The Press Box - 'The Press Box’: @$$holes Like Us (Ep. 393)

Episode Date: December 9, 2017

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker take a look at Sam Seder's (brief) ejection from MSNBC (02:00), Mike Mitchell's compelling rant on Matt Hasselbeck (19:30), and Facebook lifting its ban on pre-roll video ads (34:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, this is JJ Reddick. You may know me as a basketball player. You may have seen me play during my college career at Duke University or perhaps over the past decade playing in the NBA for the magic, the bucks, the clippers, or the Sixers. Well, today I'm here to tell you about my new show, the JJ Redick podcast on the Ringer podcast network. This is where you can find me interviewing athletes like my current teammate, Joelle and Bede, as well as in-depth conversations with celebrities like the late-late show host James Corden. The very first episode goes live later this week, so make sure to subscribe to the JJ Redick podcast wherever you get your podcast.

David, we're going to talk about the firing of MSNBC's Sam Cedar. What are the most incriminating tweets we could find on each other's timelines? Oh, no. I got some from yours. Are you ready? I guess. At WW Roman Raines is really getting over. He's my breakout star of 2017.

You're out of here, buddy. Oh, man. It's been a nice ride. That's really rough. We don't even need Mike Cernovich for that one. I know. I'm going to wait. I have to scroll back through yours and been just in big chunks here.

Hold on. I think this is a sub-tweet. I'm not at, I'm not sure which of your coworkers is specifically aimed at or the entire staff. But at February of this year, anyone who thinks Chick-fil-A waffle fries are the best fast food deserves to be fired. That's really, that's really weird. It's really weird. It's really weird. It's really, that's strange.

If you go back to 2016, this is a really weird one. This is at Brian Curtis. This is you talking, by the way. The last thing the world needs is another sports media podcast. I'm not sure that's incriminating. It just looks really bad. I just dunked on myself, right? This is the press box, another sports media podcast on the Ringer podcast network.

The press box is the media podcast where you're not allowed to use the phrase, get it first, but first, get it right. we are bright Curtis and David Schubaker of the ringer David three topics today for your inspection and amusement first the firing and unfiring of Sam Cedar of MSNBC

second Mike Mitchell versus Matt Hasselbeck in a locker room rant shall we say and number three our pre-roll problem and yours does that sound mysterious enough oh man people just tuned out of the last segment

all right David number one a segment I finally call Cedar Rapids, just to invoke a terrible pun here. Sam Cedar who does appearances on MSNBC, we found out, paid by the appearance. He came out later,

was fired and then unfired this week. After a strange series of events back in 2009 when a bunch of people were citing Roman Polanski's art as a reason to forgive or excuse

his crimes, Cedar tweeted, quote, I hope if my daughter is ever raped. It is by an older, truly talented man with a great sense of mizon sin. Obviously a joke, right, about the people excusing Roman Polanski. But that did not stop, David.

Certain members of the internet, including one Mike Sternovich, a promoter of the Pizza Gate conspiracy theory. He said his very own k-file referring to the CNN k-file sluice. Unearthed a tweet,

badgered MSNBC with it, and briefly MSNBC freaked out. MSNBC news outlets in general, they're not a company that sells soap, right? Because I got a podcast. I lost a lot of advertisers because it took one email from Sarnovich to them saying Sam Cedars supports rape and they get scared and I can understand that because they're not in the business of trying to assess. They're not news organizations.

Exactly. And I really think there's a real danger here because if a news organization is not willing to take a stand on an assessment that is as clear as you and I walking outside and saying, hey, it's daytime. Right. Then it's all fake news. We're in trouble. Right?

I mean, because if they can't make that declarative statement, what can they do? What did you make of this whole weird very 2017 moment? This is very, very 2017. I think that's the right way to look at it. I think that there's, you know, a lot of, a lot of parallels in, you know, the political sphere to what MSNBC is doing here. Not to draw parallels between, you know, Cedar and any of the other people who've lost their jobs over the past several months.

But you see it, I mean, but there is this sort of like this incredible ingrained fear amongst professional liberals to not be on the wrong side of anything and to just to be to appease at the drop of a hat. I think that this is a little bit bigger, I mean a little bit, you know, more intricate an issue than just the MSNBC side because, I mean, you mentioned Pizza Gate. Cernovich came to, you know, the attention of many people on the internet during Gamergate when he was just sort of one of the kind of mid-level conservative voices who gave them platform. by his attention to them. And certainly, like, he, that's the first time I heard his name, and he, he, you know, scaled the ladder of significance

during that period of time as well, along with some other. Or descended it, yeah. Yeah. But that was sort of like, you know, even during, during Gamergate, that's, I mean, they, a similar, a similar thing happened to Sam Biddle, used to write for, it was writing for Gawker at the time, where they took his tweet that said, bring back bullying and just, like, deliberately willfully misread it.

