The Press Box - Shannon Sharpe, Chuck Todd, and the CNN Meltdown for Dummies

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

Bryan and David talk through the pronunciation of presidential candidate Ron DeSantis’s last name (0:41) before jumping into media news involving Chuck Todd leaving ‘Meet the Press’ (9:48) and Shannon Sharpe leaving FS1’s ‘Undisputed’ (21:02). Then, they dive into Tim Alberta’s piece about CNN’s Chris Licht and provide their top three takeaways (31:48). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's official. One Shining Podcast is back, and I am your host, Tate Frazier. And as March Badness begins, we're covering everything from Selection Sunday all the way to the championship and beyond. We're going to have great guests that are coming through on the show. And look, if you're a friend of the program and you're already subscribed, you don't have to do anything. OSP is back. It's going to be right back in your feed. And if you're not a friend of the program, and this is your first time on the rodeo, then let me tell you this. You need to go to Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast. and smash subscribe today

because the OSP show is back. David? Yes. The campaign of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has hit a rocky point. It's not those poll numbers where he trails Donald Trump. It's the uncertainty

about how to pronounce his last name. This is real. Over in Axios, Alexios, Alex Thompson, and Sophia Kai report in the early days of his campaign, DeSantis has gone best. back and forth between pronouncing his name DeSantis and D-Santis. We have actual audio evidence here.

This is a South Carolina radio interview cited by Axios. Listen to the pronunciation closely. You got to go, where can people find you to donate, volunteer, find out more about you? Go to Ron DeSantis.com. Ron DeSantis.com. Oh, my God. Almost sounds like a middle initial, doesn't it? Ron D. Santis.

Now here is another interview Ron DeSantis did with the conservative radio host Mark Levin. We're really excited about the enthusiasm. The number of people go to rondasantis.com and make a contribution. Now that sounds like Ron does Santis rather than DeSantis.

What do you think is going on here? I think he pronounces his name two different ways. So when I saw this story bubbling up, I was like, well, I must be missing something. And so I found like a helpful slate article about it, which helped me realize I wasn't really missing much. So there's some implication that his wife helped change the pronunciation at some point during their marriage. I don't know. I mean, I think in some ways, in some ways, I think you could pretty honestly make the case that it's a little bit. that those pronunciations are a little bit interchangeable.

And it's only when you say them really slowly and deliberately, like when you're in a position of giving the website address that your name is a part of or pronouncing your name clearly for the cameras when you're running for president, that these things become more of an issue. A lot of Italian names are sort of, I think I can speak from some position of authority, are sort of pronounced in various ways depending on the dialect or mood of the person saying them. And, you know, just for whatever it's worth, we're not, we're like one generation removed from Italian names being deemed basically unpronounceable by the vast majority of Americans.

Like, think back to your Italian teachers that you have when you're in like elementary school. Like, it was always like Mr. D or Mrs. B. My father-in-law was Dr. B through his entire career teaching at a high school in New Jersey. You know, it's just, this is, this is part of the weird, you know, evolution of of of uh italian americans um in our you know culture yeah it is a little bit strange that you don't have this sorted out by the time that you're on stage right by the and i don't know what it says about the campaign if it says more about the campaign or the way that campaigns are covered that this that this sort of minutia is what is taking up all the oxygen from the desantis i'll just go with that one uh presidential campaign i mean the other big story of the week was

his wife saying that their kid watches frozen every day and him wincing, uh, in pain. Right. I mean, that's a bad look. It's, uh, it has a lot of, you know, elements of what we all love about politics, you know, when you say one thing and you, you live your life another way, et cetera. But, um, but yeah, that's, that seems to be all the sort of news it's coming out of DeSantis land. You would think that there would have been.

meeting at some point early on in which an advisor, perhaps Pat Summerall's daughter, would have raised their hand and said, I'm sorry, I may be coming in here late, but do we say DeSantis or DeSantis? And they would have just made a call at that point. Kind of like we need to have one position on Ukraine. So how that worked out. Yeah. Or other big issues today. And that's the role of a very seasoned, very confident campaign consultant or media advisor, right?

If you don't have one of those, then you might be in a weird position. I mean, that says probably a lot about your campaign. You know, I've had people, you know, I have people at work that call me by Dave and David, you know, different people call me different things. And I for a long time was like, I'm not Dave. I'm just not Dave. If you want to call me Dave, I'm going to correct you. and at some point you're just like, you know what?

They just got away with five Dave's without me saying anything so they get to call me Dave and I'm comfortably Dave to a lot of people. Not a big issue for me anymore. I've known you 30 years. I've never called you Dave.

