The Press Box - The Cosby Conviction, the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, and Francesa's Return | The Press Box (Ep. 462)

Episode Date: May 1, 2018

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker deconstruct the media reaction Michelle Wolf's jokes (03:15), the role journalists played in bringing Bill Cosby to justice (26:00), and Mike Francesa's brief retirement and return to WFAN (28:45). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's G-R-O-W-T-H growth. David, Bloomberg and Vanity Fair announced last week that they're putting up paywalls. What I want to know is, What would be behind the ringer paywall? Okay, the first thing that comes to... Okay, there's two things that come to mind, but the first thing that comes to mind that is always sort of discussed around, you know, in these sorts of conversations

is like access to ringer slack channels. If you pay enough money, you can see our private conversations. The problem is it would inevitably, like, water down the slack channels and we'd end up having, like, back room slacks. Because otherwise we don't want to, like, you know, we'd be so guarded about our hot takes being too hot. Yeah, it become like the real world, right? All of this is to say, we're all living in a bubble.

All of this is to say that it's almost impossible to come up with content that goes behind a paywall that's actually worth having behind a paywall. When we joke around on ringer slack, the one thing that gets brought up as the paywall content is Juliet Littman's Hollywood couple stability rankings. I'll call it that. I'll go like the deadpool of relationships. Very firm opinions and it's a it is a path that even the ringer would. not go down. Wow. Yeah.

Can we just turn it into a podcast? That's what we usually do with ideas like that. It's a lot better if there's laughter surrounding a column like that. I don't know. What would you put behind the ringer pay well, Brian? I don't know. That's pretty good. I'm trying to think of a basketball thing that we don't already have on the ringer.

No, it's just that the, I mean, the only thing that you would want people to pay for. Are we withholding anything? Yeah. I mean, just the takes that are too strong or bizarre, bizarre even for like any other mainstream presentation. Stuff that would get us in trouble. Yeah, it's like the ringer after dark. That's a new, that's a new vertical.

Yeah. We've hit it. This is the press box on the ringer podcast network. The press box is the media podcast where you're not allowed to claim the wayback machine was hacked. We are Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the ringer. Here is a mini ringer reading list for your enjoyment. How about Victor Luckerson on the Montgomery Alabama's new lynching memorial? Fantastic piece.

Really good. Danny Kelly's NFL draft grades. Justin Verrier on his old team, the New Orleans Pelicans. And from the David and Brian department, David and Sean Fennesse's emergency podcast on Avengers Infinity War, and me on the Pelicans, the loneliest newspaper beat in the NBA. David, I've got three topics for you today. First, the White House Correspondents Association Dinner

and Michelle Wills' Monologue produced the Super Bowl of Takes. We offer the two best ones. Second, Bill Cosby was convicted last week on three counts of sexual assault, how the media set in motion the events that finally brought him to justice. And finally, New York sports talk legend Mike Francesa has a new job. Yeah. Which is also his old job. We ask, what the hell just happened?

Plus, as always are, overworked Twitter joke of the week. But let's start with the White House Correspondents Dinner. In a segment I'd like to call Big Bad Michelle Wolf, as far as I can tell, David, people are mad at three things. Number one, Michelle Wolf said, stuff about Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Number two, that the New York Times as Maggie Haberman complimented Sanders for sitting there and taking the mean stuff.

And number three, that the White House Correspondence dinner is happening at all. Is that about it? I think those are the broad strokes, yeah. So let's start with number one by listening to the joke Wolf made about Sanders. I actually really like Sarah. I think she's very resourceful. Like she burns facts. And then she uses that ash to create a perfect sense.

smoky eye. Like maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's lies. It's probably lie. Do we want to hear one more offensive joke? Yeah, by all means. Offensive in air quotes about Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Here we go. And I'm never really sure what to call Sarah Huckabee Sanders. You know, is it Sarah Sanders? Is it Sarah Huckabee Sanders? Is it Cousin Huckabee? Is it anti-Huckabee Sanders? Like, what's Uncle Tom but for white women who disappoint other white women? It's culture. Is there anything better than the uncomfortable laughter

of the White House Press Corps? Yeah, that to me is this big a highlight of this thing as any of the jokes. No, absolutely. And they do those crowd shots where everybody's looking at each other and kind of smiling. And like, do I laugh here?

Yeah. Am I on camera? Every year you watch. And there's always either like a half-second delay between the audio feeds for that because they always seem to be reacting kind of late. It's either that or just all of these journalists literally lack a sense of humor. So I think both of those two things could be true. Here's the key question here.

Are you offended by any of the jokes? No. I listened to this. I caught some of the highlights the night of the dinner and then listen to what I believe to be a longer cut yesterday. And then today went and re-listened to the whole thing, which I I had already listened to 95% of because I was in search of the thing I was supposed to be offended by. Or just maybe listening to it from start to finish my opinion would change.

I am absolutely perplexed by this. Yeah, because when you hear the whole thing, you realize like 17 of the 20 minutes are just like jokes about politics, right? Yeah. Benign jokes that nobody on earth could be offended by. Yeah. So we're really talking about like two minutes worth of material about people that work in the Trump White House. But two minutes. I mean, every year.

there is someone that is overly offended by the jokes at the White House correspondent. Right? Yes. And, but it's never a media firestorm like this. And you don't usually see journalists taking formal exception to the, to the, to the, to the, to the humor of the guest, I mean, of the, of the comedian. But isn't this just because this is a proxy fight for other thing, which is Trump versus the White House, Trump versus the White House press corps? Oh, yeah. I'm sure there's a lot of that stuff at play.

