter can be the other part of the front page. There's room for all, for, you know, all kinds of deviant activity. There's room for lots of corruption. And Larry Cudlow, yeah, entertaining a publisher of white nationalists at a birthday party in his home. Is it weird? I had no idea. I had no idea.

Is it weird that I was just willing to let that one go? Like, so we're so far down the hole now that I'm just like, Well, you know, you know, you talk to a lot of people. You got to raise money from a lot of places, you know, whatever. I mean, someone's going to be a white nationalist if you're just cruising in Republican circles these days, I guess. Yeah, I think you are truly, you truly have too much whiplash. If you get the point we love that. I also love the never-Trump or impeachment tweet where it's like, I finally decided this is it, which was Brett Stevens last Tuesday in New York Times.

It's like, I have reluctantly decided after much, much thought, much cogitation that it's time for this president to be impeached or he ought to step down. You know, it's like, thank you for telling us you finally got there. You know, we're happy. I mean, and I guess it's fair. I mean, the charges were filed, you know, I mean, Cohen played guilty, obviously. So we're at a little different world than just like charges were filed against him. But I feel like if you've waited this long to come down on that side, you know, you at least would wait for like the Trump team defense to the situation, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, it just, it feels like, it feels like there was a cell date. There was, there was a, there was a date where your, your call for resignation had its maximum salience. And we are somewhere past that date now. Yeah, I think that. I guess argues that he really was thinking about this the whole time. By the way, we need a separate category for revelations where the Chris Buckley style satirist, if he were writing a, a funny, satirical novel about this, would have rejected because it'd be too over the top. And the fact that David Pecker kept the hush,

payments and damaging stories in a safe, according to the AP? Yes. It was like, so this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this the, this, this, the United States. I mean, come on, man. How can that possibly be true? But it's true. Reportedly true anyway. Yeah, well, all of the pecker news

All of the All of the pecker news comes from The former, the former, what, editor-in-chief Of the, of the, was that, is that, I'm triggering the title wrong. But a former employee who, I mean, for all this talk of non-disclosure agreements and everything else, it just seems to be completely open, free to, to, to, to gab about whatever happened while he was working there.

Um, it just seems like an incredible oversight for this like, you know, this, this, this, this, this, this, criminal cartel that they were running to keep news of Trump mistresses out. Alleged cartel, we should say. Yeah, of course. I've used that with great hyperbole. The other thing is watching that Trump interview with Ainsley Earhart, a name so great that if it didn't exist, Fox News would have had to invent it. Maybe this says a lot about

where we are in this divided country, but you watch it and you're, for a moment you're just, at least for myself, I was caught just thinking like, oh wow, like Donald Trump is admitting to this thing. And it's not even like I'm admitting to a crime, but like that he's admitting he's admitting to paying to be, he's admitting to paying off someone who claimed to be his former mistress. I guess he's not actually admitting to the affair. This seems to be, this is a totally separate subcategory,

which in which Trump and or his associates seem to admit to what everyone was accusing them of. We've had a couple of Giuliani moments like this. And then Trump goes, you know, listen, that was actually my own money. That's, that paid off these women. Yeah, that's actually what the problem is here. That goes to the root of campaign finance violation. It's all so strange. That whole, that interview is just so weird.

I mean, this is so far afield, but like, you know, I understand why the Trump team is reluctant let him talk to Mueller or Mueller's team. But you got to think that, like, on some level, Mueller's a little bit reluctant, too, because, like, those, like, he's just, he, he doesn't have a vested interest and even defending himself in any sort of, like, consistent, truthful way.

