The Press Box - 'The Press Box': Anatomy of a Walk Off (Ep. 414)

Episode Date: January 16, 2018

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker examine the journalistic "shithole" that Donald Trump created last week (05:00), the content that attached itself to the Stefon Diggs's walk-off touchdown (23:15), and Facebook's announcement regarding media posts (34:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Bill Simmons. The NFL playoffs are in full swing, and The Ringer NFL show has you covered for all your pro football needs. Sunday night, get Michael Lombardi and Tate Frazier's rapid reactions on GM Street. On Tuesdays, the Ringer NFL show with Robert Mays, Kevin Clark, and regular guest, Danny, break down all the biggest angles on Wednesday. GM Street again on Thursdays. Clark, Mays, and Danny are back at it again. And on Friday, GM Street's Friday focus gives you all the insight you need for gambling, fantasy and everything else. Don't forget about my podcast too on Mondays.

The BS podcast, Cousin Sal and I playing guests the lines. More importantly, the ringer NFL show, subscribe right now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. David, it's been 20 years since Matt Drudge told us that something was going on in the White House between Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton. What do you remember about that very old media scandal? I remember going to the drudge report.com for the first time and thinking, man, this website looks old. I'm just kidding.

But I very specifically remember hearing about it and not quite knowing how to wrap my head around it. And then I went to try to find a computer. I think I found a computer that didn't have internet access, then found one with internet access, and tried to type in Drudge Report, having never seen the words before and failed. Eventually I got there. But I think by that point, you know, I had heard most of the story. It was more of an adventure in like discovering a website than it was really an adventure in like learning news. Yeah, it was amazing, right?

And when you first saw Drudge, you're like, oh my God, this looks like newspapers that were printed 30 years before I was born. Yeah, this kind of design. I love that what Matt Drudge and Harry Knowles were the leaders of the internet. That was at a amazing age. I think my favorite memory is the bound edition of the. Star Report that people were lining up at borders and Barnes & Noble to buy? Just like, I want to know that I am unable to access the internet. So I'm going to go by this book, which I cannot believe that anyone actually on Earth still owns, you know, I mean, there's got to be, there's got to be landfills filled

with bound volumes of the Star Report. Yeah, I'm sure landfills filled with additions of it that never shipped out of the warehouse. I mean, I know from working on book publishing, those, these, these are still rights deals that people trip over themselves for. And sometimes it's, you don't even get the official rights. You'll just publish a government report because it's public domain or whatever. But I remember very clearly in those days going to my university computer lab, which was the extent to which most people had internet access back in the dark ages and seeing signs taped on the wall above the printer that said, please do not print out the Star Report because it was hundreds of pages long. And everybody there working on their term papers was at the mercy of, you know,

the three functioning printers in there to get imprinted out and turned in. And that would be totally waylaid by the thousands of people, presumably printing out the Star Report. I mean, what a weird, what, I mean, and just what a weird moment in time. Yeah, not to mention it's like looking at porn on a public computer. Two more favorite memories for me. One is I was traveling in South America in the summer of 98 when Clinton finally admitted to the affair. And I remember having to learn that from the international edition of Time Magazine, which I'm sure was published, weeks after it happened. The other one was in September that same year, Marien Dowd writing the column where the final words were, these are not grounds for impeachment. These are grounds for divorce.

And looking back on that as, oh, my God, a New York Times columnist could write that and stone tablets and just sort of move the earth, right? Crystallize what everyone was thinking, or a lot of people were thinking, and just kind of, you know, change public opinion like that. I thought that was amazing. Yeah, yeah, it's a completely different era than the one we're living in right now for sure. But that's not going to stop us from changing public opinion today. This is the press box on the ringer podcast network. The press box is the media podcast where you're not allowed to use the phrase, good night and good luck.

We are Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the ringer and three big topics for you this week, David. First, we're going to claw our way Shawshank redemption style out of the journalistic shithole that Donald Trump created last week. second, we look at the content that attached itself to Stefan Diggs' insane walkoff touchdown against the Saints on Sunday. And finally, Facebook told America's journalists what to do. And then it told them to kiss off. Plus, as always, the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But should we start with Trump? Yeah, let's do it, man.

We got to get right in. I call this first topic. He's a shit house because, David, last Thursday, in an Oval Office meeting with senators to discuss immigration, Donald Trump said, why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? Trump then suggested as Josh Dossi of the Washington Post who broke the story rights, the United States should instead bring more people from countries such as Norway. Now, initially, the Trump White House didn't deny the story and later it sort of did with Trump telling reporters, I am the least racist person you've ever interviewed.

