The Press Box - The Massacre at the Capital Gazette, Decision 3.0, and Failing to Report on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez | The Press Box (Ep. 490)

Episode Date: July 3, 2018

The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker reflect on the tragic shooting at the Capital Gazette last week and how Donald Trump's and Milo Yiannopoulos's comments against the press can stoke violence toward journalists (02:26). Then they talk about the impact LeBron James has had on sports media in light of his recent deal with the Los Angeles Lakers (20:50) and examine Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s surprise win in the New York Congressional Democratic primary last week (37:50). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, last week one, stuttering John Melendez, prank called Donald Trump. What I want to know is, which off-limits celebrity would you like to prank call? I assume Donald Trump is off-limits for the purposes of this question, because that's been done. It's been done. My mind immediately goes to, this is for the press box? Yes. My mind immediately goes to Vlad Putin, but I think.

there'd be too much of a language, but it would just seem like a gag even if it was real. Oof, I think it's got to be, I think, I mean, to, hey, it's got to be LeBron, right? Ooh. You get LeBron on the phone? Maybe Mav Carter, if you could get to more dirt from it. I mean, it's got some combination of access and who you think has the loosest lips. Right. I think it's LeBron, though.

I think Mav Carter is aiming a little low. No offense to Mavcar. No, no, no, I think you're right. I mean, it'd be fun to get, you know, Goodell or Silver. Goodell's good. Like if they were like, you know, three martinis in or something, but I think, I think LeBron's I think, I think humorlessness of your prank called target is important so that Roger Goodell would be huge.

Yeah. That would be it. Well, here's my question for you, because you've got a, you're the man with the Rolodex between the two of us, but just in general too. Only by comparison. How long would it take you to get on the phone if you, with, with President Trump? After hearing that stuttering John made it. Just getting right through.

I want like, if you, yeah. Just getting not setting up an interview. just cold calling the president of the United States? Yes. I might know a media member who has gotten through on the bad phone since Trump has been elected president. On the cell phone? I think so. I'm not totally sure on that, but I think I'm pretty sure I know a media member.

It's accepted that he's still using it. Right. That is not somebody who has interviewed Trump in print or something like that. So you think if you called that person, you were like, hey, I know this is awkward, but this is a matter of national security. Can I have the president's cell phone? You think you could get the number and get through to Trump? The real news here to me was that Stuttering John has a podcast, because who knew, right? Is he still on the Howard Stern show or no?

Yeah, well, good. Great questions. Who knows? Also, I think the even bigger news was he was pretending to be Senator Bob Menendez. Is this an overworked Twitter joke? Has anyone ever pretended to be Bob Menendez before in American history? We don't pretend to be anything but our miserable selves. This is the press box on the Ringer Podcast Network.

The Pressbox is the media podcast where you're not allowed to pretend you knew Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was going to win the Democratic primary. Marianne Queens. You didn't know. You really didn't. We are Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer. Your Ringer syllabus. A lot of news over the weekend, huh? It's been a big one.

A very good Kevin O'Connor, what it all means piece on LeBron James coming to the Los Angeles Lakers. A heat check about the similar topic. A BS podcast about the similar topic. And in non-sports news, how about our friend Kate Nibbs on Civility? Love it. One of our favorite subjects here at the press box. All right, David, today.

Three topics for you. First, we're going to talk about the massacre inside the newsroom of the Capitol Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, and Donald Trump calling the press the enemy of the American people and whether those two things ought to be linked. Second, we will review the media highlights of LeBron James' third decision. And finally, did the media screw up in failing to report on soon-to-be-house member, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who won a huge upset over Joe Crowley last week. Plus, as always, our overworked Twitter joke of the week.

But let me start this way. I don't know if I have great questions for you in this segment about the horror last week in Annapolis. Let me read you a few paragraphs from the Baltimore Sun's account of the attack. This is a piece by Gene Marbella and Jessica Anderson. Quote, a man bearing a shotgun with a light attached to its barrel appeared at the double glass doors to the newsroom of the Capitol Gazette newspaper. Twice he tugged unsuccessfully at the locked doors, then shot the right one blasting it to shards. he stepped into the office, turned to his right, and shot. He pumped the shotgun and shot again.

He proceeded to walk and shoot his way deeper into the newsroom. There were 11 people at the office at the time. Five were killed. This is a photographer. Paul Gillespie dived under his desk in the photo area in the middle section of the newsroom and curled himself into a ball. He could hear the gunman making his way down the aisle. He heard Wendy Winters, a feature writer and editor who sits nearby shout no.