But that's what... That's all it is, right? But it almost makes less sense, right? The idea that you would be... The idea that of all of the things to be indignant, to be indignant about your own participation event, of all the things you could point at, the comic that someone else hired and put in front of you is what...

I mean, why would you... Like, what? I don't even get it. Part of the problem when I heard her act was that 20-minute set was standard issue comedy club. Sure. Right? P-word a lot.

abortion jokes, right? Things like that, right? That you would hear at any comedy club. Sure. Totally. But I think this group, what they want is political satirist guy, right? They want a person who's coming in there and kind of flattering the media by making jokes about, you know, the press, right? Sure.

And the whole relation, you know, the whole, oh, did you see Marty Parrots's diarist in the New Republic this week? Right. Yeah, those Washington Monthly editors, aren't they underpaid? Get a full employment act for them. Yeah, right. Weirdly, I think that would have gone over well with the crowd, even though everyone in home were totally baffled. So I think that was part of it. The weird irony here to me is so the longstanding criticism of this dinner, right?

It is that it promotes chumminess between the press and the people they cover, right? They're supposed to be holding to account. And yet, then you have Michelle Wolf come up there and come up there and you have people saying, this is the AP's Meg Kinard. Quote, it made the chasm between journalists and those who don't trust us even wider. So by being chummy with the politicians at the dinner, we made the public distrust us. But by attacking the politicians at the dinner, we also made the public distrust us, but for a different reason. Right now, we just reverse the polarity of the problem. It's so dumb.

It's people who are just like very self-conscious about the fact that this dinner is ridiculous. And they're like, and now we, they feel like all eyes are on them and they have to formally back off of this of Michelle Wolf's joke. I mean, it's just so dumb. It's just so, I mean, first of all, that, I mean, that Margaret Talib, is that her name? Am I saying that correctly? I think so. President of the White House Correspondents Association. Yeah, she was on Stettler, on Brian Stettler show.

Stelter, yeah. Oh, sorry, Stelter Show. And said, her only regret is that those 15 minutes the Michelle Wolves bit are defining a four-hour night. As long as I've been alive, or I've been cognizant of the White House Correspondence dinner, the 15 minutes of that the comic gets up there and makes jokes are the only minutes that anyone cares about. Thank God they define the night.

Thank God, yeah. We could have somebody boringly talking about the freedom of the press. And nobody would watch that. This isn't like, this isn't like, oh, the lion tamer that we hired didn't inform us that his lions were wild and they ran and they rampaged through the event killing people.

This is Michelle Wolf, a comic who has a track record who has, I'm sure, a million hours of YouTube videos that you can go watch right now who was hired and given free reign to do whatever she wanted. Right. And they're acting like she's that somehow

she is the failure of this? Yeah. I don't get. If she went up there and said the most offensive jokes possible, it's, I mean, what would the, I mean, if it matched her resume up to that point, what are we surprised about?

Yeah, and she joked about that in the routine, right? Yeah. You didn't research me, which would seem to be actually true, right? I mean, people, it's like, oh, wait, she's, she makes these, she's, you know, really crossing a lot of lines here. By the way, the performative outrage was also really funny in this. It's so done. By the way, I'm sure you have a list there.

I just was like pulled from a New York MAG article that, first of all, Anthony Scaramucci, of course, called it an atrocity. This is the guy who ripped all of his colleagues on the record to the New Yorker, right? CNN's Jeff Zelani said it was embarrassment. Washington Post Paul Fari dubbed it downright nasty. Kyle Cheney of Politico said she had, Wolf had, quote. quote, undermined an otherwise meaningful night. And the New York Times, Peter Baker, lamented that she had not, quote, advanced the cause of journalism. Yeah.

First of all. That's comedy. Advancing the cause of journalism. What undermined an otherwise meaningful night? Yeah. That's just ridiculous. And here's the thing. Go to any of those political reporters who tweeted that and say, hey, for your next piece, it would be appropriate if you took like five miles off your fastball.

Don't hold the administration quite to account in your next piece. Yeah. Do something that's a little more polite for the occasion. Sure. what those reporters tell you if you said that. You're going to tell a comedian, do 80% of your act? This is a huge night for Michelle Wolfe. Yeah.

She's got a national show starting up. This is like your coming out party. Of course she's going to do the whole act. Here with my favor was Matt and Mercedes Schlapp. Yes. He a former co-clobbist. She, a Trump White House official who tweeted. A former talking head.

Right, that they walked out. Are you ever a former talking head? Don't you just going back to being a talking head? Walked out early because they were offended. And then Michael Calderona Politico pointed out that they were at the NBC, MSNBC after party. So they were offended enough to walk out of the routine, but then they were, of course, wanted to see everybody at the after party.

Sure. So actually not offended, just in a performative way. By the way, speaking of walking out, Maggie Haberman's line about how it was so brave of Sarah Huckabee Sanders to not walk out. First of all, no, it is not more brave. The easier thing to do is to sit there with a straight face and take it. I've been in that position. I mean, not in a roast. Wait, you've been roasting?

No, but like when you. I miss the roastmaster general going in on you. The most awkward thing she could have done is get up and walk out because she would have had to face questions about it for the rest of her life. Yeah, I think, I think you're right. Like grimacing and kind of, you know, eye rolling what she did on the dais there. Yeah. Be careful if you talk about her eyes, people are going to say you're insulting her appearance. Okay.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Just saying she's rolling her eyes. I think that was okay. So let's get to the Haberman thing. This is part two of offense theater, right? Oh my gosh. Did you think in your life you would see a Maggie Haberman, Kumail Nanjani Twitter War? And I hate when people do this is 2018 tweets, but here we are.