out of context. This is different because there's no, I mean, at least Biddle's tweet was, you know, if you chose to believe he was being earnest, there was a standalone tweet. But then what they did was, you know, organize followers, fans, whoever was, you know, in the anti-Sam Cedar, in that case, Biddle's side, to contact advertisers, to contact NVC and just send these really plaintiff, earnest emails. They were like, here is, like, I am dismayed to hear that you employ this person. here is a tweet, here is why I'm offended by it, you know, I spend money on your products,

on your, I watch your channel and I cannot in good conscious do it again as long as he's employed. And I think it's that sort of real, it's that sort of, you know, that sort of grassroots campaigning that has the most effect on a corporation like MSNBC. AstroTurf, we call it, right? When it's fake grassroots. Who is reading these emails, by the way? Who is the person in MSNBC is like, man, these people are, these people, these people, these random people seem really troubled by this tweet they found in 2009.

Yeah. I just don't. Who is the person that reads those? And it's like, this is a genuine outpouring of disgust and not this fake campaign. I mean, people are savvy enough by now, right, to understand this? I think it just depends on who sees it first, you know? I mean, it's, like if it gets to a certain, if it gets to the wrong set of eyes or ears without it being, you know, without someone preparing that person. for it, then it can, then the overreaction is sort of natural, you know? I mean, it's, I agree with you

though. We have to be smarter than this in 2017. We should have been smarter than this five years ago for, you know, this sort of thing is, is really easy. And it's very simple for people just to, you know, it's really, it's, it's not that hard to get 5,000 people to write a complaint email, you know. No, totally. A couple of notes here. One is it at the same time the fake controversy was happening. MSNBC discovered that Joy Reid, another one of their contributors, had written legitimately, as she quote called it, I believe insensitive and anti-gay posts about Governor Charlie, former Governor Charlie Christ of Florida. Okay. Yeah. So, and those ran from 2007 to 2009.

Yeah. So there are things on the internet that you could find that would imperil somebody's career or at least make them apologize, right? Like that is actually possible because I saw an Eric Wemple from the Washington Post wrote a com saying, this tweet's been up since 2000. Well, yeah, I mean, that's how Twitter works. You can have done stuff in your past we'll make people mad. So there is a legitimate version of this. The second part is, I like your word appeasement. Yeah.

People dunk on cable news all the time. Yes. The easiest possible target, they do lots and lots of good work, or at least just in mildly diverting work, right? They have been at their worst when they try to appease the Trump administration. This, you know, this is CNN hiring terrible Trumpites, right? And putting them on the air with Jake Tapper. and Brian Stelter and they're real journalists.

Amson Cooper and people like that, right? This is MSNBC scrambling to hire a few conservatives. This is Corey Lewandowski briefly getting a CNN job. That's just pure appeasement. That is we don't, the people who are going to be eternally offended, we're going to make a hire or perform an action that we hope will unoffend them for five seconds, and it never works. Yeah, I mean, the other thing is you, as you pointed out, Sam Cedar is a perpurance,

Perpurance contractor or whatever with MSNBC. But, you know, despite MSNBC's just total flub on this one, in some ways it just sort of reinforces their significance because the only thing people, like, this isn't Sam Cedar's only job, right? I mean, he has a podcast, he has a radio show or whatever. He does his own thing. But the only part of it that people really paid attention to was whether or not MSNBC was formally renouncing him

or then after the fact hiring him back. They go after the big corporation because they know they're the most sensitive. Right, right. And the most alludes. But out of the other side of his mouth, Sernovich, or whoever would say, you know, MSNBC is a dinosaur and nobody cares about it and nobody watches it, you know. Yeah. And they're using its dinosaur values against it. The vestigal limbs or whatever that are, yeah, I mean, it's, that's, that's definitely the case.

I mean, I think that, you know, what was interesting to me was Sernovich's reaction to him being rehired, which was basically. a sort of like, yeah, yeah, like this, I knew this would happen all along, and who knows,

you know, whether or not it's true, sort of doesn't really matter. But the sort of more meta point that he was celebrating was that now the liberal media is not allowed to go after people for past indiscretions anymore

because they've acknowledged, they, emits NBC, whoever, has acknowledged that, you know, stupid things you said in 2009 are not significant.

I mean, which misses the point, clearly. He still didn't acknowledge that it was a joke. But even, To say that, I mean, he did, but that argument sort of misses that. But, but, but, you know, I'm sure we haven't heard the last of this.

No. The next time a Republican congressman gets fired for, you know, or someone like Donald Trump gets, gets in trouble for doing something like the Access Hollywood video, they're going to say, well, you're allowed to make jokes years before and it doesn't matter, which should be set. The takeaway is that they shouldn't fire people for dumb stuff. Yeah. I mean, that's what the takeaway should be. Yeah, I mean, it's not.

You shouldn't be dumb. Yeah. I mean, listen. That's why it's so hard to quantify about social media. You and I've talked a lot about social media policy in the last couple weeks, offline and online. And the hardest thing is there is no such thing as a successful social media policy that I've ever seen. Because where do you draw the line? And this is a great example because jokes are the hardest thing to draw the line.