I think Davey boy once in a while, but never Dave. For good reason. Yeah, you know, those things can get uncomfortable. I'm sure there's people listening to this, you know, got two months into a job

and realized they weren't quite sure how to address their boss or something and you just have to avoid it forever or a coworker or something like that. Yeah, these things happen. But again, you'd hope that, yeah, somebody would sort that out in some sort of official way in the early stages of this campaign. Not shockingly, the Trump campaign has leapt on the varying pronunciations. Trump campaign spokesman tells Axios, Ron DeSantis is a phony who can't decide how to pronounce

his name. If he can't get your name right, how can you lead a country? Trump, for his part, says on true social, actually I like, duh, better, a nicer flow, so I'm happy he is changing it. It's just a weirdly magnanimous sort of zinger. I'm not quite even sure how to take that. And after some no doubt tense discussions inside campaign headquarters,

I want you to listen, David, to how the candidate, as I'll call him, answered when Fox News reporter Paul Steinhauser inquired about his name. I've got a long last name, European name. Steinhauser. There's been some confusion over your last name and the pronunciation. And I'm just wondering to correct the record. What is it? Oh, this ridiculous. These stupid things. Listen, the way to pronounce my last name, winner. Okay, I love two things about that clip. One is the obviously very canned and workshopped line that DeSantis has there for the question. But the second part is Paul Steinhauser working out of a J-school textbook that says, establish common ground,

with your subject during an interview. I have a very long last name, Steinhauser. So people perhaps have trouble pronouncing it. You presidential candidate, maybe next president of the United States also have a tricky to pronounce name. So I'm not sure that it really helps this. I don't know what his case is.

I'm not sure that it helps DeSantis at all that the video from this just seemed like, made it feel like this was a totally canned, totally set up interview with the sole purpose of getting this one-liner. out. Yeah. It's like that Simpson's episode was a councilman, Les Winen, so

by the way, this was not the best DeSantis or DeSantis clip of the week, nor was the one you mentioned. It was the one where he was snapping at the reporter in New Hampshire. And we could hear Hulk Hogan's entrance music playing in the background. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah.

I saw you tweet about this immediately. I mean, that was just, just unbelievable. And it makes me think we ought to have a candidate music power ranking, of which real American is certainly going to be number one. Yeah, we got to take like their top five songs or their top, whatever, their top two songs that they use the most. You know, the thing is with the Republican candidates, they have the sort of like dwindling supply of opportunities, of possibilities, you know, unless they're, you know, or unless they risk, you know, whatever, the lead singer of white lion coming out

saying like I did not permit you to use this song but and of course that would be a milstrom a minor maelstrom every time it happened uh real american is a really good one really safe bet i don't think hulgogen's gonna decline to let ron de santis or any other florida politician use that song you hurt my friends you hurt my pride david coming up on today's show chuck todd is out at meet the press shannon sharp is out at undisputed what happened and should they trade jobs plus three takeaways from that giant piece in the Atlantic about CNN's Chris Licked, what you need to know about what went wrong. And finally, the sports radio bit to end all sports radio bits, all that much more on the press box. A part of the ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis,

David Shoemaker and producer Erica Sarvantes here. Welcome back, Erica. Let us open, David, with two TV departures that will probably only be paired or twinned, as we say in the business, on this podcast. Shannon Sharp and Chuck Todd. I'll start with the latter. Chuck Todd is leaving Meet the Press.

Here's Todd on Sunday's episode, telling Washington, no more Mr. Moderator guy. But this is also an important time for me personally. I've let work consume me for nearly 30 years. I can't remember the last time I didn't wait, up before five or six a.m. And as I've watched too many friends and family, let work consume them before it was too late, I promised my family I wouldn't do that. And just as important, and this is what

really makes me happy. I'm also ready to take a step back because I have so much confidence in the person whom I'm going to pass the baton to. She's somebody who's been ready for this for a long time. Kristen Walker. It's going to leave the show in September. My take on Chuck Todd has always been that two things can be true at the same time. He wasn't the best host of Meet the Press, and it isn't possible for Meet the Press to be the best version of itself in this media age. What do you think?

