The Press Box - The Media's Take on Caleb Williams, Remembering Chris Mortensen, the Case of Timothy Burke and Bryan’s Movie Debut

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

Bryan and David kick off the show with the announcement of Bryan’s movie debut (00:30). Then get into this week’s topics, starting from the NFL scouting combine and a discussion about what the media is saying about quarterback Caleb Williams ahead of the NFL draft (9:22). Afterwards, they discuss the legacy of the late Chris Mortenson (25:40). Later in the notebook dump, they discuss the case of Timothy Burke, the Joe Biden New Yorker profile, the fantasy booking of the Democratic convention, and politicians tweeting out sad polls (35:30). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In a world where coaches are still the main characters, the players are now legally chasing the ultimate bag, and the game of basketball is always the top priority. There was only one brand you can trust to help you wade through all the madness. Hey, I'm Tate Frazier from One Shiny Podcast, and you can join me twice a week as we navigate the always entertaining world of college basketball. Every Monday, the ringer's comment helps me make sense of the biggest stories from the weekend, and on Fridays we talk to our many friends of the program. We're locked in on the best postseason in sports. Make sure you follow One Shining Podcasts on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. David, I'd like to start this podcast with some personal news.

Oh, okay. But you know, on journalism, Twitter, that means some professional news. So here it is. I'm going to be in a movie. Wait, you're actually going to be in a movie? I'm actually going to be a movie. Are we talking about a documentary? or a scripted movie.

None of that talking head stuff. This is a feature film. Gosh. A movie. Based on the life of Brian Curtis? Well, I'll explain. The haters and doubters, you might remember, David, said that Brian Curtis has a face made for radio

and a voice made for print. But one set of filmmakers disagreed. This person who wrote me last year is named Andrew Whartonberg. And he wrote me an email, my ringer address, and he said, I have a movie that I have written and acted in. And it's called When I'm Ready. Dermit Mulroney is in this movie. Oh, okay. Laura Cohen from The Walking Dead is in this movie.

I listen to Press Box and I have a role in the movie that we'd like you to play. Wow. What's the role? Okay, so when I'm ready, and this is how Andrew Whartonberg described it to me in the first place, is a movie about Young Love slash the End of the World, literally the End of the World, an asteroid cluster is headed for Earth. Oh, God. This is not one of those movies where a team of misfit scientists led by Bruce Willis and Steve Bussemi

are going to land on the asteroid and fix everything. or where Morgan Freeman is going to play the president. No, no. We're just going to accept it? Well, it's a movie about two 20-year-olds who are in love, played by Ortonberg and June Shriner. And they're thinking, look, our entire lives have, we're going to be spooled out in front of us.

All of that is now disappearing for cosmic reasons. So how would we like to spend our final days on Earth? earth. They're driving around. They're contemplating these questions and they occasionally turn on the radio for updates about the situation, about the end of the planet. And the DJ, yes, the DJ slash host is me. Wow. Wow, that's incredible. It's pretty funny. You're the soundtrack to the end of the world. The soundtrack to the end of the world. And that's going to be the last line in my bio when I, once this movie comes out, he played a DJ in a movie about the end of the world. By the way, it turns out it's, it's pretty, you know, simple to do

commercial radio voice. You just take podcast voice and you add 20%. Give yourself that little lilt. So these guys, anyway, let me tell you the story here. The guys, Andrew sends me the script or my parts of the script. I go out several months ago to a sound studio in Studio City here in Southern California. And not only am I performing the scenes, you have to remember, they've already shot the movie at this point. So they show me the scenes on a big screen and then I'm performing it so that it fits with how the movie was shot. right? If they're listening to the radio for 13 seconds, then my lines need to be delivered not in 11 seconds or 15 seconds.

They have to be actually 13 seconds long. Sure. So that they will match up. The character I play gets a little emotional as the movie progresses because we get closer to the end of the world. No spoilers here, by the way. At this point, I realized that you and I had never really done any acting in high school. Well, speak for yourself.

Well, we were, we were drama program adjacent. Yeah. I think it would be the way to describe it. So being emotional or being more emotional on cue was a big challenge. But thankfully, Andrew Whartonberg, Andrew Johnson, who directed the movie, very patient with me, pulling out these sort of subtle nuances of the character. I mean, needless to say, by the way, I'm incredibly flattered by all of this. I think this is just completely amazing.

I'm grateful to them for bringing me in. There was a funny matter of what to call the character of the DJ. Yeah. Early version of the script had the name, and I'm not making this up, Jim Cunningham, which I rejected out of hand for obvious reasons. Oh, what a nice tribute that would have been. We finally settled on Brian Benson.

