The Press Box - The Great Tom Brady Catfish Hoax of 2018, 'Black Panther' Pre-Backlash, and Woj vs. Shams | The Press Box (Ep. 426)

Episode Date: February 13, 2018

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker break down the prank pulled on Boston Herald columnist Ron Borges (03:45), the 'Black Panther' backlash and reviewing movies in 2018 (23:30), and the rivalry between NBA insiders Adrian Wojnarowski and Shams Charania (41:45). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, this is Sean Fennacy, the editor-in-chief of The Ringer, and I want to tell you about a podcast I host called The Big Picture. Each week, I welcome a different filmmaker to talk about their latest movie and how it was made. I've talked to the directors of some of my favorite movies, including Jordan Peel, Greta Gerwig, Ryan Johnson, Barry Jenkins, and dozens more. You can find new episodes on the Channel 33 feed every Friday by going to The Ringer.com backslash podcasts, or by subscribing to Channel 33 wherever you get your podcasts.

I hope you'll check it out. David, we're going to talk about the NBA scoops face off between Adrian Wojnerowski and Shom Sharania. But I wanted to ask you, if you had a journalistic feud, who would it be with? Wow, that's tough, man. I mean, everybody listens to this knows that I write about professional wrestling, podcasts about professional wrestling. Now, listen, it would be easy for me to pick, easy if a little bit presumptuous, for me to pick, you know, one of the luminaries of the wrestling journalistic world like Dave Meltzer as my online foe.

If I were going to stick to wrestling, I think it would be more fun to make a bit out of going after some semi-retired older wrestler and just have, you know, work in online rivalry with him. I briefly had interactions with such greats as Jake the Snake Roberts and Disco Inferno. Disco comes hard. Wow. I think one lesson that wrestling can teach us about the modern world of Twitter rivalries is that it's all of work, man. What about you? Who is your rivalry with? Are you expecting me to say Kevin Draper or Richard Deich? I hope you do. You see, I'm not sure sports media is set up for the Pauline K.L. versus Andrew Saris kind of feud, you know?

I think first, I think the problem is we probably agree on most of the major stuff. You know, it's not maybe it'd be like a lively podcast more than a more than a more than a. a journalistic feud. But no, I think it's a responsibility of every red-blooded American to have a feud with Clay Travis. And, you know, for a while, he would seem like he was trying to start one with me. And I feel like I kind of let everybody down because I didn't hold up my end of the bargain. You know, I was too busy writing think pieces.

You know, like he was kind of asking for an apology from me on Twitter and all kinds of things. So, yeah, I mean, that's really, I guess that's one of my goals for 2018. To really start a good rivalry? Yeah, and we're going to start some David on this edition of the Press Box, which is part of the Ringer podcast network. The Press Box is the media podcast. We are not allowed to complain about how cold it is while you're covering the Winter Olympics.

We are Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer. If you want some recent content from us, David just recorded the 100th episode of the Mass Man show. And I just wrote a big think piece about podcasting and soft diplomacy. But David, let me give you the table of contents for today's show, the TOC. you will. First, the great Tom Brady catfish hoax of 2018 and how it explains the Boston sports media. Second, we'll talk about the Marvel universe's most dangerous villain yet, the mostly unknown foreign movie critics who ruin the perfect rotten tomato score of Black Panther. And finally, we'll talk about Woage versus Shams, the Anakin versus Obi-1

lightsaber battle of NBA insiders. Plus, as always, our overworked Twitter joke of the week, the Cavs traded everybody edition this week. And man, that was some Twitter content. But first, David, Assegba will call it's just like Spotlight, except the scoop turned out to be phony and they're not going to make a movie about it. It began last week when a prankster named Nick in Boston saw the cell phone number of Boston Herald columnist Ron Borges on Twitter. Nick had an idea. He would text Borges and impersonate Don Ye, the agent for Tom Brady,

and Jimmy Garoppolo. Nick then dangled in front of Boarge's a huge scoop, the news that Brady would skip OTAs unless he got a Garoppolo-sized contract from the Patriots. Borges ran with a phony scoop, which landed on the back page of the Herald, and Boston sports radio guys, Kirk Minahan and Jerry Callahan exposed to the scam on radio

when they interviewed Nick and Boston. And the person who made it up pretended to be Don Yee is joining us right now. Nick and Boston, Nick, good morning. How are you? Hey, Kirk. How are you doing? Good. nice to talk to you. Explain to me how this all happened.

Somebody tweeted Braun Borges' phone number, and I just picked it up, and for some reason, I just thought, hey, you know what, I'll text him and say I'm Don Yee. And he does win with it, for some reason. And Borges just bought it hook, line, and sinker. He tried to call me three times, but I just didn't answer. Right. So then I was just like, whatever, screw it.

I just call him, and he's going to know it's not Don Yee. I call him, and say, hey, Ronnie, it's Don. Oh, God, you talked to him? Is Don Ye? Yes. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I said, I literally have three seconds wrong.

Wrong with the story if you want or not? It's up to you. And this was yesterday? This was yesterday. And he ran it. Yeah, I guess so. I just picked up the paper. I'm just laughing my ass off.

