The Press Box - The N.Y. Times in the Oval Office, Facebook's InfoWars War, and the Indignities of NFL Training Camp | The Press Box (Ep. 506)

Episode Date: July 31, 2018

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss The New York Times facing off with President Donald Trump on his home turf (03:30), Mark Zuckerberg's clumsy efforts in dealing with Alex Jones (18:30), and the problems the NFL media faces while covering training camps (33:00). Hosted by: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Produced by: Jim Cunningham Brought to you by: The Ringer Podcast Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of the press box is brought to you by the Ringer podcast network. I know this week I have been listening to the Bill Simmons podcast, especially his long and much anticipated sit down with Brian Riscilla. Love when those guys get together. Also consumed two episodes of the watch, the Mission Impossible Fallout pre-show and the Mission Impossible Fallout post show, both of which were richly rewarding. Check those out too, along with binge mode. Dave Chang Show, House of Carbs, Larry Wilmore, one shining podcast, on shuffle, everything and more, along with this fair podcast. David, former ESPN reporter and besieged conservative Britt McKenry signed with Fox News last week.

What I want to know is, what's the most laughably on-brand media signing you can imagine? Wait, for me or for anyone? Like where you would sign? No, I think anyone. Sure, anyone. Oh, man. Oh, man. That's really hard.

God. There's been so much media consolidation. It all sounds so perfect. Can I set the bar at Wright Thompson and the Oxford American? I don't know if the Oxford American is quite big enough, but that's absolutely perfect. I really like that. Maybe his B-sides, I don't know, right? I think just Wright-Thompson, like, hired.

by state of Mississippi as like ombudsman or something? That would be really good. Kind of like a magazine about the folkways of Mississippi. Yeah. God, what would be really good? I mean, am I going to get into trouble if I say

like, if I put like Dave Portnoy at Fox Sports? Is that bad? I know. Why would you get in trouble? I don't know. I don't know. The barstool police are going to show up? The stoolies will show up in my mentions that I don't. read. It'll be terrible. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how that particular one would play, but yes,

that would be incredibly on brand. Joining Clay Travis and the Fox News in the Foxx, excuse me, Fox Sports, whoops, what a slip. The Fox Sports Expanded Universe would definitely be big. We are on brand because this is as good as we get, folks. This is the press box on the ringer podcast network. The press box is the media podcast. We are not allowed to claim that conservatives were shadow banned on Twitter. We are Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the ringer. your ringer reading list today should absolutely include our 100 TV episodes of the century, which is both a great read and looks incredible. Check that out. Spin lots of time with that this week. From last week, I really enjoyed Paulo Ogetti's piece on the LeBron Kobe graffiti war going on in Los Angeles,

and also Lindsay Zolads with a rewatch of taxi driver in the age of Ncells. Lots of great writing in that piece. But David, I've got three topics for you today. First, we'll talk about the New York Times facing off with Trump, not in the newspaper, but in the Oval Office. Second, we talk about Facebook's clumsy attempts to deal with the menace of Alex Jones. And finally, Tom Brady storms out of a press conference and other indignities of covering NFL training camp. Plus, as always, our overworked Twitter joke of the week. But should we start with The New York Times? Let's do it.

I want to make sure I get all the stage play. here correct because this involves lots of people. On July 20th, A.G. Solzberger, publisher of the New York Times, and James Bennett, who edits the opinion page, went to the Oval Office to meet with Donald Trump. The ostensible purpose was because Trump has been calling journalists the enemy of the people over and over again. And Salzberger, as he later wrote, I told the president directly that I thought his language was not just divisive, but increasingly dangerous. It was Trump that had tweeted about the meeting, mischaracterizing the meeting,

shockingly with the journalist. I can't believe that that would happen. And then we learned that Dean McKay, the editor of the New York Times, did not attend the meeting. In fact, refused to go to the meeting for his reasons. So what your first impressions on New York Times versus Trump, I don't know if that's too casual, New York Times and Trump in the Oval Office. First, this is such a minor point, but I just feel like I need to say that Dean Bacay's explanation for why he didn't go was just the most like just eloquent and well-put

demural in the history of media, I think. I mean, he basically was just like, I'm not going to that bullshit, but he made it in such a way that it was completely uncontroversial. Yes, that was one of those, that was one of those, we're in kind of a time of journalistic heroes, right? And this was kind of like understated journalistic hero. You know, like, let me just, let me just dash off. And this was given to Stephen Pearlberg of BuzzFeed, by the way. But let me just dash off a few lines, right? As a rule, I don't go off the record with high ranking officials, particularly the president. As the person overseeing coverage, I don't think officials should be able

