The Press Box - The Coronavirus Corporate Hall of Shame. Plus: Should COVID-19 News Be Free? | The Press Box

Episode Date: March 26, 2020

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker look at how the coronavirus fallout has been handled by Bloomberg (01:00), Harvard (08:00), the Philadelphia 76ers (12:00), the Boston Bruins (14:30), and the International Olympic Committee (18:15). Then they discuss the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week (26:00), whether or not coronavirus news should be behind paywalls (29:30), listener mail (38:30), and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelly and welcome to The Ringer Podcast Network. We hope The Ringer can provide you entertainment and companionship during this time. So as always, feel free to check out The Ringer.com, where we're still covering the latest in sports, pop culture, tech, and media. And the Ringer's YouTube channel can provide endless amounts of entertainment. You can find that at YouTube.com slash The Ringer. Hello, media consumers. Brian Curtis and David Shoeemaker of The Ringer here. We got lots and lots of great stuff to get to today.

David and I will debate, should newspapers make all their stories about coronavirus free? We got listener mail from the band The Rembrands. You heard that right, the Rembrands, plus the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But David, let's start the show today with some good old-fashioned shaming. Because two weeks into coronavirus lockdown, we've seen layoffs, we've seen furloughs, we've seen salary cuts, other forms of miserable behavior by corporations and other well-moneyed entities. So please join me in introducing the coronavirus corporate hall of shame. Shame.

Nominee number one, David, the Michael Bloomberg for president campaign. Remember that brief moment when the businessman Democratic nominee almost seemed like a good idea? Well, Bloomberg got into the campaign late, and part of the way he was able to staff up so quickly was to offer what seemed like a great deal. He basically said, unlike those other primary campaigns that could crash and burn at any second,

I'm going to pay you my campaign staff through November. If I'm the nominee, you'll, of course, be working for my campaign. But even if someone like Joe Biden is the nominee, you'll be working for my independent expenditure campaign to support Biden. In a lot of cases, Bloomberg promised good pay and good benefits. According to the New York Times, the hiring talking points actually use those words,

quote, full health, dental, and vision benefits, and quote, employment through November 2020 with Team Bloomberg. Well, on Friday, Bloomberg said, never mind. I'm shutting down my campaign and giving my money to the Democratic National Committee. I'm still supporting Biden, but that means that. that you're all out of a job right in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. Here's Cigar and Jetty and Crystal Ball. He pledged to use a billion dollars of his money to spend in an independent expenditure

to try to be Donald Trump. Now that his own campaign didn't work out, he's like, eh, no, I changed my mind. Sorry, staff, you're off the payroll. Sorry, instead of a billion dollars, how about I just shuffle this 18 million that I have left over into the DNC. Before I bring us out of this directly, I actually have a surprise, full disclosure. My cousin was an employee of the Michael Bloomberg campaign.

It's based in New York. I only found out about this way after the fact when she was being laid off. And she's fine. She's back at her old job and got paid for a period of time. or I think exactly may still be collecting a check from the Bloomberg campaign, but there's a lot of people that got really hurt by this. And I think that this sort of indecision or change of direction,

I mean, that's a fine thing for a corporation to take, I guess in theory, certainly for a campaign to take. But when it comes to employees, people that you hired, you know, with really specific promises, whether or not they were codified in a contract, people that you, that, you know, are, have a fraction of the amount of money that not only the campaign does, but the person running the campaign does.

To treat your employees with such negligence is just, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's indefensible. And there's no, and even if the employees themselves are, are okay with it. And I can, and from my, and from what little I know, I believe my cousin would be totally fine with it. It's full vindication of Bloomberg skepticism, is it not? I mean, it's, the, the people that said, wait a second, Bloomberg's saying, never mind what I said and did a few years ago when I was mayor of New York or a Republican, I've changed. I'm in line with the Democratic Party now. I'm one of you guys. I can be a plausible

nominee. Well, guess what? That didn't turn out to be true. He is a reminder. He's worth $46 billion. And remember all those pieces that ran during the campaign about how when Bloomberg spends X million dollars. That's like you and me doing something really ordinary. Well, Bloomberg covering everybody's health insurance through November is like me buying a bag of checks mix.

I mean, that it's like nothing. And by the way, I'm going with bold party blend because I'm feeling a little wild today. But no, it's just no money, right?

It's nothing. And his official explanation here is that, okay, it actually makes more sense if one entity, the DNC, is doing the campaigning for Biden

rather than the DNC and my thing that can't really communicate with anybody trying to do it in tandem. And in this way, if I rented an office in, say, Michigan, I can just give that office lease to the DNC, which can use it directly rather than trying to run two different campaigns.

That's the explanation. So that sounds like an argument for not launching a presidential bid in the first place and just donating money to the DNC. Oh, that's an interesting idea. Or donating a whole bunch of money to, yeah, to win back the Senate or win back various. I mean, you can say all that,

but these were promises that were made to these workers, right? Yeah. They did sign, it said the New York Times at-will contracts, meaning they could be laid off at any time, but it was an explicit promise of you will have a job through November. And of course, at that point, we didn't understand most of us anyway, the full impact of the coronavirus,

which is, oh boy, here's a time when we really, when people really need good health benefits, really need a solid salary if you saw those unemployment numbers that came out on Thursday morning. I mean, of all times, right? I want to quote to you from Jane Conrad, a former field organizer for Bloomberg. She told this to the New York Times, I'm so sorry I worked for this guy. I thought he was totally different. He took me out of my job for his own gain. Conrad had had a job as a union organizer, which she left to go work for Bloomberg, now she can't get that job back this year. Her son has Crohn's disease and takes immunosuppressant drugs. She says, I was looking to get ahead and pay off medical bills.

