The Press Box - The Kawhi-light Zone | The Press Box

Episode Date: July 12, 2019

The Jeffrey Epstein indictment (03:00), the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week (15:45), fallout from the Kawhi Leonard signing (19:00), Donald Trump’s social media summit (32:15), and more. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelly and welcome to The Ringer Podcast Network. After you finish the episode, make sure to check out a brand new episode of our live music series on YouTube called The Ringer Room. Each month, we feature a new up-and-coming musical artist to play a live set in The Ringer studios. So far, we've featured artists like Cautious Clay, Mount Joy, and Earth Gang, and we just posted our episode for July showcasing Charlie Bliss. You can check out those videos at YouTube.com slash The Ringer. David, during NBA free agent madness, 22-year-old Arya Abraham claimed to break a lot of news, as did a Reddit username RD Ambition.

What I want to know is, have we reached a dystopia where all our sports news is going to be scooped by teenagers on social media? I think there's some sort of like a million monkeys at a million typewriters jokes here. I mean, at some point you can just, you know, like somebody on a Reddit is going to seem to be a, is going to look as if they can see into the future

because everybody's out there just like saying random stuff. But hell, I mean, who can, like, you know, already ambition turned out to be somewhat connected and this Abraham kid, uh, you may or may not have a few actual sources or some interesting way of perceiving these things.

So yeah, I welcome our, uh, teenage basement dwelling overlords. My question is, is this the dystopia or was the last thing to dystopia? So like a lot of dystopia. So like a lot of dystopia,

kind of replacing one another when it comes to insiderdom. We are the sources close to the process of media podcast. This is a press box, a part of the Ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers. Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer here. A lot of stuff to get to today.

We're going to rerun the final days of NBA free agency. We're going to talk about Donald Trump's troll summit. We have listener mail plus the overwork Twitter joke of the week. But first, David, I think we've got to talk about this Jeffrey Epstein story. which is a crime story and also a media story. Let us backfill a little bit here. On Monday,

the billionaire was charged with sex trafficking and sex trafficking conspiracy, according to the New York Times' write-up of the indictment. Epstein and his employees engaged in a scheme to bring dozens of vulnerable girls, some as young as 14, to his houses. Dot, dot, dot. Epstein then engaged in sex acts with the young women

during naked massage sessions, paying them hundreds of dollars in cash. prosecutors said. Why this is interesting to us, David, beyond being a huge news story, is that the U.S. attorney, Jeffrey Berman, shouted out the assistance of, quote,

some excellent investigative journalists. And by that, he probably meant Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald, who published a series back in November that brought the Epstein story back onto the public's radar. Let's listen to Brown on CNN's reliable sources talking about her reporting.

They had interviewed dozens. of girls who said that they were recruited by him and by others who worked for him to go to his Bomb Beach Mansion under the guys that he was hiring them for massages. But those massages were sexual in nature. And these were girls who were 13, 14, and 15 who came from poor families, disadvantaged families. And so they, you know, initially went there in hopes of perhaps not only getting some pocket money, but also he had promised many of them that he was going to help them become models

or get them into fashion school. So they felt that this was a way out of their lives, you know, that they're deprived lives. Is it worth David for a second just backing up and talking about how Brown got this story back onto the radar in the Miami Herald? Yeah, I think so.

So what she did was investigate a sweetheart deal that Epstein had cut with prosecutors back in 2008. Epstein was given immunity from federal charges, and as were his potential co-conspirators, which is really strange. And instead, Epstein served 13 months in the Palm Beach County Jail, often leaving for 12 hours a day on work release.

So he was given a tiny, tiny sentence instead of a potential giant sentence or even life sentence for these crimes. And what Brown did was identify about 80 women who said they were molested or otherwise sexually abused. This is her writing by Epstein from 2001 to 2006. She was able to interview eight of them, and four of them were interviewed on video.

And if you've read her pieces in the Miami Herald, just the details are heartrending. Courtney Wild, one of the women she talked to said she still had braces on her teeth when she was introduced to Epstein in 2002 at the age of 14. This just seems like a pretty, there are some other media organizations that have been chasing the story that had pulled little pieces of it out.

