The Press Box - The Chauvin Verdict, European Super League, and Author Brendan Koerner on a Kidnapping Gone Wrong

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker open up the mailbag and answer your Listener Mail. They weigh in on the Derek Chauvin verdict (3:20), discuss everyone’s reaction to the news of the Super League (14:40), and share which of their non-journalism jobs were the most memorable (29:12). Then, author Brendan Koerner stops by to discuss his recent piece in The Atlantic, “A Kidnapping Gone Very Wrong” (36:30). Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Brendan Koerner Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Emmy Award-winning producer, actor and comedian Larry Wilmore is back on the air, hosting a podcast where he weighs in on the issues of the week and interviews guests in the world of politics, entertainment, culture, sports, and beyond. Check out Larry Wilmore, Black on the Air on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. David, former Major League Baseball player Gary Sheffield admitted that he doesn't watch baseball during the season. I never watched the game during the season. He said, it's not something that I can watch based on what I'm seeing. What I want to know is if a former Major League Baseball player can't watch regular season baseball, who can?

I really thought you were going to put me on the spot and ask how much of how many hours of wrestling I actually watch every week. Oh. Versus baseball? I think I know the answer to that one. Yeah, no, I think that it's a great admission. for him. But it's sort of shocking, right? It's just that, you know, this is your job. This was your job. Now it's your job in a different way as a commentator. At least I think that's the time he was talking about. And he just waited for the playoffs or something to actually catch up on what's going on in the league. I mean,

it's pretty damning. What do you think? I feel it's funny that I don't watch baseball has become kind of a popular thing to admit. You know, it's almost like, I didn't read a classic book that I should have read. It's almost to the point. I don't think Gary Sheffield intended it this way, but it's almost to the point of something you are quote unquote confessing that actually you think makes people like you. I just don't watch baseball anymore.

Sorry. Sorry. Not watching it anymore. I can still be mad at baseball. I've always thought that like people, there's a group of people who are more comfortable being mad at baseball than actually consuming baseball. Sure.

And well, it's also, I mean, that's true. It's also a great way to say that you're too busy, that you have more important things going on, right? Or more interesting things going on. It's like, it's, in a world where everybody's sort of, you know, retweeting their own resumes and their own personal lives and everything else, I don't have time for baseball is a, is a, it's sort of a, it's sort of a humble brag, right? It's just like, oh, one of my favorite things I had to cut out of my life.

life, but the silent implication is because I'm having too much fun doing these other things. Coming up on today's show, we answer your listener mail, including questions about the Derek Shalvin verdict up there in Minneapolis. Brendan Kerner of the Atlantic joins us to talk about a really interesting piece he wrote about a kidnapping in Mexico, plus you guys had lava puns. And we lavaed them like we've never lavaed anything before. All that and more on the press box, a part of the ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here.

David, it's Thursday, which means I throw to you to tell us that it's time for Listener mail. That was good. Thank you very much for doing that. We got a number of requests this week to talk about the Derek Chauvin verdict. The jury up there in Minneapolis found Chauvin guilty on all counts, including second degree and third degree murder. Chauvin, of course, is a former Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd.

Reporter Steve Rodas asks us, through what medium did you find out the result? How did you consume the result of the case? It was on my phone, but I think more so than just the result itself. And me, I mean, the medium is important. It was that I was getting push alerts on my phone when the, I'm sure as we all were, when the, when the verdict came in and that it, but an hour before it would be announced. Um, my dad's in town visiting. So he and, uh, my wife and I and one of our kids are out having lunch.

The moment we sat down, we got the all got simultaneous text alerts. Actually multiple simultaneous alerts that the verdict was on the way. And so we all just sat there through a very kind of like, just anxious lunch waiting for the final verdict to come through. So yeah, I mean, at that point, there was no, there was no rushing home. I certainly didn't even want to like, you know, part of you is like, you try not to overengage before you have to. But yeah, I mean, it certainly came as a, I mean, I'm sure a lot of people have said it, but it was one of those things were like the result was a shock, sure, but it was like more of a shock than I think I had let myself even understand, you know, like the emotional, I mean, like the emotional reaction that I had was was, was larger than I was expected. Can we talk about that hour between the heads up we all got and the actual reading of the verdict? Sure.

Because I looked at Twitter, and this always happens when people who don't watch cable news are forced to watch cable news. And they get really, really mad and start saying, you know, wouldn't the world be a better place if cable news didn't exist? Yeah. It's a really interesting problem. And I don't, and if I can have sympathy for the cable news networks, than Fox for just a second. There is this problem, a programming problem, where a big event is going to happen. You absolutely need to flag for viewers that something is going to start in an hour. This is not like countdown clock to the, you know, Iowa primary in 2024. This is really something that is imminent. How do you fill that time? What do you do? And the times, you know, I jumped in, I saw Van Jones talking on CNN, which seems totally appropriate on CBS, which, which

I watch as a legal analyst who had watched the case, watched every second of the case, and were talking about the evidence that the prosecutors had presented and what they thought the outcome was going to be. That seemed totally appropriate. I saw lots of reports about the crowd that was gathering there in downtown Minneapolis to sort of react to the verdict. What should cable news do in that instance? Well, I mean, I do think that there's a sort of public service aspect, which is just to be

present and I know that sounds really lame and impossible for the I mean to to fully convey and for them to execute. But you know, I mean, there was the you know, obviously there were the announcement and then the verdict would lag trailed behind it and and that time. I mean, it's it's this is not an answer to your question. It seems like I'm avoiding the question. But the, but the most important thing to fill time is to fill time, right? I mean, you you have to, you're just getting an anxious.

viewer viewer viewership to from from point A to point B. I do think that do something you can't just stare into a camera and say this is coming up this is coming up I mean you're reluctant to say the sort of the parlor games aspect of the whole thing where you're just like well what is it what is a quick verdict mean right because that doesn't that's no one's idea of like good faith journalism but that's what's filled the past you know two months of this regardless is what they fill time with all the time anyway, and that's certainly the conversations that I think most normal human beings were having off the air, right? What does this quick reaction mean? And yeah, I think that the, I mean, the gathering crowds were an interesting, an interesting thing to report on.