Now I'm falling further behind on them. Not surprisingly, there are now two class action lawsuits on behalf of campaign workers. And a lawyer representing them tells the times it's kind of jaw dropping that Bloomberg spent what he did on the race and wouldn't at least provide health insurance for these folks. By the way, that number, which we now have. have clarity on thanks to later filings over $900 million on the race to win American Samoa. Wow. Have we, by the way, checked on those workers in American Samoa? Did they get, are they getting screwed in all this too?

They collected their bonuses already. They're doing their thing now. I wouldn't want anybody to be put out in Pago Pago or Detroit or wherever they're put out. That is really bad. nominee number two, David, for the coronavirus corporate hall of shame. Let's do it. Harvard. Who?

Harvard's classrooms have been closed since spring break. So that affects lots of employees of the university. Harvard gave some employees 30 days of paid leave and benefits. That's something. But as the Harvard Crimson points out, that doesn't do much for cafeteria workers and others if students don't return for the rest of the semester. And that 30-day benefit doesn't cover a group of three. subcontractors who work in the dining halls,

the people feeding the next Mark Zuckerberg, right? So, reminder here, too, Harvard is the Michael Bloomberg of universities. It has a $40 billion endowment. Yep. Harvard can afford this. According to the Crimson's DeVite and Tanya

and Kelsey J. Griffin, a petition has been signed by more than 5,000 students and others. Let me quote it for you here. we simply do not believe the world's richest university can justify depriving its workers and students of income during a global pandemic. This is not a request for frivolous discretionary spending, but a demand that Harvard take necessary measures to protect the health and well-being of its staff and students throughout this ongoing crisis. This is, I mean, again, unbelievable. The subcontractor aspect of this, I think we should sit on that for another second or look at that for another second. there's a lot of these that we're going to get to and ones that we won't even get to. There are a lot of subcontractors who are, I believe the phrase is shit out of luck right now because subcontractors are an increasingly huge part of our economy. Look around when you're at your, I mean, no one's at their office right now. Imagine looking around at your office. All of that support staff is probably subcontracted out, right? I mean, everybody that's like emptying your trash cans, everybody that's making you coffee, those people are probably subcontractors in the year 2020. And it's really, really, really.

easy for big corporations to just, you know, cut that line item out without it looking like they're making, they're laying people off. They are laying people off. They are, or putting people on furlough or whatever, like, just asshole term of art you want to use right now. That, those are people who are desperately in need of continuity, of stability. And another example of where there's billions of dollars sitting in a, sitting in a, what a, a slush fund, a coffer? Can I use, can I use coffer, can I use coffer singular? That sounds right for Hofford. Yeah. There are 40 billion dollars sitting there and, and we can't support the people that support us every single day. It's mind-blowing. Yeah. And when you work in an economy that pushes people into the subcontractor class

only to make them more vulnerable in a time like this, that's wrong. Yes. By the way, By the way, going back to the Bloomberg one, too, if you're one of the people who were, like, on Twitter, you know, like, chilling on libertarian Twitter, talking about people who, like, knew what they were getting into when they signed at-will contracts.

It's not like you got two contracts. And you were like, do you want to choose, this is not like choosing your health insurance plan and a really good employer. Do you want column A where you get slightly more money, but you're at will or column B? It's like, no, they were given a contract.

It said it was an at-will contract. They signed it because they wanted the job, and they were told that they were going to have the job through November. It's not like, This wasn't something where they like opted in to this, this, this, like, deliberate insecurity. Nobody thought that they were, no rational person would have thought they would be out of a job right now. Yes, exactly. And Bloomberg could have staffed up.

Could have gotten a ton of people without the promises of work through November. I mean, that could have happened, right? He might not have gotten the same people. He might not have gotten them as quickly, but he could have gotten a ton of people. No, you wouldn't. No, let's just say it straight up. He wouldn't have gotten the staff he got. that he got if he had told the truth.

He lied to them. Nominy number three, David. The Philadelphia 76ers basketball team. Hell young. I'm going to crib from our pal John Gonzalez's excellent piece at the ringer, which everyone should read. Gons writes on Monday, Mark Stein of the New York Times reported that at-will Sixers employees,

making north of $50,000 per year, had been informed of mandatory pay cuts of up to 20% beginning April 15th and lasting through the end of January. June. Coaches in front office staff had also been asked to take a 20% pay cut. This, despite the fact, Gons writes, that members of the Sixers' main ownership group, including Josh Harris, David Blitzer, and Michael Rubin are multi-billionaires. Multi-billionaire. Percentage pay cuts, I mean, I love how this is being framed as a more humane thing.