But this just seems like a genuine case of reporter brings an issue back into the public light and essentially forces action on the behalf of the authorities. Does it not? Yeah. And in that sense, it's a little bit evocative of the Bill Cosby situation that it took some writing in Gawker and the stand-up routine by Hannibal Burris to make everybody be like, oh yeah, there's that we should, why are we not more outraged about this thing that happened or why are we not at the time? This is certainly a cause for an incredible amount of outrage.

And, you know, it's, for whatever reason, just sort of got swept under the rug. It's interesting because at least part of Julie K. Brown's stories were about the fact that Alex Acosta was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida who agreed to this deal with Jeffrey Epstein. Acosta is now Trump's Secretary of Labor. And it's kind of an interesting question. I guess Brown would have to be the one to answer this. But whether these stories get written or at least get pursued at this level, if Acosta isn't a member of the Trump administration. That's a great question.

And we can all agree that this is an outrage that should have been corrected. and should have been written about and written about and written about. But I don't know. I just don't know if it surfaces to this level if it doesn't have a direct tie to Donald Trump. No, I mean, in a lot of ways, it's crazy for a story that sort of is salacious and outrageous as this one, both the, you know, the accusations and the way it was handled legally the first time. But the hook, you know, to use crash journalistic terms, the hook in a lot of ways was Trump. Mm-hmm. yeah that was the peg as it were and and it's not just that acosta's a member of the administration but that

you know trump obviously has his own history with um with epstein so the uh new york times did a profile of brown and this is our kind of semi daily heartrending reminder about the state of american newspapers the times writes the two reporters uh who were pursuing the epstein story tried to keep cost down by renting less expensive rooms at air bn bn bs booking low cost flights and occasionally not filing expenses. So if you're working on a story of great magnitude that's going to win a Polk Award and should win every other journalistic award, sometimes you have to not file your expenses, perhaps because you're afraid that the people at the newspaper who already strapped to the

gills will tell you to go do something else. How is that for a reminder of the precarious state of newspapers in the United States right now? I mean, it's saddening. I mean, it's sad or sad. But yeah, I mean, it's also saddening. And also saddening. Acosta, now we get to the performative Trump part of the story, which is there were so many calls for Acosta's resignation that Trump apparently strongly encouraged him to hold a press conference and deliver a performance that one Trump pal told Politico was, quote, Kavanaugh 2.0. You remember when Brett Kavanaugh.

went on television when his nomination looked at Jeopardy. Costa was then, because we're always through the looking glass when it comes to Trump here, Acosta during this performative press conference was then asked about the performance. Let's listen to his answer. Sources told me that the president encouraged you to hold this press conference. Can you speak a little bit about what the president holds you ahead of this press conference and whether you're here to give a message to the president, are you fighting for your job, or are you trying to send a message to victim?

And so what is the message to victim who say they don't trust you anymore? So first, I'm not about to talk about conversations with the president. And I'm not here to send any signal to the president. I think it's important. A lot of questions were raised. And this has reached the point that I think it's important to have a public hearing. I think it's important that these questions be asked and answered. So you see him decking the question.

I do want to focus on the question from the reporter, or should I say like six questions piled on top? of each other there. That was like a great how not to ask a question at a press conference. It started with a talk about and then had like four questions like Russian nesting dolls inside one another. Not a way you're going to get a great answer. The other journalistic sidebar here, David, is the case of Vicki Ward and Vanity Fair. Yes.

Vicki Ward has talked about this before in a 2015 article in The Daily Beast, but it was resurfaced this week by Mark Trace in the New York Times. because Ward wrote a profile of Epstein in March 2003. And I'm quoting Tracy here. Ward said she'd collected on the record accusations against Mr. Epstein from three women, two of whom said they were victims. Those accusations did not make it into the published version. Dot, dot, dot. Graydon Carter says the accounts did not run because there were not three sources on the record,

contrary to what Ward said. What did you make of that whole business? I mean, far be it from you to impugn the integrity of Greg and Carter or Vanity Fair. But why not? But that feels like a rule that you're, I mean, that is enforced more by your personal biases than by any kind of code of journalistic integrity, right? I mean, it feels like you could find a way to tell that story as significant as that story is, regardless of corroborating sources that literally. are impossible to find, right? I mean, it's basically just throwing your hands up at the entire notion of journalism if you had, if you have to have three people to corroborate a story that only

two people were present for, and one of them is the accused. Yeah, I'm not sure if what he's saying is we need three on the record sources for every accusation there, or if he's saying we need three on the record sources, because these are three women who have accused Epstein. So we need each of these people. So I don't, I don't think Van de Fair would be quite that stringent. Yeah. I mean, if that's true, then I, then, then, then sure. I mean, that, that shows that, I mean, they're not a stranger. I was just accusing them of being. But still, it's, it's a story. And we've seen this, we've seen this a lot in the sort of

