The Press Box - The Curious Case of Shedeur Sanders, the L.A. Times’ Broken Bias Meter, and Farewell to ‘Around the Horn’

Episode Date: March 7, 2025

Hello, media consumers! Bryan and Joel return to discuss the State of the Union address (2:04). Then, they break down the press surrounding NFL draft prospect Shedeur Sanders and the Bias Meter (21:40). They close by remembering 'Around The Horn' and FiveThirtyEight (56:43). Hosts: Bryan Curtis and Joel Anderson Producer: Stefan Anderson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's happening? It's Todd McShay, host of the McShay show at the Ringer and Spotify. Listen, I love all aspects of football from the college to the professional game, but the draft is my grind. Listen and watch the McShay show for all of my draft analysis. And if you want more, subscribe to my newsletter, the McShay report, where you can find my mock drafts and big boards and all the buzz and intel I'm hearing from NFL decision makers.

Make sure to like, follow, subscribe to the McShay show on the ringer, Spotify, and wherever you watch or listen to podcasts. And subscribe to the McShay report today for a special introductory offer. Google the McShay report or find it on the ringer.com. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox. You've got Brian Curtis, Joel Anderson, and producer Stefan Anderson, who's sitting in for Brian.

Coming up on a very big podcast, we're going to talk about the case of Shadour Sanders, falling NFL draft prospect. The LA Times' bias meter is showing. We'll say goodbye to Around the Horn and 538. I give you the journalist insult of the week. But first, with the first pick in the podcast opening segment draft, I am proud to select J-School.

Well, look, I'd like to first thank my parents, God, and Bill Simmons, not necessarily in that order. And this is just an announcement to let everybody know. We're open for business. Top pick. I'm expecting the endorsements to roll in. So Tony Sassarys, you know, whatever, Shepley's Donuts, whatever you got. You know, I'm open now.

Shipley's donuts. Ready to put on for my sitting. But no. Anyway. So, Brian, I think that we have sort of, this is perfunctorily added into J-School talking about the State of the Union address from Tuesday night. You know, like an estimated 37 million Americans, I too watched President Trump's address to the joint session. And I should say that I watched under duress because I had a five-month-old baby napping on me and I couldn't move out the couch.

I don't know what the rest of y'all's excuse was. But did you have that excuse, Brian? Or did you just? No, I didn't watch. Does that make me a bad media critic? Well, I guess it depends on how much of a media event you think this is, which I'm going to get to in a second. But look, I kind of watch the state of the union passively every year since it's coming to my, you know, field of knowledge or whatever. Like, you know, you just kind of sit on in the background.

Every night again, you kind of tune in or whatever. But I'm sure, like, whether or not I turned in or not, it was still, like, Trump is a guaranteed ratings booster. And I think Nilsen said ratings were up 13% from President Biden's final address last year, which, I mean, that's actually lower than I would have expected. because, I mean, if there was a lame, I mean, a lame duck address, I mean, the President Biden, even though people didn't kind of know which way he was going to go at the time, but it was like, is anybody really tuning in to hear Joe for the fourth time, right? Yeah, and it kind of saved him for a while, if you remember that. Because it was a feisty, Joe.

It was a strong performance. It was his last strong performance, right, in public. So, Brian, and we kind of talked this out. Over the past couple days, I've been trying to determine if I actually have any thoughts about the state of the union and the state of the media covering the state of the union, right? And I think my thoughts

about the politics here are probably predictable to anybody who's heard and talked before, so it's not really worth commenting on in that context. But there's just a couple things about Trump in the setting

that I find sort of interesting and almost contradictory. And the latter point will lead to, kind of lead to some advice for whoever wants to take it at some point. I'm not the first person

to point. at this, or point this out, but he's incredibly natural and comfortable in front of the camera, man. And that is just something that is so hard for almost anyone to do, right? Like, I mean, he never seems nervous, never seems tight. And maybe that's just because he is sort of blissfully unaware how he comes off to people, or maybe because he's being judged by standard that's different from every single one of his predecessors, right? Sure. And also, I think he's just happy the cameras are on.

I mean, I think that's what he's understood that a lot of Democratic officials have not. And this goes back to Trump trying to get on the front page of the Daily News and the Post all the time. As long as it's press, as long as people show up, as long as they're listening to me, I did it. I won, at least in my own, you know, scorecard, the scorecard in my head and increasingly for the scorecard for the nation, as we saw last year. Right, right, right, absolutely. Absolutely. And yeah, it's just like if you feed off of it, if you really want it, then you're going to do that. But like, nobody is expecting him to be a policy warrant. No one expects him to be a passionate advocate for any particular cause. He's just, he constantly gets to be in riff. And who gets to do that? Like, what an awesome place to be in when you get on the mic and you feel like you can just sort of riff. And it really doesn't matter. There's not really a consequence to the things that you say. And like that is a real gift to him that he's able to sort of tap into. over and over again, right? Absolutely. And again, it goes to that weird confluence between Donald Trump and podcasters that has occasionally resulted in Donald Trump being on a podcast. And then it's

Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man, like, look at this. Just riffing. He's doing our thing over here. I mean, he was on with Theo Vaughn, and they were talking about doing drugs and stuff. And it was just like, oh, he's kind of, he's built for that in a way that not a lot of people are because it doesn't really matter. Like, nothing really sticks to him. And nothing, you know, I felt like he's probably been in every weird situation a famous person can be in. So there's nothing that's ever really going to throw him. No, absolutely. But the second piece of this is,

why hasn't he or someone else pushed for more innovation of this particular address? Because this is sort of my attempt to be an influencer like the New York Times is Jamel Bowie, who offered the advice before the address that Democrats skip it, right? And obviously not a lot of people listen to him. But I'm looking, I don't want,

Trump to seize on this, but I don't, I'm surprised Trump hasn't done something to sort of shake up the format because it's not like people can say that he has a particular respect for the sanctity of the office, right? Like even his fiercest advocate should be able to admit that the pageantry and the ritual that comes with the office, none of that shit matters to him. That doesn't appeal to him, right? Like his White House is Mar-a-Lago. His wife ain't even really living with him, bro. You know what I mean? Like, he's not awed by the majesty of the position, right? So wouldn't that just open him? up to doing all kinds of crazy shit, like video presentations with AI. If you're really about that life, like, why didn't you run the Trump-Gaza AI video

during that? Like, right? Like, this is my policy to legislate Israel-Palestine. Like, why no celebrity guests? No, why no in-house crypto ads? And I'm just sort of surprised that he and his team haven't seized on that opportunity to do it now, you know, because it just seems like, There's no reason for anybody not to do it, it seems like, at this point.

Do you remember when the red line for State of the Union or addressed to a joint session of Congress was giving a campaign speech? Yeah. Like, no, no, this is supposed to be an occasion where you are telling us the state of the union. This is not an explicitly political speech. Joe Biden got criticized for that last year. Oh, he's out of here campaigning for re-election instead of doing this. Obviously, that is now we can bury whatever. that piece of civility was.

It's out. So you're right. Now, what is the frontier that we can go to with a presidential address like this? Yeah, I'm just, I'm kind of shocked that they had not already sort of thought that. It's people that love TV,

you know, staff a bunch of their whole team with TV people. I'm just surprised that it's still just him up there, like, you know, what's Don Rickles or something? You know, just kind of giving it, just giving it out to people, right? Look at these guys down front.

front, you know, that kind of stuff. I mean, he is kind of an old media guy at heart, you know, for all the true social stuff. I mean, he goes to a rally, right, and just like, I'm going to talk for two hours. Yeah. Or maybe I'll dance. Maybe I'll dance. Maybe we'll do a little village people. But other than that, it's me and a microphone.