It's very strange. It's a weird world we live in. No, he just likes to talk. I mean, the Maggie Haberman note, of all the things she's reported, the one note that strikes me that she tweets every once in a while is that Trump just thinks what,

we'll get him through the next 10 minutes. Yeah. That's just the way his mind operates. Yeah. And if you just think of everything he says like that, like it starts to make, I don't know, make sense is the right word, but it starts to make it at least kind of acquires a pattern. By the way, I remember speaking to Christopher Buckley, I remember him saying when he wrote, thank you for smoking, that he found around the same time that one of the actual lawyers defending the tobacco lobby at that time, his last name was coffin. And he said, even I wouldn't have gone that far. I assume, again, not to pile on somebody's surname,

but the guy who keeps the secrets of the president's sex life is named Pecker. Can we just fully appreciate? We did not have gone. That just seems too on the nose. Before we get out of the pecker business entirely, I just want to point out that he's one of the people whose name has been floated as a potential future owner

of New York Magazine. We have that to look forward to. I thought you were going to say the Brooklyn Nets. But there we go. Okay, let's talk about the athletic. Speaking of sports, the athletic, I feel, has been one of those things that's been a sports writing bar conversation. It's almost impossible to have a drink with a sports writer and not get to the subject of the athletic. And then every once in a while, we have one of those weeks where everything spills out.

So two stories. One was Kevin Draper's piece in the New York Times, where he talked about how the site in the last 10 months, he says, has exploded, expanded, excuse me, from 65 employees to more than 300 employees. he quotes this chatty investor in the athletic Daniel Leff, who says that he would turn down a $200 million offer. Absolutely, Leff says we wouldn't take that. The other stories from Laura Wagner in Deadspin, in which he reported that the athletic tried to hire seemingly every single sentient being who worked for the Washington Post sports section

was in an attempt to compete with the post, of course, was turned down, which tracks with a lot of the people I've talked to who's talked about how a number of people who've been approached by the athletic, they've gotten their deals improved at their old publications. And in some of them, in some cases, have said yes. What did you make it?

I mean, is there, what are we talking about here when we, when we had these arguments? Because I feel like a piece gets posted. Then there's this kind of argument, you know, with people who work for the athletic and maybe Draper or maybe somebody else that everybody has on Twitter. Do you have a sense of what the underlying angst about this is?

Well, I think, I mean, this is a very inside baseball take, but I think this is a very inside baseball subject. I feel like Draper's piece was written for the same reason that we're talking about this today, and that's it like there is the old, now it's gone from a bar conversation, like you said, to this overwhelming feeling that there is a giant story here, but a sort of inability to get to the heart of what the story is.

And certainly, on its face, this is a big story, right? There is a startup that is hiring away hundreds of the top sports writers in markets all over the country and sort of consolidating local sports writing and, you know, under one banner, paying them really well by all accounts. And making this bet that like, I mean, it really is a craven bet that newspapers that newspapers are going to die. but sports, but sports can survive. Yeah, I would say the smiley face bet would be that people are willing to pay for ad free, you know, honest sports writing. Yeah, and that there's still, I mean, and that there's still a big market and, I mean, that local sports, that micro, you know, that micro-targeting, you know, has a place still.

And I mean, clearly it does. I don't think anybody would dispute it, but like this is, you know, on the heels of the sort of ESPN shuttering its local sites. you know, we work for a sport site that takes on just everything from sort of a zoomed out, you know, national perspective. Certain New England markets aside.

And I think that, but I think that, you know, Draper's piece was really interesting for someone who was only vaguely aware of the site. Certainly it was interesting to you and I on a sort of more, a deeper level. But I still feel like, and I think part of the reason it's so interesting, I guess,

is because there are so many questions left unanswered about the athletic. Yeah, the big question you're talking about that we can't get at is will the athletic work? Yeah. Because we don't know the answer to that. You know, is this model going to work? Here's where I am conflicted about this. First of all, I think it's hard when people, it's hard for people to make judgments about the athletic in terms of quality because there's just so much of it. Yeah.

And the athletic Dallas, which I read most of the time and like quite a bit of. may not resemble the athletic Cleveland and may in fact be pitched in a completely different way other than hiring people to cover the teams. There's not a lot of like overlap in those kinds of things. The thing about the finances,

here's what I go back and forth on. If you look at the math, it is very hard, you know, again, I don't know what their numbers say, but if you just do a back of the envelope calculation, it's very hard to understand and how this is going to work. Exactly.

