The Press Box - The Hiring (and Firing) of Kevin D. Williamson, 'The Simpsons' and the Problem With Apu, and Sinclair's Propaganda Machine | The Press Box (Ep. 452)

Episode Date: April 11, 2018

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker sit down to unpack 'The Atlantic' severing ties with Kevin D. Williamson (02:00), how 'The Simpsons' responded to criticism of Apu's character (25:45), and the statement that news anchors on Sinclair-owned stations read (37:30). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, this week, Jimmy Kimmel and Sean Hannity brokered a kind of truce. What I want to know is, is there anyone in media you'd like to broker a truce with? I mean, I would love to broker a truce with Sean Hannity, too, just for the attention. I mean, you know, there's definitely some people that on behalf of the ringer, it'd be fun to broker the truth with. Any names? I don't know if I'm going to name any names. What's your answer to this question? Well, there's this one guy on Twitter, and every time I write a bet he has.

He says, Simmons has ordered Curtis to attack ESPN again. And I think I'd like to move toward detente by suggesting that he's wrong about me. And I'm right. And that we should move on to more fruitful topics like my liberal bias. Yeah, I think that would make a lot more sense. Listeners, your party to a media criticism piece summit. This is the press box on the ringer podcast network. The press box is the media podcast.

We are not allowed to use the phrase, what a difference a year makes. We are Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the. The Ringer. If you need more Ringer content in your life, and who doesn't, let me direct you to Molly McHugh's Mark Zuckerberg in Washington Primer for Zuckerberg's appearance for the house today. That was wild. Shea Serrano on Daryl Morey's Small Ball Musical. And of course, Tuesday nights, HBO premiere of the Ringer's Andre the Giant documentary featuring a certain smoothheaded talking head who will remind you of a young Steve Schmidt. David, that's like the most insulting thing I've ever said about you. Three topics for you today, David. First, we'll discuss the Atlantic's hiring and near instantaneous firing of conservative provocateur Kevin D. Williamson. And what that says about the future of the think peace industrial complex.

Second, the Simpsons finally addresses the criticism of the character Apu and everybody's still pissed off. We discuss whether they're right to be. And finally, what if you're smiling, two-paid local news anchor, read some conservative. conservative propaganda after reading the winning lottery numbers, America's Sinclair problem. Plus, as always, our overworked Twitter joke of the week. But David, I'll call this first segment, let the right one in when Kevin D. Williamson was hired away from National Review by the Atlantic, an old tweet of his where he said he had hanging in mind as a punishment for women who have abortions came under scrutiny. But Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg waved that away saying it was unfair to Judge Williamson's work on a handful of tweets, in this case, one, he had deleted. Then Media Matters found him treating abortion as a homicide on a podcast.

So it was not an impulsive take, but one he had expanded on at some length. Listen. I'm kind of squishy on capital punishment in general, but that I'm absolutely willing to see abortion treated like a regular homicide under the criminal code. Sure. Instantly. What's that? Instantly.

Sure. As of tomorrow. I would take it. Yeah. I mean, now it's going to be 150 years before this happens. And then after going one and done in terms of Atlantic. think pieces, Williamson was fired. What was your first reaction upon hearing the last part of that news?

Oh, man, I can't. The last part, I mean, it was pretty stunning that it got to the point of him writing an article. I mean, that it got that far. And then he basically ended up getting fired for the initial complaint, right? We talked about this now for, I feel like this has been going on for two weeks at least, you know, and we've talked about doing it for last week and on the show. And, you know, so we've been having this conversation. And I remember our earliest conversation I said to you, this reminded me. The first thing I thought of was the conversation, the discussions we've had on the podcast before about Jamel Hill and how tweets are so much more visceral or so much more, you know, objectionable to so many people than. the actual content of somebody's work because tweets are accessible. You know, they're right there. Someone can just, you know, retweet something and say, look at what this person said.

And it was sort of crazy to me that the entire initial furor was about those two tweets, you know. It was a tweet and a follow-up tweet, basically. And I've been reading Williamson or I've on and off for a long time. And I was just like, he's said a lot more objectionable stuff than that. Yes. It took a while. We're equally objectionable. Yeah.

It took a while for people to get to the, you know, definitionally racist stuff that he wrote when he, you know, went to Ohio and reported from the ground there. Because that was a long piece that someone had to like vaguely remember and dig up or I think probably just pour through his entire National Review Uvra. And then, you know, beyond that like, I get I mean, nobody's like read his book. He could have like, you know, called for the death of all children in his book. I mean, but no one would even know. It's more, you know, the easiest, the lowest hanging fruit are like, or tweets, you know. Isn't that weird?

Yeah. How that's become like the permanent record. Yeah. Like the permanent strike against you is something you tweeted. Yeah, the thing that should be held least against you in a lot of ways. Well, and I thought what was funny is when he got hired by the Atlantic in Jeffrey Goldberg's letter to the staff, the first note to the staff. He said he's off Twitter. And I take this as a sign of his maturity.

I just find it funny that you say, I trust this person to write for us, but I don't trust them to tweet. Yeah. Right. That's already a little bit of an alarm bell to me. Like, I understand that's the impulsive stuff. That's the stuff that doesn't come out right. It gets misunderstood. Lord knows I have been there, if not quite on the same terms.

But that's just weird to me. I don't really want you to tweet anymore. Especially when that's the, I mean, who knows what Jeffrey Goldberg's calculus was, but at almost any media company in America, your follower account on Twitter has a lot to do with whether or not you're going to get hired. or at least whether or not someone's going to notice you to employ you. I mean, that's certainly, people have been saying that about the athletic, that they're just looking for X number of Twitter followers and then you're, you know, you're on board.