I could say, don't tweet offensive things about rape. Well, this is a joke. Yeah. So it's actually, and it's actually its purpose is to be slightly offensive. That's the joke, right? That's the joke. So I don't understand like when we do all this stuff. We've been this 100 times this year. There is no social media policy that works. No. It's only your employer's going to look at it. They're going to decide whether they want to tolerate it or not. You hope they don't, you know, get rolled by, you know, weird elements on the internet. And that's all you can do. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, ESPN rolled out a slightly updated social media policy a little over a month ago, largely in response or presuming. in response to the Jamel Hill stuff that has happened that we've discussed. You've written about fairly obviously at great length. The big thing was don't break news on social media platforms.

But there's also stuff in there about expressing personal opinions and that sort of thing. I mean, I think that the real tension. What's an opinion? Yeah, I mean, that's another good quality. Well, the real tension with social media policy is that, you know, if Twitter had magically existed 15 years ago before all of these, you know, media institutions, the influence, before their influence started waning, then yeah, it's obvious. Twitter is where you get to be where you get to be Brian Curtis after hours. You know, it's a little bit of the, little bit about off the

clock, you can tweet with friends, you can make some jokes, you can do whatever. The problem is that Twitter, both because of its influence in media in general, but also because of its, because of its ease of use, because of how simple it is to, like we were talking about with Jamel, much easier to screen grab a tweet than to actually watch your show, you know, and take offense at anything there. Because of all that, Twitter has a greater influence than the actual platforms that these people that journalists are writing for in many cases. Oh, yeah. What are you more likely to see? Sam Cedar's tweets or MSNBC during the day. As someone who watches, you know, a good bit of MSNBC, much more likely to see his tweets, you know, and even the old tweets that get recycled.

You spend time on Twitter. That's the sort of thing that pops up. It's just crazy. I mean, I think it all, but this entire controversy, have been avoided had MSNBC just been like, yeah, we don't care. Like, yes, it's a, it's a joke and poor taste. Or it's a buzz off. But yes. Or if you actually, if you're actually offended by it, like put them in time out, but you don't need to. I mean, but this seems like of all of these cases, the least, the time when it's least

necessary to issue a public apology and to announce a formal firing, he's a contractor who appears occasionally. If you, if you're the president of MSNBC and this offends you to your court. then just send your coworkers an email not to put them on the shows for six months or something. You know, I mean, it's not like it's that. Yeah, but that's, they think they need the public offering.

That's what Cernovich wants, and that's what MSNBC thinks they need to do. By the way, I always love with this social media stuff, this happened with Jamel, Donald Trump is a white supremacist, right? The first thing that's so many useful, our friend Tommy Craggs likes to point out these people on Twitter argue is,

they don't answer the question of, is Donald Trump a white supremacist? Yes. The first question to ask is, Is this against the social media policy as if that was the most important? Why is it up to us as media writers, as observers, as journalists, whatever, to enforce somebody else's social media policy that we don't agree with? It's not. We don't care.

I don't care. That doesn't matter to me what their tastes are, what rules they put out for their employees. Sure. All only I care about is whether I decide that it's worth, you know, that it's, I don't know, offensive. Who cares if it's offensive? By the way, another revealing thing, Cernovich's quote was, it's a bad look, and that's what they want to make it about rather than just say, damn, that's a bad tweet. Bad look and bad tweet is so revealing here. It's not real offense.

Bad look means it's like fake offense, right? That's not a good look. That just means that you're offended on behalf of a hypothetical person who is offended rather than actually offended. Sure. I mean, and one of the problems that everyone has in discussing this issue, and other issues is, you know, when you discuss Mike Sernovich or any one of his ilk, I mean, if you actually, the New York Times story from, I think it was yesterday that the, you know, the headline is MSNBC rehires contributor Sam Cedar, quote, sometimes you just get one wrong.

I love that. But then right there in the related coverage sidebar is who is Mike Sernovich, a guide. I mean, it's every time that they did that, that Sernovich, I mean, there's other people that fit the description, but every time he rears his head, you know, you deal with the questions of Like, are you just giving them a platform that, you know, for someone who's a conspiracy theorist? And in his... Ancient accomplished. Yeah.

And specifically related to this case is there's, you know, no shortage of old Mike Sernovich tweets that are like deeply, deeply offensive. You know, I mean, he kind of comes from this like men's rights activist background where he's like tweeting in defensive, I mean, like defending rapists and all that. I mean, just there's like a lot of weird, a lot of stuff that you could drag up and people have. But I think that... He doesn't have bosses. So that doesn't matter. He doesn't have boss.

Right. Exactly. And I mean, there's a, there is a sort of like... jujitsu about this whole thing, right? Or it's like, I'm just going to attack my opponent's weak. Like, I'm going to attack basically my own weak spot on my, like, find my weakest point and, you know, dog my opponent for it. Sounds like very Trumpian.