to tell me things that I can't publish. And I don't want to be courted or wooed. So there you go. yeah and he made it it's clearly a principled stand and it's clearly like advice he would give any other journalist but he also but he made a point of saying this is just a personal thing so I'm not mad at anybody else from the

times that went even even though clearly the principal should convey to anyone else it was really well done it was really well done um yeah so okay so the

so Sulsberger and James Bennett, went to go meet with Donald Trump. When we were emailing about this, I sort of said, my first reaction was that in a weird way, it just sort of confirms just sort of my personal opinion about Trump. And this isn't really, I don't feel like this is a huge, like, insult to the president. But it's like he just sort of focuses on the parts of meetings and conversations that either he likes or that feature him saying cool things and, like, just immediately forgets or did not internalized at all in the first place, everything else?

I think it's the latter, right? I mean, do we think that Donald Trump registered the point of this meeting other than this guy from the New York Times is mad at me? Or mad at things I'm saying about the press? I don't even know that he would have registered that he was mad. I think that, I think,

you know, probably that Solzberger went in there with a, I mean, in his retelling, it sounds like it was an incredibly scripted remark, right? That he went in there with a very specific thing to say and almost as a formal statement put it out there and you can just sort of imagine President Trump you know halfway through just start smiling to himself and thinking about a rally he was at and then just telling the story about how he made up the fake news thing you know and like nothing that was said really really yeah what if what if he was smiling to himself and

thinking about a cheeseburger he ate last night I'm saying not out of the question right no no totally possible. So this whole thing blew up on Twitter because despite the fact that it was off the record, Trump decided to tweet about it. And then that led to Salzberger forcefully telling his version of events. So that's the whole thing, right? That's pretty much it. Yeah, he had the off the record part of it had been violated by the president of the United States.

So then the publisher of the Times felt, you know, the need to sort of clarify why he was there. he went on to say, I told him the phrase fake news is untrue and harmful. I am far more concerned about his labeling journalists, the enemy of the people. I warned that this inflammatory language is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence. So a key bit of background here is Trump's continuing obsession. Is that the word with the New York Times, which he, the approval of which he has craved for his entire career, right? Trump wants approval from the swells. The New York Times is the equivalent of the journalistic swells.

So that's part of this. I also enjoyed this detail from the Times' rendering of the event. Mr. Salzberger recalled telling Mr. Trump at one point that newspapers had begun posting armed guards outside their offices. The president, he said, expressed surprise that they did not already have armed guards. And some people on Twitter interpreted that as Trump is just. completely blind to the kinds of threats he's encouraging by blasting the media at every opportunity. I also read it as kind of Trump was surprised the New York Times did not have the same status symbol that Donald Trump has.

Like, hey, I've had personal security for years. You guys are just getting that? You know, like it's almost like one rich guy to another. Like, you don't have armed guards around you? I've got some, I've had guards at Trump Tower for, you know, since 1986. six. Sure. And most of the buildings and other, you know, other venues that he's visited in the past 20 years probably have some form of security. So, I mean, that would seem normal to him. But, you know, again, there's also a big difference between just like, doorman security and

the necessity for armed guards. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's just a little bit. I mean, it's, so much is disheartening. But this particularly is disheartening when, like, you know, when, Berger with, you know, in good conscience, tries to go and make a principled point and, you know, just sort of throw himself on the mercy of the president. I mean, not obviously as a journalist, but just in terms of the humanity of the situation. And it falls completely on deaf ears. Yeah. I think it's, I think this is one of those things we can probably agree where nothing will come, nothing about this meeting will change anything, right? Certainly the New York Times is not going to back off its. resolve to be tough covering the Trump administration. And Donald Trump is obviously unmoved by any appeal from the media to stop casting the media as the enemy of the American people. I think it's probably most interesting in the story of A.G. Solzberger as kind of the steward of the times and of the latest family member replacing his father, Arthur, also known as Arthur, and how he's going to stand up for the paper in these tumultuous times. I did enjoy there was a big profile of him in the

Washington Post, which by the way, I love this headline. He doesn't like bullies. That was a, that was like kind of a quote from the piece. It was the headline. I always want to create this, this, this bot that whenever you see something like that, we'll say it's only, it would only be news if it was the opposite. Wouldn't it only be news of the publisher of the New York Times liked bullies? Now that would be a story. Tell me, tell me, tell me more. You like bullies. He's sort of submissive around the office place. He just likes being told what to do. Who is who who who likes bullies? Anyway, but it sort of paints a picture of him as, you know, working at the Oregonian, then coming to the New York Times, working briefly as a reporter as an editor.

