The Press Box - The Killing of Charlie Kirk, the Murdochs’ Real-Life Succession, and Three More Years of ‘Pardon the Interruption’

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

Bryan and Joel discuss the whirlwind of coverage around the killing of Charlie Kirk (1:13) before they give updates on the Trump vs. The Wall Street Journal saga (23:32), the extension for ESPN's 'Pardon the Interruption' (29:59), Rupert Murdoch's succession plan  (38:54), the reporter caught in the middle of the college football AP poll outrage (44:50), and Adam Silver's puzzling comments about NBA viewers (53:52). Hosts: Bryan Curtis and Joel AndersonProducer: Kyle Crichton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Bill Simmons, and I want to tell you about my movie podcast, The Rewatchables. We're each week, I'm joined by Ringer movie lovers, Chris Ryan, Sean Van Van Lathen, Kyle Brandt, Malley Rubin. We have a whole bunch of people on. We talk about movies. We can't stop rewatching. And now you can watch us cover these movies on video in the Spotify app. We have covered over 350 movies, including Heat, Goodfellas, Boogie Nights, Pulp Fiction.

We have some real heavy hitters coming up here in 2025. Make sure to follow us on Spotify, where you can, watch every new episode right now. Just head to the rewatchables on Spotify, now on video. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox, Brian Curtis, Joel Anderson, and producer Kyle Crichton with you. We are putting our special episode plans on hold. Today we're going to talk about the Wall Street Journal versus Donald Trump,

the We've Got the Document edition of that story, plus a new deal for the hosts of ESPN's Pardon the Interruption. and Murdoch succession ain't just a quality TV show anymore. But Joel, we start, of course, with the assassination Wednesday of Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist. Charlie Kirk was shot while speaking at Utah Valley University in Orham, Utah, a little after noon mountain time yesterday. Kirk, who was 31 years old, was a frequent presence on college campuses where he spoke and debated. he was sitting at what he called his Prove Me Wrong table when he was shot.

As we speak here, noon Eastern on Thursday, authorities are still searching for a suspect. Authorities announced this morning that they had recovered what they're calling a high-powered bolt-action rifle from the woods near the Utah Valley University campus. Let's begin here. What did you make of how big and wide

the reaction to Charlie Kirk's murder was across America? I thought it was appropriate. I'm not surprised that his killing has completely throttled the news cycle and probably will for at least the next 48 hours because he was tremendously famous and influential. And it happened in front of thousands of people. So it was quickly disseminated onto a variety of platforms, which means that it was then happened in front of millions of people.

The violence itself was jarring. I don't know if you kind of felt the same way because obviously, particularly if you're on X, you know, the app formerly known as Twitter, you see lots of death. Like just it's possible at any given moment that you can see a dead body or something horrible happening to somebody, some sort of, you know, gruesome violence. But I can't quite remember seeing one where the bullet actually makes impact.

And that really sort of shook me up. Oh, my God. I mean, the fact that you would turn on a social media app and without looking for it, without searching for it, see a video like this. Yeah. And this is not even the first time we've seen something like this in the last couple of weeks. I mean, before this, it was Arena Zarutska, the woman in North Carolina who was murdered on the train. That video just populating your feeds. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, I mean, again, I mean, this goes back. I mean, we've sort of, I wouldn't say we've gotten numb to it. But because, I mean, we, again, we see this all the time now. But by the time it had gotten to George Floyd, for instance, I never watched a George Floyd video because I was just like, I don't need to see that. And I probably would have made the same calculation with the Charlie Kirk video if I'd had any choice in the matter. But if you just happen to be scrolling, there's no way really to get away from it. And then, you know, people are taking screenshots of it and sharing it. And so even if you're avoiding the video, you're going to see the most gruesome piece of it.

So, yeah, once upon a time, there used to be a debate about what, you know, the quality control on social media and whether or not that sort of material was appropriate. But it just feels like we've moved so far past that now that it's not even really a question, right? I haven't even really seen. Maybe is the new cycle unfolds or whatever. We will eventually get to that part of the conversation. But it just doesn't seem like it's really something that we really debate about anymore. I came, I found myself last night thinking about Charlie Kirk's kids who are very young. And I'm going to go through their entire lives knowing that there is this video out there in the world that they might accidentally see through no choice.

of their own. Just what a horrifying prospect, but something, as you say, that is really, really reflects the media age we live in. Yeah. I mean, in fact, I would say in America today, if you happen to get killed anywhere in public, there is a really good chance that it's going to be recorded and aired somewhere, right? Like before people can get a hold of it. So, yeah, It's, I just, this is just sort of what the America we live in right now. When'd you first come across Charlie Kirk? So, I wrote about the Liberty University Athletics program in 2020. And I don't know if people remember this is, you know, after the George Floyd stuff,

and this is when Jerry Falwell was still the president of the university. And they had some incidents that made a lot of the black athletes decide to leave. Like, they were just like, I don't want to be at Liberty University. anymore. So I wrote about that. And it was in the course of writing about that that I learned of the Fall Kirk Center, which is a mashup of Falwell and Kirk. And it was a think tank, this, you know, grassroots conservative think tank that they had right there on campus. And it was sort of like in recent months when we became generally aware of Adam Friedland and Andrew Callaghan, it was like, oh, this person is already well known to millions of people. And I just never

heard of him. But at that time, I became aware that he was tremendously famous to lots of people, including President Trump. But I don't, and you, you helped me with this. I feel like he was not that prominent of a figure during the first term. And this is something that is sort of evolved over the last five, six, seven years. But he's gradually become sort of a, you know, one of the figureheads of the conservative movement, right? Absolutely. And his rise in the conservative media space or just the media space full stop really mirrors Donald Trump's rise. Yeah. I mean, he comes, he becomes, you know, something more than here's a podcast or here's