All right. And I said, I'm fine with that as long as, is you spell Brian correctly. That's my only writer, as they say, in Hollywood. I don't need like a bowl of blue M&Ms when I come in and record this. You just have to spell Brian in the accepted and correct way, which is with a Y, of course. Now, would you like to hear a clip from when I'm ready? Oh, God, more than anything, yeah.

Because I've got one here. Just pretend I'm your letterman and I'm the guest. Cueing it up. You know Wolfman Jack and American Graffiti, David, you know Samuel L. Jackson and do the right thing. Here is Brian Curtis or Brian Benson. Ryan Benson back here at KIWA, wishing you all a beautiful morning, as we're now under 100 hours to go.

We've got a lot to get to this morning, including an update on the new hastily cobbled together plan from the government. But before we get to all that, we want to hear how you are spending your last days alive. have you got anything especially like share or just plain need someone to talk to you're going to answer I don't think so

amazing that incredible see how great the movie looks I knew you had a good radio voice that was good well thank you very much to see how I cobbled snuck in a little hastily cobbled together there little lonely in journalism

oh yeah little Easter egg for any press box fans who happen to watch when I'm ready and as you can see the movie looks amazing Oh, that's great. Terrific job shooting it,

acting in it and writing it. Everybody did great. So anyway, this movie will likely come out later this year. Arrangements are still being made in the Hollywood economic sense that I do not pretend to understand. There's a little premiere for the cast and crew tonight here in L.A. I'm going to bring Alan Siegel with me to hold my hand as we watch this together. Amazing. I will say, David, this is not the end of my acting.

career, but I see it as just the beginning. Oh, yeah. Think of all those, like, radio. You can even move into, you know, movie newscaster parts. Oh, God, if you're talking about like an old-timey, like, on the front, on the, on the Western front today, news. Yeah, exactly. Sitting behind a desk, you know, just narrating the apocalypse. There's always newscasters necessary for the apocalypse. And I feel like you could do just about any of those roles. I'm convinced now. All right. So if any, any director of movies or television has a role for Apocalypse Newscaster

or just befuddled podcaster. Please call my agent David Shoemaker. And as they say in Hollywood, let's do lunch. Drive a hard bargain. Coming up on today's show, David. Caleb Williams showed up to the combine. He didn't take place in any of the medical

testing, but he did get tested by the media. How did that go? We'll talk about Chris Mortensen and his legacy as an NFL insubes. We'll talk about the case of Tim Burke down there in Florida, plus much more on the press box. You see, I'm doing that Brian Benson voice again, a part of the Ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shumaker, and producer Brian Waters with you. David, the draft combine was this weekend.

A lot of content from there on the ringer.com. And I became fascinated by the way our sports media friends were talking about U.S. quarterback Caleb Williams. Caleb Williams is going to be the one-one in this draft. We're not allowed to say first overall pick anymore. He's the one-one. And when he gets

drafted by the Bears, he is going to become their QB-1. This is what you have to say. It's not a starting quarterback anymore. He is QB-1. Now, any player who was in that draft slot, especially quarterback, was going to undergo a certain amount of scrutiny. But the

scrutiny that Caleb Williams is undergoing is pretty interesting to me. Because it shows how we in the sports media are figuring out how to talk about players like Caleb Williams during what has been called the player empowerment era. So let's start with a few data points in the career of Caleb Williams and we'll walk up to the combine. These are things I think you'll agree that are different from what the media would have been thinking about 10 or 20 years ago.

First up, Caleb Williams. Williams freshman year at Oklahoma was fantastic. Then he enjoys NIL rules and he transfers to USC with his coach Lincoln Riley. Thanks to the NIL, he makes tons of money in college, an estimated $10 million, according to Kaelin Collar of the athletic. Again, absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it's very different than quarterbacks in past years. SC lost to Washington this year and Caleb Williams hopped into the stands and hugged his mom.

and appeared to be crying. Remember that visual? Oh, yeah. Probably one of the most memorable of the college football season. I think ESPN took that shot for like 30 seconds. Williams would later say, I give my all on every single play, every chance that I get. I've been an advocate for mental health,

show your emotions, and express yourself. Okay, another data point. Last summer, when it was clear that he was going to be the number one overall pick in the next draft, a representative of Caleb Williams was making inquiries about whether Williams could get an ownership stake in the NFL franchise that drafted it. And it turns out, according to Collar, that the person making those inquiries was Carl Williams, Caleb Williams' father.