At a bare minimum, at a bare minimum, you should be throwing open the books, right? you are running a corporation that despite its worth in the billions of dollars, despite your own personal worths in the billions of dollars, if you want to, if you want to, if you want to, if you want to make people take pay cuts, because in some hypothetical world, you are running a zero profit margin corporation, then show us the numbers, you know, show us the math. Because I'm not, I still don't agree with it, but at least there will be like some sort of moral justification. Or not even moral. The moral is already out the window. Some sort of like economic justification there. Clearly that's not true. Clearly that's not true. Yes, we're in

extreme times. But when you're in extreme times, how in the living fuck is your first reaction to save money for your corporation instead of literally save the lives of your employees? I just don't understand. A couple of great features of this standoff. Senator Joel Embed of the Sixers, who's a mensch, said he was going to give half a million dollars to coronavirus medical relief and also said he would help any Sixers employee affected by the cuts. So the team center was going to help the workers affected by the team's pay cuts. Think about that for a second. I also love this while the blowback was pouring in.

It was reported that one of the owners Michael Rubin said he was outraged. Like he got on the record saying, you know what? That was the other billionaires, right? I'm outraged by that. I can't stand this. The Sixers, of course, back down and called it off in what Zach Lowe of ESPN called a big, important precedent-setting win for rank and file employees. The Sixers, David, were not the only pro sports team to get votes for the Hall of Shame this week.

The Boston Bruins are apparently actually going through with this. The patch site in Massachusetts reports layoffs for 68 employees and indefinite pay cuts for 82 employees will take effect April 1st. This affects both the Bruins and the TD Garden Arena. Bruins' statement, of course, cited difficult and painful deliberations before taking these steps. Also quoting Gons from his piece, as the Houston Chronicle reported Houston Rockets owner Tillman Fertita temporarily suspended vacation time and paid time off benefits at a hotel he owns in Houston. Fertita also furloughed 40,000 casino employees earlier this week. For Tita eventually reverse course on the cuts for vacation time and pay time off at the hotel

because of another terrible news cycle. Here's another full disclosure. My family loves going to the rainforest cafe, which is owned by Tom and for Tita. It's actually the most painful disclosure in this whole segment. Oh, my God. Listen, this is so crazy. There's a lot of these that are, I mean, that we'll get to throughout this court. I mean, or we won't, again, that we won't get to where it's like the furlowing thing comes up.

I mentioned this because for Tita works in the hotel industry and there's a lot of this furlowing of employees, which by the way, functionally means that they can't legally collect unemployment because they're hourly workers who are just being signed up for zero hours instead of people who are actually being laid off. Great kind move there, big boss. But this idea that people that show up every day to work for you are like dudes that you picked up in front of the Home Depot to come do yard work for you is just. fucking ridiculous. Like these, like, it doesn't matter what's in the contract. There is a social contract that's implicit. And almost every, I would say, almost every version of this employment.

Like, if one of these people who work for Tillman for Tita or work for the Bruins or work for the Sixers when that was still a possibility. And by the way, the Sixers thing was apparently a trial balloon for the entire NBA. So you don't get off that easily. No one gets off that easily. But if one of these employees wanted to leave for another job, they would give their boss two weeks notice and continue working for two. weeks. That's probably not in the contract. That's part of the social compact of the employer-employee

relationship, right? These are things that are like implicit. And one of the things that's implicit is if there's a rough month, like, have you never been to a store in your life where someone was sitting behind the counter with nothing to do? Like, this is like slow times are part of business. If you can't factor that in to your P&Ls, that's your fucking problem. Like, that's your error, that's your inadequacy as a businessman or a business person. You cannot be dragged. You your like just tossing your employees out on the street because because the world has gone into disarray okay well that really sucks for them a lot more than it sucks for you and don't give me and again libertarian twitter don't give me the shit about like liquid funds or like you know not

not being fair to count the entire assets of somebody who like that's different in the amount of money they have invested in a team or different in the amount of money that's coming in these are you're talking about people who are literally withdrawing money from their IRAs to pay rent to buy to buy medicine to send their kids to the hospital like money in different silos doesn't fucking matter right now pay your employees totally right co-sign everything you just said i'm also done with nba triumphalism for a little while that can be postponed till the end of the pandemic and even beyond because if if if the NBA is growing by leaps and bounds and taking over the world and also the owners of the sixers say they cannot pay their employees the full wages after a couple

weeks off of basketball. Something, something doesn't work here. Something's wrong. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. We're just going to have to shelve the other topic for a while. David, Hall of Shame nominee number four. President of the International Olympic Committee, Tomas Bach and Japanese Prime Minister Shenzhou Abe. Oh, wow. For refusing to postpone the 2020 Summer Olympics until Wednesday, by which point Canada was refusing to send a team. Australia was saying its athletes couldn't possibly be ready, and the IOC's hand was completely forced. Here's America's debate show gold medalist, Stephen A. Smith.

And the reality is it was the right decision. This should not have been a delay. This decision should have been made, to be quite honest with you, at least a week ago, or at least around the time that the NBA and the NHL has suspended their play, that Major League Baseball has suspended its play. Here's the reality of the situation. You have individuals, athletes that have been training for years upon years for this moment. So what happens?

You know, the Olympic Games hadn't been canceled. They're sitting up there flying in the wind. I don't think the IOC realizes that by delaying this decision, you may have jeopardized even more individuals because you knew that those athletes suspecting that the games may indeed continue definitely had to be ready, which means that the level of safety in terms of social distancing that you were asking the world to practice, they were unable to do so because they had to go out the entrain and to make sure that they didn't dip in terms of their preparation in any way. So you were jeopardizing those athletes by not suspending these games. You were jeopardizing them by putting them in a position where they felt compelled to continue to train and what have you.