It was a real loud. It was real loud like a fighting no, he said. Winters had recently participated in an active shooter training course. Her surviving coworkers believe she might have confronted the shooter because she was found in the aisle and not at her desk. The five employees that were killed were Winters, Gerald Fishman, Rob Hyas, and John McNamara, and Rebecca Smith. What do we do with a story like this that was so haunting and so traumatic last week? That's a great and terrifying question. I have to say, like, I'm not the kind of.

of Jerno who, you know, hides under his desk, you know, in depressing news weeks of which there have been many in 2017 and 2018. And last week was a, you know, stare at the floor for a couple of hours, weeks for me on a lot of accounts, but this, certainly after this. I mean, it was just, I don't know. I don't, I don't often feel, I feel depressed a lot, but I often don't let it get to me in that particular way. Yeah. And I let it get to me last week. And, Yeah. I'm right there with you. I think that,

yeah, I mean, I think that my, I saw a really early report of this, and it just sort of processed it as another shooting, which is, you know, flooring in its own, in a different sort of depressing way. Yeah. And then, yeah, I mean, as soon as it was IDed as a newsroom, I mean, it's interesting, because the story kind of, it takes on a couple of different lives, you know, like at the same time

where, you know, another, you know, mass shooting, whatever is part of it. But then, you know, the, you know, the, everybody's mind immediately goes to Trump's attacks on the media. Before any information on the shooter came out, you know, the internet was passing around these just like two days before some outlets had posted some stuff about Milo Yanopoulos like kind of like inanely texting back to them instead of

saying no comment saying basically just like I can't wait till people the crowds rise up and kill you all or you know I'm sorry that was a that's not exactly what he said so the battleground no pun intended sorry the battleground sort of

shifted away from what actually happened in a lot of ways ideologically before the news even got out. And then by the time, I mean, I think this all has to, it probably all boils down to the, um, what we've talked about many times before, both on the air and in person about, and about how quick the news cycle is on these things now that, um, you know, the calls for gun control or the calls for, you know, and then the, the sort of, it's almost a meme now about how the conservative side will be like, this is not the time to be talking about, you know, political issues, but they've basically gotten to the point

now where they know if they just keep their heads down for 48 hours and the whole thing passes on, right? So, I mean, the cyclone these has gotten so fast. And now, all this is to say, the ideological conversation is happening and ending before the news of the, the actual news of the shooting even gets solidified. It feels like it's like

minutes afterwards. Yeah. I mean, a couple of ways that goes, right? Not only the Trump stuff you talked about, but the guy on Fox News, oh, not, let's not even play the audio. No. But the guy on Fox News saying whether he, you know, Trace Gallagher is his name, saying whether he investigated, you know, whether the paper had an ideological bent, which may have just been one of those things.

I am, I am once in a while willing to give people, you know, the benefit of the doubt, speaking extemporaneously in the middle of something like that. I think he deserves the benefit of the doubt. I think he did this with a, with a pure heart and with a, you know, open mind. Was he trying to make the clumsily make that they don't deserve this point? Yes. I think that he, I think we give him the benefit of the doubt, but given the benefit of the doubt, this is still, like, bizarrely damning.

that this is where your mind goes, especially from, you know, a reporter on Fox News, just like, just in case you were wondering, this wasn't one of those lefty rags that might deserve to get shot, you know, or whatever. And even though, I mean, that wasn't what he was saying. He was probably saying, your mind might be going to President Trump.

Let me make it clear this, you know, this is a different, this is not that or whatever. Turns out nobody deserves to get shot. That would have been a good point to make. So I think this, this, when you say our minds with two issues. One was, aside from the political stuff, was the whole idea of just threat, that reporters find themselves facing.

Huffington Post did this big piece where they printed a lot of their nastiest email, which will be recognizable to people even who report on sports, right, who get nutty emails all the time from people. Yeah. And, you know, indirect and direct threats. This guy, the suspect's name, Jared Ramos, 38 years old, he had pled guilty to criminal harassment because he was allegedly. stalker harassing a high school

classmate or high school someone who went to the same high school as he did. This was reported in the Capitol Gazette and as USAID had reported his grudge against the paper resembled a war of sorts. On Twitter, he regularly attacked the newspaper. It's journalists and editors and a judge

that presided over the case. Ramos almost regularly posted about wanting members of the staff to kill themselves hoping the paper would shut down and repeatedly include the hashtag cap death watch. In another post, Ramos makes mention of a shotgun saying, my bullets are words. Police say Ramos used a shotgun in the shooting on Tuesday, on Thursday.

Excuse me. So there was a, you know, I think there was this whole issue of journalists work under these kind of threats all the time. Obviously, rarely, thank God, do they manifest themselves in this kind of awful way? Sure. But anybody who does reporting that is, I wouldn't even say high stakes, low stakes, medium stakes, winds up getting a lot of email like that. And that certainly brought this into relief. About the Trump stuff, here, let's do this first.

Let's listen to Trump at a rally in West Columbia, South Carolina before the shooting. Interviewed 10 women on one of the opposing networks, you know, the enemy, the enemy of the people, I call them. And a lot of people, the employees of the Capitol Gazette wrote this open letter where they said, we won't forget being called an enemy of the people after thanking various people for their support, you know, and help after the shooting. You know, this is one of those things where it's like, and a lot of people say, well, you know, this guy had a grudge that was different than something that had been spurred on by the president, right? But it's bad and dangerous to call the, you know, the press, the enemy of the American people, even if no one shoots up a newsroom. Yeah. Or if someone shoots up a newsroom for a different reason.

it's still bad, right? And still incredibly dangerous. Yeah. And I just, I mean, that's one of those things that Trump has said it now in so many versions and so many times. Speaking of getting, you know, not even feeling it anymore, like you talk about with shootings. How many times have Trump said this? We just kind of ignore it now. Yeah.