I agree. Nobody had the art of trending every week just to get dog piled down like Chuck Todd did. I mean, it seemed like every interview of any significance or just every week, you would just, if you popped open Twitter, if you're if you're in the echo chambers that we travel in, if you pop open Twitter on, you know, lunchtime Sunday, Chuck Todd's always trending and it's always people saying, how did you ask this obvious follow-up question? Why did you let him off the hook? How does he still have this job? You know, not a lot of people could do the job as well as he did it. Though, you know, we've gone over it time and time again. He's a, he is a, he was a serviceable host with a lot of, you know, obvious positive attributes. You know, he got the job for a reason. But he's operating in a time where the naysayers are going to be louder than the people,

then the praisors and serviceable is not going to, you know, no one's going to let you skate by on serviceable. Not to mention he's doing it at a time when politicians don't feel obliged to come on meet the press. When particularly Republicans don't feel obliged to come on meet the press or talk to many, if any, mainstream reporters at all. And also when you can just find really good political talk that makes you smarter everywhere. I think you and I watch the Sunday shows into the 2000s because there was this idea that you would turn those on on Sunday morning and be like, I'm going to learn stuff now. Like I am interested in politics.

I want to hear smart people and our elected leaders who may not, that may not be the same category, but I want to hear from both those groups. And I'm going to learn something from this. And I just wonder now in the world we live in, are you? better off watching an hour of any of these shows or just picking your favorite political podcast, whatever it is, that's going to chew over the one or two newsy things that come out of those interviews. And then probably have a better panel discussion, group discussion than what's offered on those shows. Well, that's it. I mean, you make the right point. I think from a programming point of view,

the answer is just what do you, what do you want us to do? Just like cancel meet the press because it doesn't feel modern enough or doesn't feel the moment enough. And we had to segment less than a month ago about whether they should bring back, I mean, bring back,

Crossfire. Crossfire. I mean, if they're going to bring back crossfire, I'm sure there's some point where you like, you know, people at CNN, they're like, we never should have canceled Crossfire. We should have just let it keep plugging along and do better than wait for the new heyday.

that everybody's talking about. Crossfires as good as it ever was, whatever. Meet the press as an institution, you know. It'll go down with the ship. It'll go down with terrestrial television. It has been interesting to see them sort of try to franchise it and do a daily show and to have, you know, over-the-top content and everything else.

But I think that says more about the relative weakness of the brand than it does about the particular strength of Meet the Press. Yeah, I mean, I think Kristen Walker will do a very good job. She's hosted the show before. She's good at what she does, but it all just seems a little bit like, on the one hand, I don't think there's any reason to even speculate about the future of the show. I think it will continue on the same plotting path that it's on, but also, like, what are we even talking about? there's better, like you said it,

there's better content elsewhere. Yeah, I was looking at the list of people that Todd has interviewed in recent months that was in the New York Times. It was like, Mike Pence, Vivek, Ramoswamy, is a Republican presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, and Hakeem Jeffries,

House Minority Leader. And I'm like, Pence and Ramoswami had been talking to everybody because they are low-polling presidential candidates, and that's what you do is give a million interviews. There's no such thing as a get anymore. No. You made the point.

I will say Kamala Harris is kind of a get. But that's why my proposal would be, or at least what I would float in the NBC, Meet the Press brainstorming meeting is, do we need an interview in this show at all? Like, if we can get Joe Biden, then yes, I want 30 minutes of Joe Biden to start the show or an hour of Joe Biden, if he'll give us an hour. Kamala Harris probably fits that bill. But there's probably not all that many people that really do. I guess if Chris Sununu wants to come on and say he's not running for president, okay, I'm not sure what the next five questions are. But that's at least newsworthy.

But beyond that, I think the list gets pretty small. And then the question is, is there something that could be called meet the press, that's different when you just don't have that immediacy of a somewhat rare political interview like you did during the Tim Russard era. And to me, the easiest thing to fix on these things would be the panel discussions. Yeah. Because it's still a really valuable piece of real estate. And it's like, again, I don't know what these people's contracts are, but now that Chris Sununu isn't running for president, could we put him on the panel this Sunday? Could we get John Favreau?

Couldn't we get Bimani Jones? Could we get Molly Jones? Could we get Molly Johnson? fast. Couldn't we just go and get a great lineup every week and be like, we're not going to have the bad network TV version of this discussion. We're going to have the good version of a political discussion. If it gets a little hot, that's okay. Because we want people to tune in and we can get an absolute all-star team here to do this. I mean, to me, at least that's very, very fixable. And you can do it every week. It's repeatable, which we know with interviews, it's not repeatable because they're either not going to show up or you're just not going to get a very good interview at them.