It's Spalding Gray. This is what we got. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just, you know, hey, if he takes my advice, people, people, please don't blame me. I'm sure that it's already anything. But anyway. You know, Brian, as I was listening to last Monday's episode,

and you talked about your trip to the movies, and sort of like he talked about Sean Baker's plea about the theatrical exhibition and going to the theater or whatever. And your experience, you kind of thought it sucked is what it sounded like. You didn't use those exact words, but that's the impression I got. I thought it was a bad deal financially. Did you have a good time? I have a good time.

Oh, yeah. I'm there with my kids. We're eating popcorn. I mean, that huge tub that you get the free refill on. Okay. Well, this is what I'm talking about because I'm like, I still think that for all of the passive watching that we do on streaming devices, right? You know, hey, I've kind of got this movie going on in the background while I'm doing something else or while we're talking or whatever. Like, I passed a theater the other day.

Actually, I was in downtown Silver Springs with my son and I'm looking up at the theater and I'm like, boy, I bet that looks like a lot of fun if you're almost three years old. You know, as I kind of can't wait till he can follow storylines or whatever, you know, like more sophisticated storylines for movies or whatever. It seems like walking into this big, bright, fun place with a huge screen. Like, there's some sort of allure to that. And I don't think I've done it. I hadn't done it in a lot of years because my wife is not a movie person.

And I kind of been to the will of the person I'm with. But, like, I don't know. It just kind of seems like, I don't know. the idea of seeing a theater that seems like some really cool shit. And I'm like without needing to save the Sean Baker's of the world, it just seems like going to the movie for movies sake

is something that like people should kind of want to get back into and enjoy the event of it all. It's incredibly cool, it's incredibly fun, and then you're going to hand over your credit card. You're like, wow, that was $50. That was $50. That's a good night.

You got to eat, you got to watch a show? I'm sorry, with your child. This is not a night. This is the 3 o'clock in the afternoon. Night is still to come. We still got to go out to dinner. Fair point. There's a lot.

I don't know. And I'm just like, somebody tweeted at me and was like, Hey, man, have you ever seen how much it costs to go to a concert? A movie's a great deal. I'm like, I'm not talking about like concert tickets and NFL tickets.

That's also a terrible deal. Man. This itself is a terrible deal on a smaller scale. You're arguing for agoraphobia. Man, I feel like, you know, that the folks need to get outside, you know,

and I don't know. I remember the last time I went to the movies, and I'm not going to say what the movie was because it was horrible. But I think I'm... How can I say this politically? I made a misadjustment or maladjustment on milligrams. And so I went to the movie a little bit more lit than I expected. And so I was laughing in such a way in how bad the movie was that my wife was like,

do we need to move back in the back of the theater? but like the social part of it all and like stifling my, I don't know, maybe that's just me indulging my own bad behavior or whatever. But it felt like, it wouldn't have felt the same

if I was watching it on the couch because I probably would have been scrolling or something. And like, if you go to the movie theater, the movie is the show. And I kind of like that. It is. And I'm with you.

By the way, when you start taking your kids, they get a little bit older, here's going to be the other shock. Ads. Oh, man. They don't watch commercials anymore. They're not like us

turning on Saturday morning cartoons. And then you're going to get there and like, oh, wow, there's like 34 minutes. I think I timed it one time of not just trailers, but commercials for like verbo. And my kids are going like, what the hell? Yeah. I just had that experience with my son listening to radio because I was in a car that is not my car. And I could connect everything. And I was trying to explain radio to him.

And I was like, it kind of sounds cool. And it's like, hey, there's a guy or a lady somewhere in a studio playing. playing music for a whole bunch of other people. We don't get the... Spinning records. Yeah. Yeah, and sometimes they'll have to do these ad things that you're not for me. I was like, oh, man, this is really...

It felt like 1984 in my car, like, all of a sudden. And I switch this button, and then I can go to a different guy or lady. Yeah. Playing different records. This is amazing. They're doing it. Yeah, man, we're all listening to the same music at the same time or the same political talk. Isn't that cool, you know?

So anyway, I don't know. I'm not Sean Baker. Go to the movies. Anyway, the last thing that I just want to say enough because I want to get out of this is that everyone who listens to this show regularly knows that I'm a native Houstonian who still cares quite a bit about the people in that place. And in a very different world, deep sigh, I'm back there instead of Maryland, but that's neither here nor there. But I want to talk about, and if you follow me on Blue Sky, I already shared this, so don't spoil the story for class. It's my first memory of Representative Sylvester Turner, who, He recently, he died earlier this week the night, day after, attending the state of the union address.

And he'd only held the job for a few months. He had succeeded Representative Sheila Jacksonly, who'd had that, who'd held down that congressional position and seat for many, many years. They're both Houston legends. But Sylvester Turner, my first memory of him is from 1984, not 1984 again, when I was in first grade of Paul Horn Academy in Houston. Independent School District. And I took some sort of current events quiz that included a question about him, included a question about the mayor of the city. And I answered him. And it was crazy because if you look back at 1984 and what he was doing, he was losing the race for Harris County Commissioner, you know? Like it wasn't, it wasn't mayor at all. But he must have made a huge

impression on me. And I was thinking, I was like, man, what is it about Sylvester Turner? Houston had not had a black mayor at that point. It wasn't like Detroit or Atlanta or any of these other places, you know, after, you know, the Civil Rights Act and the turmoil of the 60s that had gone, you know, basically the city was turned over to black people or poor, you know, poor minorities, whatever. Like Houston didn't have that. And so I'm like, man, what was it about Sylvester Turner that made me think that he was

supposed to be mayor, you know, almost 30 years before he actually became mayor? But anyway, Sylvester Turner served in the state House of Reps for 25 years, but ran for mayor twice. The first time was in 1991, and it had this really weird journalism note that people may not remember is that during his 1991 campaign for mayor, there was a reporter named Wayne Dolchafino of KTRK, who ran an investigative report questioning Turner's involvement in an elaborate insurance fraud scam. And the resulting scandal, it basically cost turn of the election. Like he was the favorite going into it and lost. And it devastated him. And it devastated him so much that he sued Wayne Dolcefino and KTRK and initially was awarded a $5.5 million libel settlement. Whoa.

Yeah. And it got lowered to 3.2. So KTRK appealed that ruling and the Supreme Court, the Texas Supreme Court, overturned that monetary award. But the court found that the broadcast were both false. and defamatory. Right. So anyway, you can see how much media, like, I mean, that is a huge media story.

And it almost demands, like, a documentary or something or some sort of, like, short series or whatever. But Turner never really got over that. And neither did Wayne Dolchafino, because I just want to, his most recent tweet came on February 27th, and this is what it said. This isn't fair. Equity is supposed to mean fairness,

and he capitalizes fairness. with but there was a grammatical error or whatever the budget for Harris County's DEI program has ballooned 500% in just four years using funds from the COVID pandemic

that haven't been needed in years hopefully Elon Musk is watching what we've discovered so look I mean you can see in retrospect why Sylvester Turner may have felt like Wayne Doltrafino had it out for him

but anyway you know, I did just kind of want because I was thinking about the power of media and how it made me think that Sylvester Turner could be mayor someday, man. And that's really like, I mean, it's the sort of thing that like it seems small, but man, in 1984, like, you know,

we were just not too far out of the civil rights movement and for a little black boy in the South in a city where nothing like that had ever happened before to think that this dude could be the mayor. It says something about Sylvester Turner's presence, but also his indomitable. He kept on and eventually got to be mayor. And look, he probably won't be remembered in the way that the predecessors were, like all these other people that were first-time mayors, the people who came of age during Jim Crow and maybe got the tag of civil rights activists.