And by doing that to them, you may have endangered even more people throughout this world because of your ill-advised decision. to delay making this very decision that you should have made. So it's inexcusable. It's unfortunate that they took this long, but thank God they finally reached this conclusion because I spoke to a couple of Olympians and they swore up and down. This was the decision that they wanted.

It was the right decision. It was just a bit late. As I find myself saying almost every week, thank God for Stephen A. Smith. Yeah, I mean, listen, the IOC, The IOC has a permanent place of villainy sort of in our contemporary culture. So this feels somewhat less surprising.

However, I don't think anybody expected great things of the Tumman Fratitas of the world either. Just because, and obviously, and obviously, like, villainy is not a defense for your villainous acts. But this is absolutely true. The Olympics are, you know, a total. them. You know, I mean, in some ways, there's this sort of metaphor for stability and continuity

in the world. And I understand that it was a difficult decision, I think, you know, on some people, to some people to call this off and, and justifiably you would wait as long as you could before calling it off. But no, I mean, it's a, but this is, this is, this is, I have absolutely zero, uh, confidence that this decision was being made by on some kind of like, you know, metaphorical, let's keep the world's strong decision. I mean, decision, a basis. This is a financial decision and a really crass one. And it was certainly made in probably the least defensible way possible.

Absolutely. It was strung along this long for the same reason we keep hearing. Sports is an escape, right? What people, we need to see if we can have the Olympics later in the summer because the world will need an escape. No, the world doesn't need an escape. The world needs a vaccine. for coronavirus. And whenever I hear this, I'm repeating myself again, whenever I hear this, somebody say, people need an escape. What I hear them saying is I need an escape, right? I professionally

don't want to deal with coronavirus. I don't want to grapple with the terrible pandemic that we're all locked in right now. That is hurting less fortunate people as we've been talking about here. I want to have sports so I can talk about something else. So I can get my mind off this. And every time, every time the IOC people would open their mouths, that was the message. That was indisputably the message. Plus, I want those, that money that I got from NBC, that money that I hit locked down, the tourism dollars, all that stuff. That's number one. Number two, to your point about the IOC, I love this because you're right. They have a place of permanent villainy in the sports media.

But see, we forget because of the frequency of the Olympics. So like Monday through Friday of a normal week, the villains are Roger Goodell and the NCAA. And then you're like, oh, right, the Olympic committee, right? Those guys. We also hate those guys. And it's so funny because there's like, there's a piece that everybody writes, which is they should cancel the Olympics. This is a pre-pandemic piece. like this is terrible.

The economics are terrible. The effect on the country is terrible. And what I loved about this is everybody took the let's cancel the Olympics piece and just turned it into a let's postpone the Olympics because of coronavirus piece. And it was actually the same piece. You know, it wasn't. It really, it really, it was about coronavirus, but it really wasn't. It was also, it was just like our general loathing for the people who run the Olympics

and impose the kind of economic conditions. on host countries that they do. Sure. I mean, it's, we're wrapping this segment up. I just think that, I mean, you look back at all of these, all of these bullet points

that we've run through here, and it's just disgraceful. I mean, you have great, you have wonderful folks like Joelle and B, and he's not the only one. There are a lot of other NBA players who have, you know, pledged money to help the employees of their teams

who are being disadvantaged right now or being directly hurt right now. But what you see, I mean, and obviously these are, amongst the wealthiest people walking the face of the earth, but it's their bosses who are the real, the real money. And we will continue on, we will continue having this conversation every time we, you know, have this podcast. But it's the wealthiest among us. You know, we give, we'll, you know,

we'll give Donald Trump his fair share of shit. We'll give the Democrats and Republicans in Congress a very deserving, um, or whatever, what they deserve through this whole mess. But it's, you know, I mean, we've, we've also, I mean, there are elected officials, but indirectly, you know, we've elected this giant class of fucking ridiculous oligarchs that have more power than any of them do. And the fact that they're all like running and hiding behind like, behind, you know, loss statements or whatever is just ridiculous. Like, you talked about the fact about Bloomberg's money earlier. I mean, like, like, where, where, where, where is Jeff Bezos right now? Like, how, like, like, how is he not just making all of the surgical masks that we need? How are those not already in people's hands? because that is literally no money to him.

And this is, you know, this is, this is the, this is what we've created here. I'm putting my Bernie Sanders sweater back on right now. But like this is my, this is just, this is just indefensible. This is, I mean, this is, this is like person by person. This is, this is active evil in the world. So, you know, good job, guys. All listeners who were sending us notes about David being a secret Bernie bro, you're going to want to edit those notes.

He is no longer a secret Bernie bro. It's all, he's out. He's, it's, it's wide open. now. All right, David, time for the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Please send your nominees to at the press box pod. This one comes from our pal, Kyle Madsen. He says it was an overworked Twitter joke to make any joke about the Los Angeles Rams new logo. It looks like Trump's hair. It looks like the old Internet Explorer logo. Quoting Twitter here, it looks like a penis. I don't know. I don't know. I didn't really get that from the first thing of that. But I totally agree. And I sort of wonder, like, are any of these new logos for sports ever good? Like, are they ever going to get, or is everyone going to ever be put out on Twitter? And everybody's like, you know, that's really, really sharp. No. I really like that. Listen, I mean, there are occasionally that will happen. But for the most part, sports teams logos and uniforms are just the new, like, you know, play by play announcers. Or we just like, we just, as a culture have decided to let to shit all. on all of them. There's no win. Now, there's no win.