Yeah. I said just one more thought on this is it put this in this larger context, too, of journalists making errors on big stories. There was a CNN screw up as we talk about this podcast, as we record this podcast, excuse me, today about the Trump Russia stuff. There's Brian Ross's and ABC's very hyper. profiles grew up the other day, that networks are really afraid of making big mistakes, right? Because the stakes are so high in these stories. So I think that kind of gets flushed into all this, too,

is that they're trying not to, they want to, you know, take all the Trump and the whole administration nail them to the wall. But at the same time, they don't want to make big mistakes, you know, so they're just very sensitive of anything going wrong that would give the right in Trump ammunition. I don't know. I mean, but at the end of the day, it's like, can you, is it, is it so difficult? I mean, the answer is yes. This is a rhetorical question. But is it so difficult for a corporation or a media company just to say like, here's our formal announcement. This was a bad joke.

I mean, this was a joke. It was a joke in bad taste. We're moving on. Yes, it's very difficult. Time now for our overworked Twitter joke of the week, David, where we celebrate, despite the fact that American culture has shattered into one billion pieces, we can all come together to make the exact same jokes about the exact same bits of news. Oh, yeah. Lots of honorable mentions this week.

when Michael Flynn apparently flipped and agreed to cooperate with Robert Mueller's Russiagate investigation, congrats if you posted a picture of Henry Hill testifying at the end of Goodfellas. When the Pontiac Silver Dome, former home of the Lions, failed to implode if you called it the most lions thing ever. Congratulations on that. But our winner, David, we actually have a self-nomination. Oh, my gosh. From the ringer's very own, Zach Mack.

Can you believe this? We get a lot of nominations every week. People nominate others, but they rarely nominate themselves. That's true. The big news this week in sports world, of course, is that the Russians are not going to be coming to the 2018. Winter Olympics. They are banned. Oh, yeah.

And Zach tweeted, but can we ban them from our elections? Oh, my goodness. Congratulations, Zach. Right. Congratulations for joining the monoculture now, bad. Now back to whatever it is you like to do. Topic number two, David, I'm going to call this assholes like Matt Hasselbeck. Yes.

So Monday's Steelers Bengals game was extremely hard to watch, unwatchable, horrific. Depends on what you're watching for. Many, many sort of things came out of that, but one was a particularly memorable Mike Mitchell monologue. At least he's a safety for the Steelers in the locker room. I feel like I got to ask a guy, hey, are you ready for me to hit you right now before I hit you? That's crazy. He defended the game of football. He compared himself to Jack Tatum.

He also denounced, quote assholes like Mass Hasselbeck, who works for Sunday countdown on the SPN, who had said that Mitchell was a dirty player. And at first you're taking our money, but now, you know, I got assholes like Matt Hasselbeck calling me a dirty player and try my character. And we've never met before. Just to be clear, and thanks to ring her intern, Jordan Coley, for trying to start. suss this out for us. I think Mike Mitchell's gripe with Hasselbeck dates back to last month and

a hit that Mitchell made on Chief's quarterback Alex Smith for which apparently Hasselbeck called him a dirty player. And which he was fined for and then the fine was challenged and the fine was rescinded, I believe. Mitchells quote at the time, and this is not his

his, his you know, mematic rant from this week. He said to Michelle To Foley, He said, I was very frustrated with Alex and people in the media, Matt Hasselbeck, we're going to have words next time we're on Monday night football. You don't know me and you call me a repeat offender two personal files over the past three years.

Him coming up to the set of Monday countdown or Sunday countdown would be fantastic. Sure. I endorse that. Let's just have it out, right? Why do we need, you know, it's like, everybody's like talks about Richard Sherman and Skip Bayless a couple years ago. That's okay. That's okay. I think that this is what the real...

I'm not opposed to that. I mean, the real power of Mike Mitchell's, of Mike Mitchell's monologue. I mean, one that he's, like, incredibly charismatic, and this was an... This couldn't have been, wouldn't have been better if Aaron Sorkin had scripted it. You know, I mean, this is a very, very good... He was... He did a great job.

It was really compelling. It was. But I think that the real power of it is that, you know, assholes like Matt Hasselbeck is, like, the easiest target in professional sports and sports media right now, you know, a little bit of... I mean, it has a lot to do with what we've talked about many times before. The decline of ESPN, the fact that ESPN is a perpetual target for anyone's sports grievance. And then, you know, just in general, it's like the talking head versus the athlete and the sort of, you know, and the sort of Donald Trump can, Donald Trump on the NFL sort of culture that we're living in right now.

