The Press Box - 'The Press Box': Heroes and Villains (Ep. 408)

Episode Date: December 28, 2017

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker look back on 2017 by reflecting on the ideas of the journalist as a hero (01:30) and the journalist as a villain (19:30). They wrap up the show by discussing the problems with "best of" lists when it comes to journalism (32:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, we don't believe in year-end media awards, but if we had to hand them out to each other, what would they be? Best Sports Media Podcasts of the Year? I think I'll allow you to accept that on behalf of me. I think we finished like 4th. That's probably true. Honorable mentioned Best Sports Media Podcasts of the year. We still get a trophy, please?

Yeah, most overworked ringer employee, David Shoemaker. People who don't sit in here and will see the haunted look in your eyes Is art requests come over the transom while you're recording this? I might miss that fact. At least I'm having fun. Best segment we made up two minutes before it started. Does that go to the one we're doing right now? I was going to say all of them, but yeah, I guess that's right.

You're hearing the result now because 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, here are some of the best pieces I wrote in 2017. David, this is our year-end edition. I'm excited. You're so excited. Three topics for your inspection and enjoyment about the year that was in media. Number one, the journalist as hero.

Number two, the journalist as menace. And number three, why we're not doing a best of list. I appreciate that. That'll be kind of an anti-segment. Let's start with the journalist as hero. If there's any story about 2017 that I'll remember first, and probably because it's the nicest. It is the one that Stephen Spielberg has made a movie out of.

Yes. The most highly classified documents of the war. The Times have 7,000 pages detailing how the White House has been lying about the Vietnam War for 30 years. The way they lied, those days have to be over. The heroic journalist, the truth teller, the one who's standing up to the President of the United States, even while the President of the United States tweets up. about them. First of all, should we talk about how this happened?

Yeah, go ahead. Take a stab at it. I don't, because I don't think of journalists as particularly heroic characters. And it sort of took Donald Trump to make them into one, right? Yeah, every hero needs a villain. And guess what? We got the biggest villain of all. I mean, it's funny because I think now especially, we live in this time where it certainly didn't start with Trump.

where journalists are, you know, horribly in the tank, right? Yeah. For the liberal New York Times, the failing New York Times, for the liberal Washington Post. And yet somebody like Maggie Haberman has carved out this niche in the popular imagination. And, you know, probably deservedly so or mostly deservedly so. As somebody who's holding the president to account and holding his feet to the fire and breaking news out of the White House, which leaks like a sieve. Yeah. But, you know, I don't remember.

I don't remember that model during the Obama administration. No, I mean, I think that, I don't know if it's in the popular imagination so much as it is in reality. But it's, you know, certainly there's during the Obama administration, you know, opposition news, the news that was holding his feet to the fire that would have been holding his feet to the fire, be it at Fox News or whoever else, I think, was a little bit more. of a caricature in their way, you know? I mean, it wasn't the same. It wasn't, it, it, it, there was no Maggie Haberman of, you know, the Fox News primetime block. No. It was also because Obama was less venal than Trump.

Yeah. I mean, that's the thing is right. It's like to set up the journalist as hero, you have to have somebody who's just doing. And let's say, let's say even if you like Trump, even if you're in that shrinking 35% that just has more crazy news out of it. Yeah. Out of the White House that the journalist can break. Right. I mean, I think to the extent that, you know, there's a lot of Trump fans that are excited no matter what Trump does because he's, you know, messing with the status quo. He's breaking, he's destroying norms. And I think that for a lot of journalists, Maggie Haberman's a great example, who have been around for a while covering this sort of thing. It's the kind of thumbing your nose at the norm is whether deliberately or not that make some of the best copy. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

There's a couple of models of the journalist as he rose, circa 2017. There's, I would say, Haberman and like David Ferenhold of the Washington Post. And that's really the old model, right? This is a great newspaper reporter who has great sources or is doing really smart investigative legwork and is pulling news out of the White House. The Trump administration has also done another one, which is person who is there when Trump official does something totally insane. Like Ryan Lizza, who was recently to let go by the New Yorker. like Anthony Scaramucci calling him up. Sure.

And again, good for Ryan for recording that and putting that out there. But that's just like I was just a witness to something that was just completely insane and inexplicable. Yeah. I mean, there's been a lot of that. I mean, it's with, it seems like you just get a, you know, an inch into the Trump administration into their circuit, into their orbit. And sometimes, you know, you're gifted with what would in any other administration, be a time-altering story. Yeah.