So the best case scenario, I mean, the worst case scenario is that, is that Trump's, or, you know, the worst case scenario way to look at this is that Trump's, you know, the worst case scenario way to look at this is that Trump's, endless media bashing might have played some part in legitimizing the shooting that eventually transpired. I'm not saying that it did. I'm just saying that's like if you want to look at it

the darkest way that's possible. But the best case scenario isn't that far away. The best case scenario way to look at it is like, well, Trump, you know, dodged one. You know? I mean, because everybody watching this

happen, no matter what political affiliation you are, spent some time wondering if this was a person influenced by what the president said. That was a real possibility. Yes. And to pretend like, oh, it doesn't matter because this is a different kind of shooting.

It's like, that's just, I mean, yeah, we should acknowledge this for what it is. I mean, this was a, it's like what you said about, you know, reporters dealing with this kind of stuff all the time. That's a real issue on its own. That doesn't absolve Trump. The best case scenario is that Trump called the press an enemy of the American people, essentially equating the press to a country America is at war with. Yeah. And then also someone went and shot up. up a newsroom for unrelated reasons. That's the absolute best case scenario. That's unacceptable.

That didn't work. That's no good. I mean, I'm sorry. I know this is not like a hot, a hot, a hot counterintuitive take here, but that, that, that's just absolutely unacceptable. Yeah. How, how, what's your better the next time Trump uses that phrase after this? You know, made some, you know, some, some thoughts and prayer stuff on Twitter and stuff like that. He seemed a little bit, he seems slightly apologetic or at least reserved, right? We know he's like, you know. But he's so, but that's the thing is we know he's going to forget the next time he goes out. the next time he's doing a rally. So he'll go back to the, you know, playing the oldies, playing the greatest hits.

Yeah. And he treats it. It's like, it's like one of those lines at a rally. It's sort of like, it's like lock her up was, right? Build the wall and they're going to pay for it. It's sort of a laugh and applause line now. And, you know, where everybody at the rally. It's a punch line because it doesn't, because he clearly doesn't take it that seriously.

But it is a serious thing. Yeah. And I just think it's one of the, it's in, I mean, we can look at public opinion and stuff like that. but at some level it's incalculable what it does to the way people think about the press. Forget the mass shooting idea. Just the way people think about the press in the country when you have someone repeating that so many times. And just so randomly and wantonly, right? There's just no, it's like he was talking about it last week.

There's no point to talk about it last week other than, you know, the usual Russia, et cetera, et cetera. It's just like, yeah, let's just throw this in the speech. Yeah. Why not? in a speech where he was supposed to be endorsing a candidate, I believe, for South Carolina's gubernatorial nomination. Okay. Let's just throw this in about the press. I mean, we're talking about Trump and the press and the, you know, the backdrop is there's a shooting.

But all, you know, to go just to, you know, put a bow on it. We're obviously, we're not biased, hopefully, but we're obviously coming from a very particular position of working for a media company. I'm biased in favor of a free press Sure I'll take it But it's just like But like you know We do the show every week

To call bad actors in the media Or dopes in the media out on their dopingness You know I mean we do this all the time It doesn't need But like the existence of an unfettered And unbiased press is not a partisan issue And to make it one Is a really dangerous thing

Because I'm sure everybody listening to this considers themselves a smart person, but there's a lot of people out there who don't know the difference, you know? And then you get, anyway, anyway, there's more important things at stake here, and that's that, you know, there are people who, like, demonstrably unwell people who are getting their hands on weapons. Yes, which is something we've talked about before. And as you say, it's, I think that may be the saddest part is when you register,

you're just like, oh, a shooting happened, you know? Yeah. Like, oh, an NBA signing happened or something like that. And this one of all, I mean, you know, you always hear about personal, these horrific personal stories of, you know, people and women in relationships that, you know, predict their own demise, their own death at their mate's hand or whatever. But this is one of those stories on a bigger scale. There were people at the paper who were like, yeah, we got to watch out for this guy. This guy might shoot us. This guy, whatever.

Absolutely. And then it just like, it happened and there was nothing to be done. I will segue awkwardly to the overworked Twitter joke of the week, David, where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious. that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. First of all, I got an email, a plea, if you will, from one Ben Waldman, who asked me if we could do anything about the tweets that say, insert free agent superstar's name, colon, why I'm joining the athletic. Right. Do we have, have we reached full saturation on that? Yes, I think so.

We did have Anthony Kennedy why I'm joining the athletic last week. That was a good one. Yeah, I like that. I think this may be beyond our power. Anyway, consider this the public shaming. if there hasn't been one of anybody making more jokes about that. David, you might have seen, this was low on the NBA transactions news scale, but Austin Rivers was traded by the Clippers, the team coached by his father, Doc.

I'm very familiar. Father trades away son, okay? It was an overworked Twitter joke to invoke the season four episode 24 episode of the Fresh Prince in which Will was rejected by his birth father. Can I play you a quick clip? Now, you know what, Uncle Phil? I'm gonna get through college without him. I'm gonna get a great job without him.

I'm gonna marry me a beautiful honey, and I'm having me a whole bunch of kids. I'm gonna be a better father than he ever was. And I sure as hell don't need him for that because ain't a damn thing he could ever teach me about how to love my kids. Wait for it. All right.

How come he don't want me, man? Why are you laughing, David? Why are you laughing? Because Will Smith is a great actor. Was American society better when we could all sit down and watch a very special fresh prince? A fresh prince, the whole family should watch together. What percentage of the fresh friends were very special episodes by the end? Was it like 35%?