Are you racist? I am the least racist person that you have ever met. I am the least racist person. But why do you think these white supremacists, these various white supremacists out there, are supporting your campaign? I don't know because I am the least racist person that you'll ever meet. So I don't know. By the way, I am the least racist, just so you know, I am the least racist person, the least racist person that you've ever seen. The least.

I am the least racist person that you've ever met, believe me. The least racist person. No, I am the least racist person that you've ever met. And you can speak to Don King, who knows me very well, you can speak to so many different people. 19 days out from the election, you've been labeled a racist, you've been called a sexist. How do you respond to that? I am the least racist person you've ever met. Racism, the least racist person.

In fact, we did very well relative to other people running as a Republican. Quiet, quiet, quiet. Now, David, I've never interviewed Donald Trump. But if I had, I don't think he'd be. be the least racist person I'd ever interviewed. I think several sports announcers are in fact less racist than Donald Trump. Anyway, be that as it may. But can we start by talking about various media institutions blushing about whether they should use the word shithole?

Yeah. I mean, I think that there's a certain amount of, you know, performative theater that you see with the, with the various TV channels and radio stations and even, you know, print outlets. explaining how their deliberations and then subsequently their choices, how to use the term, presumably this has all been discussed in meetings leading up to this point. I mean, I don't, I think a, you know, a major media outlet would have been negligent to not have considered what would happen if, you know, if our current president use such language in a public forum, even though this was a private one. But yeah, I mean, it's pretty incredible. I mean, it's, And, you know, it's, it's, it's, I was watching TV and, you know, in the, on, on one of the news channels,

it seemed like between the seven o'clock and the eight o'clock hour, suddenly the shackles came off and they were just saying, shithole left and right. It's, it, it is, it's, it's, it's a very interesting question. Um, I, I almost feel like, you know, the coverage would, uh, the coverage about the, the, the, Trump meeting is less interesting than, or I would be personally more interested just to, you know, be a fly on the wall at the NPR executives meeting where they're making these decisions. Yeah, can we do it like E60, you know, used to do that fake editorial meeting at the beginning of the show, except it's the real one where NPR executives are asking whether they should use the word shithole on the air. I think that'd be fun. I would love that. I love that NPR's rule was that

host could use the shithole once an hour. That wasn't, you know, that was enough. No more than once an hour, plays he could say it, but that's it. Also, the George Stephanopoulos saying that he couldn't say the word on the air on ABC, but sort of apologizing for it and saying he opposed that decision because he thought that was sugar-coating the term. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's, I, you understand, I guess, both sides of that. It's a really weird, you know, of all the, of all the moral stands they make on live television. This is a fairly minor one. You know, if you're if if if if the president says shithole, uh, you know, one would logically think that that, that, you know, give some, uh, entree for news purveyors to also say shit hole. That said, um, you know, it, it's suddenly

you're, you're, you're putting it in your own mouth or the mouth of the network, the, the, you know, the parent company. And, uh, yeah, you'd understand why some people would be a little bit uneasy about it. I think it, you know, it's just a really bizarre, it's just such a bizarre situation we're in, I mean, frankly, as a country that we're like having to have these conversations about whether or not we can just say shithole in front of the kids. Still, yeah, and I feel that this is kind of a rerun of what we did in October 2016 with the Axis Hollywood tape. I went back and looked at the original Washington Post story, which was titled Trump Recorded, having extremely elude conversation about women in 2005, doing everything it could not to sidestep the term.

Also, what's kind of interesting is that with the access Hollywood tape, Trump, when it came out, Trump immediately copped to it. And that's the whole locker room talk bit that came out afterwards now, notorious. But then Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin reported sometime later that Trump was saying, that we don't think that was my voice on the tape after he had become president, which is exactly, what happened here the White House had when the story came out in the post this time had no denial, just kind

of reiterated their talking points on immigration. But then a couple days later started this bizarre semantics discussion, which is whether Trump said shithole or shit house. The latter being

somewhat exculpatory, I guess. He merely said shit house. country, not shithole country. I love that. Yeah, Shithouse at least has a little bit of like personality and nuance to it, I guess it'd be the argument. I don't know. Tom Cotton, I think, was, you know, went on the, went on one of the Sunday shows and did his level best to appease absolutely eaten zero sides in this whole

kerfuffle when he, when he said the most lawyerly thing you could possibly say, he said, I did not hear derogatory comments about individuals or persons know. it's like you know and there's also this word from eric ericson that that trump is bragging about the whole shithole thing to his to his you know billionaire friends on the phone at night um it's it seems like the argument about the the argument about the argument you know obviously the the more the more meta conversation that we are engaging in right now i should say um you know it's it's much less interesting or it seemed you know the stakes for that are are seemingly much lower than the conversation that they were in Trump's office to have about DACA about immigration policy.

