The Press Box - The Media Tries on Formula One, Free Speech, and a Tribute to ESPN’s John Clayton

Episode Date: March 21, 2022

Bryan and David open by discussing the boom of Formula One in the United States, Netflix, and how this changes the sports-media landscape (1:08). Then, they weigh in on The New York Times’ editorial column on free speech, the subtweets, and how this was all handled (27:18). They end by paying respect to ESPN NFL reporter John Clayton (35:57). Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Associate Producer: Stefan Anderson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Derek Thompson. The news cycle these days is absolute madness. Pandemic, inflation, war, crypto, it's too much. That's why my podcast, Plain English, breaks down the news twice a week to be simple, memorable, and when it's appropriate, fun. No blather, no fluff, just the world's most important stories with fresh context and takeaways you'll actually remember. Listen to plain English free on Spotify. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to the press box. Curtis of the ringer here along with David Shoemaker and producer Stefan Anderson, who is sitting in for Erica today.

David, we're going to talk about the heavily sub-tweeted New York Times free speech editorial and say goodbye to NFL reporter John Clayton in just a second. But I want to begin by telling you about what happened on sports Twitter on Sunday. Oh, exciting. Everybody you follow on sports Twitter, David, was tweeting about Formula One on Sunday. This is correct. Two-thirds of people you know were tweeting about March Madden's, but everyone you know was tweeting

about Formula One. And I want us to take the opportunity to look at this moment, the moment when the American sports media officially embraced Formula One. I got three data points for you then. Okay.

To prove that this is indeed the moment. Number one, we have a new ringer Formula One podcast hosted by Kevin Clark. I'm very familiar with it. I designed the logo. Data point number two. You know Trey Kirby, longtime NBA podcaster.

Yeah. He is now doing season two of a Formula One podcast called No Breaks. So NBA podcast to Formula One podcast. That is, that is, you know, to me again, I don't know if there was a, you know, Premier League Club podcast. and maybe a cooking show podcast built in there.

But these are the new stations of the cross. Again, also appeared on the Mask Man show. Yes, it's a great guy. This is an incredible trajectory. And data point number three, kind of random, but I saw Michelle Beatle tweeting about Formula One on Sunday. And then I was kind of poking around, and I found actor David Allen Greer of In Living Color fame

tweeting at Michelle Beatle about Formula One. So we've arrived. We're here. The moment is upon us. And I think Can I just throw in a fourth out of point? Sure. Because we're just talking about spurious there.

Just random things you found online. My day actually began today with my wife who does not work in the sports world or the entertainment world or anything, getting on a Zoom call. And the first word out of her boss's mouth was that everybody watched the Formula One race. What? See? Nobody had watched it, at least the one that I heard on the call. Probably telling, right?

But if bosses are opening meetings that way, I think that's significant. person who is newly into Formula One, assuming everyone is. Probably something telling about that. It's really funny looking at Twitter because I feel everyone was right at the point where they were deciding. Do I ironically tweet about the fact that I've been a Formula One fan and follower for about 10 minutes? You know, like, ah, I've been a McLaren guy all my life. Ha, ha, ha. Or, David, do they cross the threshold?

where they can now just do straight Formula One analysis like they would for the NBA or NFL. It's really hard. I think to answer your question, you can have, you know, you can straddle that fence pretty easily, right? You just get one or two kind of self-deprecating tweets out there, and then you kind of open yourself up

to do more serious tweets with, you know, with a couched in a sort of self-deprecating sort of light. It's weird. It's an interesting spot. And I think that one of the things that sort of gets me is that I know that we've talked about this before, but just general discourse on Twitter when it comes to sports is elevated to such a high degree.

And I'm not, you know, everybody can make a joke. But like, it's to be a writer online about a, you know, the sport in the current, in the modern era. is really like paralyzing at times, right? I mean, you can't, even if that's your area of expertise, you can't, you're, there are so many Twitter eggs out there that somehow have a better grasp of stats and historical information or whatever than you do.

You could just feel like, like what am I doing here? But so, so the idea of like taking on a new sport, one that you know full well, you know, has its historians and adherents and everything else, it's, it's a, it's a bold move. but the Formula One sort of new to everybody, right? I mean, at least to the audience, when you talk about everybody you know on Twitter is tweeting about it,

the conversations that people are having with people that they quote unquote know, that's largely amongst an audience that is relatively new to the sport. Relatively new to the sport, a lot of Americans, right, who may not have really tuned in very much. And how do we all get here? Well, it was easy.

Formula One had the greatest possible rollout or reboot or whatever you want to call it in America through this drive to survive reality show on Netflix which is co-produced by Formula One itself. Four season came out two weeks ago. It started back in 2019. Have you watched this at all? I've watched a little bit of it.