Yeah. So, I mean, to have someone stop self-promoting for the sake of, I don't know, decency, maturity, that seems a little bit weird. We have some real talk about Williamson. Yeah, let's do it. He's not that good. No. He's not that good.

No. He's more gonzo than good. Yes. Right? And I would suggest that at a place like National Review where the writing does not tend to beyond that sort of gonzo unconventional style that he gets wildly overrated

absolutely true it's not even I mean it's the gonzo but there's there's there's two parts of him he's a you know a theater critic by trade before he was a really a political comment commentator and he he wrote about the theater a lot for national review as well

I think so there's the highbrow subject matter and then there's the sort of purple is not the right word but the sort of like the hyperliterate word choices, writing style. And then, yeah, the sort of gonzo, the gonzo aesthetic, too. He was just so much better than everything.

He was so, he's not better. He was just such a different beast than everyone around him. Exactly. That he got held up as this literary icon. A writer, right? Not just somebody who's arguing conservative positions doing, you know, good, and I'm not saying the quality of writing there is bad. But it's just like, it's like he was just doing something totally different.

Sure. So I feel like he got totally, you know, conservative stylists, you can have Evan Williamson, and I'll take Andy Ferguson from the Weekly Standard or Jonathan v. Last, right? Any day of the week. Any day of the week. I filled the whole argument about him before and after was basically just on the wrong trajectory. Because I thought there were a lot of well-meaning people basically trying to figure out what is the line in the sand of acceptable discourse, right? If you said X, you can't get into the Atlantic. Or if you said Y and trying to figure out like, okay, if you think abortion is murder, and then if you think this and then, you know, you can't get into the Atlantic. Here's why that's totally nuts to me.

What's worse? Writing and saying everything that Kevin Williamson said, right? Or helping write George W. Bush's axis of evil speech that pushed us into the Iraq War. Yeah. And if you say the latter, then why is David Frumman in good standing at the Atlantic? Yeah. Why is that okay, right? And if you, because that to me is just as disqualifying as anything he did,

which is why I think the whole kind of trying to figure out what is, publishable speech and what is not and what gets you the next job is just it's just silly well i mean part of this is i mean a lot of this is on goldberg right because you he he should have seen it should have seen this reaction coming and he should have been had a you know preemptive letter to the staff he should have told people it was happening and for them to address him directly with any concerns or or shut up you know i mean it's if you you you certainly can't give this very milk toast i don't really think he meant what he said response the first time around and then subsequently fire him for this for that very thing.

I mean, we just listen to the podcast. First of all, of all the podcasts that didn't need to exist. I mean, like that would, like that, I mean,

that was not. You can say the same thing about this one, but fair enough. We get Jim at least. We have high production values on this. But listen, but it's not like, I don't,

the fact that he reiterated it two days later on a, on a, you know, a podcast that's most, just verbal diarrhea or here are the things I wrote about this week or that we talked about this week. I don't know why you'd be surprised by that, you know? I mean, that's, there's nothing there.

No. And the fact that you also talked about it on a podcast. Yeah. Yeah, that's weird. I mean, it's like your whole case was that it was just a totally impulsive tweet that he didn't mean anything by it. Yeah. But the fact that he talked about what he clearly believed in another venue was the disqualifier.

Yeah. Or even if it's not, I mean, even if it's not impulsive. I mean, I think the defense of William Sam. that some people mount, and I think there's a lot of legitimacy to it, is that he's more of a provocateur than an ideologue. That's right.

He might accept that. And even though he has said that he does, you know, he has said in triplicate that he does believe that thing, if he's a provocateur and he's just trying to, you know, take the most extreme stance

or the most interesting stance just to get a rise out of people, again, I don't know why you'd be surprised that he would repeat it. Right? So to that extent, it's on Goldberg. he's got to be

he's I mean the Atlantic as an institution should be employing conservative people if that's what their editorial direction you know director sees fit and if they're going to they should make these rules for themselves

it's not it's not if it's about abortion opinions on Twitter then you know so be it but have it like be confident in your decision that's where I want to go next this to me is the unreported

at least as far as I've seen part of this is the staff at the Atlantic right what they thought about this and whether they were willing to work and be at a same place with Kevin Williams, which to me, ultimately, just operationally, is the much bigger question than we can, you know, all of us debating whether this work was disqualifying for this job. Will the people work with you?

I tweet a little bit jokingly about Barstool Van Talk at ESPN. Some would say there was a limited audience for that tweet, but I thought the, I thought the analogy actually worked out just fun. I kid. Anyway, what happened there was that. that they get into business with these people and ESPN. And some of their prominent employees say, you know what? This is no good.

This, the two were, even though these guys might not have been the perpetrators of why I didn't like it, Barstool, that was this hive of misogyny. And I do not want to get into business with this brand. Yeah. And that was ultimately what it was, right? Yeah. It wasn't that something had happened at Barstool. It was that valued ESPN employees were like, no way. And to me, this whole decision rests on.

Do people at the Atlantic who Kevin Williamson might have indirectly said should be hung or their friends should be or their sisters should be or their mothers should be or whomever? Right. Do they want to work with this? Can they work with this person and can they make it work? Yeah. Like it's a company of people, right? Journal, you know, magazines there, we can talk about ideas and this and this and that. But ultimately, it's like, do you want to work with this person?