somebody who's visiting college campuses, but here's somebody whose turnout operation is key to Donald Trump getting elected for a second time in 2024. Like he is that, he was that level of player within the Republican Party within the conservative movement. It's really weird, too, because, like, it's a mashup of something that we had not really seen before. You know, I'd seen the comparisons to Rush Limbaugh, but Rush Limbaugh was pretty clearly, like, a media figure. Like, he was a radio host, and he had TV, you know, I think he was on TV at some point. And Charlie Kirk was sort of, I guess, sort of symptomatic of this new age, where he was both a media figure, like he had his podcast and other ways of getting out to people, but he was also

a political actor. So I guess one word that I have not seen used for him, but maybe it's more appropriate as an influencer. Like if you think about it that way, that he's an influencer, right, which sort of encompasses everything. Media, I'm a political actor. I can, you know, whatever, right? He's not, he's not bound by any sort of journalism code of ethics. He was just talking to people and using it to drive interest and fed all his other activities that he wanted to do. And that starts at an incredibly young age. New York Times, notes that he wrote a story for Breitbart News when he was a senior in high school. Man.

And that article leads to his first appearance on Fox News. Dave Weigel and his piece for Semaphore goes further. He founded Turning Point USA in 2012 at age 18 using startup capital from conservative donors who wanted to reach more young people and who saw him doing it with content that look native on Tumblr and Twitter. And this was part of Charlie. Kelly Kirk's power. He was someone that Republicans saw could talk to kids. Someone who would predict and later be partially responsible for Donald Trump doing way better among young voters

than any of us could have expected. Like so many of these figures, he comes of age in the 2016 presidential campaign. Times notes that he claims to have visited the White House about 100 times during Donald Trump's first term. Wow. Then I mentioned, of course, he's into grassroots activism. Weigle notes that it was a turning point action stage that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Trump from in 2024. That was a Charlie Kirk production.

I did not know that. Okay. Huh. You mentioned podcasting, going to college campuses to debate people, even people or maybe especially people that disagreed with him, which would then become content itself. And Weigel had a good line here. He said he pitched the conservative movement, not just as a club for tax cuts and law and order politics, but as a lifestyle. Now, go back to pre-dump GOP and think of how unlikely it would have been that the party of Paul Ryan, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell would become a lifestyle brand for young people. I mean, Mitt Romney, man. That was the last Republican presidential nominee, right, before all of this.

And there was certainly not a cult of personality and certainly a different sort of strain of politics, even though, you know, like in terms of policy, they probably all wanted the same things, but the way they went about it and the way that they generated enthusiasm, very, very different, of course. So, yeah. I was thinking last night, Joel, about what people are reacting to with this death. You mentioned Charlie Kirk had millions of fans who liked his work, who liked his ideas. more than I expected even, I think. That has been sort of surprising, and I don't think of myself as sort of naive about the current state of things, particularly the political discourse.

But his idea is like, you know, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a mistake, that MLK was not a good person, equating homosexuality with grooming children for sexual abuse, so on and so forth. I didn't realize that I had as much purchase with people as it does, right? And I know a lot of people will probably say, well, they don't necessarily endorse everything that he said, whatever, whatever. But there were clearly a lot of more people. And I'm educating myself. Like, I'm learning through this that, oh, wow, this is why he was who he was because what he said, the ideas that he believed in resonated with a whole hell of a lot of people. And I just, I was just generally unaware. I thought Clay Risen made a really interesting point in his New York Times obituary today.

where he said, look, there were a lot of people during Trump's first term that were poised to be Charlie Kirk that might have been a version of this. He lists Nick Fuentes, Milo Yanopoulos. There's some names. Oh, man. God, Milo, man. I forgot about Milo. Oh, yes. But Charlie Kirk, and this is Clay Risen's word, had a certain polish to his presentation. he projected as a nice young man. And according to reporters who dealt with him, political opponents, he was very courteous in public. So that's a key part of his rise, right? Like that is that he is able to take some of these ideas, even the ones you name, and still be this massive figure in the movement where others were not.

You know what it sort of reminds me of, and this is a name that is sort of faded into anonymity in recent years. Richard Spencer. Do you remember that from the first term? And I actually met Richard Spencer and had a conversation with him for a story I worked on at BuzzFeed. I think it was my last story at BuzzFeed. It was about the guy that ceded the money for the rise of the alt-right, William Regnery, right? He's part of the Regnery family. And Richard Spencer could not have been more accommodating, could not have been nicer. I also met with another guy in Atlanta. He was, you know, I guess you would call him a white nationalist. You know, he, I mean, he was explicit about that. And he defended the clan who lived in Atlanta.

One of the nicest lunch guests I've ever had, you know, like it was a really nice thing. And you could see how people could sort of fall for that allure if your mind went that way, right? So, yeah, I can see that people would look at Charlie. You know, he's wearing his, you know, college shirts. He's on college campuses. And willing to engage with people in a way that, you know, usually people. but don't get a chance to mix it up like that and see them mix it up. So, yeah, it makes, yeah, I can see the source of the appeal for sure.

When Gavin Newsom wanted a conservative to come on his podcast, his new podcast and debate him, he picked Charlie Kirk. That was the guy he reached out to. Charlie Kirk had occupied that space in the world. You can't get Nick Fuentes. You can't get, you know, the guy that used to run the proud boys, right? Like that they're a little bit more incendiary, intentionally so. Yeah, but Charlie Kirk, there's the pretense of having a sort of civil discussion.