I mean, there's no, again, even if it had, this was, I thought, and actually a bad Rams logo, but even if it had been a good Rams logo, I sort of doubt it would have gotten a great run on Twitter. No, I mean, listen, I think there should be a more, I mean, you can make your jokes, but we should honestly have a moratorium on this stuff, because we make fun of the new uniforms,

we make fun of the new logos every year, and two games into the new season, we forget all about it. Like, I am old enough, Brian, you are two, to remember the days when the current, the existing Denver Broncos uniform design was the greatest pox on humanity that ever happened. Yes.

And that turned out to be the template for basically every uniform redesign that came after it, right? I mean, for every team. So, like, it does, like, just, just, I know that, you know, we're not all subject to hot takes or cold takes exposed, whatever, but like, you sound silly. I mean, we're all being silly to make this big of a deal of a sports team logo. Unless, I should say, it actually looks like a penis, in which case, make all your jokes, right? I mean, if you accidentally designed a Ramshorn that only looks like a penis to everyone that looks at it, like have at it.

David now defending the billionaire sports owners, by the way. Just want to note that little switch. I'm defending the graphic designers, okay? There's a different. Elsewhere in the news this week, the U.S. Senate finally passed a $2 trillion relief bill to try to cope with those terrible jobless numbers we saw. today. At what seemed like the end of the negotiations, the New York Senator Chuck Schumer declared, right now we're on the two yard line. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write. Please keep Pete Carroll away from the negotiations. Thanks to Doug Seibor, Josh Peterson, and Tyler Tourville for that one.

David, last week, we talked about Rand Paul testing positive for coronavirus and how even as he was awaiting test results, he had disregarded. the advice of everyone and gone swimming in the pool of the congressional gym. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write, and I love the simplicity here. Drain the pool. Drain the pool. Thanks to Michael T. That's two for Michael T.

By the way, we see you there. If you came up with that joke of genius simplicity, congrats. You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. David, I want to begin the notebook dump with a question. Question from listener Danny Nicklin. He asked, should newspapers and other media outlets put coronavirus news behind a paywall? Or should that news in this time of crisis be free? It's a really interesting question because a lot of publishers recently have dropped paywalls for all their coronavirus coverage.

The New York Times has publicized the fact that it will not have an article limit when you read coronavirus articles. Many other publications, including the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, have dropped paywalls. Digidae reports that even though COVID content is available for free, Bloomberg, the Atlantic, and the journal have seen massive spikes in subscriptions. Still, not everybody's doing that. The Tribune publishing and Hearst papers, including the San Francisco Chronicle, have put all coronavirus coverage or nearly all of it behind a paywall. The LA Times still has it behind a paywall. So does the Boston Globe. Where do you stand on this? Because I've been, since we've been talking about this for a couple of days on email, I go back and forth,

but I kind of want to hear you start. Do we have some moral imperative at this time when everybody's searching for information, when information sometimes can literally mean the difference between life and death to make that information free? I mean, I think there certainly is a moral aspect to this, but I don't think we have to get that far. I guarantee everybody who's decided to keep things behind the paywall has at some point lamented the battle like the uphill battle that real news organizations are fighting against fake news in the digital age, right? What you were doing is opening up the playing field in Google search results or everything else to fake news. I mean, you are seeding the battleground to them. And I think to zoom out a little bit more, this is really the whole paywall conversation in microcosm, although obviously the stakes are much different now.

But to be running the LA Times and to be making, I guess, the argument that your very specific paying audience are the only people that deserve the hard work of, I mean, that your work is only worthy of those people. I mean, you must think that your work is important or you wouldn't be paying people to do it, right? I mean, and to and to sequester it, to put, I mean, to limit its reach, especially in a, you know, situation. like this just seems just counterintuitive to like, I mean, counter to any, any intuition available. Like I don't, I can't, I don't understand what the argument would be. So here's where I come down. I totally agree with everything just said. And I think there's a perfect world where that's the case, where something like coronavirus has the entire country, if not the entire world in its grip. And we say, okay, this is one of those situations. However much revenue we need

to generate with subscriptions, however important that is to our business model, we need to pull those down so that everybody can get it. Let me make a couple of counter arguments. And I'm not sure I totally embrace these, but I at least want to throw it out there for discussion. One, the subscriptions we're talking about, at least for the like foreseeable future are really, really cheap. Like a Los Angeles Times digital subscription for your first eight weeks is $1. Right. So, Almost everybody can afford that, right? Now, maybe you can't afford to get delivery of the physical newspaper. Maybe you can't afford to do this long term.

That doesn't fit in your budget. But we're not talking about huge amounts of money here, and there's lots of trial ways to get in, things like that. That's number one. Number two is this. The media is already beleaguered, as you and I know full well, right? The media is being, even as the coronavirus treatments are happening, and the coronavirus response by the American government is sort of kicking into gear, the media is being criticized by the president from the coronavirus briefing platform.

The media at the end of this is going to lose months and months of advertising revenue. No more movie reviews or excuse me, no more movie listings, no more movie ads, right? No more restaurant. We've seen what this has already done to Alt Weekly's. We're not going to get a bailout. I guarantee you that. Unless some of these publications qualify for the small business, you know, kind of reachouts and stuff like that. We're not going to get a bailout like the airlines and the cruise lines.