But obviously it's a lot less juicy. Now the meta conversation, if I can Bogart the segue here that's more, you know, that might have more significance to, you know, our country as a whole is, you know, the question of whether or not that comment was inherently racist and what it says about our president. I think, you know, obviously there's a, you know, a corollary here about whether, about the, you know, we're talking about things were allowed to say out loud in the media. Yeah. And so we had this another moment, right, Don Lemon going on CNN saying the president of the United States is a racist. This really truly bizarre thing where Trump was signing a proclamation about Martin Luther King and MLK Day of all things. A reporter shouted, are you a racist? Always a great

occasion for that. I guess what I find surprisingly this, Brian Stelter of CNN wrote this. Journalists have covered other racial remarks and controversies

in Trump's past, but this time felt different. And I kind of find it funny that this felt different because I don't actually think this is necessarily

any more morally repugnant than calling Mexican immigrants, rapists and murderers. And weirdly, I actually think it's the profanity that people are

reacting to. I think that weirdly juices up the racism in a way. Do you know what I mean? Because he said shithole, you know, he's expressed the sentiment 500 different ways. But I think because there's a, you know, swear word buried into it, I think in the journalistic mind, that sort of makes it a bigger moment. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, I think that there's two different, there's two totally different angles here, although I don't know how totally different, but certainly there is a,

contingent of the media that is much more concerned about the profanity than the content. And, you know, it's largely the same block that, that was sort of outraged by the entire premise of Trump being a legitimate candidate for the presidency. To think that someone, quote unquote, someone like him, you know, would be there engaging in debates with serious politicians was an outrage to a lot of people. But I also think that there's something, I mean, to take a totally different tact, I think that, you know, some of the things that he said before that are considered, you know, that people have called racist, you know, seems so wacky. You know, I mean, they see, in, in some ways, it just seemed like such a put on, you know, and it's

sort of hard to wrap your mind around anyone believing someone. of the stuff that he said. I think that there's a weird innocuousness to saying shithole countries. I think that it's a weird, it's, it's, it sounds so convincingly offhand and, and, and almost boring. And I think that, that what part of the reason why, at least for me, it's more sort of, you know, disturbing and heartbreaking, um, is that, you know, it is so kind of offhand. It does seem so believable. And it's, and, and, you know, as many people have pointed out, in modern America, institutional racism is, I mean, it's so built in, it's almost boring. It's, it's, it's, it's that sort of offhandness that is, that's the most disturbing

thing about it. Yeah, and I guess there's been this kind of post facto effort for them to sell this in the same way they sold locker room talk, which is just, this is how regular, quote unquote, regular Americans talk. Yeah, I guess. I mean, I see your point. I sort of think, you know,

when he said, you know, immigrants are rapists and murders. That sort of sounded to me like the kind of heartbreakingly offhand remark too. I don't quite know where I fall on both sides. His whole, his infamous both sides thing, whether that was,

I mean, we're talking about just like levels of racist build here. I did find it. So, on the media angle, by the way, I was very amused by this political headline, quote, racism charges swarm Trump as shithole debate rattles immigration talks. So you notice where they put the journalistic condom on that headline, right? They're okay with the word shithole, but they're still leery about calling Trump a racist. Hence, racism charges swarm like that swarming around Trump. I can't help but think about. about Jebel Hill is a lot of people appointed to with this. And, you know, there were certain, it's like, it's like it's taken everyone a year. I, and I don't even think to admit this, but to, but to just kind of convince themselves, they can just go ahead and say it, right?

It's not, it's not, it's like really even an argument anymore. Is Trump a racist? Does Trump say racist things? It's just a matter of people getting over this kind of old media decorum just coming out and saying it. Yeah. I mean, I certainly, I mean, working in a media organization, you can sort of just imagine the, you know, how beaten down the copy desk is at this point after a year plus, you know, I mean, that you can just imagine the sort of the sort of heavy sigh and then having the copy chief saying just like, okay, well, the argument I was making is that he's not a racist. It's just, you know, even if you want to define the remarks as racist, we don't know what's in hit the man's heart.

But at a certain point, you know, am I really going to die on this hill, you know, with this accumulation of evidence? You can imagine, like a darkly comic scene occurring in every major newsroom about this. Yeah, probably the ringers, too, if I know Craig Gaines as well as I think I do. I didn't want to call him out. But yeah. The other thing is, speaking of what lurks in their heart, so we don't need, as journalists, we don't need Trump's permission to call him a racist.