Me Too era. And I feel like just referring to it in a blanket term is risks being a little bit dismissive of the individual cases. But, but, you know, we've seen we've seen outlets after outlet or stories of outlet after outlet turning blind eye or kind of

giving up the pursuit of these stories for structural reasons that kind of disintegrate as soon as you tell as soon as you

make an attempt to tell the story. Yeah. 2003 being a very, very different time and the bar being seemingly

much higher to get those kind of accusations into print. I would say, I would say on the one hand, I believe that, and I think that's

true. and then a magazine let me let me totally triangulate here one 2003 everybody operated under different rules about getting this stuff

into print two if I'm thinking as Graydon Carter here you absolutely to accuse somebody of that in print you got to be right and you better be sure

you better be very very very sure and that's that's tricky business even under the best circumstances number three and again

this is not about Vicki Ward so much as the general phenomenon. When there's a big story that gets broken, there is a 100% chance that journalists will come forward and say, I was this close to printing it myself, but my editor wouldn't let me. Sure. I got, I got this. I was right there. I was right on the doorstep and only my feckless editor.

We saw this with Harvey Weinstein. Yes, of course. Yeah. I think what sets this case apart from maybe some of those other instances of journalists, you know, tweeting ruefully about the situation is that this story actually ran. And it's one thing to say we can't report out the story. We can't run this piece without what X number of sources. But to run any story at all without touching on that, if you believe it to be true, or really even if you don't, if you have suspicion that it might be true, is telling a different story, right? I mean,

it's almost implicitly negating all the rumors that are out there to not touch on that. And I think I think that that is the real controversy here, that they would run a story about Epstein at all and avoid the charges. I mean, you could, it'd be one thing to just to shove the piece, right? But to just shelve a central, I mean, a very significant component to it. I mean, maybe the most central part of it for, you know, sourcing issues, it just kind of beggars belief. you're putting a different truth into the universe essentially. Yeah. And I'm sure, again, reading Carter and Ward's back and forth, the piece, I have not read the piece, gone back and read the piece, but the piece was apparently very critical or pretty critical.

So I guess there's another argument to say, well, we've got so much stuff on him in here. Let's stick with what we can prove. I was also kind of entertained by a Kim Masters column. Kim Masters, the, I think semi-legendary slash legendary Hollywood writer. She wrote a column in the Hollywood reporter about her own dealings with Graydon Carter. And this has nothing to do with Epstein or really anything other than the glory and the extravagance that was 90s magazines. She's talking about being a contributing writer of Vanity Fair.

And she says, Kim Master says, I remember venting at one point to an editor when I was reporting a particularly contentious story, and he sent me for a spa day on the company. So in the 90s in magazines, this is how we solve problems. Yeah. I have a problem with my editor. I'm just going to pay for you to go to the spa and just relax.

I'm just, you just go off and be pampered somewhere. This is what we're doing. We don't, we don't do that anymore. And anybody who's not in journalism listening to this podcast, that does not happen. You know, the ringer does not send me for a mud mask when I have a problem with a story. It is not going on. Have you ever thought about just asking for the mud bath directly? Is that?

No. I guess that's my fault for not being imaginative enough. All right, David, time for the overworked Twitter joke of the week, where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Please send submissions to at the press box pod where they will be gratefully received. David, the baseball's annual home run derby was Monday. How much of that did you catch? And please be honest. Zero.

I always like asking you that when there's a big baseball event. Well, here's what happens in the home run derby. The players match up one on one and whoever hits the most home runs in that round, then advances to the next round, et cetera, right? Well, over all of his rounds, the Blue Jays, Vlad Guerrero Jr. hit 91 home runs. The Mets Pete Alonso hit 57. home runs, but then Alonzo beat Guerrero in the final round to win the home run derby.