We talk about experiencing this on Twitter. We mentioned the graphic nature of it. Of course, we had people jumping to the conclusion because they saw somebody being hauled away from the protest, that that person was the quote unquote shooter. Yeah, man. Forties later came out and said, no, he wasn't. And again, I don't know how to say this other than sometimes some of that Twitter video right and people are citing now what the authorities talking about the suspect they're looking

for just folks is you just have to be like and i'm just like look at all these accounts that are identifying somebody who authorities say isn't the person and those tweets are still up and they are still up and they're probably never coming down it's really hard to know in a story like that because i saw video of just generic video of people running during what appeared to be some sort of a shooting and then a bunch of other people were like, that's not from Utah Valley University. That's from some sort of some other incident. And I was like, oh, it's really easy to confuse people in this sort of news climate because who's in charge? Like nobody at Twitter, there's not quite quality control over that sort of stuff. So you have to kind of figure it out on your own.

What's not usual, perhaps, is the director of the FBI, Cash Patel, posting information on Twitter that turned out not to be true. Around 620, Eastern yesterday, Patel writes, The subject for the horrific shooting today that took the life of Charlie Kirk is now in custody. First of all the worrying just sounds way off there, the subject for the horrific shooting. Less than two hours later, he backtracks also on Twitter.

The subject in custody has been released after an interrogation by law enforcement. That created this interesting moment in right-wing Twitter, conservative Twitter. It was like, hey, man, are you? you posting or are you looking for the person who did this? Yeah. FBI not really covered themselves in glory in the middle of this, but it's not really a surprise

given, you know, how things, that agency has been gutted over the last few months. But yeah, I was to that point, like the way that people were sort of performing on Twitter yesterday, and we don't want to overstate it. I mean, are your parents on Twitter? I mean, are you the mom on Twitter, Brian? No, absolutely not. Okay, okay, mine aren't either. And a whole bunch of people are not.

I have a lot of friends that in my age cohort that don't even engage with any of this stuff. But, man, if you were on Twitter long enough, I don't know how you couldn't feel things were really ominous about the direction of our country, particularly since there's whole swaths of people on social media and media itself who are using this situation as a pretext to call for vengeance, right? You know, lives a tit-tok. This is war. Elon Musk. The left is the party of murder. Laura Lumer, who has a direct line to President Trump. Like, this is his home girl. Like, they are real tight, you know, make of that what you will. It's time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, and prosecute every single leftist organization. And again, Cash Patel has not said anything about, I mean, clearly we don't know who did this yet, right? But people are already sort of jenning up in using media and using social media as a way to prepare people for something.

And it seems really scary about where this could all head. And it was also vaguely worded, wasn't it? There was a lot of them in the air. Yeah. They made you think, who are you talking about? Man. Who is, and that it's almost the vagueness of it made it scarier. Yeah.

I mean, if you're a person with a public platform in this country who says things that a non-insificant number of people disagree with, you should probably be concerned for your safety. What a thing to say. Speaking of which, people that have a platform who were talking about this incident yesterday, there was Donald Trump, the President of the United States, who said this from the Oval Office. It's a long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible. For years,

those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. He would go on to list several acts of political violence and also leave out other acts of political violence, like the killing of the Minnesota state legislator and her husband, shooting of another Minnesota state legislator and his wife. That was less than three months ago. The invasion of Nancy Pelosi's home and the attack on her husband, which you mentioned.

And, of course, the sacking of the United States Capitol on January, 26, 2021. I mean, once again, they don't have anybody in custody right now. There's no, they don't, we don't know who did it. We don't know what the motive is, any of that stuff. What, what sort of people, this person would be aligned with other people that pulled this out. We've got to get to the bottom of it.

It's probably inevitable, Joel, that media people would get in trouble. Mm-hmm. In the hours after Kirk's murder, one of those was Matthew Dowd, a former George W. Bush strategist who was with MSNBC. He said this on the air. He's been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to hateful thoughts lead to hateful words,

which then lead to hateful actions. And I think that's the environment we're in, that people just, you can't stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that's the unfortunate environment we're in. According to a number of reports, Matthew Dowd no longer works for MSNBC. Can I ask a question? What did Katie, I'm assuming that was Katie Tara, say after that.

What did she say after that? I don't have the transcript for right after that moment. I don't know if she was, she could feel the way that was turning. and was trying to steer out of it. Yeah, there you go. That's it. That's what it seemed like she was like, let me get that car out of the ditch, you know. There's a couple more of these, too.

I mean, this is from Scott Fowler, the Charlotte Observer. The Carolina Panthers have fired Charlie Rock of the team's communications department for an insensitive post regarding the murder of Charlie Kirk, a source familiar with the organization's decision tells me. And then, however and probably, Joel, there was Kurt Warner, yes, that Kurt Warner.

Not the Seattle Seahawks running back. Not the Seattle Seahawks running back. Kurt Warner, the quarterback, was tweeting about how hard it is to throw a deep ball in the NFL yesterday, which is the kind of thing you would expect Kurt Warner to be tweeting about on a Wednesday afternoon. Came back last night and tweeted,

although it's my job and the season I am in right now, we have larger issues surrounding us today, and I should have been more sensitive to that. For that, I apologize. my heart goes out to all those affected by today's tragedies. I mean, man, there are a lot of sports figures who actually interrupted their regularly scheduled programming on platforms to send their condolences, to, you know, share words of comfort with their followers or things like that. So I'm actually surprised that Kurt Warner, I'm surprised somebody didn't either get to him prior to that or that he himself did not tweet it out before that, right? Like, I just, there were so many, you know, Des Bryant, you know, I'm just, I got a whole bunch of

Sue Cravens. There's a whole bunch of random former football players who were tweeting very similar things. And so, yeah, it's actually, it's not funny, but it's like, how did you get to the Kurt Warner piece of it through all the other football players? Because I didn't even see Kurt Warner's tweet until you shared it with me. It's also something worth noted when we talk about Charlie Kirk and what people were feeling yesterday. We talk about how young he was, his wife and young children.