Now, since then Borgas has been suspended, David, what did you make of sports writing's great catfishing scandal? I'm glad to use the word catfishing, because I was worried that we were going to have to spend the first 10 minutes of this segment explaining to all of our millennial listeners what radio call our pranks are. But this was one of the most amazing stories. You know, we've all, you and I, I mean, honestly, people who grew up listening to, you know, Howard Stern and sports radio in the 90s are familiar with these sorts of hijinks. It's been a while since we've heard something, heard about something like this happening, especially on this level, right?

I mean, you can't really get a more electric audience for this than Boston, you know, the Boston sports crowd and a more. you know, and to hit right after the Super Bowl, with, you know, Patriots fans sort of at a very emotional raw point. It couldn't have happened at a more, like I said, a more sensitive time. I don't know. I mean, the first thing that occurred to me was that if I got a text message from an unknown number claiming to be someone with a scoop, I would like to think I'd be skeptical enough to double check it. But, you know, in the modern era, like, I changed my phone number is a really, is a really, is a really, is a really reasonable excuse. I mean, he didn't have to use that excuse, obviously. But, you know, I just, it was just such a terrible cluster. And I don't, it's, it's just so funny. I just can't get enough of it.

Well, there's a little bit of a twist, too, right? Because it'd be a text from an unknown number of somebody you had talked to before, right? because it seemed like Ye and Borges had some kind of relationship, right? This wasn't like the total out of the blue text. Yeah. When you referred to him as old friend in text message, that seemed to just be trying to like give up the joke, you know. But it was hard to tell what kind of relationship they had just based on the text messaging. Yeah.

I mean, a couple of interesting things to me. One is the Schadenfreude that just poured out from not only Boston, but kind of national sports Twitter, Michael David Smith over on pro football talk, who noted that Borges had been, he said, using material from his writing without proper credit for years. Borges also was suspended and then from and then left the Boston Globe back in 2007 after he committed plagiarism. Marty Barron was the editor, by the way, back then, speaking of Spotlight. Wow. It's, and of course, in the binary world of Boston media, right, you were either pro-pats or anti-pats in the eyes of people.

And Borges would definitely be on the latter. second side of that. So, you know, then you get people not only like the W.E.I. guys, but, you know, Dave Portnoy and everybody grave dancing on him after this whole thing is revealed. That was, that was kind of amazing. The other thing that was crazy to me is our pal, Kevin Clark, said this had the air of a James O'Keefe sting coming to sports writing. And Ben Volan, who writes about the Patriots of the Boston Globe, said that someone tried to plant a fake story with him during Super Bowl week. he thought.

Uh-huh. And so maybe this is like, I mean, when we heard from Nick and Boston, it was just like a one-time gag, he said he had no agenda other than, you know, he saw the guys never on Twitter and thought it would be funny. But the idea that there is someone or some people running around trying to plant stories, fake stories of sports writers is pretty incredible. Well, you mentioned Twitter. I mean, there's no shortage of people who like, you know, we'll get, we'll squad on the, you know, a Twitter account with an L turned into a, one that looks a whole lot like a famous sports writer and try to disseminate fake news, right? I mean, it's just the thrill of the thrill of fleeting attention or significance. You know, just getting a joke over, just getting a prank over on the world is an ins in and of itself.

And that's fine because it is. I mean, it's hilarious. I don't, I don't fault the pranksters at all. That said, there's no better target than, and I'm not a longtime reader of Ron Borg. I wouldn't claim that I was, but there's no better target than the sort of old guard sports columnist. You know, a big city, but local sports columnists who just, you know, get by on their, for lack of a better word, high and mightiness, you know, week after week. And I mean, it's just, like, you know, if this were, if this were just a beat reporter who got fooled, it would just be. brief apology. You know, it would probably be an apologetic tweet. I got this wrong. Sorry,

I won't make the mistake again. You know, when you come at it, when it's, when it's presented by somebody, I mean, for one thing, when it's the full color, you know, sports page of the, of the newspaper. And it's presented as a big scoop that's obviously a different story, but also just the, I think it's just the demeanor and the platform that really made the difference. I also think that, you know, in this moment, in Boston I think that there's a lot of people looking for a villain

you know and after the Patriots lost you know there's a lot of hand-wringing about what Belichick could have done differently but nobody wants to hate Bill Belichick you know I mean and there's a lot of

nobody wants to get on Tom Brady's case the normal and certainly you know it's hard to it's hard to fault the other team for beating them. So at the end of the day, there's this weird void where like where our current villain is.

And Ron Borges, by just dropping the ball on this piece, had sort of became their local villain for a while. Yeah, I would say, you know, in addition to the kind of stuff you say about being an old school newspaper sports column is the kind of Olympian status of that person, you know, I'd also say that the fact this was anonymous sources. which is all of our cocaine, right? Oh, yeah. But also something we're all kind of suspicious of. And, you know, the fatal thing here, potentially fatal anyway, for him is that, right, he said sources plural in his piece. And, you know, I don't know if regular readers, I don't know how much, you know, people sort of how much that triggers your brain. But when I read sources, I generally assume a story is true because.