Pretty impressive stuff. So Haberman's tweet, as you said, the press secretary sat there and absorbed intense criticism of her physical appearance or job performance and so forth instead of walking out on national television. It's impressive. Now, Johnny comes back and says, quote, they call you liars. They call Mexicans rapists. They call Muslims murderers. They support white supremacists. But someone calls them out on what they do.

And suddenly they're heroes for not walking out. And then he continues. I ask Maggie, NYT, to quote the line. where Michelle intensely criticized Huckabee's appearance. Also, this feud took a very weird turn where he claimed that she unfollowed him, who knew they were following each other on Twitter, and then she came back that he had unfollowed her first. So I don't...

Fantastic work. Definitely got into the weird. Fantastic work all around. Yeah. Listen, you can't... There's a smart point that other people have made that for all of the... equivocation that major White House correspondents have done in regards to Donald Trump. You know, I mean, you were getting at this.

They're not, the racist things that he said, they're not, we're not going to call it racist. We're going to couch this a million different ways. If we are going to call a racist, it's going to be at the end of a 12-hour all-hands meeting in which we decide to use certain terms, you know, racially charged instead of rate, whatever. And then to just get wrong what she had done that was so offensive. Right. I mean, just to not to like to split hairs to such a ridiculous degree when it comes to the White House and then to just just to like not and just fall victim to your own failure to understand or comprehend when it comes to a comic routine. She just so, so she later retreated to the softball coach line.

That's what she said was offensive about. That's what she said that they were attacking her appearance. How many times you have to go through the transcript to find that? The one, the one thing I would say in, in Haberman's defense here, which I was. I don't, not in favor of the tweet. Brian, the weekly, weekly Brian Curtis, Maggie Haberman, defense corner. All right, here we go. There is this point where people start to say, and non-Johnny said this,

it's extremely obvious that Huckabee is one of your sources. I do a better job of trying to hide that fact in the future. This is like a thing of current media criticism on Twitter where you think you understand how the media works. Right, right. It is really, really unlikely that Sarah Huckabee Sanders is feeding Maggie Haberman, much of anything of use. Yeah.

But as someone who covers the White House, they have a really complicated relationship, right, that is tended to probably on a daily, if not hourly basis. Right. Right. Yelling, screaming, non-returned calls, et cetera, et cetera, right? That's just how these intense beats work. Right. Whoever's on them.

And I think one of these things is like, Habrim was getting a ward last night at that dinner. And then Sanders goes in there and this happens. And it's almost like a hand grenade is thrown into this. relationship. Where all of a sudden like, you know, something I am tending to on a daily basis, not to forgive Trump because no one has done

more to undermine the Trump administration through reporting the Maggie Haberman, nobody in the world, right? But it just throws a hand grenade in this relationship and I think part of it is like, oh my gosh, you know, things have gotten out of whack, right? I have to do something. I think that goes into it. I don't think it's one of those things where it's like,

this is my trusted source and I've got a cape for her in front of a nation, you know. No, I think that's true. and I think that there's a degree to which, God, Michelle, Michelle Wolf is, in a lot of ways,

I mean, she has been on the daily show, right? I mean, in a lot of ways, she's very similar to, um, some of the less,

uh, outrageous or perceived to be outrageous hosts that have come before. Mm-hmm. But she is a different sort of comic and her, and her, her, her, her,

her comedy at the correspondent center was, you're right. It wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't this sort of like, demure sort of sat. satire that maybe they were hoping, I mean, that they were expecting. Or that they just generally would like, would prefer.

There were all those tweets say, it shouldn't hurt. It should just sing. No, if you're actually, if you're tweeting rules of comedy, you don't understand comedy. Like, seriously, like, if George Carlin were, if George Carlin were alive and had Twitter, he would not be informing us of the rules via, like, daily Twitter thread. No, it's, I think that it's, I think that one of the ways in which the sort of general generational divide that you see a lot in, you know, liberalism over the ages is manifest right now. There's, you know, there's some people for whom the status quo is not out of reach,

is sort of like, especially for the sort of liberal journalist journalism establishment. It's a different crew than some of the people for whom Michelle Wolf might be the target audience. And it's a little, and it's, and I think for, in a lot of ways, John Stewart was sort of bridge the divide between the two halves, you know? Yes, yes. He was still cutting edge enough, but and he would go just far enough or whatever. And it was very nailed down factually. I hate saying, I hate even making this case because I don't feel like Michelle

Wolf did anything even a little bit wrong. But I do think that there's a, there is a, you'll see a lot from certain internet writers who think that Sarah Huckabee Sanders is worse than Donald Trump because she's knowingly abetting his lives, right? That is, that is a definite point of view of a specific part of the sort of lefty, internet, right? Or as bad as Donald Trump, sure. Right. And, and, and for certainly for people like Maggie Haberman, the opposite is true, that the fact that she has to endure working for Donald Trump is evidence of her, her inherent goodness, and that she should be spared this sort of smear,

right? When Donald, when the White House decides to offer her and Kellyan Conway up as the fodder for the White House correspondent center, they could have just not sent anyone. But when they, when they set them up to, to act like it is for anyone to be offended on their behalf is just sort of It's so silly. They're going to be the targets. They're the ones who are there. I like your point, too, about different audiences because this got tweeted in my feed. Michelle Wolf taught quizzling journalists what the First Amendment looks like when you don't care about access.