Can I can I interrupt real quick? Sure. The opening story is about his time at the Oregonian. When he's 25 years old, he shows up as a, you know, fresh-faced reporter. He ends up covering the sheriff's office and writing a bunch of really good stuff. But they try to kind of explain how no one could tell that he was, that he was who he was, except for the fact that he had nice shoes. You've worked in and around newsrooms for a long time. How many seconds do you think it took for everyone there to realize exactly who he was? Do you think under 15? Minus 15 seconds when they first saw the name and an email come around.

Absolutely. Yeah, my gosh. That's crazy. Absolutely. It also casts him as being, I like this sentence. The publisher of the Times sits in direct contrast to the President of the United States, demure, private, vegetarian. speaking of cheeseburgers, self-effacing and reliant on proving himself through hard work rather than trading on his famous surname, according to interviews, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You mentioned Dean Beke. I like in this story how there is this heroic profile crafted of A.G. Solzberger walking into the Oval Office, talking to the president, confronting the president about his rhetoric, and an equally heroic profile of someone refusing, at the New York Times refusing to go into the Oval Office, right? there are different modes of heroism here that are actually completely contradictory. But Bekaye skipped the meeting. His point that he made that I read a minute ago about off the record with high-ranking officials, can we just applaud that as a general principle? There's way too much off the record in the world. And to just have a little bit less, especially with the president of the United States,

whose every utterance should presumably be on the record at all as much as possible, as much as far as journalists are concerned. Yes. I did like reading that. Yeah, I mean, listen, this is the sort of between social media and just the Trump presidency broadly defined. This is just sort of the glory days of like going behind the curtain of journalism. You know, I mean, like the frequency of such meetings with hiring officials aside. this was, you know, a thing that would very occasionally be brought up on 24-hour cable news,

that there would be all these off-the-record discussions or whatever. But the fact that the secret meetings themselves are now almost every time a news story is pretty incredible. It really is. I mean, that's the Trump is going to be kind of known as the secret meeting era of Washington. The secret meeting that just leaks immediately. Yes. I just, it's really incredible. By the way, on a kind of double-related note, there's now a Bob Woodward book that's coming out next week.

I saw this, yeah. This is Bob Woodward's 19th book. It's known as Fear and 448 pages. Speaking of off the record, I love this. There was a CNN.com story yesterday that said it quoted an anonymous source saying, Fear is the most intimate portrait of a sitting president ever published during a president's first years in office. Now, why in God's name is anonymity granted to somebody to hype a book? I don't understand.

Like, why would you not want your name on that, right? And sure enough, in multiple stories, then we get a quote from Jonathan Karp, president publisher of Simon & Schuster on the record, calling this book the most acute and penetrating portrait of a sitting president ever published during the first years of an administration. I think I know who said that. I think I know who said that. Oh, my gosh. That was great moments in off the record.

So I think if you wanted to know more secrets of the Trump administration, David, I've got 448 pages coming for you of dish and dirt and according to some of these accounts Bob Woodward has once again started showing up to people's houses at night as made famous in all the president's men at odd times asking for interviews so so he's back on the case well I'm excited to see him back I love that this was I mean you you know we're not very far removed from an era where the Bob Woodward you know the the Bob Woodward book was the sort of tent pole of a presidential term. Now I'm sure this is going to come and go as previous books and major news articles have with,

you know, we're going to be totally shocked by this for a week. We'll talk about it and forget all about it within about 48 hours or just internalize it and move on, I guess. But, you know, it's good to know in an era of such upheaval that there are some institutions of the presidency that continue on a pace as with the previous presidents and that is

the Bob Woodward inside the White House investigative book. We spent most of the Trump presidency saying this is not normal folks but Bob Woodward coming out with the book this is normal. This is like the definition of normalcy. Bob Woodward has written a book

about a new administration. All right guys, it is time for the overwork 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. David, did you remember last week when we were talking about Trump's all-caps tweet to Iranian President Rouhani? That was a thing. We're now in the second week of Ruhani jokes. This one comes from Papa Roach.

Remember Papa Roach? Yeah. Oh, yeah. To Iranian President Rouhani, all caps begins here. Losing my sight, losing my mind, wish somebody would tell me I'm fine. Nothing's all right. Nothing is fine. I'm running it.