you know, I assume that the person has gotten multiple people on this, right? Mm-hmm. And, you know, what it seems like is that he got this from one person who, of course, turned out to be fake. And again, and if it had been real Don Yee instead of fake Don Yee, that would have been a great source, right? Because other than Tom Brady, who actually knows the answer to this question, whether Brady's going to hold out. But I just think every time there's like a car crash like this, you know, we just, you sort of look at anonymous sources and be like,

what if a lot of this stuff is not real? You know, what if a lot or what if a lot of this stuff is agenda driven? And by the way, it certainly, it almost certainly is. And, you know, I think that kind of perks up people's ears too. Yeah, no, I think that you're really onto something because that if that were really Don Yee, texting Ron Borgas, even then it, what it, it exposes something significant, which is how the sausage is made, right? I mean, even if it were true, what we're left with is a player's agent directly texting

a sports columnist and saying, please help us start our campaign to get Tom Brady more money. We don't want to just deal with it. We want to start a public outcry before we have to go and have this conversation with the Patriots. It exposes more than just the fallibility

of one sports columnist, that's for sure. And also the levels of insiderdom, right? Because in these texts, we see the references to Peter King and Adam Schaefter, right? Right. And you're the local guy. And I sure would like to get this one rather than give it to those national guys, you know, that whole just sort of, I think

Barstool Big Cat who weirdly got involved in this with Ed Werger on Twitter, one of the weird, talk about weird or journalistic feuds of our time, talked about that, you know, living in fear that Peter King is going to come, you know, take your lunch away, right, is going to come and steal the scoop if you don't use it. And that's, I think that the real missing element of the Big Cat versus Ed Werder feud is that Werdor has been staking out this mustache sports writer corner for so long. So Nick and Boston appeared on the W.E.I. Morning Show with Menehan and Calhahn. Later on W.E.I. The same station, should we talk about former Pat's tight-in, Christian Faria's

reaction to the news? Yes, let's do it. Let's go for it. he decided to do kind of a dramatic performance of the Don Ye tweets in an extremely racist mock Asian accent. Am I, is that, is that a fair description of what happened? I think so, yeah. Adding a bizarre, racist second act to this thing that didn't really need one. I don't know what to say about it more than that. that. I mean, that he got suspended for it is significant because, I mean, you would like to think

that this would be a suspendable or fireable offense at just about, you know, at any place of business. But I don't think, you know, Boston Sports Radio has acquitted itself of, you know, of such things in the past so well. And, you know, someone at our workplace raised the question whether or not there would have been any suspension at all if it weren't Don Ye, you know, someone of that, if it weren't Tom Brady's manager that were being lampooned. Lampooned isn't even the right word.

I mean, that we're being targeted in this, like, ridiculous voice. I think that in some ways it just feels like the fitting in-cap to this insane story, if it weren't so offensive, you know, but just that something this wacky is, I mean, just this bizarre is what spins out of this already bizarre story. I don't even know what to make of it, but this is the world that we live in right now. One more thing about anonymous sources, too, by the way, is that I think the answer with anonymous sources, there's plenty of legit stories that come by anonymous sources, obviously, including, you know, tons of insider stuff. The thing about it is the only way to police them is this story reveals. Like, most people aren't going to be pranked, I think.

You know, I mean, I don't think that's going to be a recurring problem in sports journalism to any important degree. But what this exposes is that the only way to police anonymous sources is for the insiders to do it themselves. Right. You have to be the one to decide, is this story real or is this just some, you know, bloody meat being thrown out for some other purpose? You have to, of course, in this sense, decide, is this person real? And nobody else is going to check that. And readers don't. And readers and press critics and whomever else can't go back and check your work, right?

No. Because it's anonymous. So the only people, and this is the conundrum of anonymous sources. and in this case it shows it because it's just like this is the only way there's no way to check this there's no way to run with this and when you spectacularly get it wrong i think it just sort of points out that dilemma i mean you can think of it separately from the ethics and journalism point of view which is like i was just thinking like if you everybody everyone just turned off the podcast but if you would if you had texted me that you know over the weekend and said hey david i got a new phone number but here's what i want to talk about on the press box this week i can't imagine i would have gone to the trouble of like texting your old number and just being like, hey, are you actually texting me right now? Now, I might have figured out some other way, or I might have dropped you an email and tested, you know, I guess if I were really skeptical, that wouldn't be crazy. But yeah, you're right.

When it comes to, if you ever find yourself in a place as a writer, as a journalist, where your word is as good as bond when it comes to vetting sources, then that's incumbent upon, I mean, then yeah, I mean, if you get, if you screw up like this and you lose your job, you brought it on yourself. I mean, that's not a, that's, I'm usually the last one ever to call for anyone's job in any sort of, you know, media controversy, but you know, you've put yourself in that position, you know, I mean, it's either, either, I mean, somebody, somebody really dropped the ball. If, you know, it's either the writer or the editor and or, or, you know, the process, it really sucks for, for the glorious field of journalism because you're right.

I mean, it's incumbent upon the writer and there's, there's no, you know, real other alternative. One last note before we run on this topic, Bill Simmons, our boss, tweeted about the Boston sports media this week. And I wanted to venture a semi-unified theory of Boston sports media that I think kind of folds into this. Bill tweeted that he grew up reading Ray Fitzgerald and Peter Gamens and Bob Ryan and those guys from the 70s and 80s. And as he put on Twitter, they elevated sports fandom and had an incalculable impact on what I wanted to do for a career. You know, it's funny because the Boston writers, largely speaking, not all of them, but a lot of them from that era, were known from the outside from Philly and New York as being kind of homerish, right? I think the proper, I think that's probably an inexact term. It's probably more like they were, especially in the case of like people like Pop Ryan and Kamins were fans, fans of the teams they had covered.