And I'd just be fascinated to know who at the Atlantic was like, yeah, no, you know. and what Jeffrey Goldberg's inbox looked like as the various, as the, as he hired him and as the second thing came out. Because to me, that that is just, you know, just as important as anything. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure there was a lot of, I'm sure there was probably a feeling on, on, you know, on Goldberg's side that because Williamson is anti-Trump, that, you know, previous sins would be forgiven in a similar way to the way that, you know, from, David Frum's, uh, semi-conversion to the moderate left. made him acceptable. Yeah. It turns out when you go really hard on these, you know, on some very, very, you know,

inflammatory subjects, it's not as easy to forgive and forget, I guess. But I do want to say, you know, you mentioned Gonzo earlier. I referred to him as a provocateur. Yeah. I wanted to just at least mention this. I mean, certainly a lot of the ideas, if you've read a lot of his pieces, he's definitely trying things on for size. He's trying, there's some intellectual exercises. Like when you wrote that, you know, the Republicans, you know, have been the party of, um, of social justice.

And civil rights. And civil rights. Yeah. They were, I mean, certainly they were during the, you know, in American history, but that they still are. That there was no great flip-flopping of allegiances, right? Of sides. That's, I mean, he knew that was bullshit when he started writing it. Absolutely. But he wanted to see if he could do it. And the fact that people kind of engaged with it seriously, I think, you know, speaks to the fact that he did a fairly good job. And certainly he's, you know, I don't, you say he's not a very good writer. And I think stylistically, it's a little bit he just, I pull my hair out, you know, sometimes, but I don't have any to pull.

But the, but yeah, I mean, he's a, he's a smart man, you know. I mean, many people have pointed out that, like, Tanaasi Coates engaged with him on the reparations issue. You know, I mean, there was, you know, he's got, he's got a level of. respect. And, but I, but I do think that there is this sort of interesting, like, conservative preoccupation with being a provocateur. You know, it's not, we all know. The word you're looking for here is troll, right? Well, it is, it is a troll. I know that, I know that word seems toxic. You're right. But I don't think it really is because I think there's a lot of troll in everybody, even people who are calling out trolls on Twitter. Totally true. You know, people like to write pieces

to get reactions. So they have certain tweets or certain pieces to get reactions, even if the bulk of their work is, you know, let's say on the other side of whatever non-troll fence that is. Yeah, but it's, I mean, there's not, you know, I think the conservative writers look so fondly back at, you know, William F. Buckley or Christopher Hitchens, I think, number one, who was certainly would have been described as a troll if you were around today, right? A lot of his pieces, absolutely. I mean, you could see him just going in with his, like, lip snarled and a wink in his eye, you know, I mean, he knew what he was doing.

And there's, like, a fascination with being offensive. and not and I don't mean that necessarily as an insult, but it's this, you know, there's a point where you have to get, I think there's a feeling that you have to be a troll to get attention. Like he would have, Kevin Williamson would have never been up for the Atlantic job had he not pissed as many people off as he had along the way. Do you really think that's a case? Well, no, no, this is, I'm just. You can't follow the Ross Douthat path to fame and fortune? I think you can certainly. I think that there's, you have to be really good to be Ross Douthit.

But I think the liberal media, there's this giant market. I agree with that. There's this giant market for quote unquote reasonable conservatives. Sure. Right. Even if you have all the same issue positions that you just regard people and treat people in a different way and generally, you know, seem like a reasonable guy, at least in your pros, right? But the thirst for page views, the thirst for clicks for retweets.

Do we think some of this is being in the national review bubble? We talk about the liberal bubble all the time, which is certainly exists, but the national review bubble where some of this stuff plays. I read a piece of his, this is not one of the controversy or ones, but he wrote this one in 2012 called Like a Boss. That's all about how Mitt Romney should just own being a rich guy. Did you remember this piece? Yeah. Which actually is what Donald Trump essentially did four years later.

So I guess he gets credit for being fairly prophetic with that one. But to me, when I read that piece, I can see the temptation of a liberalish editor with Kevin Williams. Because I can, the point of that is kind of one of those funny, provocative things. Right. You know, it's like, oh, this is kind of a piece that we'll get everybody riled up. This is an easy tweet. Mitch Romney should be a rich guy. You know, all this stuff.

Yeah. But like the top of it was all this kind of, you know, weird paragraph about how rich guys have more male errors. Right. He said this about Obama says, since Obama has only daughters, may as well give this guy a cardigan and fallopian tubes. Right. Like it's just like weird and sort of off putting. But you could see if you're the Atlantic, well, we would just see. We would just take that paragraph out.

Yeah. And we would just have the other. two paragraphs, which are funny, well argued. They're not wrong, right? Mitt Romney didn't make a mess of himself pretending not to be a rich guy or getting concerned about his wealth, you know? And I think that's what it is. They think, oh, we just, you know, just kind of trim around the edges a little bit.

And he can be our kind of conservative writer. I'm not sure that, I'm not sure Ken Williamson had any actual interest in that. I think he seems like a guy who wants to be what he wants to be. Yeah. And maybe so. I mean, I certainly, to me, to me, the trolling, the provocateur. stuff. It was aspirational. I think that he, I think that he probably loved the idea of writing for the Atlantic and having a broader audience and either converting people to his point of view or continuing to, you know, antagonize them for, for attention. Yeah, he had some, he had some line about that in his goodbye note to National Review. The, a brief detour. The Atlantic hired Williamson for its ideas section. What part of the Atlantic, as it's currently constituted, is not about ideas. I have no idea. Like Tanahazi Coates, Molly Ball, before she went to time.

McKay Coppins, David Graham, aren't they writing think pieces? Isn't that the whole Atlantic? Yeah. Isn't that like the ringer starting an NBA vertical? Isn't that the whole thing? I mean, it just seems a little redundant, doesn't it? You're exactly right. I always just thought that was funny.