Yeah. And I think I think it's sort of the moralizing talking head, right? the one who particularly is going to come out and say dirty player or somehow you violate the values of the game in some way because a lot of them don't talk like that no I mean they they don't although you know I was after after Mitchell's after Mitchell's clip went viral you know I was watching NFL live and Teddy Bruskew

Herm Edwards during his uh you know who's a famous on I mean famous on air moralizer we're both sort of like saying you got to change with the game football's evolving and that's part of your job saying this to Mike Mitchell, you know, it's hard to look at people on an ESPN set saying this stuff and not just feel a little bit of a little bit of a sickness in your stomach because this sort of moralizing is functionally like just a 2017 version of he got jacked up, right? I mean, instead of celebrating, instead of celebrating the on-field concussions, now we're taking the sort of moralizing role of condemning them. He got called out. Exactly.

You know, it's a, that's a great point. It's, it's, it's, there, ESPN's an easy target and in some ways a very deserving one, but I think, you know, as we've seen before in these situations, and you and I both talked about, talked about this a little bit, is that, you know, the other villain here is clearly the NFL and they're an easy target too. Yeah, I mean, it's funny because to me, whenever we have an NFL argument, the hardest thing to parse out is that it's really, there's a lot of right and wrong mixed in to every pronouncement about the NFL. Yep. So, I mean, from Mitchell's a couple of things that I took away. One that I totally agree with is that why was Rob Gronkowski's clearly ridiculous after the whistle thing? Why did that merit the same penalty as things that happened in the course of a football game is one thing that he said, right? If I'm in the end zone and, you know, I'm trying to avoid a help me.

I'm trying to make a quick hit and it's a bang, bang play. Helmet to helmet happens. Why do I, why does somebody like me get a one game suspension? And then Gronk, who's just trying to hurt somebody after plays over, why does else he get a one game? game suspension. Why are this the same thing? By the way, I'll quote his, this is Mitchell's tweet. So, Gronk elbow drops a guy off the top rope like dusty roads. Shout out to the mask man.

It gets the same suspension as a guy getting a penalty making a football play. Totally right there. But the other thing he said is he definitely went back to this argument. We hear a lot from football players and ball of fans, which is football is a violent game. What are you going to do, turn it into flag football? He mentioned Jack Tatum. Jack Tatum got in a collision with somebody and paralyzed them.

Like it was like he is the poster man. I won't call him a child poster man for, you know, this old style of football that we've taken out of the game. And, you know, or at least we've tried to legislate out of the game. Now, I understand he is making a larger point about how difficult this is. But after watching that Monday night game, if your point is, sorry, football's violent. I don't know that that's going to do it. You know, I don't know that that's a complete explanation. That's when players on the field were visibly shocked.

By what it happened. Yeah, when you talk about players needing to evolve, I think that the real evidence of a lack of evolution, and this is more of like a, you know, emotional meta sort of evolution. But in a game where Ryan Shazir is maybe paralyzed and maybe his career has been ended before our, our eyes to not register that, you know, maybe a little bit more delicacy is needed both as you play the rest of the game

and as you deal with the concept of you know, particularly, potentially injurious hits afterwards. Now, that's all fine. I think that to me, the really compelling,

I mean, to me, the really compelling case for the NFL's fault in this is just that these find, there's no structure to how these punishments are meted out. And Schaefter talked about this a little bit, on ESPN afterwards where he said that targeting, you know, the concept of targeting may

be maybe up for specific review next season like it is in college. If you're, they can review that stuff and referees can hand out, referees can hand out fines based on that. But more than anything, it's the, you know, the need for what he called an infraction schedule for consistency. I think that that's, I mean, I feel like I discussed this in another context last week. but when you find yourself as a viewer outraged, it's often because you just can't find a,

you can't find a location to place a regular amount of rage or discomfort. And in this case, we don't even know who broke the rules. Mike Mitchell is totally right about this. There's not, this stuff should be spelled out, you know? And the fact that it's not makes it harder for us to wrap our mind around and easier to get just generally outraged about. Now, do we think that spelling this out would be just like,

crafting a social media policy? Well, it's just so much, you know, athletic movement on a field that just defies any kind of bright lines. I think that that's, I think that that's exactly,

I think that's right. When we talk about in-game hits, I feel like I'm pretty, pretty much down the middle on this issue. But I still, you know, you watch things in slow motion and you clearly are seeing things

that you can't see in real time. And certainly, and you're seeing things that don't exist. You know, I mean, it's you can, you can, it's easy to watch a slow motion video and try to pinpoint the moment

where the tackler's eyes went to the helmet instead of the ball or instead of the body but those things, that happened so fast. It's impossible to pin down. I do think you can spell out things like if you do what Rob Grinkelski did, you're gone for the season.

Sure. Oh, yeah. If play is stopped and you attack someone, that to me is the easiest one. Well, it should be bigger. It's easy, but again in the same ESPN segment I keep mentioning, Herman Edwards most, he was, he said, we got to change the way we play. You got to change, if you're not going for the, for the ball, if you're going for the body instead of the ball, then that's your fault and whatever. But he also said, you got to protect star players because if star players are out, then people stop watching games. And that's when things get really sketchy, right? Yeah, well, that, but that just went to a weird moral place. But when you go, but that's, but that's, I mean, in some ways, that's what you need to do. If you say Rob Grancowski, it's not one game, it's going to be, it's a six game suspension. Then maybe that will affect the way that people play the game. Now, obviously. Obviously, that's not between tackles or whatever.