Right. And that made them distinct where Philadelphia and New York were really guns and knives and you kind of earned your spur. by beating up on the teams you covered. It was a little different in Boston, again, generally speaking. I think Boston sports media is still driven by that same sports fan impulse. I just think it's manifesting itself totally differently, right? There's there's fandom where as Ryan once told me,

you're writing about the Celtics from a pro Celtics point of view. There's also fandom where you kind of turned it into an us versus them kind of thing, right? Yes. Who can, nobody gets to pick on Tom Brady. Nobody gets to pick on the pads. The deflategate guys are not only wrong. They're liars and they have an agenda and they're trying to bring us down. Yeah.

So I wonder if I almost see the same impulse, the same kind of, you know, thing driving it all. But it's just for whatever reason, because of Twitter, because of sports radio, because of the deflategate, you could list 5,000 reasons. It's just, it's just sort of coming out in a totally different way. Does that make sense? Yeah, man. That totally makes sense. 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. This week's runner-up comes from listener Gary Isabel Jr.

We mentioned Jimmy Garapolo's new $137 million contract. David, if you reacted to that by saying with that, he can afford a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco. You were runner-up this week. One side note, by the way, you know the Twitter account freezing cold takes? Oh, yeah, of course. of like bad predictions. The guy who runs it noted that overwork joke, but called it the frequently used joke of the day,

which to me really sounds like store brand overused Twitter joke of the week. Am I being a little sensitive? It's kind of like buying the Safeway catch-up instead of Heinz, you know? Oh, my gosh. Overused. Please, by the way, a public term. Everybody feel free to use it. Second runner up this week is when Josh McDaniels quit the Coltshead coaching jobs,

speaking of the Patriots, before he started. if you rendered that decision on a napkin, the same way Bill Belichick quit the Jets back in 1999. Congratulations. You were also a winner. But this week's runaway champ is the variety of jokes made about the calves trading away all their players. JW sent this one in saying,

Next Cavs practice, quote, okay, so when we go around the room, say your name and one interesting thing about yourself. That's kind of funny. But I think our grand prize this week goes to anyone on Twitter who announced that you, you had been traded to or by the Cavaliers, right? Because it was a joke that not only consume media Twitter, but actually brand Twitter too with contributions from the Jacksonville Jaguars and Waterburger,

I saw among others that kind of got into that. And then weirdly, like, days later, Conan O'Brien comes off the top rope and says, I don't know how this happened, but apparently I was just traded to the Cavaliers. It's just about to me, it's like the archetypal overworked Twitter joke is when Conan or one of his writers suddenly feels like, I need to get in on this. Oh, that's so great. All right, Dave.

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I'm going to burn it all. The revolution. All right, David, our second segment we call Panther Pride, reference to our old high school, by the way, for anyone that doesn't think that's very funny. One of the best reviewed movies in recent memory is coming out this week. And that's making some people angry to wit Marvel's Black Panther got rapturous reviews from its early critic screenings. Then there were a few critical holdouts, which made the Marvel fans mad. And then sadly familiar, if you remember the all-female Ghostbusters, there was a backlash from people

who want to hate Black Panther because they liked the DC universe better or they have quote-unquote economic anxiety or possibly both. David, what were your takeaways about the state of movie reviewing circa 2018 as viewed through this prism? Oh, man. I almost feel like we need a timeline to go through this one. Okay, the first item sequentially is the, I don't know if I'll say tidal wave, but the, you know,

the semi-serious rainstorm of very early reviews for Black Panther. I like that meteorological distinction. you make you thank you you know i mean talk about anxiety i mean when i i working at a site that has and will continue to cover this movie i'm sure you know pretty heavily every time i like look up and or look at my twitter feed and see that there's a major newspaper releasing their review of black panther or even a minor blog releasing the review of black panther i get for the past week i've been scared almost every day into thinking that i'm a week behind at my job so and i and the movie has not actually been released i i don't know that i don't know that i don't know that i don't

It's not coming out until Friday, well, Thursday night or whatever. I'll be there with bells on. But it's just, I understand it's for SEO or whatever. It's for gimmicking the Google search so that when someone searches for Black Panther reviews, yours has been up there, you know, accumulating clicks for days. And also it's out there to beat the rest of the reviews, you know, just to the punch, just to get your opinion out there and to get some attention. But I'm not sure what real service it does is for all of these reviews to sort of be coming out way ahead of time.

I mean, I guess you can argue against that, that just having more time to form an opinion or whatever is fine. But what's really happened, though, is that all these reviews are coming out without the audience having a chance to confirm the reviews or to form their own opinions one way or the other. And so the story is not, the story is no longer about the movie Black Panther. Because certainly there's very few reviewers with the esteem of,

you know, you mentioned Pauline Kale earlier, or Roger Ebert, or any of these people that like kind of could really set in a, you know, set somebody's weekend agenda by the way they would review movies. The storyline ceases to become about the Black Panther or become about watching the movie. It starts to become about what the motives of the writers for praising it or then subsequently for not fully, not fullthroatedly praising it. You know, we're in a really interesting time where there's a lot more autonomy of the audience right now. and that's a good thing overall. I certainly care.