You know, it's easy to kind of misuse that data point if you're, if you're interested in it, if you're Fox News or whoever else. But I don't know. I mean, it's it is a very, it's a good question. What do you do? Yeah, the tea leaf reading that you're talking about where why did it take so many hours to come to this verdict? Why didn't they ask to see any of the evidence again, which I heard on all the networks? Seems a very limited value and seems like it's going to expire and become completely meaningless the moment you get the verdict. So yeah, I could deal with a lot less of that probably, but certainly analyzing for people that hadn't watched the case, like, how was the evidence presented? Was the evidence compelling? You know, what tactics did the prosecutors use,

excuse me, to prosecute the case? I don't know. There's seemingly a lot you can do in there that doesn't piss everybody off. Our pal Tom Fountain says, will the Chauvin conviction and other recent police killings change how journalists take police statements at face value? And I suspect he had seen, and I'm sure you saw it, the Minneapolis police initial statement about the death of George Floyd that was being posted by everybody on Twitter. Even Snopes had to come in this week and say, yes, this was the actual statement that the cops in Minneapolis posted. The headline was, man dies after medical incident during police interaction. This is how they described the events. Two officers arrived and located the suspect, a male believed to be in his 40s,

in his car. He was ordered to step from his car. After he got out, he physically resisted officers. Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress. Officers called for an ambulance. He was transported to Hennepin County Medical Center by ambulance where he died a short time later. That was how they put it, seemingly leaving out some very important steps in that. So if you had just taken the police statement at face value, you would have had a ridiculously incomplete and wrong impression of what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis. I mean, I know that this is maybe so obvious that it doesn't even need to be said, but it was sort of, it was compelling and saddening to me through a lot of this trial,

how much of just sort of kind of both-sidesness to the whole thing there was, right? I mean, I guess one of the one redeeming thing was that immediately after the verdict, there was a lot of voices on Fox News who said that we the right, that they reached the right decision. But then there were also a lot of more notable voices, Tucker Carlson, amongst them who sort of zagged in the direction of, you know, the jury was swayed by the potential of riots, et cetera, et cetera. I think, oh, here we go is Josh Barrow had a good kind of few tweets about this. And I'll read directly. He says, this is such horseshit. This is directly in response to Tucker Carlson's. saying that the jury was swayed by that. He said, this is such horseshit. Conservatives who were vaguely mad about black activism but can't actually argue for Derek Chauvin's innocence have fallen back to this theoretical argument that the jury was under undue pressure.

And he goes on, but it's true. You could see a lot of people just sort of like rebounding sort of into that position. And I think that speaks more just to the fact that you have to have an opposing take, right? And it's saddening that that you have to feel like give a position in this, but that's the way that the story, that the entire narrative about black activism, about police violence, about specifically the injury and death to African-American

people by police, that it's become a political football because, well, I mean, there's a lot of reasons, but because the Republicans and the right more broadly are, you know, are catering to a very specific slice of their electorate. And they're afraid to look, well, moral and right, I guess, is the thing. I think the bigger point is that it's, you know, the police statements that are full of shit have to be addressed as such and not, and not, they just can't be allowed. I mean, this discussion seems like it's almost beside the point, right? Like, why let them have, why let them give them that oxygen?

That should have been almost kind of a deciding moment that when it was proven that that statement was wrong. It should have been a straightaway from there. But it's not, you know? I mean, that's part of the just tragedy that they would have so little regard for human life that they would be protecting their officers, you know, rather than actually tell the truth. Yeah. And I think there's a couple things here. I think some reporters are just way too trusting of the cops. I mean, I think we can stipulate that for sure.

I think there's also just an issue when you, let's say there is a murder like George Floyd's murder at the hands of the police. And you're a reporter, right? You might not have access, immediate access to the witnesses who were there. You might not have access, immediate access to George Floyd's family. The one thing you do have access to, at least partial access to, is the cops. So the cops are coming in and saying, well, we're the one person you can. can get a hold of. So our narrative, however wrongheaded in this case, is going to be the one

that gets a lot of initial airplay. Yeah. And the question is, what can you do so that you are not swallowing that line completely whole or at least thinking about it's skeptically? The laundry points us to this tweet by Barry Picheski. Instead of writing police say, use police claim. Some measure of doubt is implied and it's well earned. Pacheski continues. Another option, though not always possible, is just to ignore what they claim altogether. You don't have to be their stenographer. So I think it's just, you know, part of it's just universal, journalistic, skeptical thinking about your sources. Yeah, I think that's right. And also in the instance where videotape exists, and this is not like a universal problem, but there is a tendency to need

sources, or for newsrooms to be so interested in quotes and in sources that you almost publish them in defiance of your own lying eyes at times, right? It's not just

police claim. If you have video evidence to the contrary, or even that seems to be to the contrary, I think you could use a more

strong word than claim. Even in the absence of other quotes from opposing, we don't need opposing sources. We don't need opposing viewpoints

to a lie. Listener Danforth wants us to talk about the Super League fiasco. If you did not follow this, and I'm,

guessing you did if you're here on this sports website. More than a dozen of the major European soccer clubs gave the finger to their domestic leagues, David, and were said to reap the financial rewards of this new Super League. Now, everybody hated this idea. This idea made baseball starting the runner on second base and extra innings look popular by comparison. I was struck, and you and I are not soccer people, unless you've become one since our last podcast, just how universal the basic idea was here for sports fans. And that universal idea is

bad rich man makes sports less fun. We do that all the time, right? We do that with owners. We do that with commissioners. We kind of used to do that with players, that we don't do that so much anymore. But bad rich man makes sports less fun is a universal language. You don't need to know anything about European soccer, European football to immediately get that and immediately to get mad on Twitter. Yeah, I mean, we have, we have, well, we have like a journalist class. It's pretty expansive when it comes to professional sports in the U.S., but, you know, and there's certainly a lot of that, right? When especially, you know, collective bargaining times, various other times when it's easy to point it or on a team by team basis, you know, no offense,

but it's easy to point at Jerry Jones and be like, rich man makes sport bad. No, if that's Jerry Jones. But it's, but it's, but it, I felt like the, the, the groundswell was sort of what took me by surprise more than anything. I mean, I feel like, while yes, it is, it is easy to say, rich man make, you know, makes the sport bad. I feel like if this had been an American, I mean, I feel like if they had announced that the NBA