Yeah, I mean, to take a lot of the stuff you just said and sort of ball it up for, well, to go back, I said there's not, there's no such thing as a get anymore. Yeah, there is, I mean, Kamala Harris is a get, but also it's like anything that actually feels like it merits that term also feels like a sort of like a fix, right? I mean, it's like people, the only interviews that you get that feel at all like with any exclusivity,

feel like the viewer can just see the marionette strings attached to the deal as you're, as you're, you know, performing the interview. And so I think that actually the point you made is right. It's almost, I mean,

listen, we have minimal experience booking a podcast, but you know how these things, how these sort of transactions work. If someone's like, hey, I want to get so-and-so on your show, they want to promote their new whatever,

then you say, well, either no, or it's like they can come on and, you know, we'll just do a full interview and I'll throw in a bit at the end or, like, you know,

they can do their promote, they can work their promotion in. It's like, if you want to come on the show, yeah, but you got to hang with the panel, right? You got to be part of the show. I'm not just going to, like, give you 10 minutes

just to do your song and dance routine. So there probably is a way through, even with some of those interview, you know, big, big, quote unquote, big guest bookings. In terms of having a better panel, yeah, I mean, listen, we say this all the time. There's, you mentioned a lot of good names. There's many more.

it's just a matter of switching up the numbers you have on speed dial. And at the outset, I'm sure it'll be a matter of kind of taking great pains to make new, potential new panelists feel like this is a new opportunity for them. And it's not just you're going to be shoved into a role of, you're not playing George Will. You know, you're not, this is not going to be the same thing that you've seen before. I don't know. Heaven forbid. Yeah. No, I think, look, people who do podcasts who do things like us for a living, they like to be on TV. They like getting that kind of exposure for whatever it is they're doing. I don't think that'd be hard to get those people and go find them.

I think it's more like it's hard to, it's, you're right. I think that the difficulty is just having people who are like eminently available at 8 a.m. on Sunday morning, right? Which is not, which is not, which is not. not a difficult thing to do. You're right. The answer is almost always yes, but you just got to plan. You have to make sure that that person knows that you want them on the show with enough planning to get them there and not they can't just be the same like eight people who live two blocks away and are always up at six. No, sir, we're not going to need you in the green room today. Please stop showing up without us asking. I love the way people quit media jobs because if you get canned unceremoniously from your TV job, you come out and say,

you know, what we were doing, we were just starting to be successful. If only we hadn't been given more time, you would have seen the results. And if you're Chuck Todd, and you seemingly quit on your own terms, you list off all those meet the press,

ancillary streams of content and say, I've succeeded beyond my wildest imagine. We've built this brand even bigger than anybody thought it could be built. Yeah. always entertaining. The other big departure of the week, Shannon Sharp is planning to leave FS1s undisputed.

This comes from Ryan Glassbeagle, who wrote about it in the New York Post. Sharp is leaving the show he hosts with Skip Bayless after the NBA finals. They've been doing this since 2016 and before that on first take on ESPN. What do you think about Shannon leaving Skip on undisputed?

It's a very weird story just like all of the chatter that's sort of been bubbling up over the past, what, year, just turned out to be sort of true or feels like it was, no one's done any, had taken any great pains to, to deny any of it. It's a, it's a weird one, man.

It's a weird one. It's like, it's, I mean, there's a lot of meet the press coroll areas. I mean, you could draw just in terms of people kind of, whether it's a worker or shoot to use the wrestling parlance,

but it's maybe the most shocking. part of this is that is that I guess the sort of implication that these on-screen arguments actually are like weighted with real life disagreement which is you know in the legend

of certain shows like PTI it's sort of those things are sort of built into the back story oh they used to always argue in real life and so we put it on TV but but I don't know this seems different it would shock me to learn

learned that it, you know, that Stephen A. Smith was just angering his co-workers left and right. Or J.J. Reddick, who's been out there throwing, you know, fireballs with, with more regularity in the past several months. But, you know, people have feelings. People on TV have feelings, too. It seems like, you know, there are a couple of, there's a couple of, of clips of, of Shannon and Skip that have been floating around over the past week that you know

rewatching now you're just like yeah I can see why someone be deeply offended by that and it might make it hard to go to work the next day and whatever it seemed like it at the time

frankly yeah I mean the Tamara Hamlin one the one about Tom Brady where Tom Brady one in particular I mean it gets you because it's just it's just so unnecessarily

demeaning yeah I mean it's I don't even know what to say. I mean, if you, once you, once you come to, come to grips with the fact that, you know, these, these kind of jokes at each other's expense are not necessarily like co-signed by the recipient. The whole thing feels a little bit gross. But I guess you watch with that, I mean, part of the

tension of the show, the reason why people watch is that, is that question. How mad are they really? You know, how much do they really believe this? And, you know, the answer has to be either one or the other. You hit precisely on what fascinates me about this because I think even people who watch these shows religiously are probably feeling like this is a bit. Nobody has this many ferocious opinions about sports. And no two people are angry at each other or ferociously opposed, maybe I should say, on every single issue.