I've watched it every time this conversation sort of trickles up. It's a good show. It's a good show. It's very hard-knoxy. I think with the interesting exception that on Hard Knocks, because it's about one team, you may get like one position battle, a season where the two guys are frenemies

and have this kind of interesting relationship. On Drive to Survive, everybody is a frenemy, even the people who are on the same racing team. They're all competing with each other. So there's just a lot more drama and a lot more, but it did such a great job of pulling out the personalities and creating it. And to me, that did two things for the,

sport. One is it just explained to people who knew nothing about Formula One and I should put myself and you in that category certainly, right? New nothing. Like, here is what it is. Here's who the people are. Here's what the rivals are. Great. I can watch this show and I can understand it. But the other thing it did that's really interesting is to me, it repackaged the sport as a reality show. Yeah. So if I told you, hey, dude, we're going to do a ringer podcast and, you know, a bunch of local sports radio segments on auto racing. you'd be like, okay, see how that goes.

But if I told you we're going to do a ringer pod and a bunch of sports radio segments on a Netflix reality show. Ah, that makes sense. That's the kind of stuff we already do segments about. And to me, that was such a huge step. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned hard knocks, and that's definitely, you know, a significant, you know, antecedent or whatever to this.

obviously Netflix itself has had a lot of luck with last chance use of the world, you know, that sort of thing. To me, I think the real precursor is the ultimate fighter because it introduced, it reintroduced the UFC to the world. I mean, you know, you can track just popularity in ratings through the first couple seasons of that show and just it saw the sport skyrocket, but it also, like you said, made it a reality show.

It wasn't just some subset. It wasn't one team or you're looking into the background. It wasn't just, you know, last chance you, a sort of like a little piece of the world that's sort of supposed to represent, supposed to be emblematic of the bigger sport, those sport at large. I mean, the UFC just kind of built,

halfway built itself to the ultimate fighter. That's where all the, you know, and I mean, they had promising up-and-comers that would, they would just sort of shoehorn into the show to get them that sort of popularity, to get them that, you know, they'd get the fans to know them and to understand them. And now the whole,

the UFC sort of overall is, is, has a lot of the remnants of that reality show package, right? I mean, just the way that the actual show, I mean, the actual sport presence itself. It's a really smart move. Because even if you can point at that show, you can point it, you know,

you can point at a million different reality shows that have come. But this is a real achievement, I think, with even separate from the things, you know, the shows that have come before it. I'm not saying it's necessarily like good or bad. I certainly don't think it's, you know, a force of evil or anything like that.

But, you know, we've had a lot of conversations on this show about how streaming, how over the top, how cord cutting has affected and will continue to affect professional sports. And I don't think any of us really thought Netflix is going to figure out a way to do a reality show that's going to be the most significant thing in the way that we watch sports in the modern world.

I mean, as far as the way that things have changed, it's really amazing. And what's interesting is we've seen Amazon and Apple, Netflix's competitors say, hey, we're going to go buy sports rights. We're going to get Thursday night football, baseball, all that stuff. Netflix has not really been in that game yet, but they're like,

we're going to create a reality show that is kind of shoulder programming to sports. And maybe a lot of the times even more interesting than the race you're about to watch. Well, that's just it. You can make, I mean, Formula One might be sort of unique in this regard, at least compared to some other, you know, mainstream sports. But you can definitely see the argument for, I mean, we both, we all understand why

sports rights, live sports rights are super valuable, right? There are very few things that are just like that magnetic that are broadcast, you know, that you have to go watch live. that you have to watch, you know, if you want to be in the conversation. But if you have something like, you know, if you have like the foundational reality show, as silly as it is to say about it, then every time there's a big race that someone else owns, like you're only going to watch that race once, you know, you might watch the highlights again, but you might, that might inspire you to go back and rewatch season one on Netflix, right?

I mean, it's going to be, it has the potential to sort of be an endlessly renewable resource for them. It's been a big increase in viewership of the races and ticket sales for the American races since the show started. Michael Baumann wrote a really good piece about this recently in the ringer. I highly recommend that. He talked about something funny was in the first season in 2019, the top teams didn't want to participate in drive to survive. Because they're like, we don't think this is kind of invasive or we have a lot to lose by doing this. So we're not doing it. So what the show did, by necessity, was tell you about all the teams, Michael Wrights that are in the middle of the standards.

And that's interesting, too, because sometimes the championship in F1 or an individual race is just not that interesting. But, oh, I'm interested in this fourth and fifth, this fourth, fifth place, you know, let me do that one more time. I'm interested in what's down the list because that's a great story that I know about. I know who those people are. Mm-hmm. And that was sort of accidentally ingenious as well. Well, yeah, you see that kind of thing over and over again. Of course, the people that are going to, you understand why the middle tier, you know, teams are the ones that are more willing to do it.