But surely, surely it's important evidence that Trump kind of half-heartedly denies the charges every time they're made about him. Right. And you mentioned the Eric Erickson tweet that he was calling friends to brag about it everywhere, everywhere, right? So if Trump's okay with it, shouldn't we be okay with it, right? Shouldn't that be another reason that it's okay to call him a racist? because he doesn't seem to mind all that much. You know, I mean, frankly, and this is a, I mean, this will probably sound like me, you know, begging off the conversation. But, I mean, frankly, the, the most powerful argument against

calling Trump a racist to me is that it, is that it only, it only leads to an argument about whether or not Trump is racist and not about the substance of his comments or about anything else. It's a semantic debate at that point. You know, his defenders will say, yeah, well, these things were off color, but that. that's just his character. It doesn't mean that, you know, that he's inherently a racist person. I mean, certainly Trump seems to relish in any kind of, you know, attention, especially the worst kinds at times. You think. But, yeah, but, but, yeah, but obviously he himself, I mean, you know, I don't think he's being disingenuous when he says he's the, he's the least racist person

you'd ever interview or whatever. I think that he's, you know, I think that he probably believes Is that just like anyone in the world would like to believe that they're, I mean, well, not anyone, almost everyone in the world would like to believe that they're a, a non-racist person, whether or not their actual beliefs belie that stance. By one very important final note is that my Australian friend Russell Jackson informs me, as I sit here in Melbourne, that shit house, as opposed to shit whole, is a hugely useful and important word in Australia to describe when things go bad. Australians use a word shithouse all the time. So from over here when they were watching the semantic argument come out there, like, oh, shithouse, yeah, it kind of means, it means exactly the same thing. And in fact, it's a word we use all the time. Do you think Donald Trump is courting the international audience by using the term shithouse?

Is this more intelligent that we gave it credit for? Well, yeah, I mean, he would be sort of pivoting back to Australia, right, after hanging up on the prime minister and all that stuff he did early in the thing. Yeah, maybe this is where his, uh, his, his new. international bases. All right, David, it's now time for the overworked Twitter joke of the week, where we celebrate a joke that's so easy to make that everyone on media, Twitter, makes it at exactly the same time.

Our first runner up this week is from listener N2P, who is submitted to us before. Thank you, N2P. David, you must have seen the Wall Street Journal scoop last week that Trump's lawyer paid the former adult film star known as Stormy Daniels, $130,000, not to talk about a, quote, alleged sexual encounter with the president? Well,

everybody made the joke. Finally, someone who worked for Trump got paid. That was a reference to Trump's different contractors back in the day. Oh, man. I know. I know.

Second runner up from listener Peter Baskin. Remember when we had that brief Oprah for president boomlet last week, which still may be going on as far as I know. You might remember that everyone tweeted gifts from Oprah's favorite things with captions like you get free health care. He gets free health care. Everyone gets free health care. Oprah's favorite things being a boundless source of jokes on Twitter. But this week's winner, David, simply because it's sports,

because it was made in so many different forms comes from listener Nick Field, who says any, so any version of this joke, if you had Brady, Bordell's, Foles, and Keenham in the final four, it's time to play the lottery. Our final four quarterbacks are Brady, Bortle's, Foles, and Keenham, just as everyone predicted, which I, by the way, as I, I feel kind of a tribute to the old Bill Simmons joke. Keatim Foles. It's the NFC championship game on Fox. Which next to baga that so-and-so's music may be the most ripped off

Bill joke of all times. So anyway, thank you, Nick. You have correctly identified this week's overused Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, before we talk about Stefan Diggs, a quick break. Have you tried to hire someone lately? It's hard. You post a job. and hope you'll find the right person for the job, but think about it.

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All right, David. Topic number two, I call this anatomy of a walk-off touchdown. Even here in Australia, it was a big deal that Stefan Diggs caught a 61-yard touchdown pass with 10 seconds left to beat the Saints on Sunday. And when you have a moment like that that just stops the sports world in its tracks, I think it's worth us taking a minute to marvel at all the things that happen content-wise. So number one, can we talk about Joe Buck's call? He steps into it, passes.

as the official sports media critic of this podcast, I thought that was nails. You know, Joe did this thing early in his career, as he said before, where he was trying not to emote, where he was kind of doing a Pat Sabarol impression. But that was Joe Buck yesterday reaching for the sky. His voice sort of cracking in that Sean McDonough way as digs ran into the end zone. I thought that was great. It was very, it was, it had a certain sort of poignant minimalism to it as well. I mean, Joe Buck never read a loss for words. You know, it was just some sort of like postmodern poetry.