It's just not possible. If you and I tried to do that on one episode of the press box, we wouldn't make it out of the cold open. Yeah. Without just dissolving into laughter. But here is an example where apparently some of it actually is real, which weirdly counteracts our critique of the whole sports debate show thing. And you write about Stephen A, I think generally, though the Stephen A, Max Kellerman thing,

which was not that long ago, it clearly there was something there on the air that he did not think Max Kellerman was the right host for that show. And I think if we went back and looked at clips, we could probably find that peaking out of the usual back and forth of the sports. Yeah, but that would be a different. I mean, there's workplace disagreement is fine, not feeling like you're not being served by your co-host, your producer, whatever. I mean, that's something that many people have dealt with. But to have like the act, to feel like the inciting incident of the split is actually occurring on the air as something else. I agree.

I do wonder if these sports debate shows are a somewhat creaky institution, along the lines of Meet the Press. Oh. I think Stephen A's fine. I think Skip is probably fine. I saw some predictions from Dan Levitart and others that he really needs Shannon to make the show work. I think you probably find some another host or a rotating group of hosts like Stephen A has, bringing in Mad Dog Russo and all those guys and JJ Reddick and get whatever he needs out of them.

I think that probably is fine. But I wonder if beyond them. there really is a huge, huge future for this format. Because we talked about many times, they haven't really been able to clone these guys. Skip and Stephen A were stars together on first take. Then they split up and the shows have been successful. Shannon was a little bit on first take with Skip and then went over and followed him.

And maybe Shannon Sharp is an interesting test case. Does he go off and want to do a debate show? I don't know. Maybe he just wants to do a podcast and be like LeBron James is the loudest fan on at court side of Laker games. But I do wonder if there's much more beyond this. If it wasn't the format, but it was like the particular guys coming along at that time

that viewers gravitated to. Because again, if they could have replicated this, these networks, it's not like they're like, you know what, this is too much debate. They tried. They tried 100 different. Try with Pablo and Beaumani. Right?

They tried in a very, very different way. They tried with Michael and Jamel in a very, very different way. And we are back to Stephen A on what network and Skip Bayless on the other network. I mean, I'm just spitballing here, but maybe the part of the attraction, too, is the, if not the creakiness of it, the sort of generational aspect to it. Because we've seen a lot of younger talent come in, both on shows like First Take and various other shows. they've tried to create on both sports channels. And I don't know, maybe there's just something a little bit more like obvious, a little bit more like easily processable about seeing people in their 30s

just show at each other. Again, we hear these podcasts all the time. Like there's, it didn't, and maybe the tongue-in-cheek aspect of it is a little bit more on full display. You know, the self-awareness is a little bit harder to divest oneself of when you go on TV. it's the age of, I mean, and they're not the same age, but the sort of generation of the on-screen generation of these guys and just sort of the feeling that they got pulled out of the newsroom

or they got pulled out of another job to go like yell on television gives it a little bit more legitimacy, even though they're such so transparently performing. It still has a little bit of that, that, you know, my uncle yelling at the TV screen aspect of the old thing, right? It's not the same as it's, it doesn't feel like these guys are professional. I don't think it would have worked. I mean, Mike and the Mad Dog didn't work as a television show.

You know, it doesn't work if you're, if you're radio hosts, even though all these guys do radio now and Mad Dog is doing first take. I mean, it's doing, yeah, he's doing first take. And I don't know. I just, it just, it just seems like, like, like, there's a little bit, a little bit of that tension comes from the unconventionality of the subjects. Totally. And they talk about it all the time. If you listen to those hosts talk, it's always talk about their experience being rooted in print and coming at this from the point of view of somebody who is writing a column every couple of days.

I want to ask you this. If Shannon Sharp and Chuck Todd had to switch jobs, who would be more successful? I mean, I think that the real answer is, I think it's pretty definitely Shannon Sharp. I think that you can do a passable Chuck Todd, not impression, you can do Chuck Todd's passably just by being a, just by, you know, really digging in on your journalism 101, television journalism 101 skills. You know, you could just read cue cards and act serious. I'm not saying you could do the prep work in the same way and do the process in the same way but he could pull that off. And maybe just ask different questions.