Yeah. And I don't know. I mean, I'm sure there's some Patriots fans. I mean, some Patriotators that would get mad. But it doesn't seem like the NFL, is the NFL punished our players less? And the leading rushers out for six games for domestic violence from last year, right? I mean, it's like, is that really the problem? No, I mean, but I think just, you know.

I think that weird way that makes people matter. I think that what they, but what the NFL at the end of the day really wants is the latitude to not suspend Rob Grancowski if this happens in the playoffs. not him in particular, but on some level, you do need to watch out for, you know, having teams at relative full strength when they're playing for a Super Bowl. And if you have a codified schedule for suspensions, then it complicates that.

It complicates the marketing value of some of these games. Right. I mean, we saw a version of that in the World Series, right, where Yuleiguriel makes this racist gesture in the dugout and they say, we're not going to suspend you during the World Series because this is too important, right? You can do your suspension next year. I'll make just one larger point before we move on about athlete rants against reporters.

Go for it. Which is just that there was this culture on the internet that whenever for a while, that whenever somebody in a locker room said something about a media member, this is like Russell Westbrook, and we can name 100 different examples, they would just be cheered on on the internet because, aha, I'm sure the reporter deserved it. Or I'm sure the talking head on TV deserved it. They didn't always deserve it.

and it's worth parsing through what the guy is actually claiming and what the person actually said. This is another thing I disagree with Mike Mitchell with. He said, this guy doesn't, Hasselbeck doesn't know me. He called me a dirty player, but he doesn't know about all the money I give to charity and stuff like that.

You can watch the games and make that conclusion. I'm sorry. That's just, you know, now Hasnwick may not be right or maybe wrong, but somebody can watch you on TV and come and make an argument about whether you're a dirty player or not. I don't think that's,

I don't think that's out of the question. Vante's perfect. Does he, I don't know, Vante's perfect. I've never talked to him. I don't know how much charity money he gives out. But come on, man. Come on, man.

I agree with you. I think I would just say that part of the, like, again, the lack of definitions in this whole thing is what really complicates the situation. Because you can call some, because you're left having to call someone a dirty player because there's not a rubric for what you get, for what they've actually done and what they actually are in any sort of like system of rules. That makes sense. You know, I mean, dirty player. I mean, dirty player is... There's no misdemeanor. There's no felony, so you're left with some really broad term that could mean literally anything.

And honestly, dirty player is one of those things that, like, it's a phrase that you can toss around with your friends with minimal significance. But it is the sort of phrase that you can... If someone says it on ESPN, accuses someone of being a dirty player, you can understand how that person would take it much more personally than it was intended when it was said out loud. It's not exactly a term of art, but it's certainly a loaded phrase when it's used in the wrong context. Sure. Totally, totally. Maybe rather than dirty ballplayer, the thing you should do is say that was a dirty play. Rather, so pick out the sin rather than making a broad statement about the guy.

I'm the dirtiest player in the game. I know one thing. Win at all costs. Now, David, before we move on to our next topic on pre-rolls, here's a mid-roll ad. I'm Mallory Rubin, deputy editor of the ringer.com. Joining me today, now that he's finished gazing upon the porzing god himself in his care of magical creatures class, it's Ringer staff writer and your maister, Jason Concepcion. And we're here on urgent business.

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In spring 2018. Akio binge mode! Protect Hegel. Jason, I have some. Very distressed. news for you. Topic number three, David. Pre-roll.

Oh. Everybody just turned off the podcast. Now, this was a headline in Ad Age the other day. Facebook to lift longtime ban on pre-roll ads. And you sent me a note and email. I think there's an interesting convo about advertising in the digital age and how pre-rolls have basically

stopped being ads and become ransom. Did you just sign up for the premium plan on YouTube, Hulu, etc? Hot take. What did you mean by that, David Shumman? I mean, listen, it's not just, that was one of many articles that we kind of all saw at the same time about, you know, BuzzFeed not meeting their profit goals, Mashable being sold for, you know, a fraction of what they were valued at just a short time ago. Lots of layoffs all over the media landscape. All this is like failure to meet advertising numbers.