It was just like, dude, sideline, touched out, you know, whatever. It was, you know, as close as he's going to be to a loss of words. And there was something just kind of, you know, that was perfect for the moment about his call. Absolutely. It's the old thing of it doesn't really matter what announcers say, you know, as long as they say the facts of what's happening. The catchphrase is rarely memorable, but it's the tone of voice. that sort of matches the kind of wonder that you're experiencing when you're sitting there on the couch, right? That's what the real great ones do.

And that's what he was able to do there. Second thing, even observing this from overseas, is the kind of obligatory tweet where you let everyone on Twitter know you're watching the game that everyone else is watching? Yes. When a moment like that happened. So what are the approaches here? There's the one where you just tweet a bunch of gobbledygook letters, right? That was one. our pal Robert Mays had football man

that's a good one yeah what else is it what am I forgetting there's just the there's just the all caps wow but that moment was I mean just floored everybody watching it I mean I was watching from a sports bar at a California ski mountain just happened to go in to catch the end of the game

if you could imagine you know a hundred people who have less in common except for their love of the slopes. I don't count myself in that number, although it was there. And people who were generally not, you know, didn't wake up that day with the interest in watching an NFL playoff game. I mean, I think a lot of people were there kind of accidentally. The whole place was just wrapped.

And if there had been viable Wi-Fi access, I think we all would have been live tweeting that moment. Well, we'll cover offline what you were doing at a California ski mountain over the weekend. Another piece of content, David. Did you see Stefan Diggs's post-game interview? You got to take us through what is the best play of your career. Ten seconds, third and ten. Walk us through what happened after that.

I ran a row. My QB gave me a great throw. God took care of the rest. He watched the play. A guy ran into another guy. I give all the glory to God. I give him the praise on his great Sunday. What was going through your mind?

Were you looking at the Jumbo Trine? You started to run out the tunnel. Explain everything that was going on once you crossed the end zone. I still don't know what just happened. one of the great interviews that I remember seeing. I mean, it's, of all of the post game interviews

that have been passed around in recent memory, I can't, I can't think of one that was more free of irony at the very least, you know, that was more,

I mean, that kind of felt more, more just sort of honest and impassioned. It was, it was really something. Yeah. I make fun of the questions of those things a lot.

It's one of my favorite things to do. But there are times like that when something so mind-blowing happens that the important thing isn't the questions it's the reaction on the guy's face right just you just want to see him you just want to see how he felt and um you just want to hear him cuss in that case damn that shut felt good that was pretty funny um that that's what you want and that interview will never remember those questions or anything like that but just seeing that guy's face was great television and just you don't have to get much more complicated than that he could have

said anything. Speaking of things we'll never remember, we're never going to remember that point after kick, which seemed that, which took about 10 minutes to get orchestrated to get enough Saints players back on the field and the referees to be finished with their, with their necessary review of the touchdown. Now, listen, I'll stipulate that that touchdown, you know, it should have been reviewed. I mean, just like any other big play would have been. But the, you know, the Stefan Diggs interview is all the ammunition you need.

to, you know, to insist that the NFL needs to look at some rule changes for this sort of thing going forward. I mean, I, some of these arguments just get so, just get so silly, you know, about rules changes. It's only, as if they're only happening amongst, you know, podcasters and, and Twitter personalities. And, and, but this is one of those where it's like, I can't believe that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, and I think, and I actually think part of the power of it was that rules be damned, that was, you know, that was, you. that was such a clear ending to the game, right? I mean, there was nobody in the announce booth, nobody watching the game thought for a second

that there was going to be a flag. And as, you know, as soon as it, you know, as soon as it was over, it was over. It was one of those rare unimpeachable endings in the NFL. I mean, those, it's weirdly, it's, you know, for big endings like that, there's, there's sort of few and far between. You didn't think Kai Forbath wanted his moment to come out

and kick the extra point to, bring his playoff I think he was happy I think I think that everybody would have been happy you know just to especially the people

rushing the field probably would have been happy for the game to be over at that point I often think about that what you're talking about in terms of announcers when they do the review

of the last play of the game right? So as we're talking about with Joe Buck one of the big announcer moments is your call of any kind of walk-off event be at a home run touchdown like this or whatever.