Yeah. I mean, I think of both of them were forced into those chairs tomorrow, Shannon would come off better. Presuming he had a good team behind him. But I don't know, man. Maybe this is what Chuck, maybe all the people that gave Chuck Todd

put Chuck Todd in the position that he's in love him because when they hang out with them after hours, he's like, he's like Skip Bayliss. Like, who knows? He's like Shannon Sharp. Yeah.

Maybe you could just throw him in there and he would just start swinging. He's, I mean, disarmed Chuck Todd. You know, he's been on, he's interviewed him how many times, you know,

he's been on this podcast. When he's casual Chuck Todd is, is compelling in a way that on, you know, meet the breast Chuck Todd isn't. Maybe he would be better. I don't know. I don't know.

I love to hear of sports takes. casual, casual Chuck Todd. Yeah. Absolutely available for your debate program. Coming up in 30 seconds, did you read that giant Atlantic piece about the meltdown that's happening at CNN?

Don't worry. We got you. But first, let's do 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. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received.

We had another big transaction from the world of TV, David. Padma Lakshmi is leaving Top Chef after 20 seasons of that show. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write Padma, please pack your knives and go. Or alternately, please don't pack your

knives and go. Thanks to David Sorosie. If you pointed to this as the real big story in television this week, congrats. You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. All right, in the notebook dump, we've got to talk about this CNN story. in the Atlantic

because media Twitter is talking about nothing but it was written by Tim Alberta it is a very good story I recommend you go over to

the Atlantic and check it out it's also fascinating because it feels like a real blood in the water moment media and business reporting this is not the first time that Chris licked

and his future at CNN has been called into question just check out Dylan Byers in puck three times a week. But it does have a lot of force of reporting behind it. It has months worth of interviews.

And as Alberta says, interviews with nearly a hundred people at CNN behind it, it's in the Atlantic. So there's some extra juice there coming from that institution. I thought what I could do, David, is give people three points, three takeaways from the article that explained. why the Chris Licked ear at CNN has not gone swimmingly. Are you ready to hear these? Oh, thank goodness. I need these, yeah.

Number one, he is a bad manager. Jeff Zucker, who is his predecessor at CNN, was a very popular boss with a lot of people around there. Lick comes in, and one of the first things he does is start publicly running down

the work that CNN did during the Zucker era, which was also the Donald Trump era. Now the funny thing about that is CNN did a lot of good work during that era after getting rolled by Trump a little bit at the beginning. CNN also had great ratings and made tons of money during that era. Licked is still running down that era in Tim Alberta's article. He says this about CNN's COVID coverage. In the beginning, it was a trusted source, this crazy thing. No one understands it. Help us make sense of it. What's going on? And I think then it got to a place where, oh, wow,

to keep getting those ratings. We kind of keep getting the sense of urgency. Shockingly, a lot of CNN people read that and thought, well, that sucks. She would talk about how we covered COVID that way. Yeah. Then you get to just some strange choices in terms of management. Jeff Zucker had an office, Alberta reports on the 17th floor right near the bullpen in the studios at CNN.

General among the troops. Licked, Alberta writes, decamped to the 22nd floor, setting up in a secluded space that most staffers didn't know how to find. So it's probably a bad sign when your employees can't find your office. So you're aloof and unavailable

and you're running down the highly rated and morally defensible work your employees did under the previous regime. Uh-huh. That's bad. Also, he is, already announced this morning that he's changing offices. Physical offices?

Yes. Great. By the way, a couple of comic highlights in terms of this, too. I thought there's at least one scene in the story of Chris Lickt working out and saying Zucker couldn't do this shit through clenched teeth. Alberta writes, is he hoisting a pole with a grunt? That's funny. Also, there's a Christmas party where Licked was a little bit less than communicative with

staff and later somebody found him reading a critical story about him in Puck, Alberta writes. CNN has also installed another executive, David Levy, to do the business side of CNN. By the way, always a bad sign when the company says, you know, you're doing such a great job. We're going to install another executive to do half of your job. Yeah. All right. So that's the bad manager part. Number two, bad programming.

I was thinking about this. You and I have done how many CNN segments? Lots. I'm reading Alberta's piece and I'm like, what has Chris Lick done? Like actually in terms of programs, new shows, slightly tweaked shows, what has he done at CNN?

Like, what comes to your mind when I ask that question? Oh, I have no idea. I mean, the Trump Town Hall. That's it. The Trump Town Hall. I mean, that's my answer. Let me give you a few others. How about the Don Lemon Morning Show?