And now Facebook does this. I mean, there's two different things. I mean, there's many more than two different things, but there's that, there's the, you know, the monolith of sponsored advertising and advertorials is not panning out in the way that we thought it would. And the flips and the other half, we have Facebook now allowing pre-roll ads, which goes against the very soul. I mean, everybody says this about Facebook every time they change anything. But of just being able to scroll through your timeline and watch a video, you know, watch five seconds of a video and then choose to move on or not. You know, I mean, that's how it's, that's how the site, how the mobile app is constructed. And they're talking here, I think more specifically about when they're doing Facebook television

style shows. They're doing broadcast. It's not just not the stuff in your timeline. But to still, to take the prohibition off that, it just opens up this larger question about like, how are we subsidizing the internet in 2017? You know, how are we, how are any of us paying for what, we do. Yeah, and I like how we have to be kind of sheepish about it. I was looking at the Hulu, you know, sign up today. So for $11.99 a month, you get no commercials. I pay for that. For $7.99 and for a special low price right now, $5.99, you get what is called, quote, limited to commercials. But I love limited. Limited from what? You know, limited from whatever Hulu decided to give you. Yeah. Limited versus what you see on television normally. I mean, it's just,

I love the, you know, the language of that is very funny to me. I mean, it's funny how angry ads make people now. Because I feel you and I, I don't always pull out the old guy card on this podcast. We got it. Why not? Why not? But that's our lane. Remember how passively and mostly happily we used to watch advertising on TV?

Yeah. I mean, I still can impress my wife by how many jingles I can sing from the 80s. Even like local Dallas 4th mattress companies and stuff like that. Furniture stores. Bag car, local car dealerships. Car dealerships. David McDavid. Yeah, absolutely.

But now it's gotten to this point where, and you and I are probably one of them, you just get really pissed off. Oh, yeah. When you see a commercial. Just furiously angry. Yeah, I mean, that we're in journalism. We understand that to fund this,

you have to put up with a certain level of advertising. Oh, yeah. Well, there's nothing. I mean, listen, I did, like I said, I subscribed to Hulu Premium. I was Hulu free initially and you just had to watch the ads and they've changed? I don't even remember how it worked.

But I used to subscribe to the 799 plan. And then as the ad volume in, first, and this is not just a Hulu problem. This is how online video works. It was the same ads over and over again. And more than anything, they were just sort of placeholder ads for like, just so they could show future advertisers. Like, this is where your ad would go when like the 13th Chevrolet ad is running, you know?

Like this is, you know, and sometimes back in the old tech days, this is why, I mean, why people are mad is partly because technology is bad, right? You go on some streaming platforms and you just get caught in a loop of advertiser, like the same commercial plays over and over again. That's the worst. You got to reboot. You got to reload the page and then, you know, and then you have to rewatch the show if it's something, you know, they don't let you skip ahead. That's old internet too. But I would watch, I would watch these commercials. But then as the volume increased, I was just like, you know what, I'm here for this is, I basically go, you know, at that point was watching Hulu for work purposes. I would watch, watch, watch Monday.

night raw the next day. It was easier than setting my DVR. I could watch it on my phone, you know, whatever. So it was worth the extra couple of bucks. And it's a pleasure to watch all that stuff without commercials. You know, it's a, and it's, it makes it really easy. But you start to view the commercials. This is what I texted you as a sort of like ransom, you know? I mean, when they're, when, when every, when half of the ads that you see on, on YouTube, or trying to get you to sign up for YouTube premium or whatever they call it, you know, when they like, when they, when they, when they really, really push this stuff at you, then it is sort of infuriating. And I wonder if some people just like toggle away, go to a, go to a different website, or if they all just eventually succumb like

I do, you know, or borrow a friend's login, whatever. But, you know, one of the things that came up, and this is, I'm going to kind of zoom out a little bit, but one of the things that came up in the pieces about BuzzFeed and Mashable and all the various websites that aren't hitting their ad goals is that a lot of advertisers are going, instead of going to websites, they're just going straight to Google and Facebook. Like, that's where all this ad money is being invested now.

And it makes sense. You know, why would you give money to, you know, whatever, Brian Curtis.com to advertise when they're just going to be advertising on Facebook anyway, just give the money to Facebook, you know? And I think that that's part of the, that's part of how YouTube and Hulu and Netflix, they all kind of have us wrapped around their fingers, right?

Because they're, we're getting to a point where, All these websites are sort of monopolies, and everybody that doesn't have the absolute power of a Facebook is struggling to figure out what our revenue structure is going to be. Absolutely. By the way, related, remember the first time you heard a podcast host read an ad? Yeah. How jolting that was? Yeah. Remember when it was, yeah.

Like, oh, wait, we're all commercial pitchmen now? I think it was the first time where, despite, you know, audio not being a new, I mean, audio is not new. podcasting was a very new thing for a while. I think that was the first moment where I realized that we're just doing radio, right? I mean, it's like, where have I heard this before? Oh, Howard Cern, we're doing live reads, you know, or not even live, it's not live, doing ad reads.

To realize that the same calculus applies to podcasting from an advertising side as it did to radio a hundred years ago and, you know, up into the present day, yeah, is a little bit jarring. I was incredibly jarring for me. Because it was usually a writer that I really liked. And all of a sudden, I was like, oh my God, you know, this is the new price, right?

It's that you get to read it. But weirdly, I think we don't hate those ads, right? Because someone you like is saying the ad. We tolerate them a little more than you would, random Ford truck commercial stuck on the front or in the middle of a video. Well, the biggest, I mean, the difference on podcast, to be frank, is that you can fast forward through them.