I don't just want the mega contract of the number one overall pick. I want to see if we can get a piece of the franchise. Seems like a really good question. I mean, you know, just to get things straight on the way in, yeah. Imagine asking for something pie in the sky in a negotiation. Who would ever do that? But you can agree, perhaps different than athletes in the past. Carl Williams, by the way, would also tell GQ last year

that if Caleb Williams didn't like the franchise that had the number one pick in this year's draft, he might go back to USC and wait another year and see if a different team didn't have the number one pick the following year. He doesn't have an agent. Kaelin Kala reported in The Athletic that one of the Realtz, reasons he doesn't have an agent is because Carl Williams called a bunch of agents and said, hey, what if we can negotiate a contract

that's completely different than the mandatory contract that all first round picks have to sign? So we can get out of this salary cap, out of these, all these franchise tags that Caleb Williams could be hit with in future years. What if we could do that? Couldn't find an agent to go for that, so he doesn't have an agent. Then we get to the combine.

Caleb Williams does not work out which is pretty common for prospects right at the top of the draft. Sure. He also doesn't do medical testing, which our very own Ben Solex says, is the new normal or will become the new normal? To skip the medical testing, yes. To say,

just with reasoning that makes as much sense as inquiring whether you could actually get a piece of the franchise that then it's going to, that then is going to build itself around you and make money off you, that you're saying with, again, Very logical reasoning. Why does this help me? I think Williams himself said,

why do I need to let 32 teams look at my medical test when only, what do you think? Five teams might draft him. That's if there's some major trade with the Bears. Finally, Caleb Williams gets to the podium at the combine and gives reporters a chance to ask what they really feel. Here is the first question of that press comment. Good morning, everybody.

Are you afraid to compete? How do you respond to people saying? that you're worried to be compared side by side with your peers in medical measurements and workouts. Are you afraid that being measured against the sky one-on-one? Is that why you're not doing things? No, not doing things. It was a decision by me and my team, my family, and it comes down to that. That was a hell of a question right off the bad.

Are you afraid? That's how every press conference should start. Are you afraid to compete? In the NFL? I know it's like, you know, as a reporter, you always want to make sure you get your question in. Yeah. In those scrum settings, but that guy wanted to get it all in. Like, we that question had three parts at least.

So here's what's interesting to me, dude. We do no longer live in a world run by 1990s sports columnists where any of those data points I reeled off would themselves be a sign that Caleb Williams was not up to enough. We've changed a lot. And here's a data point to show you how much we've changed. Left out of the toast to Peter King the other day when he retired was that interview he did with Cam Newton. Remember that one way back in 2011, I believe it was?

Yeah. Where he quoted Cam Newton saying he wanted to be a football player, but also an entertainer and an icon. And then Peter King did the passive thing where he pretended that all the coaches in the NFL would be really upset with this. didn't argue whether they should actually be upset with this, whether the world had not changed, and whether the world should have always perhaps been like that.

Yeah, we don't do that anymore. And you can almost feel the entire sports media complex if I can speak for everybody at once, adjusting in real time. Yeah. Right? We're not going there. It's different.

It's different. it's a different kind of agency than players would have enjoyed 10 or 20 years ago, but we're not going to come down and judge somebody for those things. You can feel that happening all at once. And that's a happy development. It is. I mean, you say you feel them adjusting in real time. I've since, it almost feels like a sigh of relief.

A lot of the questions, the sort of, you know, big picture questions that this cycle has raised or almost they just feel like people have been exhausted by being obligated to ask them without even realizing it for the past decade. And now to take some of this stuff off the table, I think Caleb Williams and his team have done us all in great service. Everybody but that guy who led off the press conference, yes, was relieved of the burden of asking those kind of questions. I think the happy place this is going to settle in.

to. And I think we're also sort of moving here. Again, if I can speak for the entire sports commentary, it is, okay, asking for things in a contract, trying to maximize your value when you are arguably as valuable as you will ever be as an athlete. That does not make you a bad person. That does not make you selfish. But once we accept that, then we can move on to other questions about the player, which may not be answerable now, but may be answerable in the future, and come to a more balanced assessment. So what I mean is we can take those kind of silly things or old-fashioned things off the table about, you know, he's not a bad teammate because he does X, Y, and Z.

But someone can also potentially be a bad teammate anyway. This doesn't take off the table that you could never be a bad teammate. because we know that isn't true. Bill and Rosillo have talked about this, right? I feel everything is going to settle into this other media. We're then relief, as you say, oh my gosh, we don't have to pretend that we're mad at a player for making money.

We don't have to pretend we're mad at a player for, you know, driving a bargain during a hard bargain during contract negotiations. But we can also say things about players or try to find out information about players. Once we've taken all that old stuff off the table, do you agree with that? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, and that should be what it's really all about, right? I mean, I think it was, I hope I don't get this wrong, but I think it was Albert Breer on Rosullo's podcast that made the point when they were talking about Marvin Harrison Jr. not working out at the Combine prior to it, you know, prior to the combine. And he said, you know, it's one of these things where a lot of these athletes, I mean, all of these football players, I mean, functionally what they're doing is they spend, you know, two months, three months training to be in the Olympics, training to be a track athlete so that

they can perform well at the combine and in doing so prove something theoretical about their on-field ability when they'd probably all be better suited just to keep training at doing training with better trainers and better facilities at playing the position they're going to play in the pros, right? This feels sort of like the metaphorical version of that, right? It's like, why are we using this ridiculous old, I mean, I understand why you're having professional athletes to run the 40, you know? You know, I mean, that makes sense in a vacuum, sure.