But there's something important about those local politicians, the ones who will never be a senator, but who care deeply about their hometowns and neighborhoods and want to serve there forever. rest well Mayor Turner. You ran a great race. And yeah, just 70 years old, man. It's kind of young. Kind of young. Yeah, and absolutely.

And while we're talking about Harris County politicians and the state of the union for that matter, can we talk about Al Green for a second? Oh, man, Al Green. That's actually my mother's congressional representative. What a U-turn for Al Green's sentiment over the last couple weeks. Do you remember that video?

That was the ultimate dims in disarray. oh my God, there's no opposition to Trump because Charles Schumer was talking and Al Green was shaking a cane. Yeah. And everybody's like, this is it. This is the resistance. This is what we got. This is what's going to stop the Trump army. And then all of a sudden he gets removed from the state of the union address.

He gets censured. And by the way, 10 Democrats in Congress voted to censure him. Yeah, man. And now it's like Al Green, yes. Finally somebody has stood up. Yeah. Did you think of it the same way that I did that I thought that the Republicans were probably excited to throw him out and that the Democrats didn't stand up for themselves? Like on TV watching it as a media event, I was like, oh man, they just kicked out this old, frail-looking black man and nobody rallied to his defense.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's one of those things where you like the Democratic caucus, and this is where the Dems and Disarray thing has a grain of truth. It's like, they just don't know what to do. Right. We had the bingo paddles. There was like, what are we doing here? What's going on? And not the thing about, like, if you think about how that looks on TV, like, I mean, I guess like they're all using consultants or whatever, but on TV, it looked really kind of sad.

Maybe you had to be in the gallery for it to feel powerful. But on TV, it looks kind of like, hey, you guys look like you're holding up your hands in class and nobody's calling on you. Yeah. And that's, you understand. It's like when people look at this and get mad, what they're seeing is that there's no central. person that people can follow. Right.

There's just nobody that's like, hey, let's not do the paddles. Or hey, if Al Green's going to shake his cane and get thrown out of there, let's get mad at that. Yeah. Let's decide what we think of this guy. But what we don't have two completely divergent opinions over the course of a couple of weeks. That figure doesn't exist right now. Yeah.

I mean, it's just like, I mean, that's why the Republicans, they all, I feel like they always win these moments, the ones in TV, the ones for public, like the big media events. Like, I don't know what it is. If, like, maybe just Democrats, is because people perceive them as being earnest and it comes across as corny and sort of ineffectual.

But I just, the visual of those other Republicans on TV, I'm like, oh, they always sort of seem like they're in control. Like, maybe that's just revision. Revision is history there, but that's what it looks like to me on TV at least. Yeah. I'm just, I'm just interested to see how much of that surprise past Trump.

Because they do have, the controlling authority and he's standing behind the podium. And everybody knows what they think because what they think is pro-Trump, not anti-Trump. Right, right, right. Yeah, it didn't require you to, all you got to do is kind of like, let's follow that guy.

He's got his back and rod, him, you know. There you go. There you go. Let's do a few headlines because I want to talk to you about Shadour Sanders. Oh, man. I can't wait. I'm excited.

The way he's being covered says something, doesn't it? Yeah. the way we have come to cover the NFL draft? Absolutely, absolutely. Shadour, of course, was the quarterback at the University of Colorado. He was one of the architects, if you're not a college football person, of the Buffalo's return from the dead these last two seasons.

And Shadour is, not incidentally, also the son of the Buffalo's head coach, Dionne Sanders. There were two stories about Shadour Sanders this week. One comes from the ringer's very own Todd McShay, who wrote in his new newsletter on Monday. And here I'm quoting, I spoke to two high-ranking individuals who work in personnel departments for two different NFL teams

selecting in the top 10, each of whom was present for their team's official meeting with Colorado quarterback Shador Sanders. He's talking, of course, about the scouting combine in Indianapolis. On his podcast, McShay would describe what he heard from these two high-ranking individuals.

One person that I talked to said, The best way I can describe it is it just wasn't a professional approach. Shador Sanders did not take a professional approach to this interview. The other person I talked to said he wasn't taking it seriously at all. I didn't get the sense that he was taking it seriously. So when you hear it wasn't a professional approach and you hear he wasn't taking it all that seriously. That's not the interview that you're looking at. it's not the response you're looking for

from a potential suitor from somewhere you plan to go play. Now, Mishay had some caveats, which we'll get to in just one second. But Joel Matthew Barry said almost the exact same thing in his NBC column the next day. Again, it was

two teams, two sources. Quoting Barry here, they both said it was a bad meeting and that he came off as unprofessional and disinterested. So now, Shador Sanders is falling and I love this, falling in mock drafts. The athletics,

Dane Brugler had him going 21st overall in his latest mock. He had him going sixth in January. So where do we start with Shador Sanders in the case of the bad interviews? Man, it really just kind of shows to me how different this process is now from both the media side and the athlete's side.

People need to ask. ask themselves, what incentives does Shadour Sanders have to go out and impress a couple of people that he feels like he might not play for? Right. I mean, I think that's the thing that people are not thinking about is that Shadur may have intel that other people don't have. And they always think, oh, wow, NFL executive said something bad. We must report that. This must have some kernel of truth, a couple of people have said it. But this is why, and I kind of think about like the proliferation of NFL podcast in recent years, when guys talk about the questions they were asked about the draft combine or how weird

the whole thing felt. And you get a lot more behind the scenes insight into what the players think about this process and how little regard they have for it. And I kind of felt like this report, though I understand why it's driving media attention right now, it sort of overlooks the idea that people don't really investigate why athletes may not have any incentive to engage with this process like earnestly or seriously anymore. And like we don't, that side of it is very rarely reflected in that particular cohort of, that particular part of journalism, right?

And I don't know if it's just because of like cultural differences because, you know, middle age white guys talk to middle age white guys in NFL offices or whatever, but I don't know. But I just kind of feel like people aren't thinking about, they hear that from Todd McShea and Matt Berry. And it's like, man, the NFL really has it out for him. And I hear it and I'm just like, what does you do or know? Like, what does you know or know? And maybe he knows something about these front office guys that he feels like,

I don't have to go through this whole dog and pony show, right? And that is one of McShay's caveats that maybe he has a guarantee somewhere in the top 10. We usually hear that more with NBA draft picks and NFL draft picks. but maybe someone has told him or has told his dad or has told his agents, hey, he's not getting past here. And now he's meeting with teams in the top 10 that are past wherever here is. So he's like, I don't need to indulge this process. I don't need to be interested in what you're telling.

Well, can I add another piece of this theory just so I say, I hear that piece of it. But the piece of it that people sometimes don't think about is that players sometimes don't have a lot. They have a lot more information than they used to. too about these guys. Like, for instance, you know,

Todd McShay said it was a high-ranking official for two teams in the top ten. I'm not saying this guy did this. I'm not going to, but the New Orleans Saints have a pick-and-stop the top ten. I don't know if they need a quarterback. They got a lot of money tied up in Derek Carr, but they could presumably be wanting to do something out.

They need a quarterback, whether they need a quarterback, whether they paid Derek Carr. or not. Do you know who their assistant GM and college scouting director is? Oh, no. Jeff Ireland. Do you remember what Jeff Ireland became famous 15 years ago? There was an Oklahoma statewide receiver named Des Bryant. Yeah. And you want to remind people what he asked Des Bryant during the draft process? Yeah, I would love to. He asked Des Bryant if his mother had been a sex worker. And I mean, he called it, I mean, sex worker is the language we use today. He asked Des Bryant if his mom was a prostitute after Brian allegedly told Ireland that his dad was a pimp and that his mother worked for his father. Now, Bryant says he never told Ireland that his father was a pimp.