We talk about his political ideas that a lot of there were to a lot of people, you know, very ideas that they embraced. We should also know that he was an evangelical Christian. And you saw a lot of people yesterday, including some of those sports figures you talk about tweeting out Bible verses. Right. That was clearly part of what was resonating yesterday on Twitter in the aftermath of that. Absolutely. We will talk more about Charlie Kirk on next week's press box episodes. Joel, another story this week.

You'll remember back in July that Donald Trump sued the Wall Street Journal. I do remember this. Donald Trump sued the Wall Street Journal because the journal reported on what it said was a 2003 birthday note that Trump had sent to Jeffrey Epstein. Trump called that story false and defamatory. And he sued the journal for, I always think it's worth repeating the actual figures here, $10 billion. It's a lot of money, man. $10 billion. Well, this week there was a journal story by Kedija Softar and Joe Palazolo.

Those are the same reporters who wrote the initial journal story back in July. And their new story begins like this. Lawyers for Jeffrey Epstein's estate have given Congress a copy of the birthday book put together for the financier's 50th birthday, which includes a letter with President Trump's signature that he has said doesn't exist. man have you have you ever gotten a birthday book before brun i had never have gotten a birthday book did you really when i was 40 yeah when i turned 40 i got a very nice birthday book and people wrote notes and said what does joel mean to me that kind of thing no no there were no pictures of young women or anything like that just you know nice remembrances of of times we spent together

things i've done uh whatever it was very sweet my my wife put it together for me so yeah it It can be nice if you get it, if you get one of them. The Donald Trump administration, his administration's line changed a bit on this. So now the letter exists, but Donald Trump did not write it. Donald Trump did not sign it. And some of those experts on Twitter were suddenly handwriting experts showing you why that signature, where the last letter ran off into the distance, could not possibly be the signature of Donald Trump. I mean, there's a lot of handwriting experts out there.

That sounds like when my fourth grade teacher accused me of forging, you know, my progress report. I got a progress, you know. And it was just like, I was like, no, I didn't sign that. I don't know what you got. What my mom would, you know, mom, why would they say that about me, mom? So, yeah, I'm familiar with that. Wait, you did, you did forge it, though? You're willing to admit today.

I tried to, yeah. Well, it was, you know, actually was a conduct report. I got in trouble at school. So, yeah. I didn't want to have to. That was like the, I don't know if school worked. Totally works like that anymore. My kids haven't brought one of those home yet.

There's some report cards and stuff we have to sign, some math quizzes we have to sign. But that was always such a terror, right, that you're going to bring that home and face up to mom and dad. Oh, my God. Yeah. I mean, and again, it was in the era when there was a lot less debate about the value of corporal punishment. So I knew what I was trying for. Yeah. First thing I thought when I saw the journal story was, guess what happens when you don't knuckle under the pressure?

When you don't pay the man to go away. Instead, you keep reporting. And you produce the document that the White House said wasn't real. So the interesting thing, and I guess, again, court is only as good as the judge of the jury that here's the case, right? So we can't make any, you know, predictions about what would happen. But I assume in ordinary times, in an ordinary court, if you produce something like that, that pretty much would make the defamation case go away. Or at least it would redound to your favor, I would assume, right? Yeah.

Yes, that is correct. And also, we've lost all of our sense of media law because of the nature of these lawsuits. Right. Like the 60 Minutes lawsuit, you're like, wait, what? Right. And how much, how many billions of dollars are you suing for here? Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah, it doesn't matter because, I mean, the thing is, it's really interesting. I mean, when I have done stuff, you know, Slate or whatever, and you have a media attorney, and I would just love to know what these media attorneys are recommending under those circumstances because they're like, you know, the law ordinarily would be in your favor, but the climate is not, right? climate is not. Charlie Worsal also has a really good story in the Atlantic about this. He notes that, of course, while Donald Trump's letter is the big story here, or the letter signed by Donald Trump's a big story here.

I'm exactly how I'm supposed to word that. The rest of the birthday book is actually much more disturbing. Recommend that you go read his piece about that. Charlie's also an expert on parts of the internet that you and I don't visit. And he says, I mean, these are parts of the internet, right? they're obsessed with ideas that there are powerful pedophilia rings out in the world. And what Charlie reports is those parts of the internet don't know what to do with this kind of information.

Huh. Just don't know what to do with it, right? It's this idea that what if you have conspiracy theories, things that you imagine are happening, and then all of a sudden you're like, oh, this is a real thing. And it was signed reportedly by the president of. of the United States. Yeah. The current president of the United States.

I mean, and great job to Charlie, Charlie, former colleague of mine at BuzzFeed. There you go. There's a good dude. As I predicted, I should even say this, but I just kind of, I think those people were, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't extend them the credulity under these circumstances. that it's just easier to pretend that it didn't happen. You know, but it's tough to, you know, we all have to write in such a way, like, you know, we have to write. And obviously, these people are, you know, they're caught up in conspiracy theories as it is, so it's tough to know kind of where it's going. And I'm glad that there are people that are keeping tabs on that world so that we don't have to.