That all makes sense. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write. It's messed up that the home run derby is decided by the electoral college and so the popular vote. That's great. Thanks to Brian Rice, Eben Altman, and Mike Miller for that one. Jim Cunningham and Danny Hifetz also note that since Alonzo plays for the Mets, his presence in the home run derby was used to make fun of the Mets. for example, Pete Alonzo

held the 14 homers. I think the Mets just found a new close anyway, good stuff. We always like Mets jokes around here. David, if you don't count the very short-lived presidential candidacy of Richard Ohita, we have our first dropout in the 2020 election.

His name is Eric Swalwell who sort of trolled Biden and Buttigieg during the first debate and is now going to drop out and run for his house seat. It was an extremely overworked Twitter joke to write Swalwell that ends well. Thanks to Julia Rowe, Dan Pappson, Betsykely, and Alex. By the way, what was your favorite part of the Eric Swalwell campaign now that you can look back on it? I mean, I think we'll all be wearing our Pass the Torch T-shirts for a long time.

Hashtag Pass the Torch. Yeah, that will definitely stay in the public consciousness forever. Also enjoyed this tweet that was sent to us by Chris Olson. Eric Swalwell drops out of POTUS race, scramble now on by other candidates to pick up those 12 votes that are now available. That's not nice. That's not nice. Kamala Harris also had this great public statement where she said, Eric Swalwell is a great fighter for America.

It was just the most generic the candidate is leaving statements you can ever imagine. I really enjoyed that. All right, David. Finally, on Monday, there was a flash flood in Washington, D.C., big topic on Twitter. especially a tweet that showed water seeping into the basement of the White House and forming a pool on the carpet. A lot of great stuff there. For example, I guess the swamp hasn't been fully drained. Also, that's impossible.

Trump said his White House doesn't leak. And my favorite, that's just how Stephen Miller enters the building before taking human form. Thanks to Brian Cogsall for that one. all right on to the notebook dump I was gone earlier this week so we didn't really get to talk about NBA free agency especially the Kauai Leonard bit if you had never read the ringer.com

Kawhi Leonard left Toronto to sign with the Los Angeles Clippers after convincing the clippers that they had to trade for another superstar Paul George to join him in L.A. Okay, read literally any other article on the ringer and it will be about this. First impression.

it was a media vacuum. Yeah. Was it not? Yeah. I mean, everybody listening this probably knows, but there were three,

there were basically three teams in play as dictated sort of by Kauai Leonard's preferences. He was either going to stay with the Toronto Raptors where he played for a year and won the title or go to one of the two Los Angeles teams where he's from Los Angeles.

It was either going to be, obviously the Lakers of the Clippers. The Lakers have LeBron James and recently acquired another top five player in Anthony Davis and getting Kauai would make him. a super team. He had previously been linked to the clippers,

but their inability to get another superstar made it seem like they were, you know, nominally out of the running. But there was no, nobody was inside enough to actually get a report. There were a number of sports, pseudo sports media figures that professed inside knowledge or at least,

or at least, you know, performed as if they might have inside knowledge. Chris Carter most notably the notably the former I mean the the Hall of Fame NFL receiver and you know and he probably did have some

some contact with the with the Leonard camp but I think he was mostly right as it turned out yeah but I but and we what you had was just like this sort of basketball world just hanging on these kind of sporadic tweets and and reading journalist tweets

not knowing how much to trust them the answer in that case was almost across the board none. And just everybody was just waiting, you know, with bated breath to see what Quiet Leonard would do. It was really stunning. And then, of course, he made his decision. Then, you know, all the employees of the ringer and every other sports journalistic outlet had to stretch and get into gear and start doing their jobs. But it was, you know, it was everybody was caught off guard by the timing, but everybody was utterly shocked by the results. Is this just because Leonard has a small, a relatively small number of people around him versus your other NBA superstar

slash corporation like LeBron James, like a lot of these guys? I think, yeah, I mean, not just that, but also the corporation that you refer to has a journalistic wing, right? I mean, basically every other superstar on that level has a go-to journalist who's very inside, very connected to everybody in the camp. You know, I mean, the stories kind of leak out in any number of ways when you have when you're kind of attached to journalists. And that's not imputing anyone's integrity to say that.

There's also the situation, the issue required, despite being one of the best players in the league, was really not looked at as a, as a, you know, one of the top three players in the league, let alone one of the top one or two until fairly recently, right? And so he, and he was also in small markets in San Antonio. And, I mean, Toronto isn't a small market, but it's a relatively small basketball market.