But why use these traditions just because they're the traditions, right? Why discuss players? Why discuss players, their mindset, their personalities, their leadership abilities, their their determination based on the expectations that were driven by limitations created decades ago, right? Don't we have, shouldn't you in the position of player evaluation be begging for a different format to be able to interview, to be able to interview and just break down these players? You know, shouldn't we as journalists be begging for other means of having these conversations rather than sticking to this tired old rubric? Particularly on the idea of the combine and putting so much emphasis on, as you say, the Olympics and training to run a great 40 times.

I feel just as the sports media was modernizing, morally speaking, the combine was becoming a TV show. Sure. And was becoming a content window. Now, listen, it would be fine if it was, I mean, Bad Love the Network stars were like, no, I mean, or maybe to use a more, more current, current, but still totally outdated metric that, or comparison that would, that will fit neatly on the ringer universe. It was like the first few seasons of MTV, the MTV is the challenge before it became a profession for everybody on the challenge, right?

If it was like that, that would be great. Everybody wants to go see all the best receivers in the world go have a race. Like that would, that's wonderful. That would really help you if you're a draft guru. But if what you're really asking is who's got the best trainer leading up to their 40,

that's not really, that doesn't necessarily tell you anything about who this player is, right? Yeah. As the combine, becomes professionalized. And like you said, as it becomes a TV show, and not for nothing, fits into the sort of like advanced metric mindset that's taking over media at the same time. It's like, look, I have hard and fast numbers. Now let me like factor these in. The more data I can

have, the more I can tell you about this player. You know, but it's that to become a professional endeavor in so many ways. It actually becomes less useful in a lot of ways. I completely agree. And I just, I just think what's funny is we can all accept that. But then when we say, oh, we created this big offseason content tent pole. And then the best players like Marvin Harrison and Caleb Williams didn't come or didn't come in the way we want them to to come and participate in our fun. Oh, no. Wait a second.

You know, no, no, no, you don't understand. We, you know, what could you possibly have to discover about Caleb Williams playing football at this point? My God. He's been, he's been one of the most high profile college football players ever from his freshman year. Every game, you know, it's like every game is a, especially last year when S.E wasn't as good and he actually like had a bad game against Notre Dame. Every game about was a referendum on Caleb Williams. It was on TV. Yeah. But then we create this additional TV show, this additional thing. Oh, he didn't show up or he didn't show up in the way we wanted him to show up. So then we're almost forced to talk about the medical thing, have the character conversation again in old school terms. It's just, it's just a funny tension. I'm not sure I saw too many people other than that one. dude violating that, but it does pull sports people in different directions.

And it's interesting. And again, I just feel, I feel there's a happy resetting of the whole system right now. It's like the whole sports computer got turned off and it's rebooting. And everybody who wasn't even people who might have, you know, in a different age, talked a different way are talking completely differently now. And that's good. But we're all still feeling out the way to talk about players, especially in these terms, right? Contracts, leadership, you know, locker room, stuff like that. We're all feeling that out. What are the right things to say? What are the wrong things to say? How do we judge players in this hopefully more enlightened and different way? And it's interesting. And Caleb Williams, again,

number one pick, number one, been a number one pick for a year, going to be the number one pick for years and years basically since he stepped on the field for oh you he will be a very very fascinating test of that right i agree and now i bet there's a lot of sports writers and journalists of various oak out there who are kicking themselves for not knowing the answers to whether or not a number one pick could be a part owner of a franchise i guess we know now do we know now was there we know i assume the answer is no but is there an answer we race to the explainer desk and there was some clarifying by the nfl interestingly because they were like oh no no, no, no. It turns out we don't want that to happen, right? We, we like, we like when our

rookies are put into this artificial salary cap, even when they're a Caleb Williams level rookie. Yeah. You know, Heisman winner, right? Better than your average number one pick. But it's also, I also feel with number one picks and with quarterbacks at this time of year, there's so little data for the kind of quote unquote leadership questions. Remember that Trevor Lawrence was an article was that by Mike Rosenberg and SI a couple years ago and he had like one loose sentence that you know at least

created a fake news cycle about maybe you know football is the most important thing in his life or maybe oh yeah he had other interests differently yeah have other interests besides football again it's there's not much data so big pronouncements are made

other big story from the combine David was we lost ESPN's Chris Morton Oh, yeah. The ultimate insider. ESPN announced his death on Sunday at the age of 72, an absolutely fascinating guy who gets to ESPN in the 90s and who uses television to outflank all of his former colleagues in the newspaper business. And it's like television was a little different in the 90s.