On the other hand, what sports writing needs in this time of pivoting to video is jobs, period, full stop. Right. Even temporary jobs. And I'm sort of wondering, like, if we imagine the worst case scenario for the athletic, the whole thing goes under in two years. It's just like we just, it's unsustainable, we're not making enough money, we don't have enough subscribers.

We couldn't find a rich guy to sell it to. I'm sorry guys, it just did. It was a noble experiment. It just didn't work. Is that worse off that 300 plus people got paid really good wages for a short period of time when lots of people aren't getting paid wages at all? I don't know the answer to that. I mean, but that's the question to me.

Right. I mean, it's a painful thought experiment. If you take the most apocalyptic point of view, then yeah, you have people, this group of 300 plus people who got paid really well for a couple years and then now reemerge into a job market where every newspaper has decided they're comfortable with the streamlined sports page size that they have and all the sites around like ESPN and the ringer and whoever else are sort of like, yeah, it will hire like a handful. But so you still end up with 200 out of work sports writers who deserve to be employed, you know, and was that money worthwhile? I don't know. I mean,

it's a philosophical argument. I think in general, yeah, I mean, yes, in general, I hesitate, and I know you agree, because we've had these conversations about other places, including places we've worked, I hesitate to come to say anything negative about an enterprise that is paying writers to write things that they want to write, right? I think you can say negative things about them, but you can't, it's tough to say negative things about the fact that they're paying people. Yes, exactly.

But like, I don't, yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to, I mean, my instinct is not to contribute to a, you know, to a, to a, to a negative story if about, you know, if it's going to affect someone's paycheck down the line or something like that. But it does need to be discussed, right? I mean, we don't know. I mean, there's a part of their business model. I'm going to take a step back. There's a part of the business model that is like so many other tech startups right now, that is the bull rush into. too big to fail territory, right? It's like, it's not, it's not a one-to-one comparison, but it's not so unlike, you know, Uber insinuating itself into a major city before the city can pass laws that, you know, common-sense laws that prohibit Uber from taking over the city, right? By the time they start passing the laws, then everybody's like, oh, we can't live without Uber and Uber has this upper hand. It's not, obviously not a one-to-one comparison, but the athletic is spending must be spending

way more money than they're making. I mean, it's really hard to look at the numbers in New York Times story and numbers that were reported and that have been reported elsewhere, like you said, and make any sense of this, except that at the kernel of this idea, and as they're continuing to get positive press and people are responding and signing up, that the venture capital money is just rolling in, right? And they spend, and they're spending it while they have it to grow to a point that they'll have enough subscribers to eventually to self-sustain. Yeah. But that's a risky proposition. It's a totally risky proposition. Here's my thing about newspapers, because you mentioned newspapers. You will find nobody in the Ringer podcast network who loves newspaper sports pages more than I do. If I could fashion a nest of newspaper sports pages and sleep in them at night, I would.

I mean, that's like my favorite thing in the world. When we talk about newspapers, on the one hand you have Alex Mather, co-founder of the Athletics, saying what he said, which turned him into a mustache twirling villain, well, we will wait every local paper out and then let them continuously bleed until you're the last one standing. On the other hand, when I was reporting on the Denver poster this year, like that is a content, that has turned into, in many cases, a content farm, right? Like a really bad place to work where you don't want to be a sports writer. They are running out of the burning building that is the sports base towards the athletic.

because not only is the money better, but it's like their old job was actively unpleasant in many ways. So, you know, when we talk about, like, I, again, and I say this is somebody who loves newspaper sports pages, and there are many good ones still out there, including one here in Los Angeles. But this idea that, you know, it's like, what is the Denver Post at this point in history? You know, what is the New York Daily News, which you talked about a few weeks ago at this point in history? What are you, you know, is that something that that sports page is still, still has the grandeur and the quality that the title implies that, you know, it is worth saving on its own merits now because it's owned by the evil hedge fund? I don't know, you know, and I think, you know, it's like, so I think using newspapers and newspaper proprietors as the kind of, you know, stock hero. in this story against the evil athletic is very, very dodgy.