Yeah. We need some more ideas. Well, we have, it's all ideas. That's what it is. Well, I think to bring this background full circle to the tweet, I mean, for one thing, his his his tweet about about abortion was an abject failure even from a trolling standpoint, right? I mean, to say, I actually admire the honesty, if he's honest, but if you want to make an arch point about about abortion rights, do not conflate that with another equally problematic issue like capital punishment, right? Christopher Hitchens would have never would have never tied abortion rights to, to hang.

I mean, that's, those are, those are. He might have, but, but yeah, let's say on a good day. Yeah, exactly. He might have said that on a stage with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth, but I don't think he would have made that like the centerpiece of a book. At a dinner party. Exactly. A couple of glasses, yeah. But yeah, but it was a failure of a tweet.

And I think that's really, that really gets to the heart of what, you know, of the whims and problem is that it's that first paragraph problem we were talking about before. The, the, the, the, he got away with a lot because he was at the National Review. Both because it's a, you know, it's just a different climate, you know. Wasn't the racially offensive stuff in a first paragraph too? Yes, absolutely. The very first lines of his when he was in, it was, yeah, his, his, his, uh, Ferguson piece when he was Illinois. The first line was, hey, crack a, hey crack, a white devil, FU, white devil.

And that's a child yelling at him from the streets. Right. And then he goes on to make some unfortunate comparison. Which, by the way, either, I don't know if you blame his, him or his editors, but I've never, read that paragraph. and if anyone believes that that paragraph actually occurred, let me know. I mean, it's like there's like that there are no words in there that resemble real life. But anyway, it's the, it's, that's the problem is that he is that he's, he goes one step too far thoughtlessly under the pretense of, I don't, trolling, doing whatever else.

But the other problem is it's that that it was a tweet to, again, bring it back full circle. most of the people who were offended by his hiring, I guarantee didn't know who he was. I'm not talking about Atlantic staffers. I'm talking about people who rallied behind those that were originally offended, you know, other people that were tweeting about it. And their access to Kevin Williams had came through the existence of this tweet, right? So everything comes with this very particular point of view, which I'm not saying is necessarily wrong. But you got to, I mean, this is the world we live in where, you know, if you're going to troll,

you've got to be ready to own that for the rest of your life because it's out there. All right, David, now it's time for our overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. First off, we are, I think the Mark Zuckerberg Congress memes are a little too fresh. Well, that's happening as we're speaking.

It's happening in real time. So next week we may have to take stock. It's just too. It's breaking news. If you're making a tweet talking about making a platform joke based on the cushion that he's sitting on. That was a big one. You might win.

Right. Or the one with all the cameras gathered around him. Anyway, we'll talk about that at a later date. How about any tweet about Lindsay Buckingham leaving Fleetwood Mac and, quote, going his own way? That's via Hugh Hopkins, big one last couple of days. Also, how about some gags from last Monday's NCAA title game and the dominant performance from Villanova's Dante DiVicenzo? How many times did you see Dante's Inferno or Dante's?

peak on Twitter. Or, quote, Dante is the most popular Italian athlete from Philadelphia since Rocky. Thanks to Matt Sillich for the heads up on that one. David, did you see the dumb thing that Ray Lewis said? No. Or do I need to be more specific? Please enlighten me. Referring to the turbulent offseason of Odell Beckham Jr., who's a subject to trade rumors,

Lewis said that Beckham has, quote, removed God from his life. That's the reason. He's having problems. Remove God from his life. To which a bunch of people joked. Quote, Ray Lewis removed a man from his life. Referring, of course, the whole stabbing thing back in 2000, which we should note resulted merely in an obstruction of justice plea from Lewis.

I'm not going to libel anyone with the overworked Twitter joke of the week. Thanks to Nicholas Dubon for that one. How about some overworked Twitter from my adopted home country of Australia? This from Australian rules football, Tori Dixon, a player for the Western Bulldogs. Remember that mascot? All right. was, has alleged that he was bitten by another player named Connor McKenna,

to which everyone in the Sunbird country tweeted, man bites talk. Not bad, solid joke. Nice word. This resulted, by the way, in a formal hearing for McKenna, the bider, during which, and here I'm quoting a Fox Sports piece, two people describe the footballer as, quote, grounded, and someone who plays the game the right way. I believe that sports cliche is officially over when you have bitten somebody and you and you play the game the right way.

Anyway, that's from listener, Matthew Heasley. Good on you, Matthew. And finally, David, you might have seen the news that Steven Spielberg told the British newspaper The Sun that he'd consider casting a female hero in an Indiana Jones movie. We'd have to change the name from Jones to Joan. And there would be nothing wrong with that. At which point, a bunch of people tweeted, but that's not how last names work. You know, I'm pretty sure that Steven Spielberg was kidding.

You know, and there's not going to be a. Gal Godot movie called Indiana Joan. Wait, that's not as serious. Anyway, that is from Adam Sternberg via Benjamin Howard. All right, David, before we talk about The Simpsons Reckoning with Apu, let's take a quick break. Hey, this is JJ Reddick. You may know me as a basketball player. You may have seen me play during my college career at Duke University or perhaps over the past

decade playing in the NBA for the magic, the bucks, the clippers, or the Sixers. Well, today I'm here to tell you about my show, the JJ. J. Reddick podcast on the Ringer Podcast Network. This is where you can find me interviewing athletes as well as in-depth conversations with celebrities. So make sure to subscribe to the JJ Reddick podcast wherever you get your podcast. David, I'd like to call our second topic, The People versus Lisa Simpson. It wasn't Bart or Homer or Bumble Me Man, whom the writers of the Simpsons deputized

to belatedly respond to the anger over the character of Apu. It was Lisa, the pew, the pew. of liberal conscience of the show. Here's what she said on Sunday's episode. Well, what am I supposed to do? It's hard to say. Something that started decades ago and was applauded at inoffensive is now politically incorrect.