I'm crying. Cut my life into pieces. This is my last resort. Thanks to Julia Rowe for putting out that one. I enjoyed that. Did you happen to catch the news that Alex Trebek is considering contemplating retirement from Jeopardy in 2020, David? Yes, I saw this. The end of an era, it might be. Are you also aware of the long-running Twitter gag that whenever anyone contemplates a significant career change, we get the he's running tweet? I think Dave Weigel is the start of this. Well, if you paraded, he's running with Alex Trebek leaving Jeopardy. Congratulations. But this week's runaway winner, Donald Trump justified his trade tariffs, David, by saying we were getting used by people abroad, right?

Then that turns out those tariffs were incredibly harmful to the U.S. economy. So now he's doing this make good. It was an overwork Twitter joke to say, Farmers are getting the full Stormy Daniels treatment, Trump screwed them, and now he's paying them off. This was by far the most overworked Twitter joke this week to the point that John Wesley Ship, who you may remember playing the Flash on TV in the early 90s,

quoted a version of it. That's via Rajan Revest. All right, David, our second topic, the Facebook Alex Jones thing, which has been bubbling for months now, came to a head with a recode interview with Mark Zuckerberg, done by Keraswisher and published on July 18th. Zuckerberg is talking here about how do we tell the difference between something we want to put off Facebook and get rid of, right,

and something we want to roll our eyes at, puke when we read, but allow to stay on Facebook. And somehow he changed the subject on his own volition to Holocaust deniers. Here is what Mark Zuckerberg said. Sandy Hook didn't happen is not a debate. It is false. You can't just take that down. I agree that it is false. And I also think that going to someone who is a victim of Sandy Hook and telling them,

hey, no, you're a liar. That is harassment and we actually will take that down. But overall, you know, I mean, let's take this a little closer to home. So I'm Jewish. And there's a set of people who, deny that the Holocaust happened. I find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day,

I don't believe that our platform should take that down because I think that there are things that different people get wrong. I don't think that they're intentionally getting wrong, but I think that they... In case of the Holocaust deniers, they might be, but go ahead. It's hard to impugn intent

and to understand the intent. To set a little background there. He's talking, Sandy Hook is one of Alex Jones's most notorious causes that Sandy Hook was not a real event and was carried out by crisis actors, right? Right. Zuckerberg is now pivoting there onto the Holocaust. A couple of amazing reactions to this. One was Kevin Ruse of the New York Times columnist said, some very fine pages on both sides. I can't be on Facebook pages.

And the Guardians, Julia Carey Wong, this is via Recode Story. summed up Facebook's quandary with a good tweet. The fun thing about Alex Jones and Info Wars on Facebook is that if he had just displayed a female nipple, Facebook would shut him down in a snap, but since he's doing something much more insidious and hurtful, their hands are tied by their quote-unquote principles. What did you make of this morass that Mark Zuckerberg just cannonballed himself fully into? Oh, man.

Well, I mean, obviously this is an ongoing, ever-evolving story. I think that- Say that in your best newsman's voice, please. We are watching this closely. Well, I mean, it's, I know, like, I know where this segment is leading, and as I'm trying to take it piece by piece. First of all, I'll say that I'm never a bet. I always win the sort of like, the sort of false equivalency that's just like, you know,

all over Twitter from everything from like NFL suspensions to now, you know, to Facebook takedowns or whatever, where it's like, you know, Holocaust denial and a nipple are not the same thing. and and it's sort of just like waters out an argument to go there. But here's the thing. Facebook has found itself, found itself, I'll use the passive voice, in such a, in a position now where they are, they deserve to be held with such suspicion and on some levels, such contempt that those sorts of things, I think, are fair game, those sorts of comparisons. And they, and they clearly are aware of this because their entire, you know, corporate

presence right now is sort of apologizing for the past decade and specifically for the past several years so you know the Holocaust denial point was stupid but you understand where he was coming from right that like there could be somebody who if an idiot is who has been misinformed by someone by a malicious source it has like is arguing about numbers or something then that person doesn't need to get banned forever I don't know It's all dumb. But it was just a really, it was such a poorly chosen anecdote. And you could see under, you could understand how it was like, or example, you could understand how it like sounded good like when he was like putting his notes together.