Even if we admit the Mather thing is ludicrous and over the top, there's still that there. So that's all I'll say about them. Yeah, no, I think that one of the things that you alluded to, and this is a separate point though, is that there's a difference between the major markets and every other market, right? Because the fact that they're focusing on

the local sports scene in places like Denver and you know 90% or not probably not that much but but 75% of the markets that they're in is it may be a net positive you know I mean after but they have to have these they have to have have footholds in the really major markets and that's where like you said before they're finding difficulty hiring away the top talent they're not just competing I mean part of it's that because of the newspapers like the new york times and the washington post have you know or all of the New York papers have fairly vibrant sports sections

and vested interest in keeping them going. But also, you know, there's major, like the big outlets like ESPN and, you know, everywhere else do a pretty good job of covering those teams too. So it's going to be an interesting tension to see

you know, the athletic certainly has visions of being, you know, if they're not waiting to bleed out all the papers, you know, they took that back but they certainly I'm sure we'd envision a world in which they're taking a big bite out of ESPN or whoever, you know, whatever else national, national service there is. And there, and, you know, because the alternative is like when I tried to order my sister cupcakes for her birthday, but none of the food delivery apps on my phone worked in Waco, Texas. I had, I had to find something that, like, no one in the world had ever heard of. There is a smaller version of seamless or whatever for Waco, Texas. It's just, like, seamless can't be bothered to deliver there, you know? And that's not what the athletic wants to be. So, I mean, it'll be, they, they, you know, and as they spend more and more money to get to a, the national stature that they want to be, you know, it'll be, it's, it's going to be, like we've said over and over again, an interesting balancing act to see how they get there.

That's this, I feel this is about as hedge to take as you can have. Yes. Between the two of us. But I feel that's where I am right now. I don't, I don't, you know, I'd love. like to breathe fire one way or the other, but I feel that's where I am on this thing right now. And, you know, I don't, I don't. And first of all, it's just hard to get my mind around. Like I said, something with 300 people as having a particular, you know, it's like, and look,

it might not work. It might financially don't work. It might editorial and not work. But again, that's where I am at this moment in time. What was the quote about the, what was the exact quote about them waiting for all the newspapers to bleed and die? We will wait. Every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last one standing. We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for it. That's a terrible thing for anyone to say. And they should have retracted that, you know, the moment it was spoken.

That said, in some ways, that's a sort of optimistic business model for this company because there, you know, there's some days you look at the athletic and it seems like they're hiring everybody that matters, right? And they're making this giant move. but you read in Draper's piece they're talking about 100,000 subscriber, over 100,000 subscribers, that's not, I mean, that's just not, that's not a functional number, right? So, I mean, and certainly if they had 200,000 or 300,000,

that's the number they would have said. So if they're in it for the long haul, you know, if they're just in it to make a quick, to make a quick buck, or whoever the investors are just looking for a return on their profit, return on their investment, then of course they would take $200 million. You know, of course they would take

that bleacher report money. And that's going to happen. But if indeed they're waiting to bleed everybody out and they really believe in this, they really believe in this ethos that, like, eventually they'll be the last sports site standing, then for all the writers who are, you know, cashing those athletic checks, that's actually weirdly good news. But yeah, I'm split too. That was a very definitive hedge take. Congratulations on at least affecting like the first take kind of like bravado and then delivering the hedge take.

And I firmly believe this and we'll just have to see what happens. All right. That's the speaking of we'll just have to see what happens. That's a press box this week. David and I will be back with more hot takes next week. Jim Cunningham is our producer, Chris Almeida, is our excellent researcher. David, see you next week, buddy. See you later, man.

I want scoops to just drop out of the sky. Yes. We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last one standing. We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. but we will make business extremely difficult for them. Yes. Definitely on the Mount Rushmore of Pressbox. Everyone knows about the risks of drunk driving.

People could get hurt or killed. You could get arrested, incur huge legal expenses, or even lose your job. If you think drunk driving is no big deal, you couldn't be more wrong. Drive sober or get pulled over. Learn more at NHTSA.gov. That's nhtsa.g.