And, you know, he didn't have, the same media attache, you know, that other players, a player like LeBron James might have had. But then if you want to take the kind of conspiratorial point of view on the whole thing, I mean, there's also just the aspect where, like, this result was so shocking for just like a, from like a logical perspective. You know, our boss Bill Simmons and Ryan Rusillo did a podcast where they just assumed it was going to be the Lakers, but that was just based on sort of intuition, right?

And the fact that the end result went so far again, went diametrically opposite, opposed opposite intuition meant that and again this is conspiratorial if you were to make up a tweet if you were to make up a source if you were to say

if you were to profess knowledge that you didn't really have and he had gone to the Lakers or he had stayed with the Raptors you might have been right right it might have seemed like more knowledge it might have seemed like there had been more leaks

in the Leonard camp but because he made the least popular choice there were very few people out there staking the reputation on that lie you know that's interesting I just, as you know, because we talk about all the time, I am fascinated by media vacuums in 2019.

Absolutely. Because we think we know everything now, about especially about basketball, by the way. I mean, I think we feel we know everything. And I think when something happens that we don't expect, we're so thrown off guard. And I think that's one of the reasons that celebrity deaths are so big on Twitter, in addition to just being a great moment for pandering, it's because you didn't see it coming most of the time. And so you're just totally shot,

like the other night, everybody's tweeting about Rip Torn. Everybody in my feed has an opinion about Rip Torn. If I had 20 years ago, how will the internet go? Well, Rip Torn will die, and every person on Earth will have an opinion about that. Or a clip to share.

That would have just surprised me, I think. But I think this is funny because it was a vacuum. And again, the most knowledgeable people in the NBA who often can see this stuff coming a year in advance. And by the way, kind of did in Kauai's case, but then sort of talked them out of it and went a different direction.

This doesn't mean, David, that nobody tried to figure out where Kauai was going. Or as our pal Roger Sherman documented, FS1's Chris Brousard declared at one point that the clippers were out. They were done. They were off the table,

which led to this torching from Jay-on-ray, his former colleague over at Fox let's take a listen everyone knew nothing nothing and they were saying they knew everything Chris Broussard who worked at Fox

and is the biggest fraud in the history of sports media ever ESPN kicked him out Fox kicked him out I don't know what he's doing now saying that the clippers were out of it for sure and it was down to the Lakers around

he knew nothing they knew nothing it was all bullshit and I know it's all bullshed I get it. All those shows in the daytime. First take. And again, I like all those people personally. I like them all. And I understand why they're doing those shows. It works. It gets numbers. People like them. It's entertaining. I'm not criticizing that side of it.

I'm just saying if anyone in the history of the world actually takes anything any of the daytime guys say seriously. And I'm including Stephen A in this, by the way. I know Stephen A has a lot of connections, but he said a lot of stuff that was completely 100% false. I'm not, if anyone tells me, oh, you know, Stephen A said something or, you know, Max Kellerman said something. No, it's all bullshit. No one knows anything. David, in a world where we can hear cuss words now on television on podcast, bleeping has become funny. Oh, yeah. Bleeping is now hilarious. Because like, why would you bleep anything? But it's funnier than if we just heard Jayonne Ray say the naughty word. I don't know why that is. I don't know why that is.

man. Yeah, it reminds me of being a kid and watching network television. For his part, here was Chris Broussard on Twitter explaining what happened. What a season they're in for. I can't wait to watch. But I'm catching a lot of hate because on Thursday morning I said the Clippers were out. I own it. It obviously was wrong. But at that point in time, the Clippers were essentially out. They weren't getting Coi Linder without a second star and they knew it. Even members of Kawhi Small Camp didn't think the Clippers we're pulling this off. So this was the defense,

and this is something Roger Sherman identified in his piece on the ringer, is when you're an insider and when you're wrong, you say, I was right at that moment. Right. Which is an interesting defense.

Like the clippers, and I think what he's trying to say there, Roussard, is the clippers at the moment I said they were out didn't think they were going to be able to sign him. Whether that's true or not, I have no idea. But he's just trying to say, like, at a point in the timeline, I was correctly giving you the state of the game, even though ultimately it was totally wrong. That's my best defense.