And then, you know, when it starts to succeed, then everybody wants to end. That's not something that's unique to racing or to sports or to reality television or to anything else, right? I mean, it's pretty straightforward. But, you know, it does, it is, it's a great, it's a really interesting way to, to package the sport, right? Because you get, you, you, if you would have had carte blanche from the beginning, you know, you probably wouldn't have started with the mid tier, the lower tier teams, right? And this, and this sort of like opens up the door to let people sort of get it, it's sort of a backdoor entrance. And then, you know, and now people can be exposed to the entire thing. I mean, it's really, in theory, it's a brilliant thing that like every sport should do.

I don't know that it would be this successful. I don't know that there'd even be the room for the sort of success in the more mainstream American sports. But, man, it's appealing. You know, it's seductive. Yeah. And seductive is a great word because guess what? This is co-produced by Formula One. This is an ad for Formula One.

That's what this is to do. I feel like we all are in this uncanny valley. now when it comes to sports documentaries where we really don't know what is a documentary per se and what is a documentary like object that is produced by the thing

this is the second thing. So its job is on the one hand to create this really interesting series and cool characters and lots of drama and stuff like that, but really its job is to get you to watch for me, to be a fan of formula.

And on that obviously succeeding. By the way, Netflix announced they're going to do these for golf and tennis. Right. And that got me thinking something interesting. Is it Formula One that we are all responding to here, David, the sport? Or if Netflix co-produces a really interesting, a really exciting documentary about a sport that's not right in the middle of the vision for most Americans, would we just like that? Would any sport get a bump from something like that? I think that there has to be some legitimacy at the base, right?

There has to be some sort of seriousness undergirding the whole thing. You know, if you had like the equivalent of like the Tiger King, but it was about roller derby, I find it hard to imagine that the ringer would have a roller derby vertical, despite the fact that we might ironically watch one or two events as a group, you know? I don't know. I don't know. We have a whole wrestling vertical over there, man.

I'm not. Well, I haven't checked it out. We're slicing it thin here, you know. No, you're right. You're right. No, but I'm trying to imagine, like, whoa, something that people weren't necessarily paying a lot of attention to. I mean, yeah, I think, I mean, you want to talk about wrestling. I mean, it's, it's been even just the total divas and total Bella's reality shows, like, I've watched a total of like 45 minutes of, you know, over multiple seasons has done, that's done great stuff for, like, recruiting new audiences to WWE.

And they'll be, they're very open about it. it. There is, there's definitely some people that are going to come over. But whether or not it's going to, you know, we're going to see the same sort of result with tennis and golf. I mean, listen, tennis and golf have a lot of, a lot of, well, I don't know if upside's the right word, but like there's certainly a lot of room to grow, right? I mean, from where they are.

I do think that at the end of the day, you got to have some sort of like hunger for that growth, potential, right? You have to want to get bigger, maybe not at any and all costs, but you have to, but that has to be the priority. The sport, the sport you're talking about wants to get bigger? Yeah, the sport. And also, listen, there's an answer. There's a parallel argument about how much power the sport has over its competitors, right? Which is obviously different from sport to sport. And I think that it's pretty self-evident that like, this would be hardest in basketball, harder in basketball than in any other sport because the, you know, because every, you know, every, you know, highly paid player would just have the ability to say no thanks.

Or at least we would certainly have the ability to say no thanks to like any significant revelation, you know, anything, any, like, they could definitely say no things to saying anything interesting in front of a microphone. But part of it, so, and because part of the deal is you got to be willing to kind of be a heel. You got to be willing to sort of like show some ass or whatever, you know, it's like you've got to be, you have to be interesting. And for a lot of people, this is not exclusive to sports again. but for a lot of people, being interesting is dangerous, right? Or it seems it's an unnecessary risk.

And, you know, for, for, so the sport has to be willing to take that minor risk at the, I mean, and at the, you know, to trade in for potential growth. Golf tennis, like, yeah, that would be a really, like, I mean, I feel like the risk could be justified for both of those sports, just like it was in Formula One. Yeah. I feel golf is sort of right there because we're in this moment of big rivalries and certain names that you and I, people like you and I would certainly know. We've certainly seen them, but we haven't just locked in on them like a lot of people who are a little more in that world.

Yep. So it's all sitting out there. I think the NBA analogy is fascinating because you're right. Maybe LeBron and KD and a bunch of other people who either have other things going on or just don't want to be a part of this. It's a cross off. but how many people would you just have to get for it to be interesting? I don't think it's that many, right? It's complicated because there's lots of teams and lots of players,

which is different from Formula One and even golf. But I don't think you'd have to get that many for it to be interesting. Oh, no, not for it to be interesting. I mean, the interesting thing would be, I mean, imagine if they had done that during the bubble. That would have been like, that would have been the best chance to do it, right? Everybody's in one place. They're interacting and it's on and off the court. there's a lot of, there'd be a lot of opportunity there.