Okay. But, you know, the people who work at the White House press corps, their job is not to roast Trump, right? Right. It may be very satisfying to roast Trump, Michelle Wolf, to roast Trump, people on Twitter who get on there every day. Like, oh, yeah. Kind of get some big audience for this one. Here we go. Here's some funny jokes about Trump.

But that's not Maggie Haberman's job, right, like at all or is none of these people's jobs to do that. Of course not. So I'm all for pushing back against the silly tweets defending Sarah Huckabee Sanders and all that stuff and anything they write, you know, to be under the lens of scrutiny. That is obviously okay with me. Yeah. But this idea that this is what, you know, this is like the only way to communicate about Trump is to do a routine at the White House correspondence during. Yeah. That's not exactly it.

Here's my final question before you move on. what do we do with this thing are you for canceling it are you in that camp yeah I mean I don't care what they do they can do whatever the hell they want with their time

but like if but like the idea that they didn't realize this was a bad look you know before Michelle Wolf now was the time it's just so dumb when the president by the way

Donald Trump was in Michigan doing a rally on the day of the event and he skipped it for the second year in a row breaking them with the tradition the modern tradition I didn't even mention that called the said all kinds of things that CNN called lies and misstatements said of the press,

they hate your guts. Yeah. Right? That was... Clearly, the correspondent center was on his mind. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, it was counter-programming, right?

Yeah. Yeah, I don't, I'm one of those things on the correspondence. I've never been, I never wanted to go. It does not interest me other than something weird to look at from afar. But a lot of people, it should be said, do want to go. That those like... Oh, everyone in Washington wants to go. Not just Washington.

I mean, those guest tickets are like, I mean, I knew people, some, you know, some social standing in New York and L.A. who've just tripped over themselves to try to accept an invitation to that, you know, and go to the after parties to do everything else. Speaking of that, by the way, Paul Farhey's piece in the Washington Post said the celebrity cadre was small and not quite a list. Kathy Griffin. Comedy Central's Jordan CLEpper. Stormy Daniels attorney Michael Avinotti. And Baltimore Orioles legend Brooks Robinson. What?

What? Weird, like, baseball old-timers element to the White House Correspondence Dinner. Also, by the way, I watched, everybody was comparing this to the Imus, Don Imus, 1996, that he was the comedian. And as with this one, exactly what you said, it did not look particularly offensive in retrospect. Yeah. There's some jokes like about Bill Clinton having sex, basically, and all that kind of stuff. But I actually thought flop sweat was just a metaphorical thing, but he was glistening by the end of the. by the end of the routine.

He was a shiny person by the end of the routine. He was clearly uncomfortable up there. Yeah. I mean, listen, I don't, we got to get at it. We got to move on. I don't want to belabor. Please, belabor. I don't want to belabor the, you know, the weakness of Taleb and the White House

Correspondents Association. But seriously, if your formal statement after this is, I want to tell you how much your kind words meant to me following my personal remarks at last night's, Point House Correspondent Center about the roots of... Anyway. And that whole thing about unity in there, right? Yeah. There's not...

As several people point out on Twitter, the point of this is not unity, for what, you know? Yeah. Unity to defend the rights of the press, okay, but... It's so silly. The entertainer's monologue was not in the spirit of that mission. Seriously, like, name a thing.

No one has the balls to, like, name a thing that she said that was offensive. No. Maggie Hamer didn't finally quoted a line after whatever. You just felt like it's people You have to get out there ahead of it And you're absolutely wrong The good news is that this is the best thing

That could have possibly happened In Michelle Wolf Oh, she's a big star Yeah, she went in with You know, a rather relatively low-key rating And now is the biggest product Next week, all of a sudden you're interested, right? She has a Netflix show coming out

It's going to be, I mean, I should And the interest of full disclosure One of her writing writers is a friend of mine Dan St. Germain But I have no idea if you wrote for this Finally, at the end of the thing, you just close that whopper. I was really offended. Not exactly Sean Haney and Michael Cohen.

I was really offended by the entire speech until I realized that my friend was involved. All right, David, now it's time for our 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. Let's start with the new royal baby, one Louis Arthur Charles, who is fifth in line to the British throne. There was a clumsily worded BBC tweet. I don't know if you saw this. This is how the tweet was worded, Royal Baby, colon, quote, new mums have so much unnecessary pressure, close quote.

Which got a lot of people to tweet that the BBC had a great get to snare the first quote from the royal baby. It just sounded like, it sounded like he was, Louis himself was being quoted. That's from Anthony Gale. In Boston Twitter news, David, always fertile territory. It's been a long time because we've been to Boston Twitter. This is from the ringer's Alan Siegel during game five of the Celtics Bucks series, which took place in Boston, and of course featured Bucksguard Eric Bledsoe. Literally every sports fan in Boston tweeted, quote, I haven't heard a Bledso sucks chant in New England since the 90s.

Okay, that's great. Good stuff. But this week's group prize goes to every tweet about Kanye West's support of Donald Trump, I think. This is Sean Fennancy wrote about this on the ringer. There were four big giant recurring jokes. if I may take them in order. Number one, breaking Kanye is the new VA secretary. That was a big one.

That's good. Number two, Kanye does not care about black people, a reversal of his famous post-Turcane Katrina declaration about George W. Bush. I remember well, yeah. This is also a T-shirt now already, by the way. Number three, referring to Kanye's famous Bill Cosby Innocent tweet, quote, starting to suspect this guy isn't the best judge of character. And finally, a joke made by ideologically opposite sparring partners, Jonathan Chate and John Padouritz.