But I don't know how that part of it became a story. But anyway, Ireland later had to apologize. And to me, it sort of always sort of clouded. Like, I felt like that's when we started getting a lot more stories from players about, man, wasn't that shit kind of weird having to go through that and answer all those questions? There are a lot of those guys still in the league, man. Oh, yeah.

People forget that, like, John Gruden used to run a whole NFL franchise in the way that he talked about people and dealt with people. So I'm saying, like, players have a lot more information about these guys than they used to. And then sometimes if they don't engage in the way that people expect them to, I just don't think people give enough credence to the idea that, like, they may not feel that's a person worth respecting. I totally hear that if you were sure,

you doer Sanders, why do you go to the meeting with Team X and Team Y if you feel that way? Like, what's the point? I guess it's something about going through the process so people can't say that you were running for anything or ducking out, I guess, right? Like, I'm going to go through this. Can't you turn down meetings now, even if it's just a matter of I don't think I'm going to be around when you draft me or I don't want to play for you? Can't you just be like, I'm good on that meeting? We're okay. That's true. I guess like I would now want to know with, is there a third team? Is there a fourth team?

He's met with presumably more than two teams. Oh, sure. What are those guys saying now? You know? I don't think that this, I have to think, given Shador's upbringing, that there's a mistake like,

that, like, I don't think that he goes into that I'm prepared. Put it that way. That doesn't seem, that doesn't, you can say a lot of things about Dion and the way that he ran his program and these kids and everything. But one thing I never thought in this whole Dion ride

is that any of those dudes are unprepared. No. Especially not for this kind of thing. Right. Yeah. You know, the architecture of it, the media aspect, like the public presentation part of it,

in addition to the football part of it, like that whole thing, like there's an intense understanding of how that part of football works. Right, right, right. And yeah, I mean, people also don't think about the fact that like, and this is kind of the

failure of people of certain kinds of media criticism is that like you don't know if Shedur Sanders may be like I'm you guys say that my draft my mock draft status is failing

I may have real intel on like what my status is like people in my camp maybe keeping it real with me and saying you were never a top five pick you would never a top 10 pick like maybe you're low but like in the NFL, it matters so much where you go, dude. Like, it really, like, especially if you're a quarterback, man. Like, if you go to the wrong place, it can really fuck your whole life up.

You can never tap, you might never tap in on all that money. Yeah, like, if you go to the Jets, let's say. If you go to the Jets, like, you could be looking across the table for that guy, right? Like, and the Jets are in this top 10. And it may influence the way that you treat him. Even if you say, I'm going to take the meeting, but, like, I'm not going to go through a whole dog or pony show treating you like I really want to play for you, right? So I don't know.

But I hear your point, Brian, that like he could have just opted out of it, but then I think that would have created an even larger wave of stories. So we would have gotten the same story just in a different version. Oh, he's not taking meetings because he's trying to pick who he plays for specifically or not play for. Also, if you do this strategically, you know who's leaking to the media or who's talking to the media too. Like, it was like, I had two bad interviews.

There's two guys I did not hit it off with. And that gets out to the media like you immediately know like, okay, who I can trust, who I want to deal with in the future too. So anyway. I remember last year when Caleb Williams was going to this process. And it just felt like we all need to recalibrate our brains for the player empowerment era. Yep. You know, we've seen this happen in basketball and football and everywhere else. Like you just start thinking about the world differently because the world has changed enormously.

Remember Caleb Williams' dad allegedly going to NFL team saying, hey, I know we're going to be, the number one pick, but could we get a piece of the franchise as well? Which is, by the way, not kosher under the salary cap. But hey, I'm just asking, could we do that? Right, right, right. And you're like, well, yeah, of course he's going to ask because this is the way it is now. Like, this is the way the world is. Like Caleb Williams has an enormous amount of agency versus Troy Aikman in 1989 being

drafted number one by the Dallas Cowboys. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think there's just more like of an understanding of how much these teams are worth and how short and fragile and vulnerable the players are, right? Like, we spent a whole, we went through a whole concussion cycle. Like, we went a decade of concern about concussion stuff. That's kind of over now.

But, you know what I'm saying? Like, those guys know that they have a very short amount of time to capitalize. And they, so it makes sense that they would want to exert a lot of influence and pressure as early in the process as they can to sort of maneuver themselves to the, to the position that they think will suit them best. And what's interesting is we have this long and glorious history of top quarterbacks trying to engineer where they go. And amazingly, and perhaps not coincidentally, it has always involved their dads. Yep.

Let me take you back to John and Jack Elway, 1983. I'm not playing for the Colts. Wines up playing for the Broncos. So it was a good decision. Yeah, it was a good decision. Eli and Archie Manning, 2004, we're not playing for the Chargers, we're going to go play for the Giants.

That looked a little iffy at the time, but it turned out would be good to say. Well, yeah, and also, I mean, at the time, like, the Chargers were bad. Like, that's why they had a high draft pick, right? And it's just like, I don't know. Not just bad, a franchise that was a bad franchise, which is what you're saying about the Saints, right?

It's almost like a franchise where you're like, I don't want to be involved with that. Because, like, please. Even if they get, even if I'm good, they're not going to put the right players around me. people aren't going to want to play that. Wouldn't you, like, I mean, if I were Shadur, and there's no guarantees, just got a top five pick, you don't have the physical frame or makeup of a top five pick,

but enough people expect you to be in the first round that wouldn't you just want to follow to, like, Mike Tomlin, if you want some security or whatever, like, doesn't that seem like a good situation, a franchise that gets a lot out of you or whatever? I'm just saying, like, I may not want to play for the Jets, man. I haven't seen it in my lifetime except for a couple of Rex Ryan in years, you know? And even then, it was a limited kind of success. Everybody knew what was up with that. Yeah, right.

Well, and I think what's interesting, and McShay talks about this little bit on his podcast, as part of what people are reacting to is he does not have the sway of the two guys I just named, plus Caleb Williams. Right. He is not the number one pick, which we all kind of agree is going to be Cam Williams or Abdul Carter, pending Abdul Carter's foot injury.

Right. So he's like not the number one pick, but he is doing things that former number one overall picks have done, right? Players are saying, like, I know I can do this because I'm best playing this draft. I'm the single most wanted guy. So I think that's also throwing people a little bit. Yeah. Because they're like, wait a second.

Does he know where he's going to go? Or does he have information, as we say? Or does he just, is he trying to do this and not be, you know, I don't know. I think, I think that's also kind of making people confused. used a little bit or just kind of lifting an eyebrow up with this whole thing. Yeah. I mean, I guess like if you don't, it kind of,

if you know though that you're a top quarterback and you're probably top three, top four prospect and the quarterback prospect in the draft, you know, every year that NFL teams panic, man, they always overdraft quarterbacks. Like, no matter if we, even if we're like, this is a weak quarterback, this is a weak quarterback draft and

they'll still throw a Malik Willis at you. You know what I'm saying? Or whatever. You know, like teams can't help themselves. So, I mean, maybe he's just like, you know, I know that I'm still going to be somewhere in that top 30 picks or whatever. Oh, my God. It's got to be higher than that. Even when I see 21st, I'm like, really? He's going to last to the 21st pick in the draft?