The NBA, it's just like a traveling, it's like a road show, and you only have a maximum, like, 30 interesting people in one place at one time, which is not nothing, but whatever. You know, the interesting thing wouldn't just be like, could they do it without the stars? They could do it without the stars. They release, you know, super tech mobile without any

quarterbacks. This is a thing that we could do, but at the same, but it'd be interesting to see if it really got popular. Would the stars be interested? Would they be willing to sort of like, you know, take one and take the L and ask to be on the show for, you know, in the future, you know, it's like, it's crazy to think how many, like, actual celebrities, athletes included have just,

like, willingly entered the, like, keeping up with the Kardashians orbit for the, for the, like, implicit PR bump that that would give them, right? When you would just think, like, no way, like, there's no way that you would, but yeah, I mean, people will do it because it's, once it's established to be popular and beneficial, you know, people are willing to play the heel a little bit or just like play a character. When you see media members and fans and media fans start spending time on Formula One, do we think that's because we are kind of dropping or half dropping a sport like baseball out of our rotation? And all of a sudden we have more time.

Or do we all just have way more bandwidth than maybe people think we do? and we can just add on something else at a moment's notice. It's a good question. You're sort of referencing like the old Simmons idea that like you only have, was it only four national sports or whatever or that like, or that the Real Road Rules Challenge had like leapfrogged hockey at some point as the fourth major sport. I think I have about four. And then I have stuff that I can watch and really enjoy.

but I think that the challenge has relinquished the title. Yeah, I don't think that's in there. Insurgent national sport. Yeah, I do think that there's room to discuss, you know, the room to think and talk and have conversations about sports and that certainly does at some point come with the detriment of another sport. But also I think that there's a little bit of like a, I mean, maybe counterintuitively, it sort of goes the other way.

way too. There's so much sports conversation that happens. I mean, just the NFL alone drives so much of our annual conversation as we always talk about that at any moment that Matt Ryan's not getting traded, like you're thirsty to have some conversation about

something sports related, right? And so it's sort of like there's this just the chat room is open for sports talk, you know, and people are always looking for new things to fill the void. Yeah. There's always Tuesday. And, you know, Tuesday, during the NFL season may be spoken for, but maybe Wednesday isn't.

It's the reason Kevin's podcast is called or Kevin's show is called Slow Newsday, right? There are these little gaps. And I think you're right. And for the people that make content, whether there are people that work at the ringer, whether there are people doing sports radio and need to fill that run sheet every day, there are little ways to get in. And by the way, this is not to me, this isn't all that different from the way I feel like college basketball right now. now. I spent a lot of this weekend watching college basketball. I'd not pay a lot of attention

to that during the season. I really did. Didn't watch much. But you do have those sports where you can kind of come in on them and be like, oh, okay, this is not my, this is not right at the front of my brain, but it's in the kind of four or five slot for me. Yeah. And when I see it, I get happy and I perk up and I'm interested. And to sort of reiterate the point I made before, if you don't have time to be hyper-invested in a sport or like, you know, in March Madness, if you, you know, accidentally didn't realize it, but you had like a big family birthday party that took up a lot of your weekend like I did, you know, it's, you can kind of feel like you're out of the loop so quickly that like I said, you understand the value of live sports, but you also

understand the value of like something you can just push play and pause on whenever you want, you know, and that's, there's, it's nice to have that option. Was watching the race on Sunday morning in Bahrain. First of all, David Croft, who is the lead commentator, also known as Crofty, was great fun. He had this whole open that I swear set the world record for segways. You know, it was like, da, da, da, da, da, and there is, and it's as good as a rest, but there is no rest for the weary. I mean, he's just tying the sentences together in ways I'd never heard of commentator. to do. Kind of amazing. Tons of Britishisms during the race, David, come a cropper, a little bit of a kerfuffle going on, sort that one out, ladies and gentlemen, and he is as keen as they come.

We're some of my favorites. Also, an auto racing has done this for quite a while, but the radio from the car where you can hear the driver talking to the crew. Oh, yeah. It's fantastic. And during the race on Sunday, they all seem to be so clear. I really have zero traction, the driver says. Understood Max, his team says. That was a really early stop. The driver says. Copy that, Lewis. His team says. Fantastic. Fantastic element.

Also, I may have mentioned this once before. We'll leave it here. Remember when soccer was becoming a big sport for Americans now more than a decade ago? Oh, yeah. I remember it very well. And by the way, a lot of overlap. between Formula One fandom and soccer fan not only in the way it is conquering America

but the same people conquering the same people. Leave that for another time. But do you remember how there were those kind of older sports columnists who were like, I don't like this because I'm a football, baseball, basketball, maybe hockey person, and I don't like this.