was merging with the NFL, it would have been, there would have been less angry Americans than if, then this soccer decision, right? I mean, I just think that there's a sort of complacency despite people's love for these games that, that, that, I mean, that, that, that, that, the, we saw the opposite of that when it came to the Super League. Um, it always shocks me in the modern day, uh,

when, when, when a decision, you know, people are, the fine art of leaking decisions to gauge fan reaction or popular reaction is, is, is fine. I mean, it's set that aside, but it always shocks me when somebody makes a gigantic announcement like this and then is willing to go back on it basically like five hours later right when the reaction is so bad like how can you have not have at least had confidence in your test marketing or whatever you were doing to to prep for this decision how can you not have the courage of your convictions right i mean it's like it's like when i was a kid and my parents told me

my sister they were moving from from kentucky to texas she they remember my my mom said we cried so hard that they almost changed their mind but but they didn't change their mind you know, I mean, it's like you've made a decision. How are you going to go? Like, how could you've been this ill-equipped, ill-prepared for this reaction? If you hadn't moved to Texas, I would have cried my eyes out. I really would. We would be here right now.

Mike Morris writes, conference realignment, NFL expansion to Europe. The Super League is just another form of this content. Great to talk about for a day. Never going to happen. Now, the Super League, we could probably put in a sense. slightly different category because this was actually announced. This is not like the eternal sports radio segment of should the NFL put a team in London or should, you know, should the big colleges.

But it was amazing to see those content streams kind of merge during the Super League moment on Twitter. Because I saw college football writers being like, okay, this is what it would look like if Texas and USC and Florida and Alabama and Ohio State form their own super league of college football. that is not happening right now but that was just kind of like here is some hypothetical content to go with the actual content we're getting from Europe right now

and I guess this one was a little more because it was actually announced like it was not floated as you say it was here is a press release but it was funny just to watch those things because they are such appealing topics for podcast sports radio and even pieces yeah I mean I don't even know what the

I mean, the football powerhouse one, I guess, is a good parallel. I think in sports, I mean, like basketball would have to be, you know, like the top 20 players in the league, just break off and form their own league or something, right? Does I mean, form some sort of, like, I don't, but even that, I mean, it's just hard to, it's just hard to put it in the same, in any kind of recognizable terms. I guess college football would be the closest one just in terms of the sort of generational fandom that the European soccer encompasses. It's really an incredible story. And it'll be incredible to watch the fallout now, even going forward, right? I mean, to see that like, to see what these old men who are ruining sports have to face even in the absence of a Super League now. There's been at least one John Henry apologetic Twitter video.

So we're getting there. Paul Bransky asks us about the Mark Johnson saga. Did you follow the Mark Johnson Twitter saga? No, I don't think so. Okay, I'll give you the quick background here. KTVB is the local NBC affiliate in Boise, Idaho. They have an anchor named Mark Johnson. In fact, Mark Johnson is the main anchor at KTVB.

KTVB's Twitter account just tweeted out the words Mark Johnson. That's it. And linked to his station bio. So he said, Mark Johnson was the tweet. And then thanks to the link, there was just a like, anchor man glamour shot photo of Mark Johnson. Twitter just completely lost its mind. I don't know how anybody found this.

I would love to know what the vector from, like from the KTVB account to the Iron Sheik who weighed in on this or the Splenda corporate account. And even Mark Johnson himself seemed kind of confused. But I love the idea of just like tweeting out the name of somebody who works for your outlet and then their bio. Yeah. that's fantastic.

We should do that at the ringer. We should have an employee of the day. Yeah. Danny Kelly. And then there, Katie Baker. Just kind of a general biography. Just a link to all of her pieces. We should start doing that on the press box account.

That's fantastic. Should we just pause a recording for a few minutes and do all of our colleagues? You can get some real goodwill that way. Former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker also weighed in on this and thought about Scott Walker in a while with kind of a touching story, actually. Says when Mark Johnson was in Milwaukee in the early 1990s, he told me he used to lift a finger on the set each night as a signal to his daughter. That's nice. Mark Johnson seems like a swell guy.

We'll wait for the inevitable second round of tweets on that, but he seems like a night's guy. This is the opposite of the milkshake duck. It's like, where the digger we deep, the more of a sweetheart this guy seems like. On Monday, David, we talked about journalists and values. Got into a discussion about whether journalists should be, liked by their readers. Our friend Max asks us this. Something overlooked is if you're going to ask us to pay subscription fees regularly,

shouldn't we at least think you want us to like you? It's a really complex issue because as readers, we should want to support the journalist's mission for its own sake, but we're human. That's actually a really tough question. Don't you feel like we see this a little bit in the politicization? of like politics in sports where people feel like they're that you know when an athlete takes a political stance if they disagree with it then they're like more offended than they would be in I mean it's it's not just stick to sports is what they're actually feeling inside when they

when you realize that your athlete your sports idol has diametrically opposed political views to you and now you can't like them anymore in the same sort of abstract or or like kind of condition-free way. You shouldn't need to like somebody to support somebody, right? But I guess, yes, we do sort of need that sheen of plausible likability, right? You want to be able to sort of daydream about shooting hoops with LeBron in the absence, I mean, in the absence of any sort of potential political disagreement if he's your favorite player.

You know, journalism is not exactly the same, but like, in some sense, they're offering an even more, which should be even more personality, divorced, um, service, right? I mean, like, you know, New York Times reporters aren't making, aren't doing like Coke commercials on television. They're not trying to sell you anything except the, except the product. So I know, I understand the question. And I do think that there is an impulse, yes, I mean, if we're going to be shelling out money, especially as we move towards sort of the monetization, substackization, whatever, of journalism.

But I don't know, man. I don't know. I guess I don't wonder if, like, Heather Cox Richardson likes me when I opened that newsletter. You know, I'm not, it is an interesting question, though. Well, let me tell you about something I thought about this, which is that the difference between different kinds of journalists. and their ability to court the affection of their readers. It's really easy for you and I to court the affection of press box listeners. We could build that into every single segment of the podcast if we wanted to.