Yeah, so it seems like important. Like, if you can kind of maneuver yourself to be from a bad position at 8 or 9 to get to a better position at 18, like if you're thinking long terms of your career and who was more of a murder. than Dionne Sanders in his day, thinking about like your long time, the dude that says, I don't get paid to tackle. You know what I'm saying? The guy decides with the Cowboys

and starts doing pizza hut commercials with Jerry Jones where he's holding him up for money on the commercial. Yeah, man. I mean, it just seems like that also might be a guy to be like, hey, it's even more important for me to order my destiny if I'm down here,

then I'm at the top because I don't, you know, maybe there's a way that I can influence and get to a really good situation instead of just a kind of, okay, it's all on you, kid. One of the fascinating things about draft coverage to me is that it has become the entry point for young sports writers to get into the business. It used to be that you covered high schools or preps. Now, if any writer arrived at their local newspaper, the newspaper would say, actually,

we don't have any money or we don't cover their preps or we don't exist. So please go somewhere else. So what you see is these young writers are like, I can crush tape. I can watch Harold Fanon, who is a bowling green tied end in this draft and declare him to be my draft crush or my pet cat or whatever the term is. And put film of him on Twitter and like, here we go. And I'm in. And I can make mock drafts and I can do this. And I can probably get an invite to the senior bowl and maybe the combine.

And I'm in the business. I have entered sports writing. But the problem, Joel, is that the draft doesn't have 17 weeks. Right. There aren't 17 drafts. And you're like, oh, the Cowboys screwed that one up. Maybe they'll be good next draft. So you have to figure out some drama to get us through.

And I think drama is so-and-so is falling. Uh-oh, he's falling. Uh-oh, he's rising. He's like, well, we haven't actually had the draft yet. But I would argue that, you know, NFL draft guys have more of a season than like college basketball guys. you know cause basketball guys started like yesterday

yeah the draft guy started January 1 or even I'm not above looking at a mock draft in like November you know

or October you know it's like oh yeah who is that oh man got them a little high right you know right you know

right right you know whatever but the problem is like there's just there's nothing nothing is happening nothing real is happening right right so it's a new story

that Shador Sanders is falling in a mock draft which is a prediction of something that will actually happened later. Right. I mean, it's just, yeah, I mean, you don't have, you don't have draft status right now. You know, like, you don't know, we don't know any of that stuff. Like, all of that is fake. But Monty Jones talked about that a lot. And I believe that argument, that particular argument

to him where he just talks about all of this is sort of false. Like the, you know, we don't know any of this stuff. We don't have any inside information. You don't start at the number one pick, like somebody that's a very arbitrary sort of thing. So anyway, um, but, I love that people do it. And I was just thinking, I was, it's funny. I was listening to Todd, and I listened to Todd's podcast. We know, but Brian, Todd and I started Thuringer on the same day. He's a little more famous than me.

But I was thinking, I was like, man, I really missed those athlons and sporting news draft guides. They used to have on, like, the newsstands and stuff. Like, the end of that era, like, killed me. And then it occurred to me. I was like, oh, yeah, they're podcasts about that now. I can listen to podcast about draft coverage now. And it's like even more live and up to date, right? They're keeping up with the injuries and everything else and teams that trade and don't

need to have that need anymore, right? Absolutely. I mean, I told the story before on the podcast, but when I was a kid, I remember Mel Kuiper Jr. was coming on a local Dallas radio show to do a draft update. And I was like, I would love to get my hands on Mel Kiper Jr.'s draft guy. but the problem was, is he was coming on the radio

after school had started for me. Oh. So on my way out the door, this makes me sound like somebody who was writing in Model T's, but I pushed to record with a tape, left the radio on, pushed record with a tape,

and left. And when I came back, I played the tape and got Mel Kiper Jr.'s phone number so I could call and give my mom's credit card to get my first draft guy. That is shocking.

What? man, you were really, that is like Nick Wright making a friendship with like Bob Cost. You know, like, you're like, you're very, you're very, and look at me now. Well, yeah. A lot of people must thank you for woes, you know. And the little did I know when I was last pressing record on that tape. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, man, well, I mean, that's, that's the way to do it.

So I'm, I'm glad that we have that stuff now because it just, I'm, I'm a draft head. I know it's an, but I would watch the. combine from start to finish if I could. If I had all the time and read everything, so I'm glad that people are filling this need. I mean, it makes me sad that people aren't like, for instance, covering the regional final of the Texas

6A high school basketball games, right? But I guess if this is the trait we got to make, it's a trait we got to make. Can we play one more cut from McShea's podcast because this was the other media angle here that I found absolutely fascinating that he laid out there. Here is McShea

addressing the question, wait a second, why are you, not the NFL reporter, but the draft guru? Why are you hearing this information about Shadour Sanders? When I think about this, I'm shocked because why do I say that? I say that because there are a lot more people that if personnel individuals, people in personnel departments, high-ranking officials wanted to get this information out, had an axe to grind, that's where they go with this information, okay? But I'm also saying it because that's not my lane. These were just conversations, but I'm also surprised that other people haven't gotten it. And if they have gotten this information, there are networks that are relying heavily,

heavily on the presence of Coach Prime, Shador Sanders, and Travis Hunter at the NFL draft. Broadcast networks relying heavily because the lead up is going to be a lot about Shador, a lot about Travis, a lot about. a lot about Coach Prime. In draft, when drafted, like the interviews are critical that they get them, the red carpet, all the things the draft has become

whether we love it or not. What do you make of that? I mean, it makes sense that, I mean, that people would, I mean, it makes sense that these networks are depending on the Shador Sanders thing to draw a lot. Because for all of Cam Ward's like talent,

or whatever. And, you know, I mean, he's got, if you see some clips of him on the internet, he's got kind of a funny personality, you know, but like he's not a star in the way the Shadour is. And so, or the way Dion is. I mean,

Dion will be the biggest star at the draft. That's a great point. Yeah. Yeah. And so it'll, they need those guys to be there and to be a part of this, this whole thing and to be, you know,

to sort of, you know, to the extent that they can. So yeah, that makes, that sounds, that, that makes sense.

but I'm just, and I don't think Todd was also trying to get that information out there to like tank his status or anything. But it is just kind of like, I understand why athletes just sort of get frustrated with this whole process. Because that is like it doesn't, it probably will have very little impact on his, quote, draft status. I think it helps zero, to be honest. But public perception, though, which is also like monetizing that and how people see you in public, I can understand them being sort of like, why is it so important to get that out there? Two guys from loser franchises,

their opinion on me. Did you get a third? When we started out, writing, like you, I mean, the laziest version of this advice was, get three people in the story, like quote three people in your story or whatever. And like, this is two, right?

The whole Matt Berry piece was fascinating. We didn't have another discussion about that, but the whole, I'm not saying this is true. Right. That was different to me. Maybe it turns out to be true. Maybe it doesn't. That was his quote,

25 things he heard at the combine. All right, let's get to headline number two. Patrick Sunshan, Joel, the one-time savior of the L.A. Times, who is now, after Trump's re-election, its savior and its torment. Because this week,

Sunshong introduced a new feature that he had teased last year. the bias meter. This is an AI tool. If you go to opinion pieces in the Los Angeles Times right now, at the bottom of the piece, you'll find three things.

The viewpoint of the piece as determined by the AI tool, examples, center, center left, et cetera, et cetera, a summary of the ideas expressed in the piece and then below that, different views on the topic. So counter-arkey.

that you might make about the ideas expressed in the piece. So I don't know. Do we want to talk about how the bias meter already has broken, or do we want to just talk about the bias meter full stop to begin here? Yeah, I mean, so if you're concerned is that people are not getting both sides of the story, you want to make sure that they get to see all viewpoints. wouldn't you make the icon a little bigger? You know what I mean?

Like I just, because it seems like, like, I mean, this seems sort of goofy, but like, it's the same way that you can ignore comments on a story now. Right? And it's like, what is compelling me? I wanted to read this piece. The, what you're telling me, a person sophisticated enough to want to read political arguments

in a major media outlet that, oh, you know what? This article was so interesting. let me read this like randomly generated piece of shit. You know, I should say it like that. Wait, what? I saw, I saw, I saw, I saw, I saw, I saw, I saw, I saw, I thought saw you grimace. No, I was laughing.