And they were kind of the soccer troll in America. Yes, I remember that very well. I think there's a big opening for the F1 troll. Oh, gosh. Right? Who's going to do that? Well, I have two nominees right here. Because remember, that was always kind of an older sports columnist, you know, a decade

plus ago. We were like, oh, look at that guy, you know, he's a, you know, crabby and can't abide soccer coming into America. Well, David, look in the mirror and I'll do the same. We might be there. Should we do it? I kind of think so. And the thing is you just constantly say that Formula One is boring.

Yeah. This is boring. No action. It would be the best. One pass. Come on. Yeah. Probably too early for Kevin Clark to turn heel on this sport.

I remember, by the way, I don't know how, I don't know if this is, if this undercuts Kevin Clark, or if this shows how much foresight he has. I remember years ago in the early days of the ringer, him coming into my office and just leaning against the wall and being like, so, Shoemaker, you want to be an F1 fan with me? And I was just like, what are you talking? about it. He's like, I'm going to get into Formula One. I think it's a cool thing to get into. And I was like, I don't, wow. And now look where he is. I can totally confirm that. He was, he was ahead of the game. He really was.

I will, what would be the, maybe, you know what? You should, you should just, it's people driving cars, right? So, like, what's the opposite? It would be actually, like, running, or maybe get, like, Lance Armstrong. For someone who actually had to use his legs to go on his races, just be, like, let's, let's hire him to be the Formula One troll. Now you think angry Lance Armstrong? Yeah. You can say what you want to about me, but I didn't have any electricity.

I didn't have any gasoline running. Well, maybe he did. Never mind. Maybe we can find a runner. We're going to table that for a moment. To do the overworked Twitter joke of the week, David, where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious, but all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time.

Send your nominees to at the Pressbox pod where they are always, always gratefully received. This week's winner, David, comes from listener Marissa. who refers us to an item in Rolling Stone. According to the magazine, reggaeton icon Daddy Yankee has announced that he's retiring from music. It's an overwork Twitter joke to write Daddy Yankees simply ran out of gasoline. We would have also accepted he's retiring during the gasoline crisis.

You submitted something that only tangentially has to do with grim world events. Thank you. And congrats. You made the overwork Twitter joke of the... week. All right, David, from the Department of Sub-Tweeting, I bring you last week's

New York Times editorial, which had the headline, America has a free speech problem. Yeah. We talked about what Twitter looked like during the racing over the weekend. What did Twitter look like when that came out? Oh, my gosh.

We've probably talked about this phenomenon before, but it needs a name. What is a phenomenon for when you open up Twitter and you see like 50 tweets on a subject before you really have any grasp of what it is that people are talking about. It's all sub-tweets like, no, but, well, I guess some people are linking back to it eventually, but I was just like, I was,

I could have probably written the op-ed as well as or better than it was written in the New York Times before I realized it was a New York Times editorial. I was just like, because by the time I realized what it was, it was so, I don't know, what a weird sensation. But also what a,

a weird, weird column. I, first of all, there's so many first of all. I don't even know where to begin, but I'll begin with today. I was wanted to make sure I was like slightly well versed on this conversation.

I was like Googling around, like, you know, looking around at Google to see what people had written about it. There's basically just an equal number of response columns. And again, this is, you know, actual columns or website posts, not just Twitter, not just tweets,

but there about an equal number of people who are saying that the New York Times op-ed page has a constitutional comprehension problem. Like that was the sort of like argument from the left and the argument for the right was just New York Times admits that we have a free speech problem as if that was the sort of

waving the white flag on behalf of the entire leftist establishment. Even the liberal New York Times must admit. Yeah. Well it's like it's like they're pulling back the curtain. It's not like well I'll grant you this point of argument, it was just like, they're just telling us the thing we all know to be true. It's, anytime you can kind of strike that you can just, anytime you can just get everybody

to totally misread or misunderstand what you just presumed your point to be, then congratulations. You just had a really bad, you know, a really bad opinion piece. But, I mean, I don't even know what to say about it. It's, it just seems so, it's like they just missed the point in so many ways. and everybody that kind of made jokes about it was so right that it just got real boring and obvious to talk about it. So immediately,

what was your experience reading it? I think my question is, why are we still doing staff editorials like this? I have no idea. Like, what's the point? Why wouldn't this just be assigned to, like, if you really thought you'd write a piece about this, why wouldn't you assign it to two writers

and put their names on it rather than having it speak for the paper? because I understand I understand this is newspapers have done this forever newspaper proprietors have enjoyed using their newspaper to push forward their ideas popular or unpopular I get that but I don't understand like what's why wouldn't you just assign a couple of people and just write a piece

about this like there was a line in it too that said the editorial board plans to identify a wide range of threats to freedom of speech in the coming months and to offer possible solutions I just find that to be so strange. Like, the staff is going to do this. Like, why can't a person do this or persons do this?