I don't think we had an ESPN bottom line yet that you could say, Chris Mortensen reports. Sure. And ESPN wasn't really set up to be like, hey, you know, let's turn on the camera in Chris Mortensen's house so he can tell us that some NFL player sprained his ankle. Like that might have to go on SportsCenter. It might have to go on the NFL pregame show, but he was faster. They would make Chris like sprint over to Texas to Cowboy Stadium so he could like have a

background shot whenever he reported that. Yeah. Yeah. Have a stand. Edward, can you stand slightly to the. the right because we need to get Chris in here to tell us the status of a Cowboys offensive lineman Nate Newton. No, it's like it was interesting and it was it was the preview of exactly what Adam Schaefter would do in the late 2000s or the late

odds. Yep. He would take Twitter and begin to outflank the reporters on TV. Because now it wasn't just a 24-7. television network, it was the speed of social media. Yeah. I think I've told you this before. It says something really interesting about Mort, as he was almost universally known, but ESPN hires Schefter away from the NFL network. And he comes to the mothership.

And that was a moment in ESPN time when Mort absolutely had enough sway at ESPN that he could have nixed it. He could have just been like, nope, I'm the insider here. Yeah. This is my, this is my domain. And for the first and perhaps last time in the history of insiders, they decided to work together. Yeah.

And they had a big brother, little brother thing going on. And I'm sure there was some competition, friendly competition between them. But they basically said, we will rule the NFL scoop universe together. at ESPN. And ESPN and Schepern in particular has never given that up since then. Yeah. They've had it on lockdown. Whatever you read about Ian Rappaport's free agency.

And I know there's been some stories about the important matter of his free agency. ESPN has had this thing on lockdown for a decade and a half now because Mort was that kind of guy. He came from the world of newspapers. He was in Atlanta. one of my favorite board stories is every year the sports department would give annual raises out and of course journalists would never be jealous of the raise that someone else doing the same job as they are we are no we've achieved a zen detachment we don't care about such things but ed hinton who was a writer later at ESPN2 a great great character in his own right once was

upset that someone had gotten a raise or he was worried that someone had gotten a raise that was bigger than him. And Mort, Hinton told me, reaches into his desk and pulls out a list of all the raises in the sports department. This copied list that has person by person and how much more money they got. And Hinton's like, what the hell? And Mort said that what he would do every year is walk into the office of the sports editor. his name was Van McKenzie, another legend in the business,

get a copy of this very valuable list and he would take the list and make a copy of it. And he would wield it just like he would wield an NFL salary scoop. I got information. Yeah. It was funny. He was also a very big character in newspapers. This is before he was married. He was known around the AJC as well.

War Wolf Mort because he would only come out at night. He was a baseball writer in his early days there covering the Braves. He was on the road all the time in what was then known as the NL West and stretched all the way from Atlanta to Los Angeles. One of his co-workers, I believe this was also Ed Hinton told me that girlfriend he would have in one city or another would call him Le Morte, which I thought was very, very funny. he was a great prankster. He also one time goes into Van McKenzie.

That's the sports editor's office. Forges a memo that he sends to the aforementioned Ed Hinton and says, this is a letter from note from the editor. Why did you fail to win this journalism award? To which the writer is incensed and he walks in to chew out the editor and be like, what did you get off talking to me about not winning a journalism award turns out more? completely made it up. He was,

goes to ESPN. I mentioned that. Works with Schefter. He gets tripped up by deflategate. If you remember that. He had some of those early tweets and Mort's word was such gold that I remember looking at Twitter that night and being like, if Chris Mortonson says this,

the Patriots did it. Yeah. And they did it in this specific way. because Chris Mortensen didn't get anything wrong. And it turns out he did make mistakes in that reporting, much to his chagrin, later told me he got death threats from that reporting. And he told his wife not to come to Connecticut with him.

They were living in Arkansas at the time to on his trips to ESPN because he was worried about her safety. That happened. Oh, my God. January 2016, Mort gets diagnosed with Stage 4, throat cancer. It was an absolutely throttling and horrifying event

inside ESPN. That was just one year after Stuart Scott had passed away from cancer. Mort told me when he was down at MD Anderson in Houston getting treatment, he runs into TNT's Craig Sager

whom he knew from Atlanta from his days reporting the journal Constitution. And he says, hey, Craig. And Craig Sager turns around and looks at him just completely dumbfounded. And Mort said at that moment, he realized that his appearance had changed so much that Sager could not recognize. His hair fell out during his treatment. He had to have several teeth pulled to do this thing.