Yeah. Whoops. Trump Town Hall, where he threw his, new primetime anchor, Caitlin Collins, into a scenario where you had tons of Trump voters in the audience cheering everything the former president said, firing Brian Stelter,

reigning in Jim Acosta, replacing John King with Dana Bash. What do we got there? What about that is really a programming decision of any note that hasn't just blown up in his face?

Moving the deck chairs around Right. And that's what's so weird, because if you come in with this critique of old CNN, meaning Zucker era CNN, you've got a plan, right? We know part of this is managing the journalism at CNN, but CNN knows how to cover the war in Ukraine. CNN knows how to cover the Iowa caucuses next year. Your job when you're Chris Lick is creating hit shows so that people, you know, people. People will come in and watch CNN. Where are they? What is even the plan for them this far into his tenure?

You read this article and you're like, the answer to that is zero and none. Yeah. The only one I did name was the Charles Berkeley Gail King thing, which is weekly. You're going to put Charles Barkley on every night in primetime. Okay. You got my attention. Not sure that'd be a great idea, but you got my attention. there's just nothing.

Yep. Alberta rights, viewers would always turn on CNN in times of crisis, Lick told me. What he needed to find out was how many would turn on CNN for fun. Still waiting on the answer to that question. And then the third thing from this article, the third takeaway is that C.A.

Chris Lick's editorial vision of CNN is just incredibly muddled. Yeah. And doesn't make any sense. He makes one decent point, I think, about the Trump coverage in this piece where he says, look, sometimes you would turn on CNN and it would feel like everything was an emergency. Both the actual Trump is stealing the election emergencies and Trump tweeted something. It was always the breaking news thing on the screen, which got covered a lot at the time.

And then at some point, you're kind of deceiving viewers if you do that. Yeah. Because you're telling them that every single Trump story is equally alarming and equally worth their attention. So I totally do understand that. But as Alberta writes, every employee I spoke with was asking some variation of the same question. Did Lick have any idea what he was doing? Because once you get past that idea and his sort of general idea that the network needs to be more accommodating to Republicans, that it needs to have more conservative voices, it needs to have less of the anti-Trump style advocacy he sends from the old CNN,

I don't know what the critique is. I really don't. And even if you have a critique, this is not a Columbia journalism review article you're writing. Alberta's really good at pointing this out. This critique is designed to help CNN make more money and get more ratings. This is not an ideological crusade for David Zazlap of Warner Brothers Discovery and Lent. They think this is the plan to make more money to steal viewers from Fox News and MSNBC.

but it's not. It's not working. Rating's down 30% versus a comparable time in 2020 according to Ben Mullen in the New York Times. So I just don't, you know, again, I encourage you to read the whole article, but to me, like, that's it.

Bad management, bad programming, critique of CNN that is not fully formed and has not resulted in better programming. Well, I mean, sadly, I think that's what we're CNN is just a sort of large-scale version of what we talk about with a lot of legacy media properties. It's like the best way to run it might just be to shepherd it, you know, might just be to sort of fine tune and make the most of what you have.

For all the, you know, noise that people make about who's winning the cable news wars. I mean, we're talking about a vanishingly small, increasingly smaller slice of viewership. and and I mean there are this Atlantic piece just it just beggars believed that it even existed right I mean these problems pre-existed the piece but why you'd want to sign off on doing this profile that's just going to you know just shout them from the mountain tops it just so it just doesn't make any sense but it does make a certain sort of sense it's the sort of it's the sort of it's the action. I mean, it's is a big personality, a bombastic personality that had, you know, enough force of will to talk his way into the job, you know? He got the, he, and then there didn't seem

to be a lot of like just real tactical plans after that, you know, the giant profile, magazine profile seems like a great, great idea. But if you don't think about the details, you might not speculate where it could take you, you know, and, and, um, And, you know, maybe CNN doesn't need a total makeover, you know? Sometimes that's why you, I mean, the best version of something is sort of a variation on the version that exists. Mm-hmm. If you want CNN to draw a lot of viewers, it could just, you know, it could become another thing. They might be able to draw more viewers by putting on, like, you know, lewd reality television all the time.

but that doesn't mean that it's the best version of CNN. I don't know. What if you got good ratings and made money during the Trump administration? And then, spoiler alert, Donald Trump came back and wanted his old job again. Oh, yeah. So you could cover him in a similar, if not totally the same way and try to recapture that magic. But I'm with you, the shepherding thing I think is correct, because there's a version of this, where he comes in, and let's face it, his corporate bosses come in because that is part of the push here.