Well, would the obvious answer be because we have such a free speech problem that we don't want to force any of our writers to open themselves up to such criticism? Hmm. I don't know. But here's the thing. Those writers can argue back. I mean, I know that sort of goes to the entire argument.

That's what it mean, yes, right? Or somebody at the New York Times who works with the New York Times who works for the New York Times, a reporter, and says, I don't like this, can at least say, well, this is this person's opinion rather than the opinion of the editorial board of the newspaper. And by extension, the whole newspaper itself. Listen, I don't want to say that, like, you're not allowed to publish things that are potentially incorrect or problematic under just the banner of the New York Times.

There'd be no reason to put that sort of condition on any publication at all. but it really does make it difficult when an unsigned opinion piece gets things wrong to such a degree that like if this were a column and this were you know David Brooks or somebody writing it then like you would expect that their next piece

would be a follow up that addressed some of the criticism right but you can't really have like they're not going to do like the New York Times addresses criticism of its unsigned opinion piece I mean that you do whatever you want, but you've got to understand that, like, that pieces like this, I mean, this, it's a joke in so many ways. I don't want to overblow it, but like, whatever process led to this is the same process

that's going to lead to, like, their next presidential endorsement, right? So, I mean, like, what, what, what's the system here? We can skip that, too, by the way. Most interesting part of that was when it was on the New York Times reality show, when they were bringing all the presidents into the office. The actual endorsement, everybody just went like, oh well, you know, this isn't important to me. Yeah, you know, you know, I was talking about like,

don't ever criticize the media, the quote unquote media, because the media can't fight back. Right. If I criticize the media, who's going to take exception to that? Because nobody knows who's being criticized. This is the same thing, as you point out. The New York Times can't fight back because who is going to do the fighting back? It's just, I don't get it.

Yeah, I don't get it either. I mean, it's, it just at the very, I mean, to take the problem, I mean, I don't know how much we really needed to, to address, like, the actual substance, such as it was of the piece. But the core, I mean, just the argument that it made was just so flimsy, right? And the idea that, like, that, like, you know, the editors of a newspaper in particular or the op-ed page or whatever are under such, like, such an undue amount of scrutiny I mean, all the people that are complaining about this

are people whose jobs are to be scrutinized, right, whose jobs are to make arguments and then implicitly to get response to those arguments. It does seem like the biggest change that's been made, I mean, that's occurred over the past decade. It's just the direct connection that your audience has to you, the writer, right? And by the way, that's optional.

You don't have to have a Twitter account. You don't have to, like, check out your mentions, you know? I mean, it's just you open up this sort of, line of communication to the cosmos because it helps you, you know, because it's a benefit to your career in a lot of ways. And then people, you know, sometimes you're just going to be the thing that people latch on to, like, get mad about one day. It seems like a pretty straightforward tradeoff. And it doesn't seem like the first, I mean, listen, the first amendment aspect of it, too. I mean, I love that, I love that just that like free speech has just been misinterpreted, so

dramatically for so many years that places like the New York Times have just sort of given up on correcting people about like what it be it's it's it's only about the government it's only about the government controlling what you can say people just these institutions have given up on correcting that and now they're coming in like like like like the like the journalism supreme court trying to during to rule by the spirit of the law you know it's just like oh it's free speech the greater ideal like no nobody really no this is not a thing it's so bizarre and they're trying to do both in this editorial, by the way. Yeah.

Talk about government censorship of speech, but also talk about just like people, what do they call it, shaming or shunning people who say something unpopular. Yeah. To which one of the responses was, but what about the people who are shaming?

Don't they have free speech too? Aren't we protecting their right to say what they want? And by the way, I spent a good portion of this weekend, and I think what we could pretty reasonably be described as Trump country, and I had a lot of political conversation with people that I wasn't looking for, and nobody had any qualms about saying something when, you know, politically incorrect or not at any point in time.

I just think it's a pretty narrow, pretty cloistered point of view when that's what you have to complain about. Let's say a worded to, David, about John Clayton. NFL reporter who died after what was described as a short illness at age 67 over the weekend. Clayton was a reporter for newspapers in Pittsburgh and Tacoma, Washington, and of course, at ESPN, where he started contributing in 1995. Where do we start remembering John Clayton? Oh, man. I mean, I feel like every six months or so,

we're talking about somebody who is just sort of like the institution of institutions at ESPN. And you can make the case a lot of different ways, but I don't know if there was anybody connected to any sport that sort of felt like, he was made up so much of the sort of ether of the sports journalism or that genre of writing than John Clayton was. I mean, he was just

of a piece with NFL reportage, you know, before there were insiders on every pregame show or whatever. It was just, it was John Clayton. And he was just, you know, one of a kind in so many ways. I will say this as a compliment to a bunch of them,

but I think there are people that felt the same way to their various sports like Tim Kirchin. Oh, yeah. Chris Mortensen in the NFL, like when we're talking about that sort of ESPN reporter starting in the 80s and 90s aspect of it, that just felt, as you say, of a piece that were information people, but information people in the sense that there was this kind of just deep reporting and interest in something more than just what we would now consider to be information, which is breaking signings and stuff like that. And part of this is the era, right?