It was weirdly high. Yeah. It was seemingly every week. I did not remember that one. I did not remember that Ben Vareen was Will's dad. Oh, I totally forget that. Learned something new every day. In other news this week, the Wall Street Journal.

The Big Heel Turn by Ben Varee. I know. Who knew? In other news, the Wall Street Journal, reports that, quote, cuts to two fiber lines caused a widespread system failure at cable giant Comcast, okay? That knocked out cable internet and phone services around the country. It was an overworked Twitter joke, and here I'm the obnoxious voice of the person you hear on the tech support line to say, quote, has Comcast tried unplugging itself, waiting 10 seconds, and plugging itself back in? Thanks to Jeff Hoffman for that one.

That was good stuff. And last week, the biggest political news of the week, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced he was retiring at age 81. Did you see the Donald Trump Jr. tweet about this development? Oh, yeah. Quote, OMG, just when you thought this week couldn't get any more lit, I give you Anthony Kennedy's retirement from hashtag SCOTUS. It wasn't over to word Twitter joke to reply, quote, the word lit was pronounced dead at 123. PM on June 27, 2018. The black community would simply

like privacy during this time of morning. That's funny. That's everything Twitter was made for. All right, Dave. Congratulations to Donald Trump Jr. For being part of a very good overused Twitter. He did. He was the setup. Yeah. He just, that was an undergand toss. Every good routine needs a straight man.

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the last weekend we just had of NBA transactions was. What? What was it? Tim Pontemps. NBA reporter for the Washington Post says, you know, this whole thing is happening at like midnight on the East Coast, they should just make,

the NBA should really think about making this into a primetime special. A primetime special? You mean like the decision? That's amazing. The thing everybody hated because players

were taking over the league? Yeah. Wouldn't that great? Wouldn't that be great? Do you remember, this is what's so shy, do you remember when this was the end of the world?

This was the end times that we were elevating athletes above the game and above their teams. And now we as a sports media we're just like, yeah, we're in on that. Yeah. We're all in.

Well, okay. I mean, yes, I agree. I think that the decision, which you wrote about beautifully today on the ringer.com or yesterday as people are listening to this. You know, the decision was damned largely because of the actual production and not just the morality of it. Not just the old school sports as a team, you know, whatever. The, you know, the argument about amateurism or whatever. We'll talk about the balance between those two things, but yes, go ahead. Yeah.

So, I mean, I think that it, you know, but I agree with your point. And a lot of people made it. I think it was that was made by, I don't know, Pat's still in here, but our social media director made it on in-house slack as it was going on, you know, as the stories are breaking on Saturday night. That, yeah, like this is just too big of a medium moment for the NBA to ignore it anymore. You know, and I understand why it's the clock strikes 12. new day contractually, you know, because of the CBA, it's, you know, the deals can be signed.

But there's, for one thing, the moratorium on, or, you know, the tampering rules, and I'm doing air quotes when I say that, have been, two things have been said really loudly over the past month or so. One, it's a tampering rules in the NBA are just inane and need to be done away with because nobody obeys them. And the only rule is against the appearance of tampering, the only functional rule. But two, it's that, yeah, this should be, why not make this the new The draft, you know, this is a bigger deal than the draft, and the draft, it's a prime time show. So I... We've come such a long way.

Yeah, I feel like we've just accomplished so much. No, but we really have in the last eight years. It's totally true. Because I feel like, I feel, one, we've just entered this general transactions world, right? Yeah. Where transactions, especially in basketball. I mean, baseball has had the hot stove league for, you know, who knows how long. I think the NFL probably did a better job of marketing, even Black Monday.

That was always my favorite where all the coaches got fired. It was like a holiday on the NFL calendar. Oh, we just fired a third of the coaches. Let's get on TV. But the NBA was a little bit slow in this. And now, thanks to LeBron, being a free agent three times in eight years and making a decision, speaking of air quotes, it's just a thing now. It's amazing.

Chris Ryan on the NBA show that came out on, I guess, Sunday night, referred to LeBron as being post-team now, which I think is a perfect way to say this. But I remember when decision number one came down, and it seemed like a pretty big deal that LeBron was going to change his number to play in Miami. You remember that? And when back, I mean, and I think that specifically was because they had retired Michael Jordan's number in Miami,

if I remember correctly. But Jordan member played with two different numbers at various times. Kobe did the same thing. Those were very big deals because you attach a player to a number and to a team. and the fact that I think that's the biggest shift I mean and this is basically

what you were just saying but since the first decision is that you know you can look at Kevin Durant going to the Warriors you can look at you know there's a lot of different big moments

in free agency over the last decade but LeBron LeBron being the biggest athlete in the world and just saying that that am I not even turning his back on the city although Cleveland you know

a lot of Cleveland fans took it that way But, you know, just to say that I as a person, as an athlete, as a talent, and bigger than a team, a number than a league almost, that's, I mean, that's what shifted everything. Absolutely. No, I think that's exactly right. And I don't even, you know, it's funny because we think about in terms of power, you know, I'm bigger than this. I can tell these teams what to do. But it's just agency, right? It's LeBron saying, I have the power to do this. I'm not evading the rules. these are the rules. This is collectively bargained free agency. Sure. I'm just taking advantage of it, right? I'm saying, I'm the most sought after basketball player in the world.