Can you do? Some things will be dealt with at a later date. If at all. A little dismissive to the issue of ethnic stereotyping raised in Hari Kandabalu's documentary, the problem with a poo, isn't it? David, let's start with the obvious. What did you make of the Simpsons? response?

Well, I mean, I guess it's not for me to say whether or not they should have I mean, just not dealt with it at all if they weren't willing to take it seriously. You know, I mean, this is comedy. There's nothing. It's off limits. But I just thought, I thought it was tactless. It was very high-handed, wasn't it? Yeah.

I mean, it's not, I mean, I guess the conceit in a vacuum isn't that unusual for the Simpsons. I mean, it's not the first time they've had someone break the fourth wall and turn to the camera. camera. But to put that line, I think the failure that other people point out, to put the line in Lisa's mouth, who is like, you know, ostensibly the most progressive member of the cast. Yeah.

I think was a little bit unsettling. Also, the way they just looked at the camera afterwards, like, kind of like, yeah, you know. Yeah. And that's all you get. Yeah. Like, that was weird. I just thought the whole thing was weird, kind of vague, like, threatening. It seemed like, yeah, it read like, you know, the writer's room was like exchanging high fives when they came up with this concept.

And it was just the wrong concept, you know, I mean, like, you could have, if you say, you know, we're comfortable with who a pooh is a character. But we want to acknowledge the existence of this. You can build a story around him that does not deliberately antagonize. I mean, I guess my, my thing is. Well, it actually addresses it, right? Yeah, exactly. My, this is what I, this is, this is my issue with it. there's nothing objectionable about the documentary, right?

The documentary was not. Of course not. The documentary was, I mean, it wasn't like, you know, a love letter to the Simpsons, but it was based in love for the Simpsons. Oh, absolutely. The guy said, I love the Simpsons, but this is the one thing I just, you know, I just, I can't deal with. Yeah.

And it's like if someone, I mean, yeah, I mean, it didn't, there's no need to be antagonistic. sort of in response, I guess, you know, or to be so arch antagonistic might be the wrong word. Go ahead. Oh, I like this tweet from Shujah Hater. This is quoting what Lisa said. Something that started decades ago and was applauded and inoffensive is now politically incorrect is literally true of everything that is racist.

It's really funny, right? Yeah. I think there's a larger media issue here beyond the simple response, which is what we might call comedy in the time of think pieces, right? where, you know, let's say that people have always reacted newspapers and otherwise to art and to tell what's on television and debated it and all those kinds of things. But we're now at this point where I don't think there's much difference between watching Roseanne, which was a subject of like 9 billion stories the other day,

Roseanne ratings, to watching it on your phone and reading Twitter on your phone. These seem like similar things, right? And it's also just easier to raise an army on Twitter and to get people to pay attention to something like this. And so you can't just go high-handed anymore, right? You have to be weird. You know, in some way, you don't have to be talking to Twitter on your television show. But you have to just, if things don't get addressed, it can't just go on, right?

Right. It's just going to create more of a fear. I mean, I think that's part of my takeaway on this anyway. Yeah, I know. I think that's, I think that's right. I think that, you know, there's, I want to reiterate that there's nothing. I mean, the Simpsons writing team is free to do whatever they want. You know, I mean, and they thought this was a funny gag, you know, a funny way to kind of like play this off.

And it just landed with a thud. And that's part of the, you know, that's part of the danger of comedy, right? That you're going to make a joke that you think, you know. This wasn't funny. I mean, this was like, I didn't, it was barely a laugh line, right? It didn't seem like that was meant to get a laugh. Right. I mean, it was a joke that would have been, that wouldn't have made the cut at, you know,

in the South Park Riders room. But, but, you know, it's not even just like being un-PC or being, you know, or taking on this, like, touchy subject. It was addressing, I mean, it was addressing this documentary that, that, again, it was directly about The Simpsons. And it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't cruel on its face, the documentary, you know? So it seemed, it was just, it was just an incredible misfire. I watched the doc last night and was, it was a make. Amazing to me. First of all, it starts out and you think, first of all, I'm going, oh my gosh, this is going to be one of these Michael Moore-style documentaries where he never talks to the sub-putative subject of the documentary. I know where this is going. What's powerful about it is that Kandabalu talks to comedians of Indian or South Asian descent, like Aziz Ansari and Calpin and people like that. People like former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. And all of them, all of them say, you know, basically I was called Apu on the playground. That character was wielded as a stereo. type and as a racial slur, you know, and to me, it's so moving. And he also, you know, says essentially this character was like a stand-in for my parents, you know, people of my parents' age. And essentially erased them as real people and replace them with this stereotypical, you know, he calls him devious and kind of subservient guy who runs a, one runs a Quiky Mart, right? And I just think like, you, it is impossible to watch that, at least for me, and not think like, oh, this is.

this is hurtful stuff, right? This is big time stuff. Yeah. And, you know, it has to be, it just should be dealt with in some kind of intelligent way beyond obviously what they do. That's totally true. I mean, this is a point of contention online, almost every day where people willfully ignore the experience of others

because they feel like they're making a point that is so free of bias. that and so free of identity politics that they don't need to think about what other people have experienced in life, right? And they are always wrong. If you're if you're accusing other people of identity politics, you were almost always wrong. I mean, just as, I mean, it's, it's, it's, if you're slinging that phrase around. Sure. Yes. But I think that the, but going back to the experience, I think that of the people in the documentary, I think one thing that people have.

pointed out. A lot of people in, um, I do think it's important to take the people defending the Simpsons, defending, you know, whatever at face value, uh,

but there's really not many, well, here, documentary. No, no, not in the documentary. I mean,

the people, since the, since the episode has come out, you know, there've been a lot of people saying, well, why aren't you complaining about groundskeeper Willie? Why aren't you complaining?