I think it was laughing. I mean, that's, that's the way I feel. Yeah, right, but I'm just like, you put an AI piece of junk at the end of an article that I worked hard on. I didn't also like as a reader. Like, what is the, I must have, I want to read about good political arguments. I don't want to read that. Like, I just don't. This is what you got, man.

I just don't. That seems really sad. That's what's so weird. I'm just like, these people own a newspaper and I'm not sure they've ever read one. Yeah. Right. Like,

you're going to want to read, the idea of an opinion piece is that it has a viewpoint. Right. Right. It's not the other viewpoint. It's this viewpoint. I mean, first of all,

the idea, like if you write an 800-word column and at the end of it, somebody's like, hmm, what were the ideas expressed in that column? I would like them summarize for me. You need to fire the writer because they do their job. Yeah, right. Yeah, I mean, like, there's at least a glancing mention of the potential arguments against your point in most of these opinion pieces, right? I would assume if you're running good opinion pieces.

You would think that the whole idea is to float the idea and defend it and at least make it clear if nothing else. I mean, I don't get to the end of too many opinion pieces. Like, what the hell was that? Yeah, yeah. And I just like, so Laura Hazard Owen wrote about this for the Neiman Lab. And what she said something is like, whatever the AI is doing here is way less useful than what a human would do. A human assigned to come up with differing viewpoints on an issue would probably read a bunch of articles on the topic from sources of publications across the political spectrum. And the reason she mentioned this is because they found that like they were pulling from,

basically the same two sources and they were really like the AI rendering of the arguments they were pulling for like the same two sources over and over again. So it wasn't like you were even getting like good writing or necessarily good thinking. They were just pulling from the internet and putting it together

for you and presenting it like they had made a gourmet meal when actually they had just given you some luncheables. And a good columnist is going to address this in the piece. Yep. Joel Anderson argues hyperlink but let me tell you why Joel's wrong and Brian is right.

Yep. That happens. And it's just like one of these things where I'm like, if Patrick Soon, Sean thinks that certain viewpoints aren't being reflected in the LA Times' opinion pages, and really, by the way, if you have the print copy, it's page.

It's not pages. This is something that often just runs one opinion piece a day, at least in my experience. You can just hire different writers. And that would be perfectly acceptable. Human writers, not a robot to tell you the other arguments,

but a human writer. Like he brought in Scott Jennings This is what everybody else is do. Why is Scott Jennings on Abby Phillips show every night getting roasted by the other liberals on there? Because they want to find somebody with different viewpoints. Right. You want Scott Jennings to write a column?

Have them write a column. Why do you need the AI bot to have different arguments? It's just very, very odd to me. Tracy McMillan Codham writes a lot about AI, has talked a lot about it. And she has this really good post from several months ago about how, like, there was a point in which in academia and media, there was a lot of pushback. And there still is in media, right?

And there's still a lot of people fighting against it. But then all of a sudden, those institutions, the concern was that, oh, these people are going to use AI to plagiarize, to, you know, do all sorts of, like, unethical things with people's writing or whatever. And then all of a sudden, that kind of dropped. And it seemed like that became, we are going to do AI whether or not it works or not, whether there's a need for it, any of that other stuff. And I kind of felt like this is an example of that where the guys is like, I don't give a shit.

We're doing the AI thing and this is the way I'm introducing it to you. And this is just a test case. But I'm sure that he's, I assume and hope that he has better than that plan, than insights. Well, if he doesn't, then he should just have the AI write the column. Yeah. And then have the AI come up with counterarguments to the thing that it wrote. I mean, that to me is the end point here because of what's the, point of the human writer if you're just going to undermine their own work at the end of it.

Again, I just, and or label it, you know, this is center left. This, what you've just read is a right wing article. Like, again, the idea that, again, it's not about introducing different viewpoints, it's about putting a label on it. Right. Like, that's just like the most elementary idea of anything. Like, I'm going to, this must be labeled as a conservative or a liberal viewpoint. Get out of here with that stuff.

It's just, I don't know who they think people are. And you know what it is. It's QCat bad. And for people that don't remember QCat, QCat was like this innovation, alleged innovation around 2000. And they sold it through, it was like a collaboration

between Radio Shack and some other media companies. And it was basically, you would take this wand and they would put up like a barcode on your TV and you would wave this wand on your TV or whatever your laptop was or whatever.

I'm sorry, you would wave it on TV. That's right. They'd run the barcode on TV. and up would pop up all this information on your computer about, hey, do you want to know more about the St. Patrick's Day Parade that we just did a story on? Here's, you know, consult our barcode link or whatever, and you do that. And I'm just, I remember, and the reason I know this is because I was the editor-in-chief of the TCU student newspaper in the fall of 2000.

They were desperately looking for a student newspaper to accept this idea. And so they made the presentation to me over the summer. And I was like, so my thing is I got to sit in. the TV with my computer and like run this wand against it, that sounds stupid. And it never caught on. And it's now considered one of the worst innovations of like the last, you know, half century or whatever. And this seems like that.

Like, it just seems that because I don't know who you think people that read newspapers are, people how they consume information, but it just doesn't seem like they do it that way. No. And if you want to link to other articles about this, how about linking to articles in your own paper? Yeah. I mean, there was one I was reading.

it was a column about Trump and Ukraine. There's a lot of the L.A. Times wrote a bunch of stuff about that. Yeah. Yeah. There's all kinds of different resources for people, even if you want to keep them inside the building to read about this idea. Of course, Joel, this immediately turned into a layup line for tech and media writers because bias meter didn't work.

What a shock. The New York Times, as Ryan Mack noted, earlier today, the L.A. Times had AI-generated counterpoints to a column from Gustavo Oriano. His piece argued that Anaheim, the city he grew up in, should not forget its KKK past. The AI well actually the KKK,

it has since been taken off the piece. So that happened. I mean, the claim I had a point, man. I mean, you know. And Semaphores Max Taney said that Scott Jennings, the aforementioned, his op-ed arguing that Trump did a great job

handling the L.A. wildfires. That is really the, The column, by the way, President Trump came through for Los Angeles as the title, is given a center point of view label from the LA Times new AI-generated bias meter. So there we go. And again, it's just like there's not one person who's like, you know, I was a little suspicious of the LA Times. Now I will give you my money because you put the bias meter on the opinion artist.

There's not one person whom that describes. there are a lot of people who are like, this is weird and awful goodbye. I'm never reading your newspaper again. Presumably people that want conservative viewpoints want the real thing, the real, real thing, and they're not looking for the AI. I mean, I'm not trying to insult people.

Are you the sort of person that punches something into Google and just accepts the first AI results? Like, is that when you, if you're that kind of a person, like maybe this will appeal to you, but I always think, oh, like, I got to get to some real information. Like, whatever this AI shit is up at the top, like, I need to do some more searching in Google, right? But you know what? If you're that type of person, you're just going to take Google because that's free. You're not going to read through an article you hate and then go to the counterargument section. That's insane. That's stupid.

And the other thing is, too, like, let's say that you did go through this insane, this absurd process of reading the insight remark or whatever. And so you had Ryan Mack finally, you know, hey man, your AI bot is caping for the clan. How many readers consumed that information and maybe took it to heart until, you know what mean? Like, do you think they follow Ryan Mack? Did they get that, did they get the update that, oh, yeah, like, they didn't really mean to cape for the clan there. Like, you know what I'm saying?