But, I mean, like I said, they're not going to do nothing, man. They don't care about this. Some happy news from the world of sports television. Yeah. Two self-styled curmudgeon's got a new contract. Take it away, Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser. Pardon the interruption, but I'm Mike Wilbaum. Tony, we got a new deal. Are you excited to host many more years of PTI?

Tony Kornhizer, I haven't hosted in years. You're looking at an AI simulation. AI. Oh, see, I still think that Alan Iverson when I hear AI. No. No, no, no. I don't look like Alan Ivorson. No, but I don't. know you loved Alan Iverson more than you loved artificial intelligence. Everything about that clip is so perfect. From Tony talking about the way he looks, which is a subject of Tony Kornheiser for decades now,

to them sort of years after the fact talking about how AI could be artificial intelligence or the other AI, the real AI. I mean, so BTI, it hurts. I mean, 2001, is that the year? that the AI and the Sixers got to the finals too. It's just really very appropriate. Yeah. It was, right?

Spring 2001. Yeah, it's just really appropriate. Yeah, I had just a wave of warmth and joy that washed over me hearing it. Do, do, do, do, do. You just, that, that, and because I'm not a regular, I don't watch part of the interruption as much as I used to, but just, yeah, that, it's just nice that that show still exists out there, even if I don't engage with it like I used to. Is this the most uncomplicated and happy ESPN story you can possibly imagine three more years of Mike and Tony? I mean, dude, and we talked about this a little offline. And I heard you talk about it with Bill as well.

I'm surprised, like pleasantly so, because I didn't think there was any room for that kind of programming at ESPN anymore. It just, I just assumed, like when around the horn left, that it was only a matter of time before ride home productions or whatever was done. over there. But it's the last show of its kind over there and I'm glad that it's holding it down. I think it's been, and I use a loaded word here, grandfathered in to an extent like, you know,

those shows all had followings. But Mike and Tony, starting in 2001, they kind of created the format. They feel like they're just always on another tier than anything that was like them, even parts of the right home empire. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, right. And it's that link to that era. I mean, dude, did you, I don't think, I mean, this is going to sound so old. Like when the internet was first coming out and you could read the Washington Post online. That's how I first came across Tony Cornhizer and Mike Wilbon. Like, I know people, you know, say there's a whole different origin stories for that show. But they used to argue with each other in chats. Like, remember there'd be like a columnist and they would do a chat or whatever. So they would go back and forth in a chat and people would be able to ask them questions. And that's how I. first got familiar with them. And that's to your point, Ryan, that you always make that so much of this is about relationships. And you were just so drawn into like, oh, these guys, you know, the curiosity of them being friends are not the same person and don't have the same backgrounds, but they just seem to have really similar sensibilities and they could joke with each other. And they were, you know, engaged. And they were the top sports writers at the time in that country. So to be able to be exposed to that stuff, it was really cool back then. And I just, I cannot believe that a quarter century has passed basically. It's a real relationship.

It wasn't a relationship put together by a television producer. It was a relationship put together by George Solomon at the post. Like, here, you know, here are my two columnists are always arguing in the office. Yeah. And then ESPN has the idea, like, what if we do that on TV? And just think back to 2001, Joel. We're all in the same business now. I'm looking at you in a Zoom and this will probably clip for social media. But

in 2001, we were not all in the same business. No. There was print. There was radio and there was television. Right. And if you changed from one to the other, and here we're talking about print going one way, nobody goes back to print. That would never

happen because you'd take a huge pay cut, especially in those days. Right. But if you went from one to the other, there was a little bit of embarrassment about what you'd be doing in your new media. You know, I'm doing radio. Trust me, the money's good. Yeah, right. I'm doing television. Yeah, I know it's not as smart or complete or well-reported or anything like the print world I'm coming from.

But hey, can you blame me? The money's great. And Mike and Tony were two of the only people to make that jump. Yep. And have people in the print world go, ooh, that doesn't look so bad. I could actually do that and not have to apologize to all my former ink stain colleagues. They made it look fun. They made it look, you know, they were, I mean, they are still smart, but they were smart.

and they also just had a knack for like sharing opinions that did not make you hate them right like even if you disagreed with them they were still like this and they're still fundamentally likable people um and so that was really it's just amazing that they were both next to each other in the same newsroom right because you could imagine all the different ways in which just would not have worked out i mean a lot of bands don't last this long like usually there's some sort of ego play or like mike and mad dog like you know they're not together anymore right um but they're They have figured out this way to keep that relationship intact through in, and in rise in prominence and make all this money. It's just, I mean, it's a real success story. Like anybody that had started in journalism at that time, and that was 2001 is my first year as a professional journalist. Like that is the mountain top right there, like what Tony and Michael did. Like that's what you aspire to if you could get there.

And I all started with them with this idea that they would project. on just about every second of every episode of PTI, which is, I can't believe they put us on television. Yeah. And that was so helpful, right? Yeah. It was sort of the anti-Steven A, like, I can't believe television took this long to call me.

What was wrong with television? They were the opposite. And then what that did is it just made everything seem easier to digest. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, they are not creatures of TV. They are, like you said, ink-stained wretches, and they're not telegenic, right? I mean, you know, I mean, I'm not trying to diss them. I'm not either.