What do you have? Yeah. I mean, I guess it's impossible to disprove that, right? I mean, that's the beauty of making that sort of argument. But, I mean, I find. it hard to square that circle, right? I mean, and theoretically,

I think that's a fine argument to make, but I think in this particular case, it seems sort of, it seems sort of implausible that the clippers would have been out and then they were back in. Because if you, I mean, if you want, obviously we,

we don't know what's in Kauai Leonard's head and anyone that has professed to along in this over the past month has been proven wrong, but it does seem like that what would lead him to the clippers would be, you know, returning to his hometown. And it's, I mean, that, that would have been number one. And I don't know how you would have ruled out that team at that point in the process

strictly because of their inability to get a player. They were able to get a player. And if that was the scoop, it should have been the clippers think they're out, should have been the tweet. Yes, exactly. And I guess that would have been, that would have counted his news. All this feels like it should, if that is in fact, if you are actually reporting it, that granular a level. Oh, I was just giving you a snapshot in time. All that feels like it's much

better served to write after this is over to write. I was just reading like Tim Alberta's thing about you know, Trump, uh, when the Access Hollywood tape came out. Uh, he sort of pieced together all the reactions and all the hand wringing in Trump world. It feels like it should be in that kind of piece. Like, you know, Jerry, a scene where Jerry West turns to see Balmer and says, uh, Steve, I'm sorry, we're out. We, we didn't get him. You know, And then the next day, you know, they get a phone call from Uncle Dennis and everything's the opposite. Yes, exactly. Also pretty funny, David, was the L.A. Times headline, totally clips.

Totally space clips. That's a good pun right there. Jalen Rose, our pal Jalen Rose, said he was 99% confident that Leonard would be signing with the Raptors. Can I come to Jalen's defense when I worked on Jaylon? This is our producer gym for the record, everybody listening to this. When I worked on Jalen and Jacoby, Jalen told the story where I believe he was waiting for his car outside a hotel party at the valet. And he saw a guy steal his car. And Jalim ran up and opened the door.

The guy recognized Jalen. He said, oh, you're from the Fab Five. And Jailen said, oh, yeah. And he's like, oh, I'm sorry, man. And Jalen's like, no problem. Let the guy go. Chikobi said, what happened to the guy? He said, I let him go back into the party.

Jacoby said, no way, this is true. Jalen said that story is 1099% factual which means saying 99% for Kauai means like 50%. He's good.

It's the Jalen Rose scale. On the Jalen Rose scale. He was totally within the raw. That makes perfect sense. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So someone stole your exes rangerover. You walk over, knock on the window, and he's like, oh, I'm sorry,

Jalen Rose from the Fab 5. I didn't mean to steal your car. That is 190% what happened. David from the Department of the Language of Journalists, you know how fascinated I am by the overuse and abuse of the word seminal. Oh, yeah. We describe everything on earth as seminal. I read in one of the aforementioned NBA Free Agency columns by Mark Stein

that Sam Smith wrote the seminal book, The Jordan Rules. Now, the Jordan Rules is a great book. is that Jordan rules a seminal book. Is that the right word we were looking for there? Seminole. Everything has to be seminal in our thing. I think it just come to mean great, right? Yeah.

It's suddenly become a synonym for great. Anyway, I found that funny. The other phrase I heard twice this last week, which was interesting, was the term set piece, which referred to both a thing you do in soccer, referencing the women's world cup team,

and Kamala Harris's planned attack on Joe Biden was also called a set piece and yeah a set piece like it's something that she had planned to do Isn't that more like a set shot? Like is it? It feels like it feels like that's one that's a one degree off from the right

from the right metaphor there but maybe I'm crazy. Yeah, but they were both called set piece. It made me long for the old Bill Sapphire language column in the New York Times magazine because I think you would have done set piece. He would done it in like four. weeks, but it would have come out. In other media news

of a sort, David, how about Trump's social media summit at the White House? Oh my gosh. Which this is happening today, Thursday as we record this, is going to feature such luminaries as, are you ready? Jim Hofft of Gateway Pundit. Bill Mitchell,

the radio guy who turned out to be right and is apparently really into Q&N right now. Carpe-donctum, who is a do you think the invite was made out to Carpe d'ongdom?

I don't know. I'm just excited to see one of my personal idols included. There you go. James O'Keefe, Charlie Kirk, Benny Johnson, Ali Alexander,

who CNN describes as an activist who attempted to smear Kamala Harris by saying she is not an American black, quote unquote, following the first Democratic debates.