But I always think of it when they then go to the obligatory review afterwards, right? So you have the big call and you go to the, oh, wait, you know, let's look at this, which sort of destroys the drama. But you're right, the extra point does it efficiently as well. A couple other notes. One was the attempt to coin a name for the game, right, or the moment. I saw Dan Wetzel doing whiff six on Twitter. I think we need to work a little harder on that. Another was kind of just the weird sort of stuff around it,

which was SB Nation finding a guy wearing a Viking sweatshirt at the Rutgers, Ohio State basketball game who was watching the winning play on his phone. I'm just always amazed at that, by the way, that's kind of a thing. Like, if you were really that big a fan, are you really going to a random Big Ten basketball game instead of watching like this once, this big deal NFL playoff game? I'm always suspicious of people like that. Unless one of your children is playing in that basketball game, then no.

There's no excuse. But I think my other favorite part of this, David, was all the postgame columns where you had to have the obligatory paragraph where you reminded everyone how bad or marginal quarterback Case Keenem is. Like, you had to just like if they make the Super Bowl, we are going to hear the Case Keenum story. He's undrafted. He's twice waived. He used to be on the practice squad. All this stuff. Oh my gosh, you got one major division one scholarship offer.

I mean, we are going to be pummeled with this for weeks. Well, I share your trepidation. But I also say that as far as great sports moments go, Case Keenham as a quarterback really just earned this one, not just with the throw. I mean, the throw was great. But his story, you know, he's an underdog, and it's so rare that you see.

I mean, usually our underdog stories in football are, you know, E-60 segments or something about a guy that made the practice squad after like breaking his leg as a teenager. I mean, it's not, very rarely people reaching the absolute apex of the game. But also just those great photos of him and video of him afterwards being so shocked that it worked. Like that, that's, that's the face of an underdog. You know, that's the face of a, that's the face of someone who is,

as much a part of this like holy shit moment as everybody watching at home and um you know we're all gonna be we're all gonna be tired of this like you said don't get me wrong but um but man i mean that that's that's what we look for as fans is the feeling that like i mean we saw this it was this it was very similar thing in the digs interview it's the feeling that there as as much of a part of it not just literally a part of it but as part of as much a part of the reaction and the shock and the surprise as we are watching at home and it i mean it's it was just really really touching yeah Also, you know, also Case Keenum made himself about, you know, $10 million with that one throw. So, you know, it's, it is a heartwarming story in its own right.

Yeah, that is. It is. It's sort of the expression of, oh, my God, I did it, right? Like, you know, Tom Brady would never say. Yeah. Tom Brady would say, oh, my God, I completed the past. But Case Keatim definitely does. By the way.

Tom Brady would say, oh, my God, my receivers didn't fuck up. Finally, by the way, this doesn't have anything to do with Viking Saints. But I'm sure you notice the video of Eagles owner, Jeffrey Lurrieuery. dancing after his team beat the Falcons. Is there any more bulletproof form of content in 2018 than video that can basically be described as man dances unexpectedly? Like, you know, owner, Doboswini, right? Like that, it's just, I feel that that's, that's just become a part of a part of our

culture that people looking back 20 years from now will marvel over. Yeah, no, absolutely. There was one of, I'm not going to butcher his name, but, Bob Van Mironovic from the Pistons dancing the other day, just doing just like some basic dance moves on Instagram, and it sort of captured the NBA Internet for about 15 minutes. All right, let's move on to our final topic. I call this, I pivoted to video and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.

Here is the short summary of what Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook announced last week. The company has a bunch of social science that says passively reading news articles and watching videos on the news feed may make people. people less happy. And what makes people happy is, and here I'm quoting Zuckerberg, meaningful social interactions. In other words, David, if I post an article from Truth Dig and you see it, that will make you sad. But if I take Facebook up on celebrating our friend anniversary, then you will be happy. Is that about right? Yeah. I think I, I mean, part of the interesting thing about this conversation is we have no idea what the hell they're talking about. But, you know,

But that is the impression that I get. That is an accurate portrayal of my impression, yes. So the problem for journalists is if you downgrade news articles and videos in the news feed, then you, by extension, downgrade us. And I guess where I want to start is by asking you, what should we journalists, we hardworking journalists of the world think about this? Oh, man. I mean, there's so many takes.

I don't know. I think if, I don't know if there's an overarching lesson from. all this. I mean, I think that the obvious, if you want to look at lessons, I think one obvious one is, you know, don't rely on someone else to be the, to be your platform. You know, I mean, I think that one of the things that Facebook has allowed us, and many, you know, internet platforms over the last 10 years, but one of the, you know, one of the, one of the, the byproducts has been the sort of blurring of the lines or blurring of the definition of what constitutes a media company. And that's not to knock any, you know, minor players out there at all. But, you know,

it certainly put the New York Times on par with someone making news-ish videos from, you know, their garage. And I think that the middle ground is where the real interesting action is saying, and it's not just middle-sized places, but, you know, you talked about pivoting to video. There have been a lot of media institutions that have been, that have, that have become entirely reliant on platforms like Facebook to distribute their content. And, you know, whether or not this shift is a, it makes a material difference in their bottom line or in their business model, this should scare the, you know, scare some sense into them, or at least scare some, you know, scare a, scare a new pivot into them because, you know, there's, they can't rely on someone like Facebook to be, you know, I mean,