I certainly am much more interested in reading Star Wars Reddit than reading the reviews of the Force Awakens or The Last Jedi. Yes. And so overall I think that's a good thing. The problem is that when that autonomy is existing in a vacuum, then the narrative becomes something totally different then this movie is good or this movie is bad or here's, you know,

a hundred really interesting Easter eggs I discovered while watching it for the fifth time. Yeah, I would say if we're going to parse critics, you know, motivations, we should go back even before the reviews to the Insta tweet that comes out of the screening. Because, you know, to me, those are less about telling people if the movie was good than telling people, hey, I was at the screening. Like, right, that's the purpose of that tweet. Yeah. Sort of like the movie critics version of the picture of the empty field you take from the press box.

before a football game, right? Like, I'm here. I was there. I saw the movie. You know, I think he was your, your partner, Dave Schilling pointed out like, there's something totally untrustworthy about those reviews because to win Twitter with that, right? It's, you're not going to win it by saying, you know, Black Panther is somewhere between Ant Man and the first Captain America on the Marvel movie scale, right?

It's, it has to be the best Marvel movie ever or the worst. You know, I mean, there's no. So I just think that's just a bizarre thing. I mean, but I totally agree with the, I don't quite, I mean, I'm, I'm happy to read reviews a week or four days early for a movie, but it's pretty clear that that's just about SEO rather than providing some service. It's funny, because we talked a little bit about movie critics on this podcast. That like 800 to a thousand words, mostly spoiler free review, which I think you get on the front end is like the oldest journalistic form imaginable. Yeah. And yet that's still the, as you.

you say before we get to the Easter egg count and all the Mary Sue stuff and all the whatever it is. Like that is just still the way that is the way first impressions of movies are made. Again, largely from critics who are out of the demographic. It's just a, that's just a fascinating thing to me. There's nothing wrong with it. But it's, um, it's really, it's really strange to the, in terms of the motives. So I think Black Panther was running at 100% on rotten tomatoes.

Yeah. We should stipulate the, I mean, I'm sure most people know this, but it's easy to get lost. It's easy to get this confused when you're reading a meta headline about rotten tomatoes. They're determining that every review is either, quote, fresh or quote, rotten, right? Right. Thumbs up or thumbs down. Right. And the line between the two is a little bit arbitrary. I mean, the first negative review that Black Panther got gave it three out of five stars, which is not exactly a pan, you know. But the review itself, this is from Ed Power of the Irish Independent.

I read it. And he had kind of one or two nitpicks in the final paragraph, which seemed totally reasonable. I don't see in the movie, obviously. But it seemed like a rave to me, or at least like a mostly positive review to that point. Well, I saw a lot of people online quoting it out of context and then like commenters were complaining because his one of the points that he makes, I believe, earlier in the piece was that the weight of the Trump administration. And this is again, an Irish writer. The weight of the expectations of this movie coming out in a particularly kind of racially divided moment in America's history made the movie sort of a drag.

It wasn't just the spectacle of, you know, backflips and laser beams that it could have been if released during, you know, in a different year. But, you know, he wasn't saying that the movie was overly dependent on politics. It seemed to me that he was saying that you could feel the. pressure. You know, the movie, the movie exhibited that it was coming, you know, exhibited that it could feel the pressure. Yeah. He said it was too, he said that Chadwick Boseman's performance. It was like, it was like he was feeling the weight of it and was almost a little too restrained. Yeah. Which I thought was, again, having not seen the movie, but it seemed like a totally

reasonable point. Well, I actually read the other two negative reviews, which were, I don't know, less, um, less earnest, perhaps. Vicki Roach of the Daily Telegraph here in Australia. By the way, The other two came from Australia, interestingly, called it an earnest ethnical cargo cult of a movie, which I'm actually really sure what that means, but I can't imagine it's a good thing. And somebody from a website called Urban Cinephile, which advertises itself as the world of film in Australia on the internet. Thankfully, thank you for clarifying. They were reading this on the internet, like on a movie screen or something like that. she used the phrase, hell hath no fury as a crazed African,

which I think is probably not something that would be printed in a polite newspaper. But anyway, those are the only three negative reviews on there right now. Negative quote unquote, as you say. There's a lot of parallels I wasn't aware of between Australian film criticism and Boston Sports Radio. This is really great. And those reviews, I mean, all those three negative reviews

taken as a whole, I'm sure will come as music to the years of anyone who is inherently skeptical of, you know, the bias of American media vis-a-vis the rest of the world or something. But, you know, I do think that there is, I mean, everything that I've heard from people who've seen this movie is that it's fantastic and that it's certainly more thoughtful and deep than its predecessors in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And I don't, and I do think it's, you know, it's worth stipulated. that this is, you know, you said it.

You know, you, if you come back, if you're a reviewer, you come back from this, from the movie and you say, you know, you tell your editor, like, yeah, it was really good. Your editor is going to ask, well, how is it good? How is it different? How, you know, what set it apart? Is it the best movie ever? What's the most exclamatory headline we can put on this thing? And, and listen, I mean, this may be the most different and most amazing movie that the Marvel Cinemat, that superhero movies have ever produced, right? and I love these movies.

I'm the biggest comic book nerd you're going to find, and the fact that they figured out a way to do them well has been one of the happiest things that's happened in my lifetime. But it has to be said that, like, as long... I mean, I could talk for hours about how cool... I mean, how, like, the cool differences that Marvel's made in their movies is the way they've differentiated them by, like, making them suddenly one genre or another.