But I mean, this whole, I mean, it's impossible to separate, even as a Facebook defender, it's impossible to separate what you think they're doing with goodwill to, from what you think they're doing because. they're making a lot of money off of it. Or because they don't want to look biased. And it's so hard, it's hard for me to have an intelligent conversation about it because it's impossible to pin it's impossible to see through that sort of haze. Yeah. I mean, I think that I think your points about the money and, you know, bending over backwards to to appease, let us say conservatives.

I don't know if we consider Alex Jones a conservative, but appease certain members. of the conservative firmament is perfectly well taken. But I think, you know, it's like they have chosen to draw, everybody keeps saying, where's the line, right? That's what this whole conversation is about. What is the line between OK for Facebook and gets you booted off Facebook? Zuckerberg in that interview seemed to suggest that bogus evil conspiracy theories were on the okay side of the line because maybe somebody might believe it.

but what was on the other side of the line was incited, things that incite violence, right? So if I, you know, got up all these bogus theories and then said, let's go do something about it, Facebook friends, that might get me kicked off. But merely putting these malicious beliefs out into the world would not get me kicked off. And to your point about, I just want to say the word nipple on this podcast, as many times as humanly possible. But to the nipple point, that is one of those things where it's very easy to make the, that call, right, is what we're saying. It's easy to determine this is nudity, this is not nudity on Facebook. It is, he is realizing that he cannot, he is having a very, very hard time trying to draw a line

that he can then go back to people on both sides of the line and say, here's why I made this decision, right? In another, in another universe, he just says, Alex Jones, you're gone. That's it. I'm all good, right? I don't, I'm not, I'm not justifiable. I just, you're out. You're done.

We don't need you anymore here. But when you try to enunciate that in his incredibly clumsy way, you know, I think this is what happens. How many times if he, how many interviews is he given to clarify this stuff? And has he ever given a clarifying interview once? No, no. And it's like he keeps going out. He keeps rolling out a new line of argument that ends up sounding exactly the same as the one before, right? I mean, they think they found a new way to present this sort of just mushy middle, like, equivocating path forward.

And it just, it makes it worse for him every time because he can't say, he can't say anything that's actually a thing. You know, part of it is if you want to take the, you know, toss aside the money. Forget about the, you know, desire to look nonpartisan, you know, nonpartisan to a fault. you know the one thing i mean the one aspect that i think is is real and is sort of understandable um if not forgivable is that they're sort of just like atoning for past sins at this point because it's like they don't or they're trying to and failing at it but that's the part that i can wrap my mind around is you know there's a point where someone like alex jones and info wars are actually too big to kick off of facebook you know there's a point where the donald subredd

it on, you know, as toxic as it has been at times, is too big for Reddit to get rid of, you know? I mean, there's, there's a point where, where internet presences of various sites are too big to fail, you know? I mean, there's a lot of Twitter personalities who fall into that personality, fall into that category. And, you know, the error was in not getting rid of them when they were small enough to be gotten rid of, you know, or when, you know, not trying, not fixing the problem when it was a hypothetical problem. And it's, it's, you know, when you're running a social media platform that's basically a, you know, a national or international institution, you have to be on top of this kind of stuff.

So Jones's, Alex Jones's personal verified Facebook page has almost 1.7 million likes per BuzzFeed. This sort of little show played out over the next couple of days. This was like last Monday, according to Charlie Worsall, our pal over at BuzzFeed, Jones issued a prolonged rant against special counsel Robert Mueller, accusing him of raping children and overseeing their rape, and then panamiming shooting the former FBI director. You might remember that inciting violence was one of these red lines, right for Zuckerberg?

He said, you're going to get it, or I'm going to die trying, bitch, get ready. Facebook didn't immediately suspend Jones, but then four days ago, this is according to Reuters, Jones was suspended for bullying and hate speech. And the service set is close to having pages tied to him and InfoWars website removed from the platform. Then Jones, because we have to have one final act here, and this is from the New York Times, appeared on a live stream Facebook video on his page. Shortly after his suspension went into effect, there's a very complicated reason that Jones is suspended, but InfoWars is not suspended, and said he was a victim of a media conspiracy to de-platform conservative voices. this is war, Mr. Jones said in the video. So now we visited all the stations of the cross, right?