He ate oatmeal, he told me, for months and months and months as a diet. wound up getting back on the air in the fall of 2016 when his cancer was what was called virtually undetectable. It's funny. I had started reporting a piece about him because he'd gotten sick and I didn't know where that was going to go. And I remember there was an afternoon. It's like, told by ESPN, you know, Mort's, I called a bunch of people. I said, Mort's going to try to call you. but he just has trouble talking. There are afternoons where he's just, his voice is not great.

So just kind of wait around. And we had this amazing conversation when he finally did call. And we talked about his treatment. And we talked about his career. And we talked about the flake gate and all kinds of other things. And I remember published a story. And that's been like a month later, two months later. I was sitting in a hotel room doing something random.

My phone lights up. And it says, Chris Mortensen. I'm like, okay, this is interesting. And he called and he just wanted to chat and talk about the story and stuff. And then he mentioned some of those details about, you know, the pranks he played in the office and his old newspaper persona. He goes, I know Ed Hinton told you all that stuff. I know Ed Hinton and told you all that stuff. There was no pushback on any of the facts.

It was funny. Anyway, man, the ultimate insider, Chris Mortensen, farewell. and our hearts are with his former colleagues at ESPN and his family. All right, David, coming up in 30 seconds, an update on the case of Tim Burke. But first, let's do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always, always gratefully received. today's Twitter joke comes to us from Noah Kozlov.

You might have seen that JetBlue and Spirit were going to merge. But today we got the word that that merger has been called off. It was an overword Twitter joke to write JetBlue pulled out of its merger with Spirit because they found out aisle seats weren't included. We would have also accepted JetBlue needs to realize that the price of purchasing Spirit Airline seems cheap, but all the additional fees make it actually more expensive than purchasing Delta Airlines. Your spirit is a cross off for you too. Congrats.

You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, in the notebook dump, let us talk about the case of Tim Burke. You've been I've been trying to get to this for a week or two now. Yeah. Tim Burke, aka Timothy Burke, was a mainstay of old deadspin. Mm-hmm. not new deadspin with the NU umlaut old deadspin the site that really matter i was trying to think did you and i ever meet him back in the day i don't i i don't know like we might not have

yeah i don't think so either it feels like i must have and i feel like i had specific memories of having conversations with him and i but i'm not sure he had this amazing talent for harvesting clips from television and putting them online back when that was technological magic. Yeah. Later that technique would be copied

by just about everybody all the way down to the Burke style. Here is the Russian call of the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl. Clip. I always thought, you know,

the idea of him staring at like all these different feeds of all these games coming in from around the world was a real 80s, 90s vision of what the future would be like. Oh, yeah. Man watches 20 television screens at once. Felt very interesting, dystopian almost. Burke once said of the GIF or the GIF, which was his format of choice,

it's an art object. You're taking this little moment and making it exist in perpetuity. Yeah. And he, of course, had a byline on Deadspin's Manteo's story. and was in the documentary that ESPN later did or the TV show with Don Van Nata that ESPN later did about that. The events of the last month

gets set in motion by a vice story, which I know you'll remember in October 2022, that had Kanye West making anti-Semitic remarks to Tucker Carlson. Only somehow these remarks had been left out of the Tucker Carlson

interview that actually aired. Strange that. Yeah. We know Tucker Carlson would never improve the image of somebody through a TV interview. Not in Moscow, David, and not in America. He would never do such a thing. It's one of those interesting stories because you're like, wow, that video, man, where the hell did that come from? Yeah.

Well, last May, the FBI raided Burke's house and took computers and phones and other items. his lawyers spent much of the last year asking, you know what? When is he going to get those back? And where are the charges that justify that kind of raid? Last month, Burke got arrested and he was indicted in Florida. Here is the rundown of charges from CNN. One count of conspiracy, six counts of accessing a protected computer without authorization,

and seven counts of intercepting or disclosing wire, oral, or electronic communications. He, of course, is pleading not guilty. So there's a couple of interesting things here. One is, of course, with any journalist who has been arrested and indicted, there's questions of free press in the First Amendment. There's also what figures to be, or at least I suspect figures to be a very technologically complex argument, at least that the prosecution is putting forward about accessing information. Yeah. This is what one of Burke's lawyers said of the Kanye. interview. Fox, quote, was embarrassed because it had made those feeds available to the public

in a way that Mr. Burke could and did find them and disseminate them. Now, here's Rachel Cohen at NBC. Burke, in a separate court filing, explained how he accessed the streams. He said a, quote, confidential source had pointed him in a direction of a publicly posted credentials that would get him into the streaming platform. Dot, dot, dot, dot. Burke hacked no website, stole no credentials, and violated no terms of service,

the filing said. He merely found something newsworthy on a publicly accessible site. That feels like the heart of the case to me, or what will become the heart of the case in court. You and I should probably return to this as it develops a couple of times. Yeah, I mean, I've read all that I could find on it.