I'm the best basketball player in the world, and I'm not going to pretend like I'm not. I'm not going to pretend like I'm going to go, you know, write this down on a yellow pad and never mentions. I'm going to have a TV special. I'm going to do the Lee Jenkins thing. This time we did the Instagram stories thing. They kept a pretty reserved this time, yeah. But that was, I think, the big shift in the media was what you just said, which was the media supported free. free agency, of course, and had, I think, we would have been hard to find a media member in 2008,

or excuse me, 2010, when the first decision came now that didn't support free agency, right? But they could not get this idea that the NBA was about players. It was not about the Lakers and Celtics, right? And that players could do whatever they wanted. And now, looking back those old pieces, like, yeah, LeBron and Dwayne Wade talked about their, I've talked about the decision. It's kind of like an almost a form of collusion. Yeah.

Well, like, you know, no, no, you don't understand the difference here. When the billionaires are colluding to deprive the players of money, that's collusion. Yeah. I want to play with you next year. That's not in the same moral plane. No. That was weird. Yeah.

You and I spoke along the way to signing up with the ringer. Yes. We did not have to consider separate offers. Like, wait, you're here too? Yeah. Yeah. There was not a surprise. You're going to join up?

Yeah. And there was no like, I don't know if we're allowed to be having this conversation about contracts that have not been offered to us. But it was such a funny thing to worry about in 2010, that the players were, it's like, what if the players who really like each other get together and say they want to, they want to be on the same team? Well, listen, that's lost in all these conversations, right?

When someone's like, oh, but you got to say, you know, someone wants to argue that you, that you owe something to the franchise that drafted you. It's just like, dude, if you're 24 and a millionaire, it's okay to choose a city you want to live in. Yeah. Because you didn't choose the first city you lived in. Right.

You got drafted. Exactly. The draft means no choose. Yeah. And you would have gotten that same money no matter who would draft it, more or less, sliding scale. But yeah, I mean, it's crazy.

I mean, I think it does bear mention that the conventional wisdom of NBA writers or sports writers overall has shifted a lot in that span of time partly because of a generational shift. Yes. I mean, the people that are, I would say, over the age of 40, I mean, really close to where we are,

45, there's still a huge contingent of people who are kind of ascribed to the old school, you know, CW of, you know, I, I mean, our boss Bill Simmons will say it. He wants, he gives players all the agents in the world. He's happy, you know, he's got to be happy that, like, you know he's happy that Kyrie Irving's on the Boston Celtics and sort of, like, forced his way there. He's a Celtics fan. But he'll also say, like, if I were the calves, I would have played hardball and not let him leave.

You know, you keep a player, you always keep a player that good when you have them, that kind of stuff. There's nothing wrong with that. But that's a little bit closer to the old school of like, no, no, if somebody drafts you, you start with a team, that's where you play for the rest of your season. And it means more for your career if you do that. Yeah. I remember this is very jarring for me in 2010 when he first, when LeBron did this. Yeah. Just because it was like, oh, we haven't seen this in exactly the same way before. We saw, you know, we saw Shaq, you know, engineering his way to Los Angeles, right? And things like that. We see, we'd see, big players change teams. But it was just, it was just something. I don't.

believe very much, looking back of those little pieces, I don't believe very much of it was TV criticism. Because what they said was, for the first decision, LeBron, this is a, it's all about, it's a look at me, television show. Yeah. It was how, you know, I found a Boston Globe editor

where they called him a preening athlete. Something you'd really have to dig deep. The coffee desk would not let that one go to me. No, I do not believe that would happen. Here's what I'll say. It was a, it was a little bit, I mean, even looking back now, it's a little bit it's a cringy show, right? From just the setup, from the length of time. It is not, it is not

good television. I don't want to... Vitamin water backdrops. Please don't take it that I think it's good television. It was bad television. But the takes were worse than the show. I think that if he had gone... I think you're right.

I think that if he had said, I'm making my decision on SportsCenter at 9 p.m. or whatever. And the segment was five minutes long, and maybe there was in the second interview after the commercial or something, you know, just about why he made the decision. I think there would have been less criticism, although you're right, not 100% less criticism.

We all remembered in 2010 that LeBron plays basketball on TV, right? This is not a new medium for LeBron James. No, but basketball's fun to watch. Right. It's not a new medium, right? No, no. It's just so far. I was just find it funny, and I'm mostly, I mean, in most it's funny.

It's like this is not the biggest moral crisis in the world, but it was funny to think where people drew the line. Yeah. Like, you can come out to a smoke machine before a game. That's cool, but you can't go on television and pick where you're going to go. Yeah. Uh-uh. That's preening.

That's no good. Absolutely. Yeah. And, you know, we want every, we want every bit of your kind of unguarded humanity and post-game interviews, as we've spoken about recently. But none of, but none of like your actual agency, you know, off of the court. I do think when we look at this weekend's events and Decision 3.0, the fact that it's a Twitter moment instead of an ESPN moment makes it feel more organic, right? Like we basketball fans, writers, observers are kind of own it in a way. Yeah.