Zuckerberg equivocates. Alex Jones does something that is either right on or right past the line. Alex Jones gets suspended under some terms. And then Alex Jones claims that he was deplatformed by Facebook and declares war on Facebook. So I think that sort of just the whole story in four days, right? this is the whole problem. Your point about being too big to fail is fascinating, though. It's like, what if we, what if all these, what if we got all these just ridiculous people

and they produce so much content that, you know, they were, they were helping sustain our business. Yeah. Do we want them to go away? Maybe not, you know? Yeah. I mean, one of the funny things about this, and it, or not funny, I mean, it makes it a little bit, an, interesting angle is that you and I are both old enough to remember Alex Jones before he was a kind of suit all right icon you know like he used to just be a run-of-the-mill conspiracy theorist

that didn't have any particular party leanings yeah um this sounds like Trump by the way this sounds like a description of Trump I think that you know there's a lot of lines you could draw between the two but but it it is I mean it's Alex Jones was I mean he's clearly a a, you know, a little bit of a carnival barker or a lot of one. A little bit. You know, he's,

he's, he's, he's, he's, he's, he's out there making money. Um, and he found, you know, he found this market.

Um, but I do think that there's a, there's a, you know, as much as I abhor, everybody who is exactly like Alex Jones and, abhor, the vast majority of things Alex Jones says,

I think there's a little bit of this, like, how do you define Alex Jones's problem? Um, I mean, in some ways it's worse that he's like, you know, that he started off as a as a whack job and became a, you know, politically active, uh, you know, loon who's just like directing adult people to be, you know, and presumably into a probably even more problematic situations. But, um, you know, he's like, it's so, it's just crazy. It's just crazy. And, and his defenders will say that he's sort of a comic, you know, or that he's, you know, or that he's, you know, or that he's, it's performance art and that he doesn't mean it. And really, when you read, when you were reading those lines of his, it's almost impossible to believe those are things that anyone said seriously.

And yet, this is the biggest problem. I mean, they're being taken seriously. So. I'm going to, I'm going to describe a hypothetical person to you. You can't guess who this is. What if he attempted a giant feat of performance art that lots of people took seriously and made him president of the United States? Now, I'm not talking about anybody in particular, right?

And what if you, and what if you couldn't tell whether he really, believe this stuff or not or was just using it to crassly gain power. I mean, I just, you know, imagine that. What would we do? What would we do as a country? Yeah, I don't. By the way, remember when Mark Zuckerberg

was running for president? Speaking of presidential aspirations? Yeah, we had a Mark Zuckerberg president campaign watch on the ringer.com. And I think that he's sort of Is that still running? No, I think he's managed to fumble his way out of that one. Did we update that this week? It is, it's interesting, though, about Alex Jones, though, that he does have, I mean, that, that he, he does, because of the, the political

sphere, because of the political issues at Facebook, you know, which go back a long way, but particularly came, you know, became salient when the story about their breaking news feed, you know, being run with a liberal agenda, quote unquote, broke, came out, and they've been kind of dumbly trying to, or ineffectually or inadvisedly trying to recover from that by overcompensating ever since, that Alex Jones is a little bit of a shield from talking, saying absolutely insane things about the Mueller investigation. You know, but it's when it's, he has to actually go really overboard talking about some, you know, talking about it like an

again, quote unquote, a political subject to get himself banned for 30 days. Even when, you know, it's an ineffectual low-key ban at that. Oh, absolutely. All right, David, should we talk a little bit about NFL training camp. Please. I know it's fashionable in the ringer universe to say that the NBA is now a 12-month sport,

et cetera, et cetera. But trust me, folks, reporters are losing their mind during NFL season two. Exhibit A. I don't know if this started this year, but I first noticed it this year. What if NFL reporters tweeted out the arrival of every single player at training camp of the team they were covering? Not people who were holding out like Cleo Mac and Aaron Donald, right, who's present. or absence was like a news story. What if they just said, you know, just to cite a random Cowboys example, guys,

Byron Jones is here. What? I just want you to all know this. I actually saw that this year. I'm just like, oh, my gosh, because it reminded me of, remember like 10 years ago when you couldn't just throw a video on Twitter quite as easily? And people, beat writers would just randomly tweet, great catch by Des Bryant. And that'd be it.

Yeah. And you didn't know if the cornerback just fell down or something like that. It's like splatter paint strategy of NFL coverage. I'd also like to associate myself with this tweet by Robert Klemko of the MMQB. Quote, I bet a lot of NFL vets coming off injury-riddled seasons are in the best shape of their lives right now. And I'm sure all the rookies are learning the playbook super duper fast. I'd wager most of the league changed up their diets and started eating healthy this offseason. So we just got them all out of the way right there, right?