It does seem to be, there does seem to be a little bit of tension in the degree to which, the credentials were publicly accessible. Each side is saying something that seems to be at odds, and the details are a little bit fuzzy. But I will say that like this,

I'm sure like, you know, things that he's being, that he's going to be prosecuted for just seem nuts. And I think it's just on a very general level, you know, journalistic ideals, aside, this doesn't seem, this doesn't pass the smell test of something that anybody should be getting into trouble for.

I mean, this is how, if you have a negative impression of journalists, set it aside for a minute, but I feel like this is how all of us live all of our lives, online and off, but particularly online. You know, it's just like you're, if something is accessible to you and no one's waving their arms and telling you to stop, then it feels like it should be accessible until someone tells you to stop. You know, I mean, this is just not, it's very, very strange that this, that this, that, that this would be

a legal matter to be at all. And clearly, whether or not there were laws broken, clearly, Fox News' embarrassment is the driving force of this. That's, I think, indisputable. It is truly one of the most. It's almost like got swept up

in so much Fox embarrassment and Tucker Carlson embarrassment in particular. Did you forget how just crazy that is? If you wanted to score whatever political point or moral point you wanted to with that interview, so excised all the embarrassing parts? All the newsworthy parts? Yeah, exactly.

Even better said. All right, a couple small items for you, David. We'll return to this subject. There's a big Joe Biden, New Yorker profile out this morning. I haven't gotten to it yet. It's by Evan Osnos. It's called Joe Biden's last campaign. Kind of a two-for, right?

Because it's the old school attention-getting New Yorker profile. Mm-hmm. and an answer to the question of why isn't Joe Biden talking to the press? Well, because he was, because he was already so busy talking to this guy or because this guy had an exclusive? Or, I mean, this guy being Evan Osnos, I don't mean to be dismissive. This guy. Which one is the answer that you've, that you've landed on? Well, I'm not sure we know, right, because the New Yorker is too genteel to use terms like exclusive.

Mm-hmm. Or to do a lot of backpadding. I found out from, you know, from some of the write-ups about this article that Biden granted Osnows 40 minutes for an interview. But you'll notice the New Yorker, unlike the rest of us, doesn't put a red scoreboard in its stories or say, you know, 40-minute interview inside, though, inside the Oval Office. They just actually tell you the story. You know, we talked to 19 sources in and out of the Biden White House. Now they actually just give you the information. A couple of interesting things from the piece.

one point Osnows challenges Biden on the question I think we've all been wondering to various degrees, which is, wait a second, isn't this a huge risk to say that Joe Biden and Joe Biden alone can beat Donald Trump? Biden, Osnows, writes, shook his head and said, no, I'm the only one who has ever beat him and I'll beat him again. He continues, I'd ask a rhetorical question, Biden said. If you thought you were best positioned to beat someone who, if they won, would change the nature of America, what would you do? One of the quotes that stuck with me there. Biden also has one of his right-hand men,

is named Mike Donnellins, worked with him for years. He gave a little preview of what the Biden campaign is going to look like. By November, Donnellan predicted, quote, the focus will become overwhelming on democracy. I think the biggest images in people's minds are going to be of January 6th. So that is the terrain in which Biden wants to try to beat Donald Trump on. Remember that came out before the 2022 midterms?

Biden gave that big speech about democracy and democratic norms. A lot of people laugh. Democrats won the midterms anyway. And then finally, this from Bruce Reed about the question we have heard people agonize about with Biden all the time, right? That Biden believes in all these things that no longer exist anymore. Yeah. bipartisanship. An old idea of old ideas of saying,

I'm the best candidate or I'm the not crazy candidate. Therefore, they'll vote for me. Bruce Reed says that Biden, quote, proceeds as if things are on the level and tries to force them to be so. Which is a really interesting way to put that. Anyway, Evan Osnowson said, The New Yorker.

Another item for you. We are still fantasy booking the Democratic convention. I can't wait. First, it was Ezrake, wishing the brokered convention into existence. Now in the same real estate, David, Maureen Dowd, she did the Sunday column bit

where she writes Joe Biden's State of the Union speech forum. Love it. Love it. Great, great bit. And where you make it so that it sounds more like Joe Biden than Joe Biden actually will sound when he gives the state of the union. She winds up with this. Quote, I was serious, folks.