But it just showed that, yeah, that is really possible because sports reporters is a totally different thing, right? Like, that is just, you're bringing on a bunch of writers and it was a little less personality-based. It was argument-based, not personality-based. This show was explicitly personality-based, and you tuned in to watch them and see what they were going to say about things. And it didn't matter what they looked like.

it didn't matter that they weren't necessarily TV polished, even though they kind of grew into that role over time anyway. Mention this to Bill. They are now one of the only links to quote unquote old ESPN. Old in this case being defined as 2001. Not Dan and Keith, not Chris Berman and Dickie V starting in 1979, but 2001 ESPN. Yeah, man. You and I talk so much about how media companies have to change.

you can't roll out what you rolled out even 10 years ago forget 20, 25 years ago and hope to succeed. But I would also argue that those media companies have to figure out a way to preserve links to the past. The Washington Post, we don't want people like Bob Woodward going around going, hey, I don't like the new administration of the Post. No, no, no. We want Bob Woodward around, right? We want him, we want people to remember that. David Marinus, like we want people to remember classic Washington Post. Same thing with ESPN. Like, there has to be links to the past so that you're bringing in new people, but you're also making sure that old people can look around and see familiar faces.

I mean, I think people don't think we need institutional knowledge anymore and that we don't need those links. They think AI will take care of it, right? Or, you know, Wikipedia. And then you're talking about artificial intelligence, not. Yeah, not Illinois. So you're not all in Iverson. Just color fine.

Yeah, right. All right. Let's talk about Murdoch succession. Man, this is a fascinating story. I refer here to the New York Times piece by Jim Rutenberg and Jonathan Mahler, which is about this new agreement in the Murdoch Empire. Lockland Murdoch, the New York Times reports, has completed an agreement to secure control of his family's sprawling media empire for decades to come.

family announced on Monday. The deal ensures that the Empire's various outlets, including Fox News, the New York Post, and the Wall Street Journal, will remain conservative after his father, Rupert's death. So, Joel, this all dates back to a divorce settlement between Rupert Murdoch and his wife, Anna. That was his second wife. And one of the conditions of this settlement was that when Rupert Murdoch died,

his empire would be divided four ways between four kids. Prue, Liz, Lachlan, and James. What's happened over the last several years is that Lachlan became the number one boy, to coin a phrase.

The three non-Lockland kids drifted away from Rupert's brand of conservatism. Lachlan was the guy who was dedicated to running the media business in the conservative way that his dad preferred. Rupert Murdoch is now 94 years old. Man, 94, huh?

94 years old. And he and Lachlan realized, hey, if we want the empire to remain the way it is, politically speaking and otherwise, it cannot be divided four ways upon Rupert's death. So they went back to court in Reno, of all places, and tried to change that. trust, it didn't work legally, but then they started negotiating. And as the Times reports under the terms of the deal, Lockland's three oldest siblings will receive $1.1 billion each for all their shares in the empire, according to a person with knowledge and the negotiations.

That would work. I would be willing to step away for $1.1 billion, I think. And as the Times said, the previous offers had been much, much lower. because it's like, oh, it's a family trust. Why should we pay market value for the thing that's wrapped up with this trust? But the other side of it is, hey, if and when Rupert shuffles off this mortal coil, what's to prevent any of the other three siblings from going, actually, I'm just going to sell all these shares to somebody else?

Well, first of all, they are very fortunate that Rupert made it to 94. Does it make you think that he's ill, that they reached an agreement right now, I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I don't know if 94 is not enough of a reason to get everything going like it would be and hopefully will be for you and me. I mean, yeah, you know what I'm saying? Like estate planning kind of you usually start. I mean, again, they tried. This usually starts, you know, early. And the fact that it was unsettled up until now, to the extent that they wanted it to be resolved this way, they got really fortunate. But it makes me wonder if there was something nudging them alone. Like, why now? It's interesting, too, because the top line here is that the Murdoch Empire is going to be the Murdoch empire for the foreseeable future. And Lockland Murdoch, we think about him in terms of politics because that's where the fissure was. So keeping Fox News, Fox News, keeping the Wall Street Journal, at least its editorial page,

the Wall Street Journal's editorial page. But Loglin Murdoch is the guy overseeing everything in this empire. And I have some direct knowledge of this because the people I write about Fox Sports, who are, you know, worried about the way the scorebug looks on their NFL broadcasts or how well Tom Brady's coming along in year two, they report to Lachlan Murdoch as well. Oh, man. Lachlan was a guy, you remember, who announced Tom Brady's hiring on a Fox earnings call a couple years ago.

Right. These are all, there's a huge sprawling thing that may now even get bigger that Lachlan has outright control into the foreseeable future. So he cares so much more, because you've mentioned that they don't have conversations about FS1, right? They don't care about FS1 at all. But Fox Sports is actually like one of the jewels in this crown. This is something that is very important to him, presumably.

Yeah, I mean, those billion-dollar deals with the NFL, absolutely. So is wake-up barstool not going to make it until, you know, that's not going to make it on to you? Well, you and I, I think, would have doubled the viewership if we'd force ourselves to watch it this week for the podcast. I actually watched it. I did it. Did you?

Oh, sorry. You might have been counted in a rainy season. point. And what would, what did you make of it? I watched it once. Okay. That's it. That's the Joel review of wake up bar stool. Don't think I'll be watching it twice. I think we said at the time, the big noon part of the barstool deal was by far the biggest part of the barstool deal. Absolutely. The part that's still manifesting itself before our eyes. And I saw that day, Portnoy already has a biweek. They can put their putting in Big Cat for week three.

Oh, man. He's got other things to do. But that part is for Fox. And again, it goes back to what I was talking about games. Those huge multi-million, multi-billion dollar deals. Like that's the stuff here.

Right. That's where the eyeballs are. That's those are the things that they care about that might necessitate a call the lock. Everything else is just bells and whistles, I guess. Well, everything else is a cable channel. Right.