It's easy for Sean to do that on the Big Pick and Chris and Andy to do that. It's easy for people like us to do it. But now think of the top tier newspaper political reporters, Josh Dossy, Maggie Haberman, Peter Baker, we could list them, Ashley Park, we list them all. They're not really in that same position. their Twitter account is not going to sound like a reader podcast. So I think this is actually a particular challenge for those like handful of newspaper reporters or people like them. Because they're not, you'd be shocked at how much time other reporters are spending courting the affection of the masses, right?

Just look at the Twitter account of any sports writer you know, making jokes, doing stuff with other people with all their readers on Twitter. they kind of can't do that. I guess they could do that, but it would be kind of weird, right? They're kind of removed and they're kind of supposed to be doing something else. And essentially, they're saying, the thing I have that's going to make you like me or not like me

is the work I put out every day. And that just feels, I don't know, that just feels like a very, they're playing a very different game than everybody else is. So on the one hand, you could be like, well, I like all the people at the ringer and they seem to like me back. Why is that person over at the New York Times

is not liking me back. Why is that person of the Washington Post? And that might be weird for a reader to think that. But it really just has to do with the difference in the publications. Yeah. No, that's really smart. I mean, I think that there's some, I think I might quibble a little bit about

sports writers spending all that time trying to get an audience to like them. I think there's a lot of just trying to get your peers to like you and all that sort of back in. Are you following the same people on Twitter? No, no, no, there is. I mean, you're right. There, I mean, there's But a lot of the jokiness and just sort of like personality stuff is being driven not specifically by like, you know, trying to enchant potential readers, although that isn't a huge element of it. I, I think I agree with all that.

I mean, that is a big part of some people's jobs. And it's an effective part of some people's jobs, you know? But I think that we kind of talked about this or alluded to it last week that the more that you sort of become a human being, you do put yourself up for being. liked or disliked, right? I mean, I think, and maybe it's impossible to kind of be down the middle. Maybe it's impossible to be to be neutral in modern media. You know, the fact that we're getting asked this question, I guess, might be evidence at that point. Should we spend the next few minutes talking about how much we love press box listeners?

We love you guys. We love you guys. Let us court your affection a little bit more. We did something on overused sports writer Twitter templates on the last show, David. I mentioned that every sports writer tweet now, speaking of courting the affection of your peers, I'm doing the opposite, see? Every sports writer tweet now, you're just mixing and matching genres to try to get as many readers as you can. Adam Zalanka, who's a sports writer himself, sent along an overused sports headline template. And you're never going to believe this because it also involves listing three things every time you publish a story about sports.

I'll give you a few examples here. These are actual examples from headlines. Hannah Montana, country music, and a bunny suit. Jimmy Butler's college days. Well, wait. I assume there was a colon there after a bunny suit. You have to say the colon out loud. So there's three things and then there's a colon and then it's what's the piece is about.

Yes, thank you. Here's another one. Rat poison, missed buses and sideline fireworks. The ultimate Nick Sabin Lane Kiffin timeline. Oops, I forgot the colon again. Gut checks, hearties burgers, and Dean's word, colon, the story of Roy Williams's start at Kansas. Now, are you seeing a particular style here of headline? Yeah, I believe so.

Yeah, and they're all like this. And there's even some that aren't sports. Giant anchors, wrecked boats, and a Liberty Clock, colon, inside the storage site for Navy Museum. Okay. That's from the Washington Post. How do we settle on three examples and a colon as being the universal headline template? I don't know. I don't know.

It's a rule of three, though. It has a nice ring to it. I understand why people do it. It just does seem very, very trite now. Yeah, I think we can move on to other headline templates. Finally, this question from Matthew Moore, what is your most memorable non-journalism job you've ever had? I'll let you go first, David. I feel like you could answer this job for me better than I could answer for myself.

The most memorable. Waco? Yeah, I was going to say managing the bar in Waco was probably pretty memorable. I have a bad memory is the thing. I mean, but that's got to be it. David as a bar manager was kind of a great moment. It's not that different from David as a podcast host. Go on.

You're welcome here, according to the affection of people around you, right, making everybody feel welcome. Yeah, a steady procession of people who say like, Manny's taller than I thought he was or balder than I thought he was, that sort of thing. You've got the perfect personality type for a lot of things, you know, like New York, New York Bureau back when we had the New York Bureau, our director, podcast, us, but bar manager was, you know, in that same Venn diagram. Okay. Just a trusted voice, right?

You know, an adult in the room, even though you were like 22 or 23 at the time. Yeah, 22. Yeah, it was great. It was a great, like, learning experience. It was a great confidence-building experience. The guy, my predecessor who taught me how to do the job was about five feet tall. And when he was like kind of what we were like walking the floor and he was telling me how to do it, he like took a gigantic like over six-foot human being by the neck and threw him out the door

and down the stairs. Whoa. Because he had been worn to not, you know, mosh in the dance on the dance floor and continued to do it. And I was just like, okay. It's like people are, people are very, not only is that a thing that a human can do, but people are usually very willing to do what you say when you're, you know, their means of getting alcohol. Do you want to tell the listeners the very Texan name of this bar in Waco?

No longer there. It was called Six Shooter Junction. That is not a ride at Knott'sbury Farm, folks. That is an actual bar in Texas. Six Shooters Junction. Long may it live in my memory. Do you remember what my most memorable job was in high school? At the museum?

Yes. Please. The Museum of Science and History. Oh, God. I was just telling Dominique about this the other day. So they had a theater that was kind of like an IMAX theater, but it was actually an Omni-Max theater. They still had those? I don't know.

I really don't. I haven't been there in a while. It was supposed to be like the next step up from IMAX, right? Yeah, except this one had been around since like the early 80s. Okay. So it had been around forever. And it had really, it had one. screen, it had really steep seats. I mean, really steep seats. And this very thrilling thing for,

again, for 80s and 90s kids, where at before the nature documentary played, there was a helicopter ride over Fort Worth. That's what they showed you. And everybody just kind of lost their minds like they were on a roller coaster. It was often screaming in the auditorium because you were flying over Fort Worth or seeming to fly over Fort Worth. I remember one year I worked there, they had a, and I had to look this up to make sure I was not completely hallucinating. There was a documentary there, David, called The Living Sea, an undersea nature documentary. Narrated by Merrill Streep. Wow.