Because if you watch SportsCenter in the 90s, and I know that you did, you'd see this update from John Clayton about other teams in the NFL, like the Bengals linebackers or, you know, quarterback situation in another, with another team, you did not, in many cases, know that stuff at all. Yeah. And this was way before that kind of information was easy to get. So there was just this almost miraculous aspect of like, oh, wow. It didn't have to be, you know, the quarter, you know, Matt Ryan has just been traded to Indianapolis.

It was just kind of a more subtle, deeper reporting about the NFL. And that was kind of an early sort of phase of inside of him. I thought that was always so interesting. Dave Bowling had a great tribute to Clayton, the Washington Post. It says he called everybody Big Guy, which I thought was really funny. He's from Pennsylvania, went to Steelers games with his mom, bowling, right, starting at age six, started covering the team when he was in high school, was a reporter in Pittsburgh for a while, then went to the Seattle area at the Tacoma News Tribune, 1986.

This is funny from bowling. Seattle reporters turned his surname into a verb when we saw how often he would sprint. Just try to picture, by the way, John Clayton sprinting right now from the Seahawks media room into the parking lot to track down a coach or team executive. When one tried pulling away in his car

as Clayton ran alongside shouting questions. We called it being Clayton. That's how tenacious a reporter he was. Bowling also notes that he met his wife, Pat, at that paper in Tacoma cared for her while she dealt with MS. Clayton gets to ESPN David, 1995, as I mentioned.

Steady presence doing those notes on SportsCenter. He does that famous This is SportsCenter ad. Oh, loved that. Yeah. I was wearing this Slayer t-shirt. Mm-hmm. Has the long hair. This is really funny.

I saw YouTube clip today. It was like somebody from Slayer responding to John Clayton's ad. Oh, my gosh. I sadly do not have audio of at this moment. Don't you, do you remember when ESPN sort of, of, you know, kind of stumbled into the embraced debate era. And all of a sudden, John Clayton and Sean Salsbury were doing that sports center bit where they were arguing with each other.

Oh, yeah. In incredibly personal terms. And John, like, you were just a backup quarterback. You don't know anything about that. And Salsbury would be like, you've never played football. They would just use that to discount each other's opinions every time. Mm-hmm. ESPN, their editorial, or there are a little piece about Clayton said it was classic television.

I would like to gently push back on that idea. No offense to John Clayton. Also, it was not said too much in the tributes over the weekend, but Clayton was one of the people who got laid off from ESPN in 2017. Oh, yeah. Continue doing some local ESPN radio up there in Seattle. it is worth pointing out here that that was a gutting layoff for ESPN. A really gutting layoff. That's the same one when Jason Stark left the company, all these people.

And it was just to me, that was the one when somehow, when John Clayton's not working there anymore, ESPN just felt like a different company. Yeah. It's like this era of us having all these people, people we like, people who are we like because they're part of the identity. of the company because they're really good about what they do and what they care about they do. We're just entering a new phase. Still going to have lots of good people.

It's not like everybody here's going to suck. But we're just not going to have that kind of bandwidth that we used to have. Yeah. It really wasn't. Listen, it's also not a, I mean, when you're a company that's so invested in, you know, the brand being the star over the people at this point, right?

Which is fine. You know, you can do that. But it doesn't give your employees a lot of confidence in, you know, long-term employment. And it doesn't give them a lot of, you know, internal morale and just a little thing, like, letting John Clayton go is like just, you know, it just reinforces that so much, right? If someone like John Clayton can't count on lifetime employment for all he's meant to the sport and to the network, then like, you know, why on earth would you be entertaining you know your next contract there if they're not going to pay you as much they're trying to talk about your future there whatever i mean it's just it's it's it's

it's just it's a huge morale problem no different company uh joe buck david we talked about the podcast last week leaving fox for yespn well he said goodbye to fox in an unusual way turns out joe buck's goodbye was not the 49ers rams nfc championship game it was competing in the mass singer as a ram, not the Super Bowl Rams, but like actually a ram suit. He was competing against somebody dressed as a firefly. I hope I'm getting this right.