All the training camp stories are now complete. A couple other notes It's going to shock you David I know that several big training camp stories involved the Patriots this year Do you remember Cordarell Patterson? Oh yeah Speedy wide receiver kick returner bounced around

Got traded from the Raiders to the Patriots This offseason He went on the NFL Network's Good Morning football and said this What's the conversation with Belichick? I read like your game I'll just tell it man I don't know what you that meant through in the past

But basically we get the job done here we're going to make you a player that you should be. Oh, I love to say it. So Bill Belichick told him, we're going to make you the player you should be. That is an extremely anodyne quote. But according to Phil Perry of NBC Sports Boston, Patterson actually had to walk it back. Listen, I'm a funny guy. I like to have fun, Patterson said.

You know, when NFL network asked me that, Bill didn't say that. I just said that just to get people fired up. I said it jokingly. When you say things, man, people take it and run with it. I mean it the way I said it. Anyway, Kevin Clark sent me that. And I just love this because it's like any morsel of Belichick news is so interesting, right? This became a story.

But even though it had no meaning at all, it's like, of course the Patriots want to try to get something out of Corderole Patterson that other teams haven't been able to get out of. But then we had to walk that back. But the media lid is screwed on so tightly in New England that then you even have to. to walk back stuff that isn't insightful or revealing. It's like if we had to walk back the Bob Woodward quote about it being such an intimate, the most intimate portrait ever of an administration in its first couple of years. Like, hey, guys, it's one of many intimate portraits, but I didn't want to, I didn't want to specify anything.

I just, I want to go ahead and clarify that quote I gave about the book. It's totally maddening. I mean, and you talked about how, you know, it used to be harder to upload video to Twitter and that sort of thing. I mean, but in some ways this is, you know, the NFL still in its,

awkward phase, trying to figure out what its social media identity is going to be, right? I mean, obviously this is more than one outlet and this is more than one type of,

you know, it's the league as well as the papers, the reporters, the TV channels, the players, everything else. But, you know,

this is, it feels like, like just a failed version of the, you know, nonstop NBA off-season coverage, but they just don't know exactly, no one knows exactly how to take anything. They just know that they need to just churn content out of everything. Yeah, I mean, is it, is it the, is it the media that's doing that? Or is it the fact that NFL players, you know,

have less of a, I don't know, consequential is the right word, but like they sort of drive, they drive the media, social media thing less than their NBA counterparts do. So the aggregators? Yeah. No, no, no. I mean, the, the, the actual. players. Oh yeah, for sure. You know, that that's like Tom Brady, who we'll talk about in a second, like isn't tweeting up a storm and, you know, having hot takes and all those kinds of things on Twitter where I just feel the NBA offseason thing, as we just saw with Kevin Durant, is sort of dictated by the players in a way. And that this is what we get instead. I don't know. Well, I mean, we know the personalities of NBA players, or at least, you know, we try to.

I mean, it feels like we do. And so, I, I mean, listen, if CJ Macomb and Kevin Durant had the conversation, or the back and forth they had on Twitter, was it this week or last week, I don't even remember about the podcast last week. You know, if that had been two football players, unless they were top-tier quarterbacks, I mean, one or both of them would probably be cut. You know, I mean, it would have been a major news story. You know, it would have been, like the football columnist would be talking about nothing except for that for a week.

But part of that is because, you know, if that were, who fill in the blank NFL player, you don't know them well enough from Twitter or anything else to understand their sense of humor, their personality, you can't read any humanity into it. And so if, you know, if, if Todd Gurley had come out before he got to sign his new deal with some contract demands, or if Aaron Donald did that now, not even like, if he were making jokes about it online, I think that it would feel like he was making some like really definitive or defiant statement in a way that it just wouldn't be, or even if it were perceived that way by an NBA player, it wouldn't be taken as such a bad thing.

Yeah, it'd be sort of considered more at the level of personal beef than like this player is being insubordinate, which would be the NFL. This is literally every NFL story, right? C. Des Bryant times one million. Yeah, absolutely. In other news, Tom Brady, Patriots quarterback, an aspirational male role model,

got asked about his wide receiver, Julian Edelman, who is serving a, PED suspension or about to who was an apostle of Alex Guerrero Brady's trainer Here's what Brady said Tom went Julie and tested positive A lot of people connected it to Alex

Carrero What's your reaction to that I think it's fair Tom I'm out See guys I have no comment It's just ridiculous

I'm out Yeah Yeah I mean this I don't know if there's any big take I know there's any big takeaway here, but it was like one of those things that like this counts as news. It's, I mean, it sort of reminds me of the Facebook conversation we just had. I was talking,