You know, all, there's all these other stereotypical characters. And I think that what's, what many have said that's really, that makes the Apu situation, um, most point.

is that he was the only pop culture depiction of someone of Indian descent on, you know, at that point in time. I mean, there really were not many others. There were many, there were many, there were other Irish characters that you could look to, or Scottish characters, sorry, that you could look to if you're, you know, if you rather than be offended by the presence of groundskeeper Willie or, you know, any, any number of other people on the show, not to give the Simpsons a pass, but there's certainly, it certainly began in a completely different climate.

So somebody say, should Jews be offended by Krusty the Clown? It's just like, Cresty the Clown was like him acknowledging his Judaism was a later subplot that they actually gave depth to his character, albeit at a ridiculous, you know, like farcical way. And I don't even feel that that's what this is about. Not at all. That's just like, hey, look over there. There's something else you might, someone might be offended by. Yeah. I mean, that doesn't do anything for me.

No, no, no. It's just really weird. I feel it's funny because there's all these comedians now. I've heard Jerry Seinfeld say this that you can't do comedy. He doesn't want to perform at college campuses anymore because there are these PC absolutists, right, that will scrutinize every joke and put every joke under the microscope. And Bill Maher is a big advocate as well. Right. And I'm sure there are some non-negligible number of those people in the world, right?

But I'd also argue there are people who are comedy absolutists who think everything should be like, what, you can't take a joke? Yeah. Right? Like that everything that's a joke is okay and shouldn't be questioned because it's just comedy and hey, we're making fun of everybody. Yeah. Well, you know, sometimes when you make fun of certain people, it could be hurtful, right? Yeah.

And I'm and I wouldn't just, I would, I love comedy and I love when comedians love often when comedians go way, way, way too far. That's, that can be funny. Sure. But I don't know. I just, I thought there was, there's an opportunity here for them to do something. I mean, it's another amazing thing about documentary is Hank Azaria says in a documentary in an interview, a different interview,

that he was told to just do the most stereotypical version of this character possible. I mean, there's nobody, when you talk about defenses of it, people are defending it different ways, but nobody is defending the depiction of this character. Sure. Nobody's defending it at all, right? What should tell you something? The Simpsons aren't defending it other than other characters been around a long time.

Yeah, I mean, Hank Azaria was, when the documentary came out, said that it hurt him, you know, and that they were taking it seriously and they were, you know, but apparently they, the writing crew wasn't taking it quite as seriously as Hank Azaria was. Yeah.

And he apparently, he didn't want to do an interview for the movie because he said, oh, you'll have the edit of the interview. So we had to edit what I say. Yeah. I guess we,

it's like, it's like Ezra Klein and Sam Harris now whenever we have to have a big talk and it has to be on a podcast or something. Yes. But if that's the case, let's do the, let's have the podcast.

Yeah. I'm ready. And I think that'd be a fascinating in conversation. Yeah, absolutely true. I mean, to go to your point about comedy, I mean, you're right. There's no rules.

I'm sure there are some people who are going to tweet about every inappropriate joke that gets made. It's not limited to college campuses. I mean, that's a total red herring, right? But at the end of the day, you know, there have been some incredibly successful comics in very recent years that said really offensive things.

You know, Dave Chappelle deliberately offends people every time he goes out on stage louis k same thing you know now you're gonna say well those are the most famous comics they're bulletproof whatever but like maybe that's the point you know i mean maybe maybe if you're if you're just if you're doing your first open mic night and you're in you're inclined to tell a bunch of like jew jokes or something maybe wait till you get a little bit of a following you know like to put on the training wheels of respectability for a little while and see if you can be funny working like jerry seinfeld you know i mean working a more you know family-friendly style.

But anyway, I mean, it's just, there's no, there's no lack of, of boundary pushing comedy in the world, you know, so there shouldn't be, the idea that there's, you know, there should be this alarmism about the direction of political correctness running amok. If you find yourself worrying about such things, I think take a step back and take a look in the mirror. I agree. All right, David. Our final topic I'd like to call, you stay robotically on message, San Diego.

We missed a chance to talk about Sinclair last week, but here comes a Sinclair host bearing what we in journalism like to call a peg. Jamie Allman of St. Louis's KDNL tweeted the following about a Parkland shooting survivor. Quote, I've been hanging out, getting ready to ram a hot poker up David Hogg's ass tomorrow. Busy working, preparing. Awesome. Like you added those last two notes to that. Advertisers.

Yeah, advertisers deserted Allman's show, as they did, the show hosted by Fox News is Laura Engram. Alman's show is canceled and he resigned. But let's talk about Sinclair, which owns more local TV stations than anyone in the country. Here's a statement the company made its anchors read the other day via compilation from Deadspins, Timothy Burke. The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. More alarming. Some media outlets publish the same fake stories without checking facts first. The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media. More alarming.

I'm not sure. We're not sure without checking facts first. Unfortunately, some members of the U of their platforms to push their own person. I'm not sure we need to argue about whether that's bizarre. So I guess I'll start here. How worried should we be that this is on local news all over the country?