Soundtrack by Sting. Wow. At pretty high tone for the Museum of Science and History. In 95-96, I was working there, and because this theater was so steep and because people often puked during the Fort Worth flyover, you actually had to sit in the theater and watch the entire movie. This was not like a ticket-taking thing, though we did that too. You had to sit in the theater with the customers and watch the entire movie. So I watched The Living Sea at least 100 times.

I bet I watched it two or 300 times. I can say every line of dialogue with it. I don't remember them now, alas. That was my most memorable non-journalism job. That sounds fantastic. I thought you were going to tell the story about the seven wonders of the modern world. Do you remember that story? I had to do the phones.

I'll do it real quick. I did the phones one day. Someone calls the museum. This is before the internet and says, do you know what the seven wonders of the world are? I'm having an argument. And I listed off what I, the ones I remembered and by about world wonder number four got to the Hope Diamond,

which is certainly not one of the wonders of the world. And then by number five was. the human soul and then I think I just hung up laughing. Oh man. This internet sucks. You can't do that anymore. Let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag, David, 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, always gratefully received. David, do you want to hear the best Twitter jokes about Super League? Please. Number one, any joke involving season two of Ted Lasso? The Super League knockout stages have begun. That was pretty good. And finally, in my favorite, why I'm leaving Super League. Thanks to Charles Pryor, the third legal minefield, and Patrick A. Bernard for that.

And finally, David, there was the matter of a very unfortunate Las Vegas Raiders tweet over the week. The verdict in the Chauvin Trial came down. Yeah. The Raiders attempting to be empathetic tweeted, I can breathe. I was looking, that was, honestly, I looked at Twitter that day and to see who was, you know, making fun of the Raiders. And the first two names I saw were Sarah Spain of ESPN and KFC of Barstool. And I thought, okay, we've covered the waterfront. Everybody is, everybody is upset.

I was looking for the Twitter jokes about that tweet and about the reaction to that tweet. This is a very deep cut from, from Sean O'Shea. I got to say, it relies on this classic NFL film's sound clip about the 70s Raiders. The autumn wind is a pirate. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write. The autumn wind is a ratio. If you agree, the autumn wind is ratio and infrastructure. Congrats, you made the overwork Twitter joke of the week.

All right, David, the notebook dump. Remember those parties we used to have on the Lower East Side when we were young? Oh yeah, I remember them well. I'm going to have you in your mind look around at all the people gathered there on our roof and fasten on one Brendan Kerner. Oh, yeah. Great head of hair on that guy. Great head of hair on that guy. Brendan I, Kerner, the byline.

Great dude. Great writer. Always writes about interesting things. I got excited when I saw he has a new piece in the Atlantic, which is about a kidnapping that took place in the 70s in Mexico. I wanted to talk to him about how he wrote the piece, how he came up with the idea, and what it's like to reach out to the loved ones of the victim after so many decades.

Here's Brendan Kern. All right, Brendan, I feel like I ask this every time I read one of your stories. Where did you find the idea for this? So this actually dates back to 2012. I was working on my last book called The Skies Belonging to Us, and that's about this kind of golden age of plain hijackings in America in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And at the very end of doing the research on that, I kind of became interested in what other types of political violence took place involving Americans in the 70s after we had the close of this era of plane hijackings in 1973.

And I was looking into it and reading some old, you know, Google news archives scanned in newspapers. And I came across this story about this kidnapping of this American Vice Consul in Hermesio, Mexico, a man named John Patterson. And what struck me the most when I first came across it was the fact that his wife actually raised money and went across the border in Mexico to try to free her husband. And I just thought there was something really dramatic and very moving about someone risking everything and dealing with this incomprehensible situation and putting their life. on the line to save the person they love. So from there, I kind of started chipping away at it over the years that followed. And every time I looked more closely into it and gathered another artifact or another piece of information, it became richer and more complex and more tragic and more gripping.

And I just knew I had to write about it. And as a writer, this is your happy place, right? Finding a clipping. You're not a guy who's going to go on Twitter and find the idea for your next piece. You want to find it on newspapers.com or on microfilm somewhere like that? Yeah, absolutely. So my first book is called Now the Hell Will Start. I came out in 2008, and that was about a black American soldier in World War II who was assigned to build a road in Burma and kind of ended up going native with one of the hill tribes up there in the Indo-Bermis wilderness. And I got that through a footnote in a bibliography I got from an archives out in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

So I feel like almost always the best ideas flow from some little snippet you just stumble across. in a place that's been overlooked, essentially. All right, let's set up the Atlantic piece for people who haven't read it. What were John and Andre Patterson doing in Mexico in 1974? Yeah, so this was a relatively young couple. They were both, I think, 31 years old at the time. John Patterson, from a somewhat well-off family in Philadelphia, had kind of been a little directionless in life,

had gone to business school, had worked for President Nixon's Price Control Commission in Washington, D.C. for a while. But what he really wanted to do ever since he was a teenager, in fact, was be a diplomat. That he was really interested in exploring the world. He thought this might be a romantic lifestyle, a way he could serve his country, and a way he could raise his family to be multilingual and to explore. So it was really something that he and Andra, Patterson, his wife, both really wanted together. And so, you know, at the age of 30, John went into the Foreign Service training program and studied Spanish.

And he was assigned as a very, you know, entry-level position to be a vice-consul at this consulate in Hermesio, Mexico. And that's the capital of Sonora State in northern Mexico. And he was really put in charge of agricultural affairs, promoting trade and agriculture. And so he arrived in January of 1974. And when the story opens in the Atlantic, it's March 74. And he goes to work one day. and he's supposed to go out and meet a bunch of ranchers from the Hermesio area and talk to them about how they can improve their yield of beef on their cattle.