And, you know, it's treated perhaps appropriately. All right, we got time for a couple more things here that I would love to squeeze in. Yeah. Do we want to talk about the AP poll? Yes. The AP College Football Poll. I would like to nominate it, especially once football season starts. And you are the judge in such matters.

Does the AP poll count is America's softest target, a one of them? Yes, because, again, gets killed on every single college football message board. It also only kind of matters now. I mean, it's like one half level above the watch list for all those postseason awards that you and I barely know exists. Yeah, the Lou Grozo Award, I got to get tapped into that. Well, the reason I bring this up and for people that pay attention to these sort of things

that don't. So after this most recent poll came out, the most recent Associated Press, Top 25 poll of college football teams, there was a huge uproar because one of the voters, a young woman named Haley Sawyer, who covers the USC Trojans, submitted her ballot in a way that made everybody go crazy. One of the things was that she ranked the University of Florida at number 14 over the team that had just beaten them a few days before South Florida. She ranked Florida at 14 and South Florida at 16. Obviously, this set people off. And unfortunately, I think for her, she felt compelled to respond. And so she addressed the issue in an online interview. And so she

releases this video and she says, I don't want to go too much into my process before dismissing her poll entirely. She says, it's really fun, but it doesn't probably matter in the end. And people from Danny Connell to Desmond Howard were not very happy with her response to this. Brian, did you feel sorry for her like I did? Because I actually felt sorry for her. That was my first reaction. Yeah. Not because I defended her on the merits.

We can talk about that in just a second. Right. But it's just like becoming this person who's a journalist who I have, you know, sympathy for, at least notional sympathy for from the start, covering a local beat then becomes the main character of Twitter. Yeah. And you talk about America's softest tartly.

There's nobody who's like, actually, you know, I don't think the AP poll matters either and I should, and I would like to file my votes that way too. I mean, that just seems to me to be, I did feel a sliver of sympathy. What I was thinking about, and we actually talked about this on the Ringertelgate podcast, which comes out on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Check it out, folks. Check it out. it made me think about this. And I cannot find out how old she is, but I know that she seems to be a fairly young reporter here. And I was thinking about how when I worked at the Shreveport Times, it was 20 years ago, they gave me a digital camera. And then they gave,

we want you to record videos and do all this other stuff. And I was like, man, writing is hard enough. You know, like covering my beat is hard enough. But that was what they wanted me to do. And I really didn't do it. They didn't care because by the time I got figured out how to use all that stuff and upload video, they pivoted onto something else because we were on Bacconnet. So what I'm saying is that this young woman, like so many other reporters now, have to do so many things

that are ostensibly connected to their beat. Like they've got to cover the team. They've got to go on TV. They've got to, you know, update online. They've got to do video. They've got to keep a social media presence. They've do all these other things. And the poll.

Again, lots of people that are on the poll have to do the same things, but it made me wonder, I was like, man, we ask people to do a lot now on those jobs. Like, beat coverage seems really particular. It seems like it's only gotten harder in the last generation or so. And I was like, man, it used to be that there would be enough people to sort of spread those duties around that be a video person or whatever. Because also, I would never record something like that, like she had to, without running a. by like two or three different people, right, at the newspaper. Like you normally want your editor, your managers, all these people, hey, is this okay? And I'm imagining she probably did not have the benefit of that.

Think about the job here. USC had a game last Saturday. Yeah. It was a beat down of Georgia Southern, but it was a game, which means you're probably at the game, probably writing something, maybe recording videos, tweeting, all that kind of stuff. That's a lot of time, as you know, at the stadium to and from the stadium, post-game interviews, everything else. And then you're supposed to watch all of college football

or somehow consume all of college football. Now, this was an obvious one. One team lost to another. It's only two weeks into the season. Our data set is so small. So, of course, one team is going to be ahead of the other. We have a head-to-head reason why one team should be ahead of the other. But it's still a lot.

And you're expecting people to do it. And I think we should also come out and talk about, like, there's a difference to me between, hey, I just didn't look at this and I should have looked at this more maybe maybe should have studied more. And also the crank opinion where it was like actually I watched the game and I still think Florida is better than South Florida. That I actually respect. And that also gets shouted down on Twitter a lot. Oh yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. It's just like sometimes the game result and it happens all the time. There was one year that Baylor beat TCU in a game.

And at the end, Bailey ended up going on to lose another game. But they ranked TCU ahead of Baylor and people like, well, how could that be? Baylor beat TCU. That's an argument that you could make right there, right? But that's not the argument that she chose to make, which is unfortunate because I think she made the worst argument, which is that, well, I don't want to talk about my process. Also, it doesn't matter because people don't want to hear that. People take this very seriously, even if it doesn't actually affect or impact anything about these games.

Can we outline that, underline that for people who are not college football fans? The AP poll used to be, right, with those kind of be all, literally the be all end all in terms of the national championship. Now, we have a playoff. So you're ranking in the AP poll as opposed to the college football committee's rankings. You know, it's not, it's influential. Right. But it does matter way less than it used to. Oh, way less.

Yeah, it doesn't really count for anything. But I guess people, whatever the argument made, we should just underline them. Absolutely, absolutely. And people, but again, people don't want to hear that. They still think, and it does affect like TV matchups. Like when people are, you know, before, until the CFP poll comes out, people are like, oh, one verse three. How do they determine that? Often by the AP poll.