Facebook's not the the forest that you get your paper to print your newspapers on. You know, Facebook is a, Facebook is its own thing and they can get rid of you as, as, as, you know, at a whim. Yeah, it should scare them and also just make the last several years of trying to appease Facebook look incredibly dumb in retrospect. My old, my old pal, Frank Four, who's become sort of a great critic of Facebook and Amazon and all the online culture brokers wrote this piece in the Atlantic, you know, essentially pointing out that said Facebook said, we want instant article. right. And media company said, great, let's do that. And then Facebook wanted short videos and media companies said, okay, we'll do that. And now as Frank writes, after monkeying with the media

and after exploiting the media's abject reliance on it, Facebook essentially told the media to kiss off, right? And I know the pivot to video thing was this just dumb way of saying you've been laid off essentially, but that looks like such a stupid act of appeasement now. Such a stupid act. I mean, just looks incredibly dumb to go back and to say, you know, we changed everything about our business model because you, Mark Zuckerberg, became our kind of shadow editor. And now you don't want that stuff anymore. So now what the hell do we do? Um, you know, I was Googling around looking for, looking for all of the news I could find on the subject to make sure I wasn't missing anything leading into today. Um, one of the things that popped up in my feed, one of the, one of the, one of my

favorite takes, no, not even a take. One of my favorite articles about this was the Mercury News of San Jose had a helpful article showing us how to make sure to keep the news in our feeds. Like what buttons you, what buttons you had to push in the, on your profile to make sure that you still kept getting good news? Which frankly is something that I will use, but, you know, it's just, but the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the tenor of the whole thing seemed a little bit, a little bit laughable. Um, yeah. I mean, listen, it's a really bizarre situation that many news organizations find themselves in.

We at the Ringer have not fully pivoted to video, but, you know, certainly this is a development that we're keeping abreast of. Not fully, yes. But, you know, it's a, it's a giant shift, you know. And I think that it affects us a lot more than it, than it, affects Facebook, obviously. And I think that all the changes, you know, have seemed like a much bigger deal to those of us in the media than to probably those on the outside. I think that, you know, like you said, there have been, there have been these changes before dictated by Facebook.

I don't know how much the average consumer really notices these changes in their feed other than, you know, really kind of incidental things about complaining about auto play of videos and that sort of thing. I mean, those are the sort of reactions that, that, that, those are the sort of reactions that, that, that you hear out in the wild. I just, I'm not sure. And again, it'll take some time to see if this bears out to be any significant change at all. But, you know, it's, there was a, there was a great article on the subject by Casey Newton on the verge, the headline being Facebook's startling new ambitionist to shrink.

And one interesting note in there was that according to NewsWIP, Fox News Posted more than 49,000 times in December. Certainly, it's that sort of gaming the system that I assume that Facebook is trying, is trying to remedy. Yeah. So Ford pointed that out in his article two. He said, you know, they sort of realized, of course, way too late that they let their site become a tool of this Russian black op to interfere in the election, right? And they had this brief moment where they sort of promise like, okay, we're going to sort out

real news from fake news, right? Because we don't want to be this pipeline for just garbage that makes people think things that aren't true. And what they're doing now is sort of punting all together and saying, okay, we give up. We're just going to downgrade news altogether, right? That's, this is not what Facebook is not about that. It's about, you know, quote unquote, meaningful social interactions, right? Like, that's what it is. And part of it is, I think I read a good calmed by Farhad Manjou in the Times where he talked about how the um you know Facebook has had this kind of slightly mostly public hand-wringing since about December where they're like oh we used to be a force for good in the world now we can you know debate if they ever were but we used to be a

force for good in the world and now we're a force for bad in the world and we want to change that and manju's point i thought was really good where he's saying like Facebook has developed into this really powerful rage machine, right? Like my liberal, my liberal friends posting articles about Trump and saying, look at this outrage. This is terrible. Or my liberal friends actually more likely saying

everybody should read this David Remnant column about Trump. Must read column for me. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I was going to skip that one. Thanks for letting me know that. But it's, it is a really effective tool of making people mad and making people mad specifically about