It takes a lot to bring these people together, someone who studied that feud over the years. Quote, Trump has driven a lot of neocons out of the GOP, but he's brought in Kanye. He should be given the editorship of commentary change his name to Neo Kanye. Neo Kanye, David. If you merge Kanye West in the journal commentary, congratulations. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. Thanks to, I know. It's Jeff Herber, Samuel Evers, WB, Nick Theory, and the always productive Matthew Zitland for that one. Before we talk about the journalist who helped bring Bill Cosby to Justice, David, let's take a quick break.

This is J.J. Reddick, here to talk to you about the JJ Reddick podcast, part of the Ringer Podcast Network. Currently, I play in the NBA for the Philadelphia 76ers, but you may know me from my previous teams, the LA Clippers, Milwaukee Bucks, and the Orlando Magic, or from my college days at Duke University. Being a professional basketball player, I have a great opportunity to talk to a lot of interesting people. And the podcast is a place where I can share those conversations with you, the listener. On my show, I sit down with athletes, celebrities, and a variety of other special guests. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the JJ Redding podcast on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Our second topic, David, I'd like to call Just Cause, the conviction of Bill Cosby on three counts of sexual assault.

Don't laugh. This is a serious story. No, I just took me a minute to get them. The pun headline, the conviction of Bill Cosby on three cows of sexual assault last week offered a measure of justice if a tiny and utterly insufficient one given the amount of terror Cosby has been accused of. It also sent me back to the role journalists played in setting these events in motion, one that's fairly different, I think, than the one journalist played in the Harvey Weinstein and Bill O'Reilly cases. Let us review, shall we? Go right ahead, yeah. February 2014.

This is right after Dylan Farrow. letter about Woody Allen. Right. And been published in Nick Christos blog in the New York Times. Tom Skokka writes this piece for RIP Gawker called Who Wants to Remember Bill Cosby's Multiple Sex Assault Accusations? Yes. And his answer, as he goes through it, is nobody, basically nobody wanted to live in a world

where Bill Cosby was a sexual predator. It was too much to handle dot, dot, dot. The whole thing had been, and it remained something walled off from our collective understanding of Bill Cosby. What was fascinating about that is, as he pointed out, all this stuff was in the public domain. Oh, yeah. And it wasn't just, you know, in some weird thing. It was in People magazine.

It was in the Today show. Yeah. They had the accusers. It was all public knowledge, but we had just decided sort of weirdly or some of us had as a society that just wasn't that important. Or it wasn't, you know, we could just kind of willfully forgotten about it. Yeah. And it was just interesting to see the world. journalism or Skokin in particular played there.

I think saying not that important is actually really, it's a really kind of silent way to look at this because the issue isn't just about we, the consuming public, but it's also about the media, right? Yeah. I think a lot of the times, you know, the mainstream media is accused of being gatekeepers in any number of ways, you know, all the time. But I think one way in which it's very true. is that they do drive the national conversation to a large degree and that the decision was made either directly or more likely indirectly that this was not a this was not a story with any legs this was not a story with any pickup this was not a thing that the the the public is interested in reading about i mean that's why it's gone right it's not gone because some magical force of of community brain made it disappear no and and and and to that point editors just saying geez hasn't

Isn't this been adjudicated? Have we already done this piece? Yes, 100%. Didn't we do this back in 2006? Yeah. When the Andrea Constan, you know, civil suit was being filed. Yep. And then you just kind of go, well, if we, it's sort of funny because it's also a structural

problem with journalism. Often you just, people tell themselves they can't follow a story because there's no obvious like. Hook? Yeah. Hook. There you go. Peg.

Yeah. So why should we write in, and, you know, Tom's whole point was, let's just right about it because it's terrible. That October Hannibal Burris then works the Cosby accusations into his routine. Let's listen to a little

bit of that. It's even worse, but real Cosby has the fucking smuggest old black man public persona than I hate. Get some TV. Pull your pants up, black people. I was on TV in the 80s.

I can talk down to you because I had a successful set-cock. Yeah, it was great women, Bill Cosby. So I kind of brings you down a couple of nights. I don't curse on stage. But yeah, you're a rapist, so I can take you saying lots of motherfuckers is on Bill Cosby himself if you weren't a rapist. What's fascinating about that is Hamill Burris, obviously not a reporter, but that gives the Cosby accusations a vehicle to surf around on Twitter, right? That's it.

Yeah. Because then you put it on social media and everybody's like, look at this. Whoa. You know? Yeah, I think something that's funny. I think that what you're seeing is not just, I mean, there's a lot of ways in which this, you know, Skokka and then Hanwell Burris helped this reach a sort of broader consciousness. But what you're also, what you're definitely seeing is an escalating scale of virality or memeworthiness.

There you go. Gawker has a certain, or had a certain, you know, currency on social media that, a New York Times piece from 10 years ago or a clip of the Today show from ever long ago did not would did not would not would not have and certainly a 15 second Hannibal Burris you know video has more virality than than even the Gawker piece. Absolutely. And that's how that's how news can get made right now. And weirdly a month after the Burris routine, Cosby on his website, this is per a New York magazine article asked the internet to meme him. This is like the, the ultimate. case of old celebrity wants to be on the internet. And speaking of virality, you get Bill Cosby and his famous NBC late 80s, early 90s, sweaters with taglines like, my two favorite things, Jello pudding and Rape. And it pushes the story back into everybody's spotlight.