He's going to bring them a bunch of a list of educational film strips they can order through the consulate. And he goes out to this meeting and he doesn't come back. And that's really the beginning of the story. And what struck authorities is odd about his disappearance? Sure. So this is another thing that gripped me all the way back in 2000. when I first came across this story is that he goes to this meeting. He doesn't show up for the meeting, doesn't come back to the consulate. And the consulate closes for lunch. And when they roping back up again at 2 or 2.30, there was a note slipped under the door in John Patterson's handwriting. And it's clearly been dictated to him. And he says that I have apparently been taken hostage by the People's Liberation Army of Mexico. And they want half a million dollars in ransom. And here's instructions on how my wife can deliver this ransom. And it was interesting, first of all,

that he'd obviously written this note in his own hand. Someone had forced him apparently to write it. And second, that no one had ever heard of this People's Liberation Army of Mexico. And there were many, many, particularly left-wing paramilitary and guerrilla groups in Mexico at that time. But this is not one that was on anyone's radar whatsoever. And if I'm not wrong, another thing that really sort of confuses the authorities at the outset here is that this group, the supposed group demands in this letter that they don't want any publicity. Right. And these kind of groups want publicity as a general rule.

It's very the polar opposite of what most terrorist organizations want. You know, terrorists gain what they want by getting maximum publicity. That's how they kind of project their power. They may be very small, but if they can get their name out there and make people afraid by disseminating their acts of violence through the media, then that's a big win for them. And in this letter, this note written in John Patterson's hand, it says, you must not tell anybody this is going on. If you let any word of this leak or you do anything to make people the public aware of what's happening, we're going to kill one American diplomat or their family every week. So they were really, really clear about not wanting any media or press involved in this. Richard Nixon makes a cameo here, as does Henry Kissinger.

How did American policy about these kidnappings affect the Patterson case? So this is what I found really interesting in my research about this. You know, terrorism was a kind of new phenomenon in its modern definition. And there had been, in the years prior to this, several kidnappings and acts of political violence involving American diplomats. abroad. And there was one of particular in 1973 just a year before, in which two very high-ranking diplomats in Sudan were taken hostage by a Palestinian organization in Sudan and then executed. And in the course of that drama, Richard Nixon, President Nixon, gave a press conference at the White House while these diplomats were being held hostage. And actually a negotiator

from the State Department was in the air flying to Khartoum to negotiate for these men's lives. And Nixon said in this press conference, he said, you know, we're never going to give in to any demands. Like, we're not going to negotiate with people who do this. And it was kind of an off-the-cuff remark. And after that, really, U.S. policy on these situations, this no-negotiation with terrorist policy was really shaped to conform to this off-the-cuff remark that President Nixon had made. So it's something that had been discussed because of this increasing problem with kidnappings and assassinations of U.S. diplomats, but it was really in that moment in this Sudan crisis that Nixon kind of just says something at this press conference and kind of shapes American policy to this day.

So when I hear you say that, when I read that in the story, that strikes me as a kind of recurring element of your writing, whether it's not just true crime. And by the way, we are absolutely surrounded by true crime in our lives right now, our reading and watching. lives. Sure. It is a crime that interacts with the times or interacts with politics in a larger way. Am I right in saying that? Yeah, I mean, I think that's a prerequisite for the kind of stories I'm going to tackle. I'm not just looking for things that are sensational in their own right. I'm looking for crimes or acts of violence or events, tragedies that can tell us something about American history and about why our society is shaped the way it is today. And hopefully,

some deeper human truths as well. I really try to have a stew of themes and ideas in these pieces. So certainly I look for a central narrative that's dramatic and people want to follow from start to finish, but it can't just be sensational for its own right. It has to speak to something larger to justify the time and effort that goes into these projects. Okay, John Patterson's been kidnapped. He's gotten the authorities, we've gotten this very odd note from the kidnappers. What was the FBI's first theory of this case? Yeah, so pretty quickly, the FBI Bureau in Phoenix, Arizona, is the one that's kind of put at the lead of this investigation. And at that time, it's actually run by someone who'd been a right-hand man of the recently deceased Jay Edgar Hoover and very, almost

reactionary in his politics. And there's a pretty quick assumption on the part of him and his Bureau, that this has to be what they call a self-kidnapping, that this is a hoax that John and Andra Patterson got together and are faking this to get money. And so what they do is, and they kind of convince Washington, D.C., that this is the case, and that becomes the prevailing theory in Washington as well. And actually, a ton of resources are spent investigating the Patterson's. And one thing that kind of stunned me when I got a lot of documents from the FBI or via FOIA, a Freedom Information Act, was how much time and manpower was invested in investigating the Patterson's, and particularly the politics of the Patterson's. And there's a lot of documents

I dug up where these agents are reporting back and investigating anti-Vietnam war marches that Andra Patterson participated in, checking to see, you know, what they thought of civil rights movement. there was a deep suspicion and a deep distrust of these people because they might be construed as having somewhat liberal leanings. Even though, of course, John Patterson had volunteered and decided to devote his life to serving his country, do the most patriotic thing possible, and was serving at the pleasure, really, about Republican president in many ways. So it was really, I think, puzzling that so much time and resources were invested. in checking out these suspicions about these people who are suffering. Andra is able to put together the first part of this ransom money, which is $250,000, a lot of money in 1974, a lot of money today too.

What happens when she follows the instructions and tries to drop off the ransom with a kidnap? Yeah, so the note had been very specific about what was to be done with the money. She was to go to a specific hotel in Nogales, Mexico, called the Frey Marcus Hotel, a big hotel there, just a block from the American border. And she was supposed to be contacted by the kidnappers at 8 a.m. two days after the kidnapping. And so actually, John's family were the ones who raised the money. His mother was able to contact a friend of the family who was a department store heiress. and she personally guaranteed a loan from a bank in Philadelphia, and they wired the money to Arizona.

They picked it up in Tucson and then went to across the border. And this is actually one of the images that really stuck with me early on was this young woman not really knowing what's going on and just trying to save her husband and crossing the border at Nagalas with a quarter million dollars in a bunch of Girl Scout cookies boxes, which is how they delivered the money. And she goes to this hotel and actually the FBI kind of tagged along, so much of the consternation of Mrs. Patterson and some people in the State Department who were trying to protect her. They wanted to stake out the payment and try to follow whoever picked it up and see if that could bring them to the perpetrators.