But they are very similar movies compared to the wide world of moviedom. You know, I mean, there's a lot of... at time, especially in the team up movies, there's a lot of sort of mind-numbing sameness or obviousness that happens. And to differentiate any of them, I mean, I think there's a degree to which, even subconsciously, reviewers are looking for

a way to be effusive about these movies in an era where these are the movies that it's most important for you to cover. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think we, yeah, and I think you and I've touched on that before. Like, if you're locked into the Marvel universe as a critic.

You're like, this is going to take up, you know, 10% of my life comic book movies, which is probably, I don't think that's an overstatement, right? Maybe more. Sure. If I'm a professional film reviewer, then I'm going to start looking for the masterpieces of this genre because what else am I going to do? You know, even if I don't, if I'm not given to like movies like this, like it's kind of like critical Stockholm syndrome, right?

Like I just, and I'm, by the way, it's a lot of these movies are quite good. But I'm just saying like that's that's totally right. You're going to start looking for masterpieces. I think that's I think that's totally right. I'm, you know, it's funny because I'm like obviously a lot of the, you know, we're going to, we're going to see. I think the when you talk about like people who have an investment in this movie, you know, and for various reasons that that will probably start once more, you know, at least on Twitter and stuff once the movie actually comes out. But, you know, taking that, putting that aside for me. remember whenever I see something that is a hundred percent fresh in this case, the contrarian in

me does want to read the negative review just to see like what is the best case against this movie. I mean, or by the way, the positive review for Suburbancon, if there was one out in the world, you know, like who, who, what was, what was the case for this movie? And, and I don't think there's, you know, now we're seeing some people on tour being like, it's, it's, it's really good. I wouldn't say it's, it's merely really good. And that's, you know, good enough or whatever. And I just think.

the shades of, you know, there are shades of criticism and stuff like that. And, you know, I'm, I guess I'm not against the kind of fresh, rotten thing. To me, it feels like a rerun. You mentioned Roger Ebert of all the critics who were so mad at Siskel and Ebert for doing thumbs up or thumbs down saying it ruined, you know, movie criticism or it, you know, it took a complicated thing and reduced it to up or down. I'm like, but isn't how, isn't that what people want, right? Don't people just at some level want to know whether they should go see the movie or not? You know, I just, I don't know that to me is like a and if it's you know if I look at the thing and it says 53% fresh or 75% or 93% or whatever I think that's sort of valuable yeah I mean I think that I think that

the great I mean the proponents of Black Panther the reviewers who have seen it and and mostly praised it to this point you know I mean I a lot of times I think that I don't think that they're coming at this with an agenda I mean I certainly don't. I mean, not all of them anyway. I mean, and I think it's pretty clear.

I think most people are pretty, you know, are pretty honest about it when they are. You know, there's nothing wrong with reviewing a movie from a particular point of view. These are, you know, that's what a lot of reviews are.

I think that, but I do think that, you know, when you see the 100%, I mean, part of that's just a, is a fluke, you know.

Part of it is, is, you know, a little bit of Stockholm syndrome. And part of it's, you know, this is a, this is a, you know, beloved franchise, an incredibly acclaimed and beloved director and and lead, and two lead actors, really trying, I mean, you know, whether or not we're working in the margins of a very confined genre here, I mean, trying something with an almost entirely African-American cast that's never been done before, right?

And, and I think that, and I think that, you know, having, you know, getting some bonus points for that is, is, is, is, expected and it's and it's fine. But I do think that you know, we come back around at the beginning, this is, the, the, the fresh score only reflects that that percentage of reviews were positive, you know? I mean, we're mostly positive. And, you know, if you want to bell, if you want to bell curve out even like the, even the pans, you know, it's, it doesn't rest there at number 10. It's going to be, it's, you know, it's probably sitting somewhere around like 8.2 or something

like that. And the, and the, the negative reviews aren't that, you know, are not outliers, nor are the, really positive ones. So yeah, it's a little bit distracting, I think, to the overall, I mean, to the overall PR push of the film, maybe most distracting in all of this was the reports that there were, you know, online trolls that were trying to, that were planning on tanking the IMDB user score or viewer score, which, which I'm not quite sure if that, if this troll army exists or if it was just, you know, we've seen it happen in the past and we're protect, you know,

and we've seen some inkling of it on Facebook and so we're protecting against it, you know, or if it was, I mean, the other end of the spectrum is just complete, you know, PR operation by, by, by, by Disney to make it look like these people were coming out and try to get other people to the ballot box or whatever. I don't think that's what happened, but you can, but I've definitely read those conspiracy theories online, but that'd be funny. Again, this is just distracting from, from whether or not. I mean, then it becomes this incredible meta argument about whether or not, you know,

fan, about fan opinions versus reviewer opinions. And what's lost in the whole thing is like, you know, we have to wait another few days before we can even see this movie. And I'm sort of exhausted by the whole thing by the time it comes out. That's what I feel just totally exhausted. And I think it's to circle back to your earlier point. It's part of it is, you know, people being numb skulls, you know, or at least alleged numb skulls, if these infect are real people, not just some dude.

with a Facebook page saying I am I am representing the fans of the DC universe. We're going to take this movie down. But really it's what's exhausting, I think, is various publications trying to win every point of this, right? Trying to win the pre-release, try to win the think piece thing because I'm really the only reason I even know about Ed Power of the Irish Independence Review, no offense, Ed, is because there were like mashable pieces about it, right? And then there were pieces on Breitbart that were about.

the people getting mad at Ed Power. So it says this whole think piece of economy. And then, of course, when the movie comes out, as you said, everybody's going to hit all these other marks, you know, with these just things. And it's just, I don't know. I just, I'm, I'm already, I'm just sort of like, I don't want to say I'm mad at the movie. But what happens is, I guess not this one because I'm pretty interested in seeing it.