And I thought what was also fascinating about this. I mentioned this earlier with the Gawker Post is when people got interested in the story again, all the raw materials were out there in the world to find. I mentioned people in 2006, right after he had settled the civil suit with Andrew Constan for what we later learned was more than $3 million, right? Interviewing three of his accusers. 2005, a year before, Tamara Green goes on the Today Show and gives an interview about what she says happened. Then there's this, you know, Philly magazine piece that a lot of people pointed to from 2006, which is called Dr. Huxable and Mr. Hyde. and the journalist Robert Huber was talking, was writing about, that was when Cosby was doing his strange callout tour across America.

But he also interlaced that with the accusations of these women and, you know, what that did to his image and right. And essentially this kind of just weird split image we have of this person. But, you know, it's interesting. The other thing that's kind of fascinating to be about this was this idea of, you know, pushing a little further about why people didn't care. Tanahazi Coates writes this big piece about Bill Cosby in the Atlantic, right? It's his first about that same tour. He later wrote about it and said it was his first big break. He'd been struggling to make ends meet.

He'd been, you know, lost a few jobs, right? Yeah. This is his first chance. And he didn't write about these allegations because he felt like, look, I can prove the stuff about what Bill Cosby is telling people at these things. I can make my case against that. Right. This exists in this kind of blurry world where I don't have a question. court, you know, a non-civil, a criminal court case I can point to.

Yeah. And so he just kind of dispensed with it. Right. He wrote later, at the time I wrote the piece, I believe that Bill Cosby was a rapist. But that wasn't in the original piece. And again, I think, so that's another part of this, right? It's not just the, didn't we already do this? There's no peg for this.

There's no hook to this. Yeah. But it's, I can't prove this. So I'm just not going to write about it, right? It's the standards of journalism sort of tugging you in the other direction. Definitely, definitely. And I think that it, before we completely leave, didn't we already do this behind? I mean, without defending anyone that made that call, I think it was, I think it's fair to say that the, that our, as a society, our perception was whatever minor torment Bill Cosby went through after the Today Show.

I mean, after the first round of accusations, that was the punishment that our society had sort of deemed appropriate up to that point. Yeah. I mean, certainly there are people who were accused of rape who go to jail, but I'm talking about just celebrities. Like, there is some,

I think that, you know, that as crazy as it was, that there was like, oh, he's already dealt with that. The fact that he had to go through this minor PR curfuffle and pay somebody $3 million, that is the punishment that we were accustomed. And a People magazine article. Yeah.

And that was it. And he really shouldn't have any professional consequences. Cosby, of course, is also intervening in the press to try to keep these things out. This is this famous AP interview, November 6, 2014, an otherwise toothless interview about his art exhibit that he and his wife have done with one of the Smithsonian galleries in Washington. And here's what happened when the interviewer Brett Zonker asked about the allegations. I didn't want to, I have to ask about your name coming up in the news. recently regarding this comedian? No, no, we don't answer that.

Okay. I just wanted to ask if you wanted to respond at all about whether any of that was true? There's no response. Can I ask you, with the persona that people know about Bill Cosby, should they believe anything differently? There is no comment about that. And I'll tell you why. I think you were told. I don't want to compromise your integrity, but I don't talk about it.

As the interview wound down, Cosby then continued the conversation. The camera was still running, and Cosby and his wife were wearing lapel microphones. Thank you very much. Thank you. I appreciate your time. Thank you. Now, can I get something from you? What's that?

That none of that will be shown. And I would appreciate it if it was scuttled. I would appreciate it if it was scuttled. I totally forgot about that. And he goes on to imply that he and his wife had chosen to grant an interview of the AP because he thought the wire service had the, quote, integrity not to ask such questions. They would roll over. Right.

And the AP, I originally read the APPs, by the way, that moved across the wires. They put that quote out later. but the original piece read Cosby declined to comment when asked for his response during the interview. A couple of the things. Katie J.M. Baker and Newsweek did interesting work in getting going back to the victims, getting them to talk again. And then I think what's so fascinating now post Me Too or in the middle of Me Too, I should say, is that New Yorker cover from July 2015 that had all of Cosby's victims on it. Yeah. And, you know, again, we've talked about, like, after Weinstein and after O'Reilly, how difficult it is to get people to come forward and talk about this and, you know, the barriers to doing that and how tricky that is.

Everybody was on the cover of the magazine. Yeah. July 2015. A huge deal at the time, but I feel almost unfairly forgotten now. Yeah. And what a, what a just amazing act that was to pull all that together. Yeah, it's really incredible. I mean, it's really, I think the biggest thing, I think the most stunning thing to me in sort of relitigating for myself, going back through all of this information over the past couple of days, was how, just how the demeanor of coverage can change in such a short amount of time.

And again, I'm not, that's not, I'm not trying to assail anybody that worked on any of these beats. but yeah I mean just the it's not the presumption of innocence the presumption of guilt it's the presumption of possibility and I think that there was a sort of dismissive attitude that permeated the coverage of this the first time around even when you bring on as accusers even when you you you know I'm sure when they when they approached various outlets before when they you know try to talk to anybody but the idea that that that that you know that you know that you know, this was a, this was potentially a very problematic man as opposed to a celebrity going through a hard time. Right.

It's kind of broadly defined. I don't know. It's a pretty impressive shift one way or the other. All right, David, now let's move on to our final topic, which I don't want to call back after this, but it's such a good headline. I'll call it back after this. You have to call it that. Overused headline of the week. So here's the timeline of Mike Francesa.

Thank you. You're going to help me out here. Last year, Frances has announced his retirement from New York Sports Radio Station WFAN. I remember that. He embarks on a goodbye tour that lasts more than a year. Definitely remember that. He leaves the station in December. Yep.