And they say, you know what, Jim Acosta, that was just getting to be a little much. And maybe people, even people who were, you know, very, very anti-Trump and looking, you know, for that quality to a network, found that to be a little much every day. So let's talk to Jim Acosta and say what it is. Maybe that's what this is. Maybe we can tweak it up. Chris Cuomo's gone, so we don't have that anyway. We still have to figure out prime time. But it's a slightly different version of what we were already doing.

Without this prelude of running down CNN to all the people who liked it and thought they'd found a home there during the Trump years. Because that to me is just like that just is nuts. And then you could still make those changes. It wouldn't be a complete revamping. And see what you got. And as we found out, people are going to watch CNN when there's a story like Ukraine. Yep. People, that's what people want.

That's, that, that is, that is where you reflectively go. And that's a totally respectable way to run a business, right? I mean, you, you, if, obviously you can't, checks aren't going to be as big every month, but that's, that's, that's business. You know, I mean, if you're the place that people go when things that matter happen, that's a good place to start, you know? I mean, I used to work with a guy that had a chain of gems, you know, he made literally between 90 and 98% of his annual income the first two weeks of the year.

It's all New Year's resolutions. Does that mean he had to fire everybody in September? No, no, he just like held on to some of that money he made in January. By the way, one thing I was kind of struck by when I was reading this profile, Chris Lick, part of his climb through the media was Good Morning Joe. He was also brought in to save The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Remember how that got off to such a rocky start when Colbert wasn't playing the funny character from Comedy Central anymore? And this is in April 2016.

You remember what saved Stephen Colbert in the late show? Tell me. This guy running for president named Donald Trump. Because all of a sudden, Stephen Colbert started doing mildly funny Donald Trump bits for the entire show. Yeah. And it got hooked into that whole movement where everybody's ratings went up. It's so funny that then you would go to CNN and be like, you know what? We need more respect for Donald Trump.

Byron Donald's on the panel after Donald Trump speaks. By the way, that came up in the article, too. I was proud for having pointed that out of the time. That was just completely insane to put a congressman who supports the guy who just talked on your panel with your experts. On Twitter, David, Katie Kirk asked a good question. Why are media reporters obsessed with the word defenestration? both Tim Alberta in his big piece about CNN and Brian Stelter in his column about CNN for New York Magazine use that word, which is which as fans of Raymond Chandler knows just a fancy word for throwing somebody out a window. Yeah.

Always funny that word existed at all, by the way. We needed a $3 word for throwing someone out a window as if that was happening so much that the normal means of communicating that thought. applying. Thanks to Daryl Dawson and James Sutherland for sending that to us. Last one for you before we get to the headline. She's a story about Al Pacino that came across the wires. He's had a kid or something. It might be the greatest sports radio story since Pete Rose and the Hall of Fame. Sports radio?

Sports radio. Go on. Every single sports radio show in America did an Alps. Pacino. Bit. This is by my official calculations. Every single one.

Just think about that. Cultural tastes, broadly speaking of sports radio. Oh, yeah. Movies, the godfather, movies that aren't super current movies, check. The people who host

sports radio shows in this day and age, man, perhaps slightly older men, check. Slightly older man, having kids. Yeah. Just do just do a quick Twitter Twitter search that.

Everybody did an Al Pacino's now we have to. All right, it's time for a segment that will outlive even the greatest films of Al Pacino. It's time for David Schumacher guesses the strain pun headline. Yeah.

Last Monday's pun about a star anchor adding to the chorus of CNN criticism was when it rains it Amon Pours. Today's headline comes from Lister J.B.G. It's from crooked media.

Gotta warn you, very strained. The story is about those debt ceiling negotiations where House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the Republicans threatened to send the U.S. into default and got some concessions from Joe Biden. Now, the phrase you're punning off of is the stuff dreams are made of. The stuff dreams are made of.

What was crooked media's strained pun headlines? Wait, this is after the agreement was reached or during the negotiations? Yes, and mostly about those Republican threats Right. That we're going to tank the economy. Is it the bluff? Okay.

Screams or screams? No. The bluff, the bluff, the bluff, the bluffs are made of? The bluffs. No. Remember, this is their plot. This is their schemes are made of. The bluff that schemes are made of.

The bluff that schemes are made of. That's great. Some reason when I was preparing this, I kept saying that in a dusty Rhodes voice. I think he used to say the stuff dreams are made of. He has David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantus.

Coming up later this week, an old friend stops by the podcast to talk NBA finals and the assorted takery involved in that great time in American culture. Ryan Rosillo coming up. And then on Monday, Shoemaker and I return with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.