So what is the media supposed to do? You're supposed to take this giant economic hit for two months, make it worse by lowering paywalls, and then just be dead or half dead at the end of the pandemic? And what if we have a recession after the pandemic, which is highly possible, right? or something worse than a recession. They're not going to survive. So when essentially this, and again, I don't quite still don't know where I fit in on this, but I'm just thinking it's like it totally makes sense.

It's what should happen. On the other hand, if you're asking every media organization essentially just give up the one revenue stream you potentially have right now, and potentially be done for at the end of this, then what good is making it free? Yeah. Well, okay. I mean, there's a lot of truth to what you just said.

As far as the cheap subscriptions goes, I'll just say that if, you know, if we had major newspapers that were using this as an opportunity to be like, hey, if you sign up now, you get your first four weeks free just because of the coronavirus, we would rightfully call that craven, right?

I mean, we'd be like, okay, you're giving away free subscriptions with the hope that people will forget to cancel. and so you're giving way free news by trying to trick people in the paying later. I wouldn't agree with that plan. Is that really craven though? Well, I don't know.

Maybe not. Maybe not. But I think that some people would justifiably look at it that way. I mean, that's the whole point of free subscriptions, right? I mean, I guess you give people a taste or whatever. But if the point is giving people an example of the good work that you do with the hopes that they would subscribe or continue to subscribe, this seems like a great opportunity to take some stuff out from behind the paywall

and let people appreciate what you're doing and appreciate your motives for doing it, and then maybe they will subscribe, as we're seeing people subscribe more and more, having read that stuff. I'm not sure. Listen, we can't diminish the economic impact or the economic situation of all of journalism. And I would not do that. But, you know, the people that are already subscribing to The LA Times aren't going to cancel because they're giving some of it away, right? I mean, they're not, they're not going to, they're not going to take away they're not going to get rid of their subscription simply because there's coronavirus news out there. And I do think that most people are able to get good coronavirus information. So a little,

this is slightly beside the point. But I honestly believe that the economic impact for doing this would be negligible or if anything positive. I just, I don't, I'm, I'm, I, I, I'm not, I'm not seduced by that argument. It's, I mean, I do, I do, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, understand what you're saying. I do think in a larger non-craven terms here that this is a chance for newspapers to prove to people why they're so useful and why they're so important, right? There's a whole generation of people, in fact, now two or three generations younger than us that just have no idea why newspapers are important. They have just, they, they have grown up in a world where it just didn't matter like it mattered to people older than us.

And when you have like really good local news, right, again, it's fundamentally different than what you see on Rachel Maddow or NPR or wherever you're getting your news otherwise for free or a podcast or whatever it is. Like you have this chance right now to show them like this, this is what a newspaper is about. This is what we can do. And when at the worst possible time for society, we can be this lifeline. And by the way, these people are either a endangering themselves, putting themselves, you know, in a path to potentially get coronavirus or they're working from home and doing their job with one arm tied behind their back, right? And that's a moment. And I think if, again, are, you know, a hundred and billion, 20 year old is going to sign up for a newspaper subscription and then actually keep it going beyond the next. few months. I don't know. That's probably too much to ask. But I do think there's something here

about here's where you can get your local news. If you care about the community you live in, you're not just a citizen of the world, but there is something about local, good local news. This is a time to prove it. Like I said, I'm still torn. Let's do a little listener mail. Let's do it. Our first letter this week, David comes from the Rembrandt's. The actual Rembrandts, the band behind. this. Referring to a bit from last week's pod, the Rembrandt tweeted, David, we want to hear the story from your high school years about being the first to own our album, maybe on the next episode of the press box pod. David, would you like to tell that story? There's not much of the

story other than I bought the album solely because I was a fan of the friend's theme song. And I, I mean, this is impossible for any listener under the age of like 30 to wrap their head around. but like I was as far as I knew the only person to own it, right? I mean, this is at a point, this is a period of time where like you had to like, you know, buy the CDs that you love. But then if you like wanted to hear a specific song, you had to like canvas your friend group to see if anybody already owned that tape or CD and you could play it at a party. And it was, you know, I think most people who have access to Wikipedia know that this was a song that was just written as a theme song. And they eventually, after it took off, they had to expand it into a whole song. and they appended it to their album LP

because it was, you know, not originally one of the tracks. By the way, this is one of those, the glory days of when you would buy an album and the only song you wanted was like hidden, was like a hidden track at the end and not even listed. You know, you had to like push, you had to wait through like 20 minutes of silence

to get to the song you wanted to hear. But yeah, I mean, I got it. I was like briefly, I mean, I was like something resembling a Rembrandt's head for a little while. I remember I remember being a fan of, uh, yeah, what was the other stuff on that album? Uh, there goes Lucy. I was a big fan of April 29. I think it was supposed to be the big head. I never really figured that one out. But, um, yeah, it's a good album. The Rembrandts are a really good little pop duo. And, uh, and, and, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm flattered, flattered that they would

tweet this podcast. This is what I loved about David and continue to love about David is, there would have been people at our high school. In fact, many people who would have been like, I don't want to be the guy going out and buying the album for the theme song from friends that has that on it. David, David never cared about that. David owned it. Both, both owned his interest in that song and literally own the album. You never, you were never embarrassed by that kind of stuff. And one of the things I loved about you, I probably would have, would have not been able to take that stuff. I know, I mean, that's, that's probably true. But there's also an aspect of this where like, I felt like I had achieved something by acquiring the album that that song was on. I mean, it wasn't. I mean, it wasn't. It wasn't like you could just walk into like, you know, whatever the record store in your, or whatever the CD store in your local mall was, Sound Warehouse, and be like, hey, where is the friend's song? I mean, or maybe, maybe you could have, but like, there was no internet back there to Google and find out who's saying it.