It's not being foisted upon us. I think that's right. Probably that's in the background somewhere here. Yeah. And I think if you want to look really deeply into the sort of the unintentional slights that were cast and that, I mean, or the, you know, the kind of darker parts of the darker angels of our personalities of the people who were writing negative things about LeBron and the decision, there was a little. undercurrent too that he was getting bad advice from Maverick Carter and the people around him. More than an undercurrent. Yeah, but I think that that was also that it had as much to do with like it's not just athletes exercising their agency as to go to another team as athletes exercising their agency to bring their friends up and to help, you know, let their friends and confidant succeed along with them.

This is what I've always said. I love awkward press conferences. Yeah. Because you know what? You know what? What happens when you have an awkward press conference? You have the real person. You have the celebrity.

When Tiger gave his big thing after all the adultery stuff, everybody's like, oh, you know, here's what he should have said. Here's a smooth answer you have right. No, no, I want the real Tiger. Yeah. And if you watch a decision, that's real LeBron before tons of media training and tons of reps and all the stuff. And it's like, this was him. He was young. He was, you know, he was enjoying the moment.

moment like, okay, that's all right. This is the real guy. The Lee Jenkins, LeBron, that wasn't the real guy. I'm sorry. I believe those are LeBron's real ideas, but the power of the pen that can make him sound, you know, and put it all together. That's not the real him, right? I'm sorry.

That's just not it, you know? So Lee Jenkins wrote a little piece about this decision, Decision 3, that went up on the Sports Illustrated site pretty shortly after it happened. And it was clear that he had a little bit of. of access was presumably not on not standing next to LeBron as he boarded his plane to leave the country although maybe he was but like there were just a couple of tidbits of stories that you know that he no one else had that he had and it was it was cool but also the story just

sort of was what like 1500 words and then out you know there was it was just like insidery thing and then LeBron marches into the undiscovered country and then it was done yeah it was the context and some some sceney stuff but the but the but talking about as humanity. I mean, LeBron's real choice this time was not, I mean, I'm sure he made that, he had an agreement with Lee Jenkins, you know, to do that sort of thing. But it was a very quiet tweet from the Clutch Sports Twitter account, which nobody was following at the time.

No. And it didn't even seem to be that much of like a professional goal to get more followers because they didn't follow it up with anything. At least people now, but Clutch Sports didn't have a checkmark, you know, when they tweeted that out. It had not tweeted very much up to that point. And going by Jenkins' piece, it was just a call. you, LeBron called his reps

as he was boarding this plane to leave the country and was just like, it's the Lakers, make it happen, let him know, and then flew off. And in some ways, that's the sort of most compelling human vision of LeBron. It's not the guy who's like, puts on the, you know, plaid shirt to sit in front of the ESPN cameras for, you know, for an hour or whatever.

But, but... The shirt was wild when I rewatched it. Yeah. I had not fully remembered the shirt. but it's you know the guy who's just like I'm very I'm so comfortable in this decision I'm not even like

I'm just like I'm having someone else make the call and then I'm out you know I mean all of that setting aside how long the wheels had been in motion and whatever else but but yeah I'm interested I do want to say one thing you said we talked about LeBron being post team

and you know you were talking about that some before what's interesting though is that him is that even though he's transcended the Cavs and he transcended the Heat and he's transcended the NBA in a lot of ways the Lakers were

the Lakers were he got a I feel like he got a little bit of a pass for going to the Lakers because of their legacy and I don't mean he didn't deserve the pass or whatever else because all good players eventually wind up there yeah but if he had gone to the nuggets or something you know like people would have been or even the Rockets. He engineered his way there Shack engineered his way there

Kareem engineered his way there yeah I mean I watched a little bit of ESPN this morning and the conversation was more about are they going to get Kauai and not about LeBron is disappointed us all by going to the rockets or by doing whatever. I think my, yes, I think that activates a part of the fan mind that Miami doesn't quite

activate in the same way. Miami seems like a really cool place to live. But you don't want to join the legacy of the Miami Heat, which was one title versus a bojillion in Los Angeles. Yeah, no, it's funny. I do, and just to put a bow on this, as you would say, the changes in the media are fascinating to me.

You mentioned that the basketball media is different. younger. I think it's just something Brian Winhorse mentioned to me when I interviewed a couple weeks ago, which was, it's now very national. The media, the basketball media is very national. It's about all the teams, right? It's about the transactions. It's about the chess board, the risk board that is the NBA, right? In a way that's different than it was in the age of newspapers when it was about your team. And I also just think fandom is about, is much more like that now, thanks to fantasy, thanks to just the access to information we all have that we all have, we didn't have when we were growing up, the fact that you have access to Woj's Twitter,

you're kind of being told to think about to be an NBA fan as much as you are a Mavericks fan. And the little indicate, I mean, not even little. It's not insignificant that, like, players don't live in the cities that they play in for the most party. More LeBron's been living in L.A. for a while. He has a house in Akron, obviously. But, like, and team owners more and more don't even, don't reside anywhere near the teams that they own. They're all just like hedge fund guys in New York. You know, I mean, the things that used to bind us to or bind teams to cities are going or just, you know, flitting away.