Worry is an interesting word. I think that it's troublesome, for sure. It's a, it feel, you know, it's sort of like the media version of the right-wing grassroots effort to get, you know, to get low-level state elections stacked in red states, you know, and even in blue states or to run and fund people all up and down and then and stack the judiciary and that sort of thing. to go in at the very bottom. We're not launching a new news network. We are buying up, often struggling news channels, local news channels, or I mean local channels, and sort of taking over the way they deliver news. We're not trying to win the presidency.

We're trying to win the state house. Exactly. It feels a little bit, it feels, it's hard to look at it and not feel like it's insidious. And frankly, you know, I spend a lot of time on. some weird parts of Reddit, you know, over the course of any given week. There were a lot of people on the right-leaning parts of Reddit, be it the Donald or even conspiracy, places like that, who saw when the news first broke, when the deadspin video first came out, who reacted to it by saying, yeah, look, the media is, this is how corrupt the media is, before they realized that this was actually a hit on the conservative side. So they say, oh, all the media are robotically repeating talking points from above. They just didn't realize they were conservative talking points.

Exactly. Pro-Trump talking points. Exactly. I mean, it's just a very, it's a very, very weird situation. You know, Sinclair media has been an interesting subject for a long time, but they've managed to sort of fly under the radar. Yeah. And it's hard, right? I mean, I think that's what Timothy Burke's achievement in this was.

Yeah. Was getting all this footage together, right? I mean, it's kind of a weird piece. of pop art in itself. Absolutely. It's very, very well done. It feels like that could just run in a room at MoMA. And that would just be like, wait, it was like,

2018 America, right? By Timothy Burke. And I would be like, I'm going to watch this for like 20 minutes on a loop. Absolutely. But, you know, this story was reported that there were going to be these things, but him bringing it together and so many news anchors. So many people all going through the same spiel. Yeah.

It's amazing. Yeah. I mean, this is an aside, but it was, but the first time I saw it, I felt it was almost as, it was almost as much of a takedown of news anchor voice as it was of the Sinclair media. When you hear all these people reading it in this like big put on style and in the age of podcasts, it's all those people together using that tone were so preposterous. But back to the subject. David Chewmaker and Brian Curtis bring you action news. It is funny, right? If you don't watch local news, you're just so shocked like, oh, wait, they still.

talk like that? Or even if you do, you think you're kind of used to the five people you see every week, you know? And there were a lot of people standing up to do that, which was just very strange, you know, like standing on the side stage, not behind the desk. So the real question, though, is that like for people who

live in Sinclair markets, for whom this is their local news, this is the channel they've been watching for their whole lives, how do they perceive this? And it's impossible for you or I to know. But I guess, like, I wonder if it's, if if, you know, Joe Average out there, if this comes on, he's just like, well, that was a, that was a, thanks for listening to the press box, Joe.

But it was like, that was a clearly conservative speech and it was, and it was sort of odd. Or if it, I mean, I think the fear, I think the fear that goes a little bit too far is the fear that people watching this won't be able to discern that there is a slant to it. So let me bring up an example that. January 2017, according to Politico, this is when Sinclair was mandating that its stations run nine. commentary segments each week, right? From former Trump advisor, is there any other kind of of Trump advisor? Boris Epstein, right? Here's a bit from one of the segments, which I kid you not, is called Bottom Line with Boris. The bottom line is this. The interaction between the press and the White House has become much more of the story than the actual substance itself.

The briefings have devolved into a circus and a distraction. The American people and the press absolutely deserve access to the White House. And they should continue to pose their questions. However, that can and seemingly will be done in a manner much more conducive to delivering actual information to the American public. And what's interesting to me about that one is that it's not, you know, Trump is the best, Trump is the best. It's merely, well, he was talking about this, Trump's threat to essentially stop White

House news briefings and do them off the record, right? Or do them in a different way and not have these public briefings that had turned into, you know, get mad at the press secretary theater. But what he says is at the end, it's like, this is, this is better for the country. This is everyone, the media will get good information this way, right? It's all very slight. It sounds like it's actually just kind of like a Walter Cronkite kind of message. You know, now we can finally get the information we deserve.

But actually, he's like radically, he's radically curtailing the transparency of the White House briefing and of the White House generally, right? So that's bad, right? And that's what you mean. You might watch that. And if you're, you know, sort of not paying attention think, oh, this is just, you know, something nominally good happened in the White House today that the media and Trump are happy about. Yes, yeah. But, you know, he had other ones that were sort of more over the head.

Yeah. More, there were other additions of bottom line with Boris. There were a little. Boris, by the way, was the face of Trump TV during its brief period of his brief existence during at the end of the campaign. When we thought this was the whole endgame for Trump was the TV network. It probably was. But yeah. Yeah, totally.

But yeah, it's a very, it's just a very, it's a very bizarre thing. I mean, I guess when I, when I watch that, I wonder if like, we talked about Dale Hanson on this show before. Yeah. If you, if you, if you are a, if you were an unbiased news viewer, I mean, if you were right, if you are just a completely undecided voter in a Sinclair market and this comes on, is it, do you react the same way that you would react to Dale Hansen where you're just like, oh, I didn't know he was a lefty, but, you know, good for him for having an opinion.