But like with other movies, I've been mad at them before they come out because of the journalism around them. Yeah. You know, just kind of like exhausted and angry at them in a weird way. And, you know, that's pretty depressing. I mean, I think that there's, I mean, I think, you know, you'll see people, you'll see commenters online that, that, you know, fear the sort of liberal or social justice takeover of, you know, the journalism world, which is just inherently hilarious. But, you know, there is this notion that, like, a movie like Black Panther built into it is a sort of chilling effect amongst American reviewers that you can't be the first one out of the gate talking, you talk. saying it's not good.

And certainly, I don't think anybody would, you know, change their, would force their in-house reviewer to change their opinion based on political leanings or anything like that. I guess I could sort of imagine not wanting to be the Irish independent in this case, you know, knowing that and it's seen, and we could see it coming. You know, like you said, this is a complex at this point

that like you're going to, the first negative review now becomes the story. You know, who knows? Obviously, I'm extrapolating, but it's a kind of crazy. It's a wild world we live in. I really want to make it clear, though, that I'm very excited about Black Panther. I can't wait to see Black Panther. Oh, yeah, me too. It looks so great.

It's going to take a lot more meta-thing pieces about the reviews to set my will to see Black Panther. We're going to have to go another four or five rounds for them. Actually check out. All right, David, with that, let's move on to our third topic. It was an overworked yet delightful Twitter, joke last week to cast the NBA trade deadline in terms of winners and losers, but to restrict your winners and losers to dueling insiders, Adrian, Wojnarowski, and Shams, Chirania. Here's some few examples for you.

Shams choked today. Spotlight got too big. Woj showed his veteran savvy. Trade deadlines like the playoffs are just a different game. Another one said, Wojj out here dropping heat and Shams talking about some damn Malachi trades. Boy. And finally, Shams hasn't tweeted.

in a full hour and woe just going nuts. We are seeing greatness. And that was with a giff of Michael Jordan shrugging his shoulders during the 92 NBA finals. David, what did you make of this latest round of this extraordinary, I think, the word is for it, sports writer Lee feud? Wow. I'm trying to think of what the group, the best pop culture did. I mean, all these tweets have not led me to the best, the best pop culture parallel to this. I mean, this is sort of like, this would have been like if like Creed had ended with Rocky beating him up.

But the redemption of Wojj that happened at the trade deadline was such a good story. It's such a good narrative. And really, more than anything, it kept this, this Woj Sham's feud alive. Right. You know, I talked in the last segment about sort of the power of the of the, of the, audience. And certainly, like, we see this at the ringer in the NBA world constantly. I mean, memes about basketball players become big, are much bigger stories than the,

than the gamers, you know, or much, or just the, even the literal narrative of the team's record and their, you know, their pursuit of the playoffs, you know, interesting squabbling or whatever, just stories about locker room fights and stuff. those are much bigger pieces. And this Wode Shams thing is like is the greatest meta storyline of all because it's the, it's a potentially non-existent feud between two people who are covering the stories in a sort of meta way anyway. Well, I say, I say feud jocularly, of course, because, you know, I don't, I don't know that

they are really feuding in some, but they're definitely competing. And there's absolutely zero chance that the two men, you know, aren't extremely competitive about this, right? I mean, they clearly want to win, win these points. I think, so my take on it is that NBA insiderdom and surely the NFL too is uniquely designed for this kind of feud because there's a really a definite scoreboard, right? We were joking earlier. Like what if you're, if you're, if you're if you were feuding with another wrestling writer, what would be the scoreboard that you would choose, you know, or sports or media, you know, criticism or whatever. But when you have, you know, the NBA, all these little news nuggets around certain moments, right?

Like the trade deadline, the off season and then various ones that come out during the season, you can really, you can kind of see a one-to-one thing. This is not the most important news. Either these guys will break, right? Because this is stuff that would have been announced anyway. This is not stuff that would have been unknown to us readers. Right. But I just think the fact that it has a scoreboard on it.

And that makes it fun, right? Like anybody, anybody watching at home as they used to. on baseball broadcasts can figure out who won this round. Yeah, I mean, I use the Rocky reference off the top of my head, but I think that what makes the story, the meta story really intriguing is you're right. There's a scoreboard, but also it hues to this sort of like, you know, hero's journey that we're all so familiar with. And it inherently paints, I mean, just the structure of this that like,

Woj starts a vertical, he hires, then he goes, then he leaves for ESPN. leaving Shams behind and whether or not that was his, whose decision that was, you know, that they'd be separated, then that Yahoo,

the vertical continues to exist and start sort of, Shams is like, you know, beating Woj at his own game. I mean, it really started right after he was hired and hired by ESPN.