Yeah, and a discussion for another time. But I was wondering that about when the athletic says we're covering local teams like they don't anymore. I'm always thinking back in my mind, are fans, local fans like they used to be? And I'm not sure the answer to that or to what extent. Right. There's a, there will always be, you know, a degree to which we have room enough in our brain to know who the Mavs 12th man is and stats about him because we're Mavs fans and we don't have that depth of time or, you know, energy to learn that about every player in the league. But I think you're right.

More and more, it's like, like, regional rivalries are pretty meaningless. You know, there's nothing binding us to one team or one set of teams or one part of the country. It's still there. It's just not there in the same way, right? That's like, I'm still a local sports fan, which is to say Dallas Fort Worth sports fan. Yeah. But just I think, I just think the world has, the world and the media has changed an interesting way. Anyway, that's a topic for another time.

Our final topic today, David, let me give you another sports analogy. Do you know what happens when a college football team's fans win the national championship? You do the hugs, right? Oh, my gosh, the best moment of my life, right? And then the next thing you do is you get online and search out all the journalists who predicted you weren't going to win and go dunk on them on Twitter. That's what happened in the Democratic primary in Queens last week, right? Yeah. It's exactly what happened.

And so Alexandria Ocasio Cortez scores this huge upset over Joe Crowley, entrenched Democrat, been there two decades in line for leadership if Pelosi leaves after the midterms. All right. So what do people do? What do do do happy liberals, happy socialists, happy lefties, whatever we want to call them, do immediate after? They go start attacking the New York Times for not covering her enough, right? This was Jill Abramsson, former executive editor, which is to say top editor of the New York Times when she saw a Times tweet that said, said, who is Alexandria Ocasio Cortez? She said, quote, kind of pisses me off that the New York Times is still asking who is she when it should have covered her campaign, missing her rise, achin to not seeing Trump win, Trump's wins, excuse me, coming in 2016.

And she continued to Lloyd Grove for the Daily Beast saying, my feeling about the NYT now, like I did when my son cheated on a test in 10th grade, I loved him to death, but he needed a course correction. She went on to criticize several things about the time, blah, blah, blah. blah, blah, blah. I don't, like, I understand if the Times could turn back the clock, they would absolutely cover this race more, right? They would have written the standalone profile of her, which they did not before the race. She was in several articles, a number of articles about different candidates, about women running for Congress and stuff like that.

But this idea that that's what we need to attack at this moment. And I understand, right? What is it? Is it people just are we're mad, we're down about week of Trump, week of Supreme Court, week of Muslim ban. And that's naturally where you go on Twitter. Like, like who can I, who can I lord this victory over? Yeah, I mean, I think there's also the big like the further left contingent, which has a louder voice. I mean, then, I mean, maybe not terribly outsized voice, but a somewhat outsized voice online,

sort of Bernie Sanders contingent that feels that like they've been marginalized since the primary since the presidential primary suddenly have a sort of totem and a victory a victory that they can count

and I think there's a lot of you know it's an like everything online is an opportunity to get to be heard by somebody right and you don't you don't miss you don't you don't forego your opportunity because you know you want to give people time to hug and sell

celebrate. But yeah, I mean, and I think that I think that the spiking the ball on the New York Times is a bipartisan pastime at this point. You know, I mean, it's it's a, it's something that many people do, you know, joyously for very different reasons. I mean, there's a distinct, there's a distinction between a conservative side sort of like legacy media is inherently evil or worthless. Worthless is probably a more general thing than, I mean, I don't, I don't, think they're all demonizing the New York Times or whatever. But, and then the, you know, on the further left side of the scale, it's, it's, this is the sort of blindered old guard that needs to be replaced. Yeah. Or that they're just, they're making, you know, vital mistakes, which they

certainly are, right? They're certainly making, nobody says that newspaper's not making mistakes. I think the interesting story about Ocasio-Cortez is how well, how entrenched she was in and how well she worked the alternate, what we could call the alternative media, the lefty media, right? Intercept made her campaign a focus and wrote about her a number of times. Yeah. interviewed her. Glenn Greenwald interviewed her. It says she talked to the young Turks, right? At Dave Weigel, who wrote about her campaigns, reported that at her victory party, included two hosts from the left-wing chop-o trap house podcast.

Yeah. Documentary filmmaker Josh Fox, Ryan Grimm, DC Bureau Chief of the Internet of the Intercept. So she worked that section well. And so I think what she would she, she understood is that, which a lot of people have, is that lots of power can come from in a democratic primary. There's going to be low turnout. It's going to have voters that really care about the issues. Yeah. That you can get a lot of power through those kind of channels too. Right. This is somebody who's, you know, had been an organizer and a bartender fairly recently in life, right? But she, her platform appealed to the people who read those websites and she got a lot of, and she got a lot of mileage out of it. Yeah. I mean, it's not hard to, I mean, people,

lament the relatively low voter turnout in all American elections, at least not least to say, you know, congressional primaries. But you understand why like a large swaths of like the queen's voter at, you know, would not be compelled to personally turn out to vote for against Joe Crowley on his own, you know, just standing on his own. Yeah. Who, by the way. She changed the race and made it about her, you know, and her arguments about Joe Crowley. So people who read the intercept or, you know, listen to Chopo Trap House, the election is now about someone that they're actually aware of, you know?