the news or the quote unquote news. right and so when you downgrade that as Zuckerberg admits in those Facebook posts they're going to lose a lot of traffic they're going to lose a lot of engagement people are going to spend less time on Facebook and I guess their whole thing is what you're talking about where people in the wild quote as you put it um we'll just sort of look at their feed and go oh there's more there are happier things on here there's people posting more pictures of their kids there's more stuff and there are fewer articles uh about politics. So I guess I feel sort of happier witnessing that. Yeah, I mean, I think that based on absolutely no research, obviously, it strikes me that when Mark Zuckerberg is admitting that people

are going to spend less time on Facebook, he probably has some data that says, okay, like our, you know, our core users will spend less time per hour, but we might broaden, you know, broaden the net or whatever so that more people will be spending a small amount of time. It seems like a weird admission. I think overall, in the weird admission category, talking about Facebook being a force for good, talking about how he wants his daughters to grow up thinking that Facebook, you know, was a positive thing. Now, listen, far be it from me to question a man whose, you know, ideals have been changed by having children. Certainly that's happened to many people throughout time. But, you know, we see over and over again that in, you know, a capitalist society that the

the best good that comes out of many companies is PR-driven good. And, you know, I don't think that's anything shocking to say. And I think that there's a lot of different, there's a, there's a lot of different, you know, ways you can look at it. I don't think, first of all, I don't think we can undersell Steve Bannon and others, but Bannon, you know, notoriously kind of giving voice to the public utility argument that, you know, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, not risk any, you know, not, not, not, not risk being, well, regulated, to the extent that they're not already. But, you know, frankly, to me, and I think that you can see this in the way that they've,

that Facebook kind of yanked publishers around over the past several years, I think that at the end of the day, news to them was just a really, it was just a really small beer thing, you know? I mean, I don't know, if I had to guess, then the, the thing that they struggled with is like, why are we wasting all of our ammunition, you know, on fact-checking news instead of just positioning ourselves for the future? You know, I mean, it's like, the thing that's going to make Facebook a permanent institution in our lives is a thing that we probably can't imagine. You know, I mean, it's the, it's the face ID technology that they have a better handle on than everybody else in tech, you know, I don't know what that's going to mean, but they, they have their tentacles,

you know, in our lives in a way that that's, that's going to, that's going to, that's going to, that's going to keep them established. And I think that frankly, you know, this is not a big deal to them. And just keeping people relatively happy and keeping the government relatively happy is the way forward. I think that's right. And I think also just kind of understanding the impossibility of sorting out news sources, right, in a way that would make you and me happy and would make, you know, people in the media happy and then would also make somebody like Steve Bannon happy, right? there's lots of degrees of fake news. You know, there's just super fake news.

And then there's like error riddled Fox News report, right? And, you know, how do you start combing through those things for differences? Yeah. And you're right. I'm sure they look at it as like, this is something that's a big headache that we doesn't, isn't part of our core mission, you know, right? That kind of became part of our core, became part of our mission to some extent because we just became the world's publisher. and we saw that media companies would bend the knee when we asked them to provide content for us, right? To jack up our numbers.

They were willing to make little stupid little videos. And we thought, great, because that's just free and that's wonderful for us. And everybody comes through Facebook. But again, it becomes such a big headache that you just sort of punt the ball down the field. Four goes on to make an interesting point, which is just that this is good for the media. That at the end of the day, because it's sort of the real. realization, or the belated realization that Facebook's not going to be a magic elixir, right? It's not going to save us by itself and that we have to figure out a different way. Not that there's an obvious

way forward, right, for anybody, but whether it's through subscription, whether it's through advertising, whether it's through something we haven't figured out yet, we have to figure out a way to survive that doesn't just mean hooking ourselves up to Mark Zuckerberg's magic machine and that's going to do it. Yeah, that's exactly right. We talk about this a couple of weeks ago in another context, but Google and Facebook together had more than

60% of digital or received more than 60% of digital ad revenue in 2017, which is just kind of shocking. And that's, and to some extent, that's, you know, the nature of the, you know, that just goes to show the power of those two corporations

in our modern lives. I think as publishers, you know, there's some you know, presumably minor extent to which that's money that we've straight up relinquished, you know, by depending on them as a platform. And I think that I don't think that's going to change. I think we're always going to be, you know, to some extent, at the mercy of whatever platform is, is capturing the eyes and ears of the audience that, you know, that a publisher wants. But yeah, flexibility and self-reliance, you know.

I mean, these are, these are the ideals that I think the publishing world needs moving forward. Yeah. That'll do it for the press box. David Shoemaker and Brian Curtis. We'll be back next week with more hot takes about our media. And David and I's detailed plan to increase revenue and engagement across the media spectrum. See you later, David. Have fun in that shithole of Australia, Brian. Bye.