I think I must have, like, paused a VHS tape of the show or something to see the name of the band and then, like, tracked down the album. Like, it was, you know, I felt like this was, this is basically like a Wikipedia rabbit hole that I had to, like, do and I had to perform in real life. It was re-Wikipedia. Yeah. We didn't exactly have the high fidelity record store in Fort Worth, not to my memory anyway.

This one's note is from Dave Shockey, David. I love this question. What is the last non-sports news story you read that was completely devoid of coronavirus influence? I asked this because I literally couldn't think of something I'd read in the last two weeks that did not revolve around the gravity of this coronavirus world we now live in. Yeah. Have we ever faced a news event? so all-consuming.

I actually have an answer to this question. And it's only because in the house here, we somehow still have the November 25th issue of the New Yorker, which was the food issue. Do you want to hear some headlines from the cover flap that come from a more innocent time in American life? I kid you not. These are all real.

Can babies learn to love kale? The cult of natural wine. Wow. and finally my favorite, tales from the Park Slope co-op. Now, didn't that sound cute? Before coronavirus?

I would have read that before coronavirus. Just like, oh, this will be funny and sort of dry in a New Yorker way. And now I was just looking at that the other day going, I have no interest in this at all.

I'm sure this article is just fine, but I have absolutely no interest. I mean, I know personally the only, like the only non-coronavirus, influence things I've read in the past week or so how all are just like background reading on the Tiger King.

I assume that other people can sympathize with finding like British tabloid coverage of what these people were like or you know, we're doing in real life as this movie was being, you know, as the filming of this movie was taking place. I'm just scrolling now back through like ringer slack to see what article would non,

what articles have been recommended. Oh, this is really good. AIGA's I own design had a big, at a piece called, what would a feminist Alexa look or rather sound like? That was really good. There's some good true crime stuff in here, too. But yeah, I mean, all Tiger King stuff for me. This is from Smiling Tim Sampson.

I'm noticing that a lot of TV correspondents reporting from home have their bookcases on display behind them. What books would you have behind you in a live shot and which ones would you hide? What would I have behind me? Yeah. This may actually be happening for a ringer video, like in the next three days. That's a great question. I probably have as many copies of my book as I could. I mean, right now, I'm like, everybody's all spread out, right?

You're just like, you'd be grasping at straws to find books, you know, if you're not in your own house. I'm not in my own house right now. But if I could have anything, I mean, you got to go. First of all, I think that whenever you're asked a question like this, you got to go to, like, the leaders in the field, right? So I think the first thing I would do is watch an episode of Morning Joe and pause the screen when John Meacham's popped up. Oh, no. I don't know.

John Meacham has been doing these like these like, you know, at home shots on national television for years and years now. So like all of Doris Kearns Goodwin, you know, if you're, if you're, it depends. If you want to be, if you're, if you're an athlete, if you're a sports writer, you got to have like the collected volumes of like Dave Zyron in the background, you know, just, you know, just. to prove your lefty credentials. I'm trying to think who else would be a really obvious one. You know,

John Meacham and Doris Kearns, without looking at their live shots right now, I just feel there's, I just feel those would be musty old books. I feel that's there. Ms. Onsen. And by the way, all of your friends and coworkers books

have to be there as well. See, that's daunting. That's incredibly daunting. I just feel if I had to do this, I would overthink this question so much. Like if a national audience were somehow looking at me, and by the way, thank God they aren't right now, given that I don't look great today. But if they were looking at me,

I would just think like, do you go, do I go like, you know, the things I write about, right? So are there sports media volumes behind me? Are there's kind of like adventure novels that I first read as a kid that I pick up now once upon a time, right? Is they're like, you know, you're kind of the time machine, right? Or, you know, journey the center of the earth, right? That has kind of a cool thing. Do I have a lonely planet guide behind me, just kind of indicating where I have recently or would want to travel?

I'm completely torn up. Or do you just go completely high literature, right? It's like, Ralph Ellison, you know, I was like, here we go. I think in fear of, for fear of trying to be, trying to go a highbrow and just missing the mark, I would just go in the total opposite direction. instead of a bookshelf, instead of like books, I would just have a shelf full of VHS tapes, like totally outmoded VHS tapes,

and it would just be the worst ones I could find. Just like, like, like the big plastic white Disney boxes would be on one shelf and like, like, like, like screwball comedies of the 80s on another show, just like the entire like porkies and meatballs, Uber would be there.

And maybe like maybe a shelf dedicated to sports, like Marv Albert's sports bloopers tapes would be, that might be the most on the nose part of the whole thing. But yeah, VHS, I think is my answer. By the way, you actually had VHS tapes in one of your apartments or maybe the apartment we own like as kind of a look at me accessory. And that's the problem here. There's no way to do this without looking like you're trying incredibly hard.