When I called myself a bridge to the new generation, transitional figure. I was about to say the word, hey, folks. I was about to say the word folks. I'm glad that she managed to get that in there within three words of the quote you're reading. Folks are man, right?

I'll release my delegates, imaginary Biden says this summer at the Chicago convention to vote for the candidate they feel can carry our banner into the future. We're going to fantasy book this thing into reality, David. My God. If enough pundits right about it,

no matter what Joe Biden is telling Evan Osnos in an exclusive 40-minute interview, we will have a broker convention. The other thing I wanted to bring up, I am more and more, let's put it this way, I am even more grimly fascinated than I have ever been

with the phenomenon of the politician tweeting out a sad poll to get you to vote for them. Oh yeah. This is from Ruben Gallego, who's running for Senate in Arizona, owner running for Kirsten Sinema's old seat. Not the news I was hoping to share, but polling has us down six points to Maga

extreme as Kari Lake. The truth is, we're pacing behind on our fundraising goals. I can't do it alone, but if lots of people like you chip in, we will have a real shot at taking the lead and all caps winning. For a while, I was only getting the sad John Tester tweets, but now I've leveled up to sad Ruben Gallego. My God. I'm getting text messages now, emails, at least before you could imagine that that was John

Tester emailing you directly, you know? Brian, it really pains me to have to come to you like this. But when they just tweet them out, you know, I think we can kind of tell what's going on. Oh, my God. Do you think if John Tester and Ruben Giego were comfortably ahead, they would tweet? Great news, folks. We got this thing in the bag. Go buy yourself something nice.

I don't need your money. Need a new car, new television. Don't waste money on me. I got this thing. It is absolutely hilarious. And you're right. It has migrated from the fundraising pitch email. I don't know about you,

but by the way, so many of my texts are from Gavin Newsom. I think that's specific to California, although I have gotten some just having formerly lived there. Specific to Kevin Newsom, but isn't Gavin Newsom kind of the funniest person

to appear in your text messages? Yeah. like hey it's nancy pelosi would seem completely fake somehow like nancy pelosi is not texting me but hey it's gavin news it was just enough ring of truth yeah that's true that's true yeah there's probably some people out there who are like catfishing is gavin newsom right now and been having a ball at it some only in journalism for you david these are words you read in news articles that you never hear an actual human speech the primary states that Nikki Haley and Donald Trump are competing in tomorrow on Super Tuesday are

the delegate rich. A word, I believe we only unveil around Super Tuesday, delegate rich. Nikki Haley conducted a wide-ranging interview with reporters on Friday. Yeah. In newspapers, any interview in which you discuss two or more topics as wide-ranging. Again, this is not a word that it. appeared in the New Yorker profile because they were too good for wide-ranging, but wide-ranging interview.

All right. It's time for a feature that ranges all over the place. It's time for David Schuemaker, guess is the strain pun headline. Yeah. Last Monday's headline about an actress and stars new documentary was J-Lo and Behold. Today's headline comes from alert listener, Alex Tolford. It's from CNET.

Have you noticed in your neighborhood when you get Amazon deliveries? And a few of those 9,000 deliveries that come to your door now come in a very sleek-looking van. Oh, yeah, we got those all over town. So they're all those sleek-looking vans. Yeah, and I said, I never saw those vans before in my life, but now they're pulling up in front of my house at all hours. What are those vans? Did Amazon make those vans? Can I buy that van from somebody?

Oh, funny. I've got a CNET article just for you, David. Great. Talking about the... That's service journalism right there. Here we go. It's something you've been wondering. It's talking about the 2024 Mercedes-Benz E-Sprinter,

which is one of those vans. Now, don't get hung up on the title because this is a story about a new kind of van that brings a lot to the table. He does things that no comparable van has done before. What was CNET's strained-upon headline? A van in full? A van. A van among

A van for all seasons Yeah, let's just get all these out of the way A van for all seasons is great Vanford van I don't know I think of famous historical proclamations that might involve the word man uttered on old-timey television

uttered from far away Oh, oh, the moon landing One solid small step for van Went giant leaf for vankind There we go The second half for van and a giant leaf of van We actually did both We actually did both

He is David Shuemaker I'm Brian Curtis Production Magic by Brian Waters All right, we are still putting together the March schedule of Press Box guest host But David we can go ahead and reveal Who Thursday's guest host is Oh, who is it?

It is New Yorker, writer, and interviewer extraordinaire Isaac Chotner. Oh, nice. Yes, sir. Don't let him ask you anything. No. Hey, Isaac, the tables are turned, pal. I'll be asking the tough questions. Now, I cannot wait to talk to him about all kinds of subjects because he is a big NBA fan as well.

I know plenty of takes on that media apparatus. That's Thursday. And then Shoemaker and I return Monday with more lukewarm takes. about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.