You know, it's a great. Great question. I think some of the things they're showing, John Oliver did a big segment about the C of the night. Some of the things they show are pretty obviously like this is a pro-Trump segment. But a lot of the things they were showing were like, here is a pastor who thinks when we were talking about Kevin Williams the other day that Democrats are not the Party of Civil Rights Republicans are. And it's a lot of like fake historical data about it. Well, he says that this happened with the Ku Klux Klan and he says it this. And it's actually mimicking the rhythms of local news. And to steal a point from Oliver here, that to me. me is the danger of this, that you're taking whatever goodwill and trust these local anchors have built up. Yeah. And you're tilting it, not just towards pro-Trump talking points, but toward, like, anti-media talking points. And, you know, those people are, have some level of trust in all these markets, right? But you're, like, using all that to tell people, like, the media's lying to you. Mm-hmm. You know, all these things like, like, CNN and things like, they're just telling you lots and lots of lies. And I do think that has, you know, an effect. I don't know how big it is.

but it has some kind of effect on the way people think. Absolutely. And as you say, they may not be always perceiving that it's a Trump thing. Well, and when people talk about, you know, media,

not media bias, and people talk about the low approval rating of the media. They're talking about the national media by and large. And frankly, most of that, most of that lack of confidence is aimed at an abstraction of media, right? Yes.

You're thinking of, if you're a conservative, you're thinking of a, you know, the right-wing cliche about the New York Times, you know? If you're a liberal, you're thinking about Fox News, you're thinking about Breitbart, whatever. Something for everyone to hate. Most people, even if someone told a pollster, they have a low opinion of the media,

they're not talking about, you know, the Dallas Morning News. And they're probably not talking about their local evening news broadcast. So there is, yeah, a real, I think that that's legitimate. I think there's a legitimate danger to kind of making that skepticism. more concrete, you know? Yeah, and using the local news person you like to as your dispute, essentially. Yeah, there's an old thing in political science. People used to say they were mad at politicians all the time.

Yeah. It was like frustrated. Yeah. But they were mad at national politicians. They almost always liked their local representative. Yeah. And they had a really good feeling. And that's kind of exactly what you're talking about with the media version of that.

It's funny. I mean, there's some jackshay for my old boss for a Politico piece saying essentially the liberal reaction actually worse than anything Sinclair did and just recommends changing the channel. And I don't know if I agree with that. I mean, I don't know if I don't, I don't know that, I mean, Sinclair, as we talked about the Sibis, they can do whatever they want, right? They can put strange news stories on local news and slanted, you know, news and pro-Trump news. That's the thing. Even if it's not labeled, there's no, nobody says you can't, you know. But I do think there's something. I just think we're going to, I don't know how.

how we'll ever measure it, but we will at the end of Trump, whenever that happens, like this, you know, the media has been just randomly and sort of, you know, with like some with, with, with Al Buccino with a machine gun and scarf, just discredit and shot up. And what, what does that do to the media, to society, to everything? I think that's right. I mean, and the change the channel thing, I'm sure there are many arguments where I will contradict myself and say that you can change the channel is exactly what you should do. But, you know, there's a reason.

why Sinclair is buying up these local networks and not starting their own UHF stations or whatever in those markets, right? There's a reason why they're having the local anchors, bore us aside, they're having the local anchors read these things out of their own mouths instead of putting, instead of not just putting on talking heads, but hiring new people who believe that, right? It's because they are trying to, they're trying to sneak it in. They're trying to put it in a place where you're not inclined to change the channel. Yes.

Right? Yes. And the idea that some of, I mean, not, I'm sure there are people who did change the channel. But there's going to be, there's a lot of people who've been watching, you know, Channel 5, 6 o'clock news again for their entire lives. Yeah, and presumably like the local stories about local kindergartners, you know, playing a gardener still the same. Yeah. And then maybe you like that, right? Or local stories about crime and investigative, you know, investigating local companies, right?

Five on your side, you know. Maybe you like that and you tolerate the Trump talking points. And I think it's one more thing before you run. is that David D. Smith, who is Sinclair's chairman, tells the New York Times, he goes to this thing of, we're not conservative, right, essentially doing the Roger Ailes Fox News trick, right? He says, when he's talking about these must runs, these things these people must do, he says, you can't be serious. Do you understand that as a practical matter?

Every word that comes out of mouths of network news people is scripted and must be approved by someone, meaning like, yes, they have like producers to read their scripts, but not national overlords saying, please insert this into every one of your newscasts. And also he says, you know, the must runs, all the, all locals channels get must runs from, from the networks, right? All their news programming on other shows such as late night talk, which is just late night political, so-called comedy. So, you know, it's like it's all, it is part of the Ailes game where you just, I don't

do anything here. This is just, this is fair and balanced news, you know, where you don't admit that this is different news, right, or not news at all. and actual sort of, you know, talking points, as it were. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, listen, I don't want, I mean, it started this trying not to be overly alarmist about the situation. Too late.

Yeah, but I just kind of feel like we're, we get there. I mean, we make fun of sportscasters when they have to read ad promos for the ridiculous sitcom that's coming up or the reality show that's like, like in the, like, during the third quarter when they're just like reading scripted catchphrases from the bachelor in the, middle of a football game or something like that. Like that is inherently ridiculous and that's why it's funny. And it's clear they're being, you know, they're being forced to do this.

Now, if Mike Tariko or somebody came on the air and was just like, all hail our overlord Trump, that would be a real fucking problem. You know? Yeah. That would be a real problem. And we're not, and that's not what Sinclair is doing. But that's the extreme. That's a very extreme example.

But, but, you know, it's, it's, it's, there. The Sinclair CEO of that is is being disingenuous. I mean, it's very, it just, it's almost, it's almost silly to entertain what he says. It's, it is a problem. And to say, you don't know this, you can't see this. Yeah, I mean, he's lying. So clearly he knows better. All right, that's it for this week's show.

We want to thank our single listener, Joe Average for tuning in every week and also our producer, Jim Cunningham. All right, David, more hot takes about the media next week. Talk to you then.