There's no way. And by the way, if you have like 19 copies of your book behind you, that also looks weird. You know, so I don't, there's no, there's no win here anyway. That's the takeaway, smiling Tim Samson. This one is from Jeremy Schneider. Yes, it's probably too early. to say, but how much will Trump's handling of the pandemic affect the election? What do you think about that? We've seen his popularity bump up a little bit, though probably

as a number of people have said, less than you would expect a world leader's popularity to bump up in a time of crisis like this. Do we have any sense yet of how this affects Trump's re-election chances? No, I mean, you know, they, the, apparently they've, you know, charged the Venezuelan president with drug trafficking today. So it seems like, I mean, I don't know. If you want to overread into everything, I think you can maybe draw the line that like that would be a move to sort of re-establish footing that they don't actually like the way that this is trending inside the Trump White

House. There are obviously other signs in that direction too. I mean, I hate to be, I hate to just kind of throw out my hands about this whole thing, but I do sort of feel like in some sense Trump's, I mean, I don't think Trump's, just just overfocus, you know, obsession with the stock market is correct, is the right path forward, but its focus on the economy probably is. I mean, I think that wherever we're, whatever the economy looks like when the election time runs around is obviously going to be hugely impacted by coronavirus. And I think that as with almost every election passed, that will be

probably the most important aspect, I mean, the most important contributing factor to whether or not he gets reelected. And he was tying his reelection efforts to that before. And that's part of the reason why he was so reluctant to embrace or admit what was happening with coronavirus back in February. I'm with you. I'm throwing my hands up a little bit. I think what's so unpredictable here is how Trump will spin his own efforts, right, to contain the virus. Right.

There's a scenario where there are, there is a lot of awful death and suffering in America over the next week. weeks and months. And Donald Trump is standing on a debate platform in this fall saying, look, this was going to be much worse and I made it much better. And a certain segment of the population that is going to kind of roll with that, you know, or nobody could have seen this coming, right? Or it's Obama's fault. We've seen him try out some of these excuses already. I just don't know how effective that's going to be. I think my opinion is it probably won't be that effective because it's easy enough to blame your personal economic situation on your boss that fired you or whatever.

I mean, there's a lot of, you can personalize that in a different way. I think that everybody's going to personalize this in the sense of, I mean, almost everybody's going to know somebody that got the coronavirus by the time the election rolls around. And heaven forbid, a lot of people are going to know people who died from it. And I think that, you know, we always look to our elected leaders, president first and foremost, in times of national crisis. And I think that it's going to be more difficult than even with the economic argument to say, to look at this and say, you know, he did everything he could when it's clear

that everyone's going to have, even anecdotally, everyone's going to have some evidence to the contrary. Finally, David, this one comes from my mom. Remember when we discussed two weeks ago how coronavirus news would have been disseminated in the year 2000? Oh, yeah. How would we have known that the schools would have been closed, et cetera? Well, we forgot that both our moms were public school teachers in the year 2000.

Yes. And they would know. And Mother Curtis sends a letter, which actually came in the form of a phone call, that this is what would happen. A letter would have gone home with each kid saying schools closed as a Monday. And the office would have placed an old-fashioned telephone call to each home as well. Yes. So let's never, never, ever forget again to use our moms as resources when we want to know what the media world was like. in the year 2000.

From my literal vantage point right now, I will say that my 11-year-old is engaged, my 11-year-old school is fully active right now, and he's having a social studies class on Zoom about 20 feet away from me. So I long for those days in the past where schools would send home a letter and then probably never talk to you again

until the coronavirus epidemic was over. For his sake, for his sake. I'm glad that he's learning in the big picture. Yeah, my 7-year-old Zoom, moment the other day was just a bunch of seven-year-old screaming into the camera at their first grade teacher. So slightly different.

Time for David Shoemaker guesses the strain pun headline. Yes. Monday's headline about the effect of coronavirus on restaurants in China was China's virus hit restaurants say their goose is cooked. Today's headline, David, comes from the laundry. He found a 1987 associated press story about hands across America.

Oh, wow. Anybody of our vintage or anyone who has seen the movie Us remembers Hands Across America. People including Kenny Rogers, RIP, Ronald Reagan, Mickey Mouse, and millions of randos joined hands to raise awareness for poverty and homelessness. This was before coronavirus. This was before social distancing. We didn't know about that in the 80s. This story, David and the AP is about how Hands Across America was an incredible success in terms of visibility, but it didn't raise that much money, not as much as expected. You might say that

hands across America had incredible reach, David, and that's all the hints you get. What was the AP's strained pun headline? I mean, I'm trying to think of like all form no substance for some reason because it's like there's this inherent dichotomy here. Something about span. access the literal word reach I was going for synonyms reaching for the offering for the

offering plate the reach reach what it's reach beach it's reach it's reach it's reach

it's reach exceeded its grasp oh okay it's reach exceeded It's crap. Pretty good, right? That's pretty good. I don't know that I would even identify that as a

as a strained pun on first read, but I guess that makes it even better. He is David Schubaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Research by Erica Sivantis and Chris Almata, production magic by Jim Cunningham. We're back Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media.

See you then, David. Looks like Trump's hair. David? Looks like the old Internet Explorer logo. David? Quoting Twitter here. Looks like a penis. I don't know. I didn't really get that from the first thing of that.

That's your fucking problem. Look, this was going to be much worse, and I made it much better. Oh, my God. Yeah, that is really bad.