So it can sort of matter in some ways. It's just, you know, this was this was not the case. And I was actually, so Ralph Rousseau, who used to conduct the poll for the long time, he was the longtime Associated Press College Sports Writer, and he was the person to put the poll together. And I used to work with Ralph a little bit. And so I asked him, you know, have you ever, like, done the poll and had to, like, kick people off for, like, not taking it seriously or voting poorly or something like that? Because sometimes they cycle through different voters or, you know, people will move

on from a beat and they have to give their vote over. And he said that he's never actually kicked anybody off the poll. He had, and all his years are doing it, he had never kicked anybody off the poll. But there's some, there's some context that he's going to add later. He gave me a shorthand answer. So when I get more information about that, I'll make sure to pass it along. But so she'll still be able to keep, you're not going to be able to just kick her off that, that, that, that panel just because she submitted a ballot that you didn't agree with. Was it the year the Gene Stollings, Alabama team won the national championship that one vote, I think in Arizona voted Alabama number one all year.

And it was seen as a real outlier, what the hell are you doing kind of situation? And then the guy threw down to be right at the end of the year. Yeah. That's how, yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean,

it's certainly shocked the hell out of us. And I think the thing is, too, it's kind of funny. Again, if she had said, if you, if you put this in front of Vegas odds makers and you ask them,

who would win a game between Florida and South Florida, today. They probably would say Florida. The money would be on Florida. That would be a compelling argument to rank them ahead of USF, but that's not the thing that she did. But the thing that made it a journalism story to me is that there's less quality control. We're asking reporters to do more than we ever have before, and there's less quality control than ever before. There's less layer of management and editors and anything else. And so this kind of stuff is going to happen. Well, last clip for you. This is from NBA Commissioner Adam Silver.

He was talking about how consumers are going to try to find NBA games this year. NBA has now got three big partners, NBC, Amazon, and ESPN. So you're going to have to look a little harder, and this is what he said about how people watch basketball. There's a huge amount of our content that people can essentially consume for free. I mean, this is very much a highlights. based sport. You know, so, you know, Instagram, TikTok, you know, Twitter, you name it, any service, you know, the New York Times for that matter, to the extent that your content is not

behind a paid firewall. There's an enormous amount of content out there, YouTube, by another example, that is advertising-based that consumers can consume. He's not wrong, no. I mean, that is very true. That's how a lot of people consume basketball now, NBA basketball, through highlights, right? Right. But you just signed $77 billion worth of TV deals or streaming deals with not Twitter, but with actual media partners. Right. And you listen to that and you're like, dude, if you want to have a new generation of fans who are fans in a way that is helpful to you monetarily, they're going to have to watch games.

Right. And the challenge for the NBA is how do you make? Tuesday night in Portland a must watch. You know, not the playoffs, not the finals, but those regular season games, especially when you got load management issues and all that kind of stuff. And it's just amazing. I mean, look, he did an amazing job negotiating that deal. He got way more money than a lot of people thought it was going to do. Absolutely. People were predicting a lot less than what they got for. It was the NBA almost seemed like it was an existential crisis heading into those negotiations, right? Can you imagine NFL in Park Avenue, their league offices? got what for the NBA?

Right. We got this for the NFL. But the thing is, is like, because you got that much money, these partners want people to watch the games. Right. Part of it's their job to get people into the door. But man, you hear that and you're just like, whoa, what? A highlight-driven league, a sort of no context, minimal context, consumption of the NBA.

Right. Dude, that just is like, that's, you have both accurately, you've accurately stated the problem. Yes. Going forward for the NBA. Right. Also, I mean, it could be that Adam Silver was saying, hey, man, y'all sound broke. You know, maybe you should, y'all sound broke. Why can't you afford it?

I don't understand. You like basketball, that much, pay for it. You know, I don't agree with that. But it could be that. I mean, I think that, yeah, the assumption is that everybody is just going to be able to pay for whatever streaming service and whatever people start asking. Like us, we talked about YouTube TV the other day. It was like $35 once upon a time. All of a sudden, we're paying $82.

And so I think that people have just sort of gotten to near to that as well. They just expect that the people that have always paid for it are going to pay for it. And it'll filter down. And it's just like there's a concern now. And I think, you know, whenever I hear a lot of these, as you know, whenever I hear the stuff about the streaming services, I'm a lot of it's like, dude, this is overstated. It's much easier to watch games than it has ever been in human history.

and certainly in my lifetime. But when you join this with, you know, it costs a lot of money to go to a game. It's hard to find the game. You have to pay for different things to find the game you want to watch that night. It does all add up to something. Oh.

And it was just a strange note to hit for the commissioner of the NBA. Very funny for you to say a night in Portland because you're right. And nobody's watching the trailblaze, you know, unless you're a court. I can say a night in Sacramento. I mean, that's actually probably less desirable.

I was going to say, Aaron Fox ain't there no more. I got to figure out who's there. I'll shut off. I think I was on Kings now. We have to listen to as an NBA podcast here at the ringer to find out all five of the King's starters this year. He's Joel Anderson. I'm Brian Curtis. Productions magic by Kyle Crichton. Coming up on the press box, Shoemaker, just back here on Monday.

We've got stuff to talk to him about, you all, man. I got a whole, I already start my Monday list for Shoemaker, and it's already long. That's the thing. I've got my Thursday list for you, and I got the Monday list for Shoemaker in there. They're both long. I'm so jealous that I didn't get, I didn't get to talk about Jackie Cheryl with you, but I'll let it go. Dude. I just wanted to say that aloud because people like, you and I remember that.

As soon as you said it, I was like, Jackie Cheryl in the castration. Yeah, absolutely. Keep up thinking to get it. That was 1992. Yeah, man. That was the year Bill Clinton became president, not the year Dwight Eisenhower became president. 33 years ago, man. Joel, I'll see you here next Thursday with more lukewarm takes about the media.

Looking forward to it, man. Thank you.