I mean, many, many brave and why, you know, many brave people in the, you know, national media have admitted since this happened that they couldn't pick Joe Crowley out of a lineup. I count myself among those, although I don't consider myself brave. I'm late in late to the game on this. There's so many people on Twitter, by the way, no idea who that guy. was. And he was number three in the Democratic or number four, the Democratic Party. Yeah. But like you Google Image Church, I mean, you're just like, this is like

a stock, not a stock villain. I don't want to cast this person on the guy. This is like, if a movie director wanted to cast, like, ironically cast a United States senator from years gone by, this is who, I'm pretty sure the Cohen brothers did cast him.

Did he run the movie studio? Was he actually a United States senator? No, no, no. that was like, Pappy, what's his name from O Brother War Art thou? But this is, but like, he's like, it's such a, it's so silly that like. He could have been like run the bank too. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

He just looked like. Joe Crowley is a champ. I'm sorry that the guy lost. But like, this was a, um, this is, this is, this is, this is in retrospect, is the easiest thing in the world to say. In retrospect, this doesn't seem terribly shocking. What's shocking is, is the lack of the foresight of places like the times to cover it. The ombudsman hasn't written about this, right?

Yeah, no, but one of the politics senators, Patrick Healy talked about it and said, you know, of course I wish we'd done a profile before, but, you know, we did include her when she was in the paper. Yeah. She tweeted about the fact how proud she was during the campaign to be in the New York Times. Yeah. And it'd be quoted above the fold. Like when one of those group pieces was written with her in it. Yeah. During the campaign.

Sure. The, I've always said this too. I don't think there's a direct connection between being able to see the future and being a good. political reporter or sports writer. Oh, no. You know, so how many football writers knew that the Philadelphia is going to be in the Super Bowl last year, much less win the Super Bowl? Yeah, if you stopped reading all of them, you'd have no one left.

There'd be nobody. And it'd be like, obviously, there's a level of density. You don't want to be dense. You do get credit when you get things right, but people can't predict the future. They really can't. And even really good reporters, they miss stuff. Yeah. They don't see it.

They would have been in a victory party that life if they knew it was coming. I guess what I'm interested in is. like, is this a, I think it's just a very basic question. Like, is this, like, do you, do we think that the error was the sense of inevitability

because Joe Crowley was a, you know, was, had the, I mean, had the position that he did in the house, or that he, that he,

he was such an institution, uh, in his district. Or was it just a real utter blindness to a great campaign, you know, a great future politician that was happening outside their door? You say blindness, but there's just,

a lot of, there's like a lot of representatives up for for a lot of primaries in the idea of comparing this to Donald Trump is crazy. Like that's like that we should not this, it's fine to miss one. I just mean it's like missing the energy, right? You know, missing that she had a real chance.

There were other, there were a couple of other close primaries, Democratic primaries. Also, Democrats haven't really done an affected job of a primary entrenched incumbents like Republicans have done in the last few cycles. So maybe your eyes a little bit off the ball. There was that Staten Island Republican primary that everybody was watching. Yeah. between Donovan and Grimm.

A couple more media highlights. One was, did you see that Sean Hannity put up her platform in this big screen thing? You see this? Fantastic. Medicare for All and Housing is a Human Right. These were all negative things. And I love this tweet by Jacobin that said, Comrade, Sean Hannity, brings our message to the masses. This is great.

The other one was the page six hit piece immediately after the election by Richard Johnson, who said, so she was a bartender at. the taco and tequila bar flats fix on East 16th Street for her political career, Ocasio Cortez. And it said, this is one of her coworkers, at the end of the night, when it came time to split the $560 and tips she had gotten at the bar, Casio Cortez gave the waitress. This is an unnamed waitress. Only $50.

It says so much about her character, says my source. From that point on, I wouldn't talk to her. I couldn't look at her. That's the first political hit. Welcome to New York politics. Speaking of seeing the future and also about hits, the other thing that's come out in the past, what day or so, is that there's a number of people on the right wing,

Katrina Pearson, John Cardio from, where does he write? I don't even know. A couple of Breitbart writers found pictures of the house that she grew up in in Yorktown Heights and saying this is far from the Bronx, this is a middle-class neighborhood. She's fibbing her story,

fibbing better backstory about being the sort of like working-class girl. And then, of course, Ocasio Cortez fired back. And she was just like, you know, first of all, a lot of the facts in these accusations have been wrong. The accuser of going to Ivy League. And she didn't. But she was like, yeah, my mom scrubbed toilets to move me 40 minutes away to afford me, to allow me to go to a good school. Because, and I grew up, you know, seeing firsthand how that small distance can matter so much in a child's present and future. and it ended up turning into a real,

into a real, like, positive for her. But I think talking about, you know, talking about foresight, talking about, you know, predicting the future, whether or not the New York Times dropped a ball or not, whatever. The Democratic Party certainly didn't, as a whole, see this coming.

The Republican or conservative establishment, I think, has a pretty good idea of what they're afraid of in the future. And that's her, right? I mean, to be going in on snapping, you know, Zillow pictures of her childhood home to score some cheap political hit. And failing, you know, going out on the limb and failing, I mean, I think there's a long way to go. But I think that they see a lot more of potential for her in the future than anybody saw a week ago. Zillow is the new frontier of Aupor research.

I love that. That's the press box for this week. Thanks to our producer, Evan Campbell, sitting in on the board today for Davis Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. See you next week with more hot takes about the media. Oh, yeah.