Buck was eliminated after singing, Take Me Home Country Roads. By the way, both judges Robin Thick and Eric Stone Street figured out that it was, in fact, Joe Buck under the ram suit before he took it off. here is a little bit of Joe Buck's musical goodbye on Fox not bad

oh well kind of bad I mean you know I guess not that bad another little it sounded like Joe Buck it did yeah but he was not a bad singer

no I'm just saying I can understand why they realize it was Joe Buck but you know anybody that's going to go out there belt cheap trick just got my respect you and I have talked before David about zombie ESPN magazine. No longer appears regularly in print,

but we get the special issue. There was a John Madden one after he died earlier. Now there's one called Tom Brady, the greatest of all time on newsstands. I saw this. Which has a little thing on the cover that says, plus retiring as the best. Well, Tom Brady, of course,

has unretired. And our listener, Todd Bishop, says, did the magazine industry learn anything from the Betty White to Buck? Apparently not. I have a question about Tom Brady, though. Okay. Let's just say that he plays for like 10 more years. And it's like the last nine of them are just the worst years ever posted by a quarterback in the modern NFL history, right?

Okay. Are we still allowed like 20 years from now to say he retired at the top of the game? when he retired he was the best quarterback in the league and just you know just kind of segment off the fact that he then unretired and was terrible oh so we like marketed i think we kind of did that with jordan didn't we i think people are yeah we kind of did you say yeah he retired when he went to he walked out the door the best player in the league and then he walked back in yeah uh i think that kind of works

i think that kind of works uh last one for you here we have talked about the Ben Smith new media venture. Uh-huh. It was described in exceedingly vague terms when Ben Smith first left the New York Times. He's doing this with Justin Smith. He used to be at Bloomberg Media. And Justin Smith said something the other day, and I believe this was during an online seminar,

according to the New York Times, about what the media venture is going to be. This is what he said. The era of the foreign correspondent is over. What? The era of the foreign correspondent is open. And what he means is, look, we're doing this very old system of having these people, let's say, from the United States, for an American media company that are from here, that we send abroad to try to report. Why don't we find the best reporters who are people who are from there and already live there, and why don't we get them to report for us instead of doing this outdated system?

But it was so interesting to me because the New York Times story about this was called, the era of the foreign correspondent is over. And I thought, David, there's a very, very thin line between starting a new media company, as Ben Smith is doing, and pitching a column for the New York Times. Like the era of the foreign correspondent is over could be both. Yeah. And that could have been kind of a slow week one for Ben. Sure.

And this is interesting, right? because like is every new media company just a think piece that then attracts investors and then you have to execute? Have we been doing this all wrong? You and I have written a lot of think pieces. You should just have that. The thing piece is just, yeah, is the proof of concept, right? Look, I could just have one. I could have a thousand of these a day and imagine the attention we would get. Absolutely. And this is a good think piece because what does the think piece need? It needs a billboard sent me. Right. When I'm sending one of those pitches to my editors, you better believe I have that billboard sentence

so they can be like, ah, yep, that's the headline. That's the way we're going to sell this on Twitter. So it's got the billboard sentence. Also, David, important for a think piece, something is ending. The era of the foreign correspondent is over. If you can mark the ending of a thing, you're going to get that piece commission.

Yeah, it's true. And if it's kind of ending but not really ending, David, the twilight of the foreign correspondent. That also gets you over the page. Twilight has a little bit more drama. Yeah, that's true. Right. Because if somebody can name like two or three exceptions,

say, the twilight, get a commission and get millions of dollars for your media company, folks. It's time for David Shoemaker, guess is a strain pun headline. Yeah. Thursday's headline about the side effects of high gas prices was Fuel Be Sorry.

Today's headline, David comes from Chris Brodure. It's from the Reding, Pennsylvania Eagle. Penn State, like most other colleges, are doing spring practice. And you can learn a lot of things about a football team from spring practice. I'll spot you the word spring here and warn you, this is very strained, very, very strange. Things you can learn from spring practice. What was the Redding Eagle's strain punt headline?

Quick sidebar. This is not the same Christopher Brodour that was our neighbor for a while on the Lower East Side who ran. You were going to ask that. No. Different, uh, different person here. That was a question for expro d'or. Sorry, former mayoral candidate and, sometime occupant of Rikers Island. Uh, wait, you're going to have to start over. It's about spring training. What? Uh, it's about spring practice. Penn State spring practice. Okay. And that's it? Spring. What we can learn from spring practice.

Spring to mine. Spring to, uh, springing spring to, uh, very strange. What's the famous thing we do during spring? Spring. What's the famous thing? We intend to do a thing we do or intend to do during spring. Spring cleaning? Spring gleaning.

Spring gleaning is the answer. Spring gleaning. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Stefan Anderson sitting in for Erica. Shoemaker and I back Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you that, David.

See you later, man.