These people are gathering at the White House. And to talk about social media. What are we to make of that? What are we to make of the summit itself? Yeah. I don't know. I'm on the way in here. I was looking at pictures that someone was tweeting about where the White House had giant blown up printouts of Trump's tweets, like mounted onto foam core and set up around the White House. To me, that says about all you need to know about the sort of like seriousness of the situation. You know, I mean that they're just like, they're

decorating it like a fourth grade classroom. I don't know. I don't know, man. If diamond and silk can contribute to making our nation great again, then I guess more power to them. But this feels like just an attention grab and not much else. What do you think? Well, we already knew Trump had sort of embraced that world.

I guess what would amuse me the most was this Daily Beast piece about all these other people in that world who didn't get invited. This guy from Info Wars, Owen Schroier, said the event was a quote abortion of truth because he wasn't invited. So then so we talk about there's this kind of galaxy of pro-Trump social media people. And a lot of people got mad because they weren't in the cool group. Laura Lumer wasn't invited and a senior administration official tells the beast, what benefit would it be to anyone if Laura Lumer were in the same room with the president?

Why on earth would we do that? We aren't that stupid. Come on. So we're driving. So Jim Hoff. Didn't she get kicked off of all of her social media anyway? Yeah. Yeah. And that was another thing that nobody who had been kicked off social media was invited.

So Trump's major issue, right, is access to social media, which he thinks is a conspiracy against conservatives. But none of those people. Also, pro-Trump cartoonist Ben Garrison was invited. People were reminded that he once created an anti-Semitic cartoon about the Rothschild. and other stuff. And then his invite was rescinded. So that was too much. What James O'Keefe did was not too much, but that was too much for Trump.

So I just find those little distinctions to be very interesting and very almost inexplicable. Yeah. I mean, I find it hard to imagine that Trump had that much say into who was involved than everybody else. I mean, it's probably less about the actual crimes than just. just like, you know, instance by instance damage control. Everybody knew this was a, you know, this is going to end up reflecting poorly on people, I mean, on them anyway, but, you know, they're just, they're doing the best they can over there. When you start with a very stupid premise, you're going to get very stupid results.

I spent my vacation, David, in Albuquerque. Yeah. Beautiful Albuquerque in New Mexico. And I was reading the Albuquerque Journal, which has been, let us say, somewhat hollowed out by the ravages of the time and the, our media universe. But one of the things about that is there's all these all these like syndicated columns

that I don't get to read normally because I find it. Kind of like a return to the old days where being a syndicated columnist was kind of a thing. Let me give you a couple of them that amused me. One is called the lighter side.

No, that is not a cartoon that is being drawn by someone's like grandson at this point. That is an actual column with words. This has been running in the journal in Albuquerque ever since I can remember. I mean, it's had an incredible run.

It's written by a comedian named Argus Hamilton. Do you know who Argus Hamilton is? Me neither. That is certainly not a real person. That is a character in a children's mystery series. There's no way that is a real person. But the column begins every time,

God bless America and how's everybody. That's a standard opening. And then there's some kind of jokey things like President Trump gave a lofty non-prone, partisan speech at the Lincoln Memorial on Thursday a disturbed man ran out of the crowd toward the stage, prompting the Secret Service to surround Trump. The Secret

Service said the man was dangerous, scary, and ranting, but it's their job to protect him. And we'll let Jim fill in the rim shot there. This is anyway, this runs in the paper every day. The lighter side by Argus Hamilton. That's a syndicated column. I just, as you were speaking,

I googled the lighter side. And I had to type in the lighter side, Argus Hamilton, to get the to get to the right place. And the first search result that came up in Google, I started reading the column and I was like,

okay, these are some pretty like funny dad jokes or whatever, but they all seem really dated. The first thing that came up was a direct link to a column from 2002.

Oh, wow. I guess that shows you the level of technological insight we have here. Do we think this is like a, like a, one of those comics that's just kind of running to the beast,

that old comics are just kind of running over and over again. They're just touching up the jokes. exactly yeah I know that was actually that was actually a line about Reagan we just sort of tweaked up a little bit there was also by the way I I somehow I didn't I forgot to take a picture of but there was also a bridge column you know just talk about like old school newspapers it was always a bridge column and the guy who wrote the bridge column had a mind spring email address to send him someone I just anyway I love I love going

to Albuquerque can read the paper listener mail David yes God we got so many uh so many notes about our segment fear rehab, which is devoted to the somewhat mystifying, reembraced by the public of Guy Fieri. Everybody used to hate him. Now everybody loves him. Zach Silva noted that when people were casting the live action Little Mermaid the other day,

remember this was kind of a moment on Twitter. Yeah. Somebody said Fieri should play Ursula. Because I guess they both have white hair. Yes. Only Ursula's was frosted in quite the same way. That was a thing. And Fiori tweeted that.