She waited there, but no one ever showed up to take the money. And that kind of begins the real drama, and it really becomes a very long saga of her trying to recover her husband. Now, I mostly want to leave it there. So if people haven't read the story, they can discover how this turns out. But we'll tease a little bit of what is effectively the second half of your piece. Can you tell us how one of the figures we will meet in the story wound up at the North Vietnamese prison known as the Hanoi Hilton? Yeah, so there's a really important figure in this story named Bobby Joe Cassie. He's got a fascinating backstory, basically a guy from a really, really tiny town in the Texas Panhandle, fought in Korea. He served in the military for many years. And then in 1962, actually, he under false pretenses, rented a plane and then flew it to Cuba while he was AWOL from the army. tried to get a political asylum in Cuba, was sent back to the U.S., actually did a few years in prison in the U.S. Next kind of pops up on the public radar in 1970. He shows up in northeast Thailand posing as a movie producer, and he rents another plane, and he says that he's scouting jungle film locations up by the border with Vietnam. And he wents this plane, and he hijackes.

He pulls out a pistol on the pilots, and he forces them. He says, I want to go to this beach in North Vietnam, about 100 miles north of the North-South Vietnam border. And these pilots drop them off on this beach. They land on this white sand beach. And Bobby Joe could see this kind of like doughy, bespectacled, you know, American. And I guess at that time in his late 30s, jumps out with his pistol in a briefcase and the pilots take off and they look back and they just see like hundreds of these Vietnamese villagers just encircling

Bobby Joe Cassie and then no one hears about him again for almost three years. Wines up at the Hanoi Hilton. He is tortured at the Hanoi Hilton or insights around then. Then he winds up coming back to the United States on the plane, the same plane as John McCain. Yeah, and this was a real revelation for people who were aware of who Bobby Jokasee was.

Everyone assumed he was dead. It just seems so crazy. And all these American heroes are getting off these cargo planes in the Philippines in March of 1973, John McCain being the most prominent. And you see one of the last people to get off the plane is Bobby Jokasee, the only civilian on the plane, actually. and he actually refuses to answer questions. They hustle him to a bus. Actually, the Thai government makes noises about extraditing him back to Thailand because of hijacking the plane. It turns out the plane charter company was owned by the Crown Prince of Thailand. They made a big mistake there, but we don't extradite him.

And instead, he actually ends up being invited to the White House for this huge celebratory dinner in May of 1973 with all the other POWs who'd been at the Honoi Hilton and had just been released. That is just absolutely incredible. We'll leave the narrative there, and I'll ask you a little bit about the reporting process. Once you stumble onto this story, you find the website for Andra Patterson. Now, you have to email her and say, in so many words, I want to write a story about your husband's decade old, decades old kidnapping. What does it feel like to send that email?

It's certainly nerve-wracking. At that point when I did that, I want to say it was either, I think it was 2016. And so I think one big thing I wanted to do before I did that was make sure I knew a lot about this case. I didn't want to contact her too early on. I wanted her to know how invested I was and how devoted I was and how much work I'd already put in. Writing that email and pressing send, I do remember it because I spent several days writing this email, which was probably only about two or three paragraphs. But I knew it was critical, and I knew that the story could only attain so much complexity and richness without her participating and sharing her memories. And so I really agonized over every word. And of course, I hit send, and I think five minutes later, you're getting that mode of like, she hasn't responded yet. What did I do wrong? And she did respond, though, very simply. And I remember this very clearly. She said that it made her stop in her tracks. This is something that no one had brought up to her for many, many, many, many years.

And I think even a lot of people close to her didn't necessarily know about it, or at least the full contours of what had occurred. And so I think that she was genuinely shocked and just floored to hear from a journalist who was looking into this and had done so much work on it already. You're writing her more than 40 years after it happened. Why, in that first email or in your early conversations with her, Why do you tell her your doing this? Why do you want to write about this story?

Yeah. So I think the biggest thing I told her, I, one of the first things I did I send her a copy of my last book. And I was like, these are the kind of stories I do. And as you noted, I try to find a saga or a drama and a central narrative, but I try to make that central narrative illuminate something important to my mind about American history and American society and the human condition. And I basically expressed to her, like, this is what. I've devoted my life to doing is telling these kinds of stories. And it's important to me because I feel like this kind of work can illuminate a lot about our country and the state of who we are as a people and who we are as human beings who interact with one another. And I said

that this story resonated with me. And one of the reasons is because I frankly admire you. I admire the fortitude you had in the face of this utterly incomprehensible situation. And I really told her also about how my evolution of thinking about these kinds of stories has been affected by my own aging and becoming a father a couple times over and how your view of the world is a little different when you have a family and how it changed the kind of stories I wanted to tell and how I was just gutted by what had happened to her and just amazed by the braverage she had shown in this completely bewildering, perplexing, circumstances. into which she was thrust in 1974.

And Andra ultimately agreed to help you write the story why? It was a tough one. She was very reluctant. Obviously, there's incredibly traumatic memories, very difficult memories. And I have perhaps my most vivid memories of trying to talk to her about sharing what she knew. She actually came up to New York eventually to meet with me. We went for coffee.

and my mode in all of these situations is to start with small talk. The big believer that that's a way to break the ice just talking about just this, that and the other thing, my kids in New York City or whatever. And she had no interest in that. She cut me off after about 30 seconds. And she was like, I'm not doing this. What do you want with me? Why would I possibly want to do this?

And what's interesting is I think that she was so hesitant and reluctant and reluctant. And one reason she cited was that she was scared. She was scared that the perpetrators behind this might come after her. And I, in that moment, was able to give her a piece of information that put her fears to rest and tell her things she didn't know about. And it meant something to her. And I feel from that point forward, we were able to slowly build a relationship of trust with one another. And how long between that meeting and your first interviews with her about the piece?

I think it was about six months. I think that I started going down to visit her in the late summer, early fall of 2017. And I went down there several times over the next several years to sit with her and also her daughter as well, who was a five-year-old child when the central events of this story took place. but we talked for many, many hours. And that was viable, but was maybe just as valuable, was the fact that in her attic, Andra Patterson had a file box that was marked the case.