Like another media outlet did the fact checking here. We don't even know if anybody knows, you know, that like, that they caught up on the information there. So does this seem sort of unsustainable? I want this Venn diagram. Read Gustavo Riano's complete column. Made it to the counterargument section. Read the note about the KKK.

Also follows Ryan Mack on Twitter. I want to know everybody who that describes. Excuse me on Blue Sky, Ryan Mack. I want to know everybody whom that describes. What an awesome group of people that is. I mean, man, God bless you. You're really keeping the media ecosystem going if you're doing all that. I appreciate your support.

Just got a couple of quick ones before we go. RIP around the horn. We knew the ESPN debate show was ending after nearly 23 years. Now we know the final show will be May 23rd. Here's host Tony Realeigh saying goodbye yesterday. They're going to be tough days in your life. Meeting those head on is a good strategy. So I say now our great show will be signing off this air in a few months, May 22.

third is our final episode of Around the Horn. I've got three months. I attend to respond to you all, but I'll say this in the meantime. You want to be happy for an hour? Have my mom's pasta. You want to be happy for a day? Watch good fellas. You want to be happy for a week? Hang out with me. If you want to be happy in life, either get engaged at the LaGuardia, airport bathroom, or find a place where people will miss you when it's over. I got both right now. We feel your love. Around the Horn. Tony's such a good guy, man.

Just hard to not like that, dude. I can't believe he just used to be known as stat boy. Yeah. That was a different time, wasn't it? Yeah. The whole around the horn thing, I learned from Wikipedia that it was a replacement for unscripted with Chris Connolly in 2002. Wow.

I remember that. I do remember when Chris Connolly had that show. Yeah, man. That's going back. That is really going back, man. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of crazy because obviously I lived a lot of the first half of my life without a round the horn. But it seems like so much a part of the habit.

Like even if I didn't get a chance to watch it every day or listen to the podcast, like, how many times have you been in the airport or somewhere? And you look up and he's like, oh, it's Clinton Yates. Top five airport show all time. Tensley, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, Woody Pace, man. Woody Pace follows me on social media. I thought that was like one of the most famous people in the world at one point of time. You know what I mean?

So he may be. Yeah. Yeah. Those blackboards. I saw some of the tributes yesterday. I mean, there were people like, I turned on the TV to see what Woody Page would put on his blackboard that day. Yeah. I put it on there.

I told you when we last talked about around the board, this was not my show. This was not my cup of tea. I did get, you know, reading all the tributes yesterday. this one from Meena Kimes, a show that gave me the confidence to even believe someone like me

could do TV. And that's, you know, what's so interesting about it, right, it's almost two waves of around the horn.

That first wave in 2002 where they went and got the sports columnists from major dailies. So speaking of different moments in media time, they went around looking for stars and they're like,

and they are Jay Marriotti, Woody Page, Bill Plashkey, those were the guys. Those were the guys. And it was like this amazing, like, enrichment vehicle for sports columnists. Like what sports radio shows were to the 90s around the horn was to the 2000s.

And you had to do less work. You didn't even have to take calls for two hours. You could think that I thought your city kind of wasn't a big deal until you had a columnist on there. Right. Like I was always offended to Dallas. The Morning News always got their columnist in the Houston Chronicle, never got theirs. Well, around the Horde did get some things right. You know, if it wasn't like...

Look out of here. Get out of here. Did Atlanta get on the board? Did the... Did the... Journal of Constitution get on the board? I don't remember. There were a couple of times, but they didn't...

It didn't turn into like a repeat thing. But I do have the memory of... I don't know if it was Terence Moore or somebody like that, getting a couple appearances way early in the, you know, in the history of that show. Yeah, and to Mina's point, like, and somebody had pointed this out after we talked about

around the horn last time, and I was like, you know, there's something to be said for like, there's not a lot of shows that bring on that diverse group of panelists, man. You know, and that it's going away. It's not, given the climate in America today, it's not going to be a lot to replace it.

And so for that alone, I'm going to miss it. Also, I think having a good person like Tony Reilly on TV is just like, I think it's just, it's good to know that like good, fun, happy people are on TV sometimes. And I feel like he projects that as well as anybody, like on TV today. And yeah, I think just the TV will feel a little less sunnier without Tony Reilly on there. I was talking about this with Jimmy Trini yesterday,

but it's just so apparent to me that this type of show just doesn't exist for ESI. PN going forward. It's just not part of the plan. I mean, we talked about it with Nick Wright. Like, I mean, do you think a streamer will put that on there? Like, do you think, because I mean, that's kind of the question, right? Will somebody tune in to watch that on a streaming service? And the answer is, I guess if you had to guess, probably not right. I just think, yeah, it's just be, and it's not because it's bad.

It's just because you're sitting at home and it's like, instead of thinking of like, what comes on at 43530, you're like, I can watch anything I want at a any time. Yeah. And so ESPN is going to be Stephen A and Pat is going to be games and it's going to be stuff about games. You know, the late sports center with SVP, other sports centers talking about the games from last night, NFL Live, the NBA show, like, it's going to be about those things. And that is going to be the extent, I think, and I don't think I'm overstating this, the extent of ESPN's program. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. No, that's right.

I mean, you know, a really interesting way to think about life. And I'll indulge, is what you're watching at 430 at any point in your life. You know, at one point, it's like rescue rangers or like Chippendale, the rescue ranges. Then it's like, saved by the bell, you know, save by the bell reruns. And then for a number of years, it was around the horn, you know, if you live in the central time zone. Massive upgrade over everything you just said, well, no offense to Chippendale's rescue rangers. It was, they had it. I mean, the intro song was just.

Damn it. But yeah, I hear what you're saying. But yeah, so it's, I don't know if anything will ever replace that. Like, I don't know what the 430, the 430 experience will be for people going on. But even if you didn't necessarily enjoy it, I kind of took comfort in it being there, I guess. Headline number four for you. I know you, Joel, like me, enjoy reading a carefully reported piece of journalism. Oh, of course. And then, as a chaser, as an after.

after dinner, mint, if you will, savoring the low-energy insult that comes from the subject of the piece toward the journalist. You know all the favorites here. Fake news. Clickbait. Exactly. I worked at BuzzFeed. Clickbait was the insult of choice. So, yeah. Trump Communications Director Stephen Chung has used the phrase peanut-sized brain to describe reporters on more than one occasion since Trump got in office. Well, this insult of the week comes to us from the office of Iowa Senator Joni Ernst. It's a big story in ProPublica by Robert Federici, Federechi, excuse me. It's about the alleged relationships Ernst had with an Air Force General and Navy official who were involved in lobbying and legislative affairs, respectively. Encourage people to go read

the story. Here's the insult from Ernst, quoting. The fake news media is clearly too busy gossiping to report the real news that Senator Ernst is focused on cutting waste at the Pentagon. Her votes and work in the Senate are guided by the voices of Iowans who elected her and her constitutional duty alone. Here comes the insult. Any insinuation otherwise by tabloid journalism is a slanderous lie. Full stop. Man. man it's

did Sarah Palin get copyright fake news media because she should get paid off every time somebody says fake news media she should get paid off that like you should have a happy birthday song somebody should be writing a check pay up it's just with a low level I mean if somebody had accused

me of having these sorts of relationships I feel like I probably would muster a little bit more energy for it but I don't I'm not Joni Ernst so I don't know like what they're But yeah, I mean, it's chum. Like, that's the easiest insult in the world. I mean, for a second, I mean, I know you brought this up for this.

ProPublica. I'm saying it like you, by the way. You say pro-publica, but now I say pro-publica like you do. Okay. No, I say pro-publica. What do I say? Pro-publica. Yeah, you say pro-publica.