He explores his options. What am I going to do? Radio podcasting, something like that. And then he decides he's coming back to WFAN to essentially take his old job back. Yeah. And here he is talking about his return. last week. I really never thought I would be back at fans.

His show will move his replacements, Chris Carlin, Maggie Gray, and Bard Scott out of drive time to a less glamorous spot. I ask you, David, did Mike Francesa do anything wrong here? You go to the sports metaphors first. Okay, absolutely. There's a sort of boxing, I mean, the old boxing carnage of, I mean, you always retire after a match, right? Regardless of whether or not you're sure you're going to retire.

You retire when the spot, when the cameras are on you. You get to take your victory lap. you retire, if you retire 18 months after your last fight, it doesn't matter how famous you were, nobody cares. Okay. Right. So there's a little bit, I can. So he was the champ.

Right. Tired as the champ. You retire with the belt. I mean, if you want to talk about, I mean, other champions and I know everyone's probably expecting this is going to go here. But I feel like there was a Rick Flair 30 for 30. I can make a wrestling comment. A wrestling point of view on this podcast.

You're very welcome to. I wrote about this pretty recently. When Rick Flair retired, Ressomania, Sean Michaels retired him, it was long billed as his, you know, farewell match. but in the storyline he had to win to keep his job he lost but everyone knew that was going to be his last fight after the match rick flair is just crying in the ring and this is rick flair is one of the great wrestlers of all time he's a great actor these were not acting tears this was the tears of a man who had suddenly come to terms with the fact that he was no longer going to be allowed to do the thing he loved to do sure um tough stuff he didn't have a you know he he had spent his entire adult life like not functionally living with his family and he had to go go back and hang out with him. You know, he had to, I mean, he had to, he wasn't going to get to be one of, he could travel with WWE, but he wasn't going to be one of the boys in the same way anymore.

He eventually, as soon as his WWE contract ran up, he ended up wrestling again. He was wrestling against Hulk Hogan and Australia and then in TNA wrestling. So there we go. So much for that. Yeah. You know, retirement, when that's all you know, there's no such thing as a retirement. All right? You might stop doing what you're doing, but you're never going to quit.

No, absolutely. And I think he's, you know, from he did all those spots with Bill on the BS podcast, right? Yeah. Over the last couple months while he's been waiting to figure out his next thing. Mm-hmm. And he obviously has lots of opinions about sports. He has not done talking about sports. Certainly not.

I think one interesting thing about this, too, is so when I interviewed him last year, he was very hinting at the possibility with me, not quite saying I've been hinting that he wanted to maybe look into something in podcasting. Mm-hmm. And I think one thing that was very revealing about this, he made apparently report. quarterly $3 million a year or last year at the fan. Yeah. He goes out and explores podcasting opportunities. And guess what? Podcasting for all that is said about podcasting, including here at the Ringer Podcast Network, right?

This is not yet the place where you're going to go make megabucks if you're somebody like that. You can make a lot of money podcasting. I've heard different numbers thrown around, but you're right. There's definitely not. Not $3 million. No one's going to offer you $3 million up front to do a New York regional radio show on a platform. And it's sports radio, the dinosaur of medium, right?

Right. Where the money still is. Absolutely. It's just so amazing to me. Not to mention, by the way, that half the podcast things that sprout up turn to be like turn out to be fly by night things that don't actually exist. Yeah. And don't pay any of the money that they promise, right?

Yeah. It's sports radio. You're the big names. Sports radio is the beacon of stability. Think about that for a second. Yeah. No, I mean, it certainly was that, were those beeps in the audio that we just heard part of the original recording?

Yeah. So this is... No, no, no, no. I think it's... I think we should leave him in because I make... Because that's a great parallel here. This is, uh, his felicity with the landline.

This is, that, that was... That sounded very much like having a conversation with your grandfather. And I think that, like, his, his perception of what a podcast was was only a little bit beyond that point. I mean, I'm sure... He told me last year he had never listened to one. Yeah. And I think that is...

And I'm sure that there were some very well-meaning people that were telling him, yeah, yeah, you can make lots of money doing podcasts. Like, like, this is the perfect next step for you. Yeah. But it's just a different thing. I mean, it's like, it would be like trying to get your parents to invest in Bitcoin or something. You know, I mean, it's just like, okay, I believe you, whatever you're saying, but I'm just going to keep this IRA, you know? This is going to be okay for the rest of my life.

What also makes a story entertaining is that people in sports radio just hate other people in sports radio. Like we, you and I, David, if we were going to get a drink tonight, we would talk shit about some other print journalists, probably just as a matter, of course. But radio people hate their colleagues. Yeah, we did that bit on Radio Row at the Super Bowl. Right. People just find out just random. They get in the same room and they start threatening to punch each other. I don't think, I don't think friendship is even possible in sports radio.

I think like the highest form of, you know, any kind of relationship is grudging respect maybe. Yeah, sure. I've talked to sports radio with people before and I'll say, I'm just amazed at how, you know, off evil the medium is, how much people hate each other and they look at me like I don't know what I'm talking about. And then like two minutes later, they're slamming other people in the business. Yeah. Like it's just so ingrained that they don't know. So, like, when he left, just set off this chain of events where Boomer Sison was upset. He and his old pal, Chris Russo on Sirius, made a joke about WFA in, which made all the people there mad.

Right. You know, Chris Carlin, who was a former fan guy who then came back to do this show, is now being displaced as mad and sent a text or something. It is unbelievable. Yeah. I mean, if you're one of his replacements, I think you have the right to be a little bit aggrieved. Yeah. Of course, but should you be aggrieved at? your bosses because he says, okay, I want my old job back. Or this is a good, this is a good idea.