Yeah, I guess that's true. They're not stuck. I mean, listen. I think I weirdly wind up listening to all most of the ads. Yeah, because you're doing something else. Your hands aren't free or you just don't care enough. You know it'll be over. soon. But if man, if the Apple podcast app, and obviously they have competition in that field,

but if podcast apps start making commercials unskippable, then the world will come crumbling down. Like, people will be so outraged by that. You think they'll be mad at us? I don't know. The unavoidable commercial or advertisement is such, it feels like such a dinosaur now. And forever, you know, we talked about this a little bit before the show, but journalism was propped up maybe artificially for decades by the existence of these giant print ads. They would go out and sell ad space. I'm sure they didn't have to defend the concept of ads to Jaguar when they're pulling out a two-page spread in the middle of the sports page of the New York Times

or a glossy magazine or something like that. They didn't have to defend the concept of advertising to potential advertisers. No, and though I think readers, you know, I remember being frustrated by magazine ads as a kid. You know, on those big fat Sunday papers, which now God to have a big fat Sunday paper again. But they were just full of ads. I remember like, okay, okay, okay. You know, flipping through it or whatever. And certainly in the first part of the 2000s when you would start counting,

when you could jokingly count pages in the latest issue of ESPN the magazine or whatever it was and realize that it's fully half full color ads. Yeah. And it's not just that magazine that happened with a lot of places. You know, you pick up a copy of whatever, Vanity Fair. There's a whole lot of full page ads in there. It's weird because those things are sold with the expectation that most people are just going to flip past them. You know, but I got this cache of vintage Sports Illustrated as the other day at a used bookstore.

First of all, it's incredible, just the visions of masculinity they were selling. This is like circa 88, 80, 89. They'd have like a jet ski, you know? Like, how many people, you know, where are you that you're just so easy to get a jet ski? I'm not a little lakes in the United States. I just love that that was big enough to be in one of the biggest national magazines. Jet ski. A lot of, a lot of camel cigarettes, obviously.

A lot of motorcycles, right? A lot of good cars. There was some boating, a lot of boating kind of stuff. You know, it was a real man's man kind of vision of advertising. Yeah. It's all, I mean, it's all aspirational. I think that's where the jet ski thing comes from to eventually get to the point where you can get that place on the lake and ride your jet ski around or whatever. someday we'll have her own jets keys.

Even in the cigarette ads, it's not just, you don't know, you don't aspire to be a smoke, but maybe you aspire to be that guy in the ad, you know, or to drive that. Marlboro man. Yeah, to drive that car to have that motorcycle. I think that maybe this is getting way too meta, but the question right now is just like, what the hell do we aspire to? I mean, most people, they go online and they're like, I aspire to watch this YouTube video right now and not after a 30 second ad.

That's my aspiration. Yeah, it's hard. on the video in pod ads, it's hard to think of the particularly aspirational role model. It's all very, it feels more just like, you know, smart, helpful things, stuff you get in your stocking from your mom, right? That kind of stuff. Well, there's so many people now who also, I mean,

it has to be mentioned who use ad blockers for the browsing of the internet. And that's, you know, a lot of these ad blockers are very intelligent now where you can sort of choose to opt out of them for certain websites to make sure that your preferred sites get the ad revenue, get the clicks, get whatever else. It all is very, very, I don't know. It's just like, it's a very, it's a very weird point of view for the way that we engage with content that we like now, that we like, we want the content, we don't want to subsidize

it. And it's, it's a sort of postmodern, just, I don't know, just entitlement that it's a, and we all, we're all guilty. I'm not trying to, you know, point any fingers. But it is very strange. And we all know that feeling that when a new advert, like a, like a, You know, a site that you're not used to having a bunch of invasive ads, you click on it, it has the full page overlay of the homepage.

You know, we're like, we're going wall to wall with animated new Star Wars ads today or something like that. And you feel like you've been duped, you know? You feel like you've been, that someone tricked you into walking into a, you know, just walking into just like consumerism zone when all you wanted to do was read a blog post. I'd say in closing, if 2017 was the year of pivoting to video, one of the most horrible horrible trends ever

which we had like 19 examples of this year we are also then pivoting to pre-roll right I mean that means there is more of that in everybody's life like you are you know as an editorial operation if you are still in fact an editorial operation at some extent you're saying okay we can't get enough money by publishing words

so we're going to pivot towards these things these pre-roll ads right that you're talking about and that's that has weirdly become an end game in journalism again, I use the word journalism advises. The end game is, we need the money. That's where the money is. Let's have more of those.

And that's like, that's what one of the saddest things I could possibly say about 2017, I think. Pre-roll just as, yeah, I mean, it's the only kind of advertising online that you can't get away from. And it is, it does feel like, it does feel a little bit like ransom, but until we figure out a way to, until we figure out a way forward, I think in some ways we're stuck with it. That concludes this hostage video. David Shoemaker, Brian Curtis, back next week with more hot takes about the media and all other assorted subjects. We'll see you then. Bye.