that with lyrics from Under the Sea. A whole bunch of people, let me name the Morgan Holzer, Samantha O'Leary, Dukas, the Lucas, and others noted that Fierry also tweeted a parody of the opening narration of Law and Order SVU. Listen to this. In the culinary justice system, taste-based offenses are considered especially heinous.

In Flavortown, the one dedicated detective who investigates bland food is the leader of an Lee squad known as the sketchy chef unit. These are guys' stories. Reminder that Law and Order SVU is about sex crimes. So, Guy Fiori's rehab might have just been canceled. I'm not totally sure it wasn't. Also, you remember that strain pun headline we did last week on Canada

and the Canadians who build miniature cities? Of course, yeah. Yeah, we the north was the big winner there. Alex Stewart and Brian Richard thought the proper headline should be Micro Canada that was they both thought that independently

apparently so congratulations on making a terrible pun that would have actually been more terrible than the one that was actually used. If only headlines could be sung, the future awaits. Time for David Shoemaker guess is the strained pun headline David's favorite part of the show.

This is from Jeremy Rapana who's very good at finding these things and it's from the Financial Times, David. We haven't had one from the financial time. Who knew the Financial Times even did funny headlines? I had no idea. I'm just going to read you the lead paragraph of the story. I'm going to put an accent on a few words, which will give you a little bit of a hint here.

Spain's National Police, Spain, I'm underlining that word, national police arrested a crew member of a Brazilian Air Force aircraft after customs officers discovered cocaine during a stopover. in Seville in an international embarrassment for Haier Bolsonaro, Brazil's Law and Order president. Okay. So Brazilian aircraft goes to Spain. Cocaine is discovered embarrassing for a Brazilian president. What is the Financial Times' strained pun headline? There might be some rhyming involved here. Do I need to know the lyrics to Eric Clapton's cocaine to answer this?

Is that where we're going? No. More like show tunes. Because she don't fly, she don't fly, she don't fly cocaine. Pretty good. Show tunes. Oh, are you doing My Fair Lady? Hmm.

Oh. Is it, this is like the We the North thing. It's like I think I have it, but I'm scared because it's too simple. Is it just like cocaine in Spain? Uh-huh. Cocaine in Spain puts Bolsonaro under strain. Oh, that's unbelievable. Pretty funny.

Cocaine in Spain puts Bolsonaro under strain. I like to imagine the financial times just threw that headline up at this point solely to get mentioned on the press box, but I'm sure that's not true. Yeah, somebody toasted some Guinness after coming up with that one, gave themselves a nice pat on the back.

It was found on an aircraft and they didn't use plane. Shouldn't it have been the cocaine in Spain? stays mainly on the plane. Yeah. PLA and E. Or got pulled off of the plane. Oh, yeah, that's true. Great question.

Feel free to rewrite it at the press box pot. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Chris Almeida is our ace researcher and Jim Cunningham as our ace producer. More next week. More lukewarm takes on the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.

David? That is certainly not a real person. That is a character in a children's mystery series. There's no way that is a real person. I'm just going to pay for you to go to the spa. Just relax. Yeah, huh. What did you make of that whole business?

Just an attention grab and not much else. What do you think? Well, on earth, would we do that? We aren't that stupid. Come on. So. Are we, oh, are we doing My Fair Lady? Mmm. Oh, oh.

I had a weird reaction. It was because I, like, I just put an entire hot dog in my mouth or something. That is 199% what happened. Mmm. When you start with a very stupid premise, you're going to get very stupid results. I welcome our teenage basement dwelling overlords. My question is, is this the dystopia or was the last thing the dystopia?

They're doing the best they can over there. How much of that did you catch? And please be honest. Zero. Wait, wait, wait, wait, so someone stole your exes range over. You walk over, knock on the window, and he's like, oh, I'm sorry, Jaylen. Rose from the Fab 5. I didn't mean to steal your car. That is 1909% what happened. He got out of the car. He gave me some

daft. He blended back into the crowd.