And it's something she hadn't opened in literally like 40 years, something like that. And she brought it down for me and let me go through it and take photographs of what I needed and borrow what I needed. and that was a real treasure trove. And there was no way on earth the story could have been, as rich as it turned out to be, without that documentation. What did Andre think of the finished piece? Interestingly enough, I emailed her the day after it came out,

and I asked what she thought, and she told me she hasn't read it yet, that she's working up the, I guess, the courage to read it. she's very emotional about all of this. And when I told her the day that it was going to be published, she was like, well, I need to be among my family and my loved ones on that day. So I haven't heard from her since then. So hopefully she's read it and we can have a nice, you know, she did say that once the smoke clears,

we're going to have a nice long conversation about it. As usually happens in these things, I'm sure they'll things she'll take issue with. But overall, I hope that she feels that I did right by her and right by her husband. So we're talking about a nine-year time frame for you from 2012 to 2021, when this is actually published. Did the piece turn out to be what you thought it would turn out to be way back in 2012? There were a lot of bumps in the road. So I did spend a lot of time trying to find the right format for this.

And for a long time, I thought this was going to be a book. I thought that was the right format for it. And for various reasons that are probably both too complex and too boring to go into. Oh, I don't know. This is a media podcast. Let's just say that I tried to do it as a book and there wasn't a lot of interest in the publishing industry in a book. And that was a real setback for me. That was a real stinger for me.

I felt so emotionally invested in this story. I felt like there was more than enough to sustain a book, and I really had faith in that version of the project, and so I kind of had to lick my wounds a little bit after that, and I realized there was no way in the world that I was going to let this just only exist in my hard drive. I had to find a way to tell it, and I was really fortunate in that I had a very old editor

from my days of writing at Slate, And even before that for a defunct magazine called Legal Affairs, an editor named John Swansberg, who's now at the Atlantic. And I talked to him about this, and he just got it. He got it immediately. And a lot of the reason this came out in the first place is his faith in this project. And I think we started talking about this in 2000, either late 18 or early 19, started as an Atlantic project and went through many drafts. a lot of killed darlings, a lot of details left in the cutting room floor for sure. But I'm really happy with the choices we made overall. And I'm really, I'm really proud of the piece we're able to create. Good dude, John Swansberg. Now, could we have the reverse happen here where book publishers now read this in the Atlantic? They see the sweep of the story and say, hey, you know what? That would make a really good book. I would certainly, that would be wonderful. I know that there was a ton that I wasn't able to put into this story. And I would love to

keep working on this. I think there's more to tell. So we'll see. Right now, I'm just kind of like recuperating from all the labor that went into it. It was a really, I really went through the ringer on this one. No pun intended. And it's been a little, there was a certain emptiness you feel when you throw yourself into something so completely for so many years and it comes out and you kind of realize it's out there and you're not going to work on it in the same way again. And there have been a few days where I just felt a little bereft, a little, you know, forlorn and just wondering what comes next in some ways. And I have other projects going on. But a piece of me hopes I can continue to work on this in some fashion. One last one for you, Brendan. We mentioned crime stories and different

formats and genres. Is the long-form podcast an interesting genre for you? Because that feels like one in addition to the book that would accommodate the kind of stories you like to tell. Yeah, absolutely. And I've definitely spoken to, you know, podcast creators in the past about potential projects. And a big reason I haven't been able to get going on anything in that space because I was so committed to this. So that might be. something I tackle next for sure. I'm a big fan of the ones that are done supremely well, and I think it's a wonderful format. I do think you probably have to approach your sources in a slightly different way. I think there's different walls or barriers that can come up or down

based on if people know their voices are going to be actually broadcast. So we'll see. That's something I definitely want to explore, and I feel like now that I'm in this mode of a little bit hitting the reset button. That may be the next, you know, big, multi-year project I tackle might just be a podcast rather than an 8,000 word magazine story. We'll see. You can read Brendan Kerner's story, A Kidnapping Gone Very Wrong in the Atlantic right now. Also check out his books, The Skies Belong to Us and Now the Hell Will Start, because among Brendan's many virtues is the ability to come up with the coolest book titles on Earth. Brendan, thanks for coming on the press box. Thanks for having me, man.

All right, for David Shoemaker, guess is the strained pun headline. Yeah. Tuesday's

headline about marriages in front of an Icelandic volcano was lava in a cold climate. And dude, there are times

when our listeners are so much better than the headline pros. Oh, please. This was one of those times.

Lewis Millman says the headline should have been eruptuals. Eurptuals. nuptials. Dave Bray says, Lava actually.

Lava. Actually, that's it. That's what I was saying at the time. Not love, not that specifically, but lava and love swapping it.

That was really good. And I can even do better. D. Colin Johndrill sent me this one. Love in a time of Caldera. Love in a time of caldera. Now, come on, man. That is a great strain pun headline.

I just followed D. Colin Johndrell. That's even to me, that's beyond the Oxford comic. You just got followed by the press box account. Congratulations on some great stuff. Today's headline, David, comes from Howard Williams. Actually, sent by a lot of people. I'll give Howard the credit. It's from The Economist.

It is an article about Vietnamese Fah. Vietnamese Fah. And the idea is, Fah, David, He is not just a thing from the old South Vietnam and the old North Vietnam. It is for all of Vietnam. And it has a very interesting history which the author Emma Irving relates. What was the economist's strained pun headline?

Is it fa? Is it like a foe? Gosh. Something for everyone or something. Why don't we start with the common American mispronunciation? So we can play with that, right? Friend or foe, Foe,

remember this is uniting everybody. Oh, common foe or a foe. There we go. Oh, you got it, bud. Vietnam is a country divided by a common foe. That's great. Divided by a common foe. He is David Chewaker.

I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Eric. Cervantes, big week next week on the press box. Monday, David, there is a new season of slow burnout over at Slate. Noreen Malone, one of my favorites,

is going to join us to talk about that. And then Thursday, Thursday, the NFL draft is happening. What are we going to do for the NFL draft? Well, I thought we should just get a little bit organized. I mean, we always talk about

sports cliches. We talk about, you know, the sort of way that these shows are presented and news events like the draft are covered. So I said let's just do a press box glossary and go through all of the cliches,

all of the overused words, all of the terms employed repetitively, repeatedly when the media covers the NFL draft. A devil's dictionary. Devil's dictionary of NFL draft. Yeah. Of NFL draft cliches. And we're going to be joined by one of our favorites.

Danny, got a first ground grade on him, high fits for draft cliches. Plus more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.