I was talking to actually my fiance about this last night that like everything on the internet up until maybe right now, but even so right now, like everything eventually goes bad. The reason why there's, you know, we're in like the 10th generation of online dating platforms is because eventually they all get washed out and become super creepy and full of stalkers or whatever. You know, I mean, there's like there's always an end to everything. and for some i don't know why i know why that popped into my head but we're talking about facebook and now with tom brady it's like eventually everything it's not it's not just that like the patriots became the evil empire because a little bit they always were but there's a

part of me that thought we were getting past that but i think that there's just a point when we you know we know we know so much more in some way about NBA players but we've lived so much longer with guys like tom brady that it's just like an old broken down relationship and the only conversations you can have are the really uncomfortable ones or They're really meaningless ones or they're really uncomfortable ones. Yeah, and I think the Patriots are just kind of like more of a neat dividing line through America than any NBA player at this point, right? LeBron used to be that. Pro-Lebron, anti-Lebron.

Kobe obviously had a very good run. But even LeBron has now, you saw I'm opening the school this week, has become this kind of just benevolent presence and American life for most people. And, you know. It's funny. LeBron has become a more politically divisive than he is sports-wise, right? I mean, you and I watched, you and I were sitting in a bad sports bar in Brooklyn watching the, what, the Cavs and LeBron's first time they play the magic, and we were, we were just shocked to realize that, like, 75% of the room just hated LeBron.

They were there to boo LeBron. You know, it was this, like, very divisive sports figure. Yeah, that was weird. And how long it was that? But and now we're at a point where like the only way to dislike LeBron is to rail against his lefty politics sort of, you know? I mean, you can root against him

when he's playing your team. You know, you can take, you can pick the Warriors in the finals and because you like KD your staff or whatever. But like, you know, but it's it's funny that he's he's politically divisive now instead of like he's, you know, an athlete that you have to root for or root against. Yeah, it's the full Laura Engram. Exactly. It really is. Yeah, I just feel

it's funny. I mean, like, the way we perceive the NFL offseason, I think it's just in this weird moment of flux, you know, because it's like, I don't think the NFL off season is actually smaller in any appreciable sense. I mean, having remembered the draft just a couple years ago. Oh, yeah. And even like, you know, the draft that was on multiple broadcast networks, right? Not just, not just ESPN and NFL network, but like on ABC for a while and Big Fox, as they call it. in Beverly Hills. That was incredible.

And now I think it's like, again, we had this a couple months with the NFL sort of goes away. We like to talk ourselves in this idea that the NBA is now ascend it. The NBA is, you know, truly 12 months. But then it's like all this bogus training camp garbage is now all that anybody's talking about. I mean, this is now the story of sports in America is for a couple of weeks is let us create some training camp drama. Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is people do love football, right? I mean, the audience for football is a little bit nebulous. It's everyone, but at the same time, it's like, its core audience is a little bit harder to grab onto.

At least it's not as much of a, it's not as, it feels more of like an organic media play for basketball in some ways. You know, if you're, the, the, there is a, you know, there was a while where it felt like the NFL was the year-round sport. You know, and then they got totally lapped by the NBA. I mean, clearly the ratings for NFL games are way higher. I was going to say, totally lapped in. But, no, but I mean, lapped in terms of becoming, of actually making it a year-round sport. I mean, you know, hoopshype.com is still posting interesting stuff today, you know, about the NBA. They've managed to sprout the schedule in such a way that it seems like every month of the year has a vital NBA moment, even when there's not games going on.

In some ways, the down, the slowest part of the NBA is like the month before the All-Star break, right? I mean, it's the part that matters the least. So, I mean, clearly the NFL is way bigger. But yeah, I think it's just funny. It's like we finally get back. This is in some ways it's the people who cover the NFL and the fans of the NFL saying, like, let us have, you know, finally it's back. We didn't really get a lot in the offseason or we don't get it in the same way. And now we can, you know, now we're just jumping in head first regardless of whether or not there's any water in the pool.

with that lovely image with that self-destructive image thanks for listening this week's press box our producer patient as always is Jim Cunningham

yeah he is David Shoemaker I am Brian Curtis more hot takes about the media next week see you David see you later man

the Holocaust denial and a nipple are not the same thing I find that deeply offensive cut my life into pieces this is my last resort Losing my sight, losing my mind, wish somebody would tell me I'm fine.

Nothing's all right. Nothing is fine. I'm running it. I'm crying.