And I think that a, that a bunch of the online, you know, gif making and backslapping is related to just, you know, ESPN hate or and I don't and not in necessarily a bad way. Just the sort of laughing at the big institution that's getting schooled by,

you know, the Goliath that's getting schooled by David or whatever. We saw that with, we've seen that in the NFL with Jake Laser, right? Yeah. And saying why didn't they credit me and all that stuff? Absolutely. Yeah, you see that kind of thing all the time. And we know, we know that from when ESPN hired Wode, I mean, from the reporting that was done at the time, that there was that, you know,

There were powerful people inside of ESPN that were just apoplectic that they were getting scooped by this Yahoo Twitter account all the time, you know. That's capital. That's capital Yahoo, by the way, not lowercase. Yeah, exactly. And that they were, and that they were, you know, forced to credit him repeatedly on their own crawl. Now, there are people inside ESPN, there were people and probably still are people inside of ESPN who would tell you that the only reason that Woge was beating them. beating them, you know, scooping them on such a regular

basis is that ESPN had this infrastructure that made it impossible to report at that speed, right? Right. And, and, and you, and I think that's basically where this entire story, like, that, that leads you to the origin of this rivalry. That Woj goes to ESPN and suddenly he's,

and suddenly the shackles are on him. And it makes, and he's much slower at, at, at breaking these stories. And Chom suddenly has the, the, the, the opportunity to, jump out ahead. I have no idea, and I don't think anyone's, you know, reported on this or that they be able to, but it really feels like that at the trade deadline this year, that either Woj or someone way above him said, it's crazy that we, you know, hired this guy for his Twitter

scoops and we're not letting him scoop us. Let's just go back to the way he was doing things before. Yeah, I think I like what you said about the hero's journey, you know, not to get too Joseph Campbell on this whole thing, which no one would ever do when talking about NBA trades. But just the kind of filial nature of the whole feud is the amazing part, right? You know, especially since Shams was seen to having been won the off season. I think that if I'm if I'm saying this right. That's correct. Yeah.

Now Woj comes back and reasserts himself. That was, you know, what the Twitter jokes were about this week and won the trade deadline. That was, you know, I mean, that's, it's, I'm not sure that sports writing ever. inherently provides great drama. But that's pretty fun. That's pretty cool. Speaking of drama, I mean, and the way that we consume media,

you and I consume media, definitely, I mean, more so than almost anybody else, but really just the way that the average sports fan consumes media now. Sports writers are a huge part of the way we consume and the way that we interact and not just, I read this columnist, but like, you know, the way that, I mean, memes about getting scooped or, you know, the way that the sausage is made,

All this stuff is part of the way that we consume it. You know, you immediately, you read an article and you immediately want to see what your other sports, what other sports writers are saying about it on Twitter. The problem with a lot of that is that most writers in general, and present company is not excluded here, are really boring. You know, I mean, there's not a lot of, it's been a long time since I've seen two journalists go around back and, like, have a fight over some story that was written, you know, Super Bowl press row notwithstanding. And the fact that you're, that something so perfect, that's so. just like something out of like mythology, you know, that this

feud has just been born and it's like a gift to us. That something, I mean, it's, it's amazing to watch these two people race to get the first tweet out. And again, and we're talking a lot about, a lot of these tweets were separated by one minute. You know, I mean, or then that's Twitter timestamping.

It's amazing that like a margin of error is making such a big difference in the way that we consume news. And the best part about it is everybody's watching both of these Twitter, feeds to see who gets there first. You know, I mean, the story is the competition, and somehow it's actually lapped the intrigue of almost anything that happened at the trade deadline. You know, I mean, listen, the cabs put up a big fight for a storyline of the day,

but this is the ongoing feud that we care about most is, you know, two sports writers like seeing who's got the more nimble thumbs on their iPhone. Well, I've worked this point a couple of times, but I've said before, I think that, you know, inside it's it's a weird sort of side effect or or thing about our era of journalism that the insiders have become these heroic figures right nicky fink and um in holley and in basketball and this they're that they're you know they're doing their job for us right they're rooting out news they're you know they're this they're this kind of you know there's this kind of you know guy who's who's getting some answers and getting news that the teams don't want you to know and all that stuff

whether that's always true or not. And so, yeah, when they go one-on-one, I think that's it. By the way, I want to spend a segment next week coming up with the script for Creed if Rocky had beaten up Creed at the end of the movie. That's just fascinating to me. I just, I want you to do the Jim Ross narration. My God, no, no. This wasn't supposed to happen, damn it.

I mean, well, the alternative would be like it's Star Wars if, you know, Darth and Luke were co-workers, but Darth got hired on. to the empire. I can't quite make sense of this storyline either. I was like, whoa. The point is, the point is, the point is in Darth Vader, and I don't want to say that he is, all right? I mean, he's a wonderful reporter. But it's an incredibly, it's an incredibly compelling story, you know? I mean, it's really, it's hard, it's hard to say that it's not. And anything that can be distilled so succinctly down into gifts of people

dunking on other people with the heads replaced. I mean, that is the Joseph Campbell mythology of the modern era. And I don't think that those gifts get enough credit. All right. With David assuring everyone that Woge is not, in fact, Darth Vader, we'll conclude with that. Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer, more hot takes about the media next week.

See you later, David. See you later, man. You know how they should settle the Woj versus Shams since it's tied 1-1? Whoever gets the scoop on the gender of Tristan Thompson and Chloe Kardashian's kid. That would be the time breaker. Because not only they competing with each other, but TMZ and all that stuff, right?

I like the idea, though, of calling the shot for them. I love it.