And apparently to hear Francesa tell it, his bosses at Intercom said, we want to make this deal with you, but you have to host a drive time radio show in New York. Yeah. So she'd be mad at them. They gave up on you after like one ratings period. Yeah. By the way. Also, I don't know how you're aware, if you're how aware you are of this.

The pleasure that New York media columnists, like Bob Reisman and Phil Mushnick and from a saner place, Andrew Marshaun and Neil Best, get out of writing about Francesa, it's incredible. If you thought like Skip Bayliss was supplying Richard Deich with material, you ain't see nothing yet. It's, I mean, this is like story after story in the in the tabloids up there. It's really incredible. Anyway, the other, the other underrated part of this, I think is interesting.

Let's listen to one part of that interview where he talks about it, which is that this is as much a deal about Francesa going back to radio as IP. Listen. What really brought me back was the fact that I needed certain things from I wanted certain things from I think of the country. That's part of what I wanted. And what they wanted was me back on the fan. So that's why I'm back on the fan.

He wants to do an app, right? Right. He wants to own the name Mike and the Mad Dog. Right. He wants access to his 30 years of backlog of radio bits and segments and famous meltdown. downs and all that kind of stuff. So, and the company said, you have to come host a show to get that material. That seems like a fair trade.

Yeah. But what's interesting, so my favorite sports station in Dallas, the ticket, there's an unofficial website that just keeps track of all their stuff. I go there all the time to find stuff. Yeah. Relive stuff, find funny segments I missed, all that kind of stuff. That's what this is about. Yeah.

It's owning your material as a sports radio host. Sure. Which I feel is very sort of, you know, I don't know, 2018, but at least 2012. right is it's like what a print journalist used to feel right like all my stuff is valuable I want to do something with it and that's what he's essentially trying to do sure yeah I mean that all makes sense right I mean I guess I guess what I guess what most people are sort of reacting to on this is just well first of all the just the sublime weirdness of the the entire thing right that he would go on a it's sublimely weird a year long farewell tour and then what a four month retirement yeah

before he got before he came back to action whether it was he guys dragged or he just sort of showing back up at work again i mean it it does feel like that right that this is just like the big boss finally retired but he just somehow just kept coming to his office all the time and kept calling meetings and kept you know everybody kind of looks at each other maybe he's not retired um but yeah i mean i don't think that i don't i don't think that the i don't think that the i'm interested in the IP angle it's really weird to me that this is something that would have been, clearly must have been in the works around the retirement time, but didn't get, but didn't get, you know, negotiated at that point in time. Yeah, maybe he thought you could come to a deal with him.

And then it turns out that was an unbreakable, you have to come back. I mean, if any, if maybe there's a best thing, wrestling parallel, a better wrestling parallel, which is that this is just feels like a work, right? This feels like, this feels like for, that it all just must be fake. This was the plan the whole, the whole time. So some of those aforementioned media columnist insisted that during his retirement tour, that he was just jockeing for a new and better contract. And I asked him about it.

He absolutely denied it. But here he is back on the fan. Two things I want to hit before we go. One is that it is hugely important for Francesa to be number one. That is like the thing for him. And by number one, I mean number one over Michael Kay. Of course, yeah. Who do we need to do as disclosure, David?

Your old podcast partner, Peter Rosenberg's on his show. I have inflicted as hell this episode. You are. This is amazing. We're going to have like 45 minutes. of full disclosure after this ends. He wants to be number one. So he comes back and let's say Michael K

wins a ratings period or something like that. Whoa, right? Yeah. Like that is just so built. And Francis is the first one to tell you this. Being number one is built into his DNA. He wants to be number one. He cannot imagine being number two.

So that'll be interesting. Is that part of what, have they lost footing to Michael K? They have. Is that part of what's brought him back? The new crew, yes. No, but is that part of it? Do you think what's motivating Francesa? The parent company, I think definitely, right?

Because they don't want to lose, right? This is expensive stuff. The second thing, speaking of just strange politics embedded in all this, this is from Andrew Marchant's column today. Arod is going to be on Frances's first radio show, which is Tuesday. Now, follow the bouncing ball. Arod is the commentator on ESPN's Sunday night baseball, right? Right.

Frances's biggest competitor in New York is ESPN radio's micro- okay but Arod is going to the other show because Arod wants to or A Rod respects Francesca or whatever this is, right? So this is yet another turn of the wheel. Yeah, ESPN doesn't care about their radio division

at least not from the top. To the same degree they might care about it. I guarantee the New York guys care about it. No, I bet they do. I'm sure they've been calling and screaming. One of the other litany of weird things, at least from a pseudo outsider, like myself, is that it came out that he was coming back and has returned

date was like 72 hours later. Yeah. Oh yeah. I thought it was going to be like June or something. It was right away. When Jay Leno fake, like pseudo retired, at least like didn't they, they probably had to do some like test shows before he count back on the air. Right. I mean, there was there's like the idea I know

that he doesn't need that Francesa doesn't need reps see that he's fine. He can just sit right down and do it. But it's still weird that they're not spending a month hyping up the radio crowd for it. They're just like, get the hell back in there. We need it as soon as we can get it. Sooner the better, I guess. All right, David, that's it for this week's press box.

Thanks to our noble producer, Jim Cunningham, for making us look good. David Chewmaker, I'll see you next week for more hot takes about the media. Brian, it's been a pleasure. Bye. Okay, I believe you, whatever you're saying, but I'm just going to keep this IRA.