Is that the way to say it? Well, we're going to go with that. Let's go with that. So somebody calls and caresses. I trust you on this. Okay. Pro-publica. I mean, there's, I mean, what's a more serious.

journalism enterprise in the way i mean again we obviously this is a biased party here but to call pro publica uh fake news and tabloid journalism brother i mean if if you don't think that they're serious about this shit then there's nothing will appeal to you i'm sorry i actually took it as more of an insult to tabloids like the new post and the new york daily news when they're really humming they don't want to be compared to that yeah right headless body and topples bar was not a headlining broke Bublaica. Right. That's fair. Yeah, I mean, they get scooped on this.

That's, that, you guys are taking over our corners. Headline number five and another farewell. This time, Joel, it's 538. There were a bunch of cuts at ABC News. Among the cuts, among the news show consolidations, was the news from the Wall Street Journal's Joe Flint, that ABC is also eliminating the political and data-driven news site, 538, which had about 15.

employees. Man, where do we start with 538? Man, I mean, remember 2008? I just, like, were you like me? I was eating up Politico and checking 538 religiously, man.

I mean, what a time. And, I mean, I guess the thing about it, I would say, is I tied it so closely to Nate Silver that when Nate Silver was no longer in charge, I kind of tuned out as well. Yeah, that was, Two years ago.

Was that you? Yeah. Probably. I mean, he was so inseparable from it. Right. From the beginning when, and he was writing under the nickname or the pseudonym Poblano. When at first time,

it was news to me reading up today. Yeah, I'm kind of with you. Like they were kind of one and the same, but they were still, again, if you're thinking of like, where do I find the polls?

Where do I find the data? Where do I find the charts? And one of the mysterious things about this, I saw Jake Sherman at Punchbowl tweeting about this, but like, why isn't 538 for sale? It's a great question, man. Doesn't ABC News? Wouldn't there be like a lot of interested buyers,

including a lot of these Washington startups that would, you know, if you can't, you don't have Nate, you don't have the people there, but you have this superstructure of it, you have the brand, you have the thing, you could reconstitute it however you wanted to. Why does it just shut down? Can they feel like they can just use that data and not have to pay people and just use it through their existing news media structure, right?

I assume it just is about being cheap, right? Well, I mean, even trying to sell it, I mean, I guess maybe I don't, because I mean, I don't, maybe they did try to quietly sell it, right? Like, I don't, is there any, if you think they sought out any potential buyers? I don't know. I don't know. I mean, just in between like Washington Post, Politico, Punch Bowl, everybody who's competing for. eyeballs in Washington right now. That has some value.

538, by the way, housed it. It was its own thing. It goes to the New York Times in 2010. And I had the weird pleasure of sitting in on a meeting with Nate Silver because I was at The Daily Beast, and we were courting him in 538 to come be under our auspices. Uh-huh. Even remember the restaurant we took them to on the west side of Manhattan for that.

I think we probably finished six out of six in the Nate Silver Derby that year. And it was so interesting because he wasn't selling 530 and he was like, I will be under your media organization through the next couple of cycles. I think that was 2010 and 2012, Obama versus Romney. But then I will once again be a free agent and able to go somewhere else. So you're kind of renting me and my projection. for a couple of years. That was really interesting.

I mean, I didn't know that you got included on those kind of dinners. You were way high up there. No, I really was. I think there was one more empty seat at the table. No. Tina was busy that day. You're a big deal. It goes to ESPN, which is still kind of mind-bending in 2014.

Yeah. I mean, he was a baseball guy, though, right? So I guess in that way, it's sort of like a home for him, But if you don't know that story, then it's like, well, what the hell is this doing here, right? Absolutely. And then, of course, to ABC News within the Disney family. I think this is one of the sites, and we can talk a little bit about this next week, but this is one of the sites that really changes political discourse.

You know, really puts numbers on vibes, if you will. You know, not that I think it's like, it's overstating to think, like, oh, every piece of journalism was stupid before this or, you know, was ignorant of numbers. but there was a certain, it helped political journalists a lot, right? It guided them. It gave them a lot more material to which to write things, right? And like, I mean, polls are snapshots too, right? They're not in, I mean, it's a certain kind of data. And so you can do a lot off of it, which is why, like you said,

presumably you'd think there'd be a lot of interest in behind it because you can create all kind of great stories out of that data, right? But I don't know. Yeah, I guess, I thought of it as like analytics for people who hate sports. You know, sometimes you can lean into that a little bit too much. Like,

it can, like, you can lose yourself in the numbers. And sometimes the numbers can tell you things that you want to, that you, they can confirm your biases. But, oh,

absolutely. I mean, how many times when we turn out on Twitter, everybody's yelling about low quality polls? Like, that was, that was not a thing in mainstream discourse before 538. They're talking about hurting.

Polls are hurting. Again, that not a term many people were using pre-538. You can, of course, manipulate the data. But I just think in terms of, I always go back to the 2012 with Obama Romney at the end. And Peggy Noonan wrote this great, like, old school political column about I'm seeing a lot of Romney yard signs. I'm feeling something, guys. And then you went over to 538 and you're like, Obama has a 90% chance to win the election.

Yeah. I choose you, sir. I choose to believe you rather than yard sign vibes. I mean, man, you know, I guess this year, too, what was the Iowa poll, the Des Moines Register poll that had Kamala winning sort of in a in a landslide, do you remember that? I just wonder if like maybe also there's just sort of like, maybe we need to deal with the field of polling.

Like maybe we get our arms around this thing so we can figure out what's going on here because, you know, because yeah, I mean, I think that is also kind of one of the problems with polling now, right? It's like, how are they capturing people? Like, that's still sort of a part of the equation that's people have not really kind of answered in a great way. It's like, well, how are you able to reach people and reach a representative sample? And that's always going to be an issue, but I know that, you know, maybe they've already resolved it. Who knows? I don't know. Is this a good time to tease our upcoming 25 for 25 episode? Can't think of a better time. All right. This episode is going to be our Oscars in

Memorium segment. Joel, it's our tribute to the fallen. Yeah, man. And I think an interesting way of explaining how the media world has changed over these last 25 years. Because we're going to put together a list of publications that are no longer with us. I mean, anybody that used to love going to the airport newsstand can, I mean, even if you're just old school like that, like, you know that there's been a tremendous, a tremendous loss of

publications. You'd spend so much list I'm at a newsstand at a Hudson's than you used to. And we're not talking about like the Saturday evening post here. The qualifications for this list is the publication has to have died or entered zombie status in the 21st

century. And as you and I were putting together this list, I reached out to a few people. It's incredibly long. We are going to have some people that don't get in the end memoriam real. Oh yeah. I mean, there's much more than the 25 for 25. right? Oh my gosh.

There are, I'm looking at the list right now. There are quite a few. There's going to be some that you and I never experienced. We worked at a couple. Okay,

so there's a few that are very close to home. Yeah, right, right. And a few that maybe you and I never are actually experienced in their life

that we will be figuring out. But anyway, coming up, 25 for 25, the 21st century media graveyard. Look forward to putting that together with you.

Hope you are suitably attired when we meet again on the Zoom to discuss. I miss you. I miss you. Yes, P in the magazine. I miss you guys. Oh, my God.

It's right there at the top of the list. Mm-hmm. Right next to Sports on Earth and MTV News. Just a little preview. Oh, man, MTV News, man. A lot of people work there. Yeah. He is Joel Anderson.

I'm Brian Curtis. Thanks, your magic. Bye, Stefan Anderson. Thank you, Stefan. Joel. I'll see you next Thursday. Shoemakers here Monday. And I cannot wait for more lukewarm takes about the meeting.

All right. Looking forward to it, man.