I mean, and also, I mean, let's not forget that there's also the journalistist's hero when, I mean, there are people like Katie Turr who covered Trump throughout the campaign. There's another good one. And was,

you know, victim to direct attacks by him on the campaign trail, you know, over a microphone in a room full of rabid Trump fans. And she's, you know, I mean, she's a,

I mean, a great journalist. and emerging, you know, TV talent. But she's got a book deal now because of this that just came out. She's, I mean, part of her, part of her, part of the legend around Katie Tour is that she, you know, had to stare down Trump, you know, and his, you know, various attacks on her. And whether or not they were good-natured or not, you know, she was part of that narrative. And I'd say that that's a different model, which is the person who was attacked by Trump and didn't flinch. Yeah.

Like, that's Jamel Hill, too. Yes. Right. That's Katie Turr. That's some people that kind of survived the whole thing on the trail and, you know, didn't flinch in a withering assault from the president of the United States. Sure. That's an amazing model. Some more models.

I think we all make fun of, you know, I went to rural Alabama to meet the last person who supports Trump piece, right? That became a, you know, figure of comedy on the internet. But I do think the one, the kind of thing about going into America. and explaining these movements that have now been given new life or at least new support. So it's like Luke O'Brien writing about the Making of American Nazi and the Atlantic. Oh, yeah. You know, this idea that there's this fringe out there that we don't understand and we want to understand it more. And we see the, we see like the muffed version of that in the New York Times.

Sure. And there are good versions of that that, you know, don't pretty things up and don't, you know, do the kind of cute side step, but actually, you know, explain how these things came to the fore. And that's been a kind of fascinating, near heroic, journalistic mold in 2017. Yeah, I mean, that's totally true. There was the vice, the widely circulated vice video at the Charlottesville protest. Oh, yeah. Elie Reeve.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, she, like, you know, literally stared this guy down for, I'm sure, many, many more hours than we saw on that video. I mean, there is a certain, just sort of like, very old-fashioned brawage. bravery that's built into that sort of, that sort of journalism. Yeah. The other one I'd say as a hero is kind of the cable news truth teller. Yeah. Like Jake Tapper has all this new gravitas.

Yeah, it's true. In the Trump administration, like he was always good. But really the last year or two, you know, when he's standing up there, you know, sort of just directly contradicting Trump. You know, what was his great interview the last, this year with? Did he have a great Trump official interview? he was making a look. Oh, well, it was because Roy Moore's spokesman, right? Like, that was a good that was a great moment for him.

That was, yeah, that was a, it's a great recent example. Yeah, Chris Hayes is another one. You know, anybody who's kind of, it's like, it's kind of the oldest why I kind of miss Keith Oldman once in a while. The old Oberman thing, you know? Yeah. Look into the camera and just let this guy have it. Yeah, but I think the distinction between Jake Tapper and Keith Oberman or whatever,

and this kind of goes without saying is that you know, there's more of an impartiality with your Tapper characters. And, you know, I think in the era of Trump, you know, there's a lot of power to, it's not, I mean, speaking truth to power kind of takes on a new meaning, right? Because when you're actively, when your, when your task is just saying the, saying, describing reality in the face of an administration that, that seems to be at odds with it, more often than not, it's, there, there is just a sort of, you know, rather than just the,

the traditional, you know, golf clap at a, at a piece well reported, we have a sort of standing ovation. But just think about how amazing it is that you've made the cable news host into this kind of not comic character. The old Chris Matthews model of like, well, this is kind of weirdly entertaining maybe or Bill O'Reilly to like, oh, wow, this guy's getting some answers. Or gal, this person is getting some answers. This person is what they're saying is really, I think Brian Stelter is probably in that category on CNN. And on the flip side. Don Lemon has had moments of that, which is kind of also near miraculous. Yeah.

I mean, and on the flip side, you know, we talked about Tucker Carlson on the many episodes ago on this show. But he's sort of taken on the mantle of the, you know, heroic truth teller for the other segment of, you know, for Red State America. Yes. I mean, they don't want to talk about Hillary Clinton anymore just because she's not in power or running for president. Right. But I'm going to talk about her. Yeah. There's definitely a Red Cape aspect of what he's doing there.

I would create another heroic journalist category for people who dunked on Trump on. Twitter or dunked on conservatives on Twitter. You mean, I feel like Jeb Blun sort of had that corner of American life. Sure. Sure. A lot, yeah. But now we're all Jeb Blun now. Like, everybody, it's like you earn your spurs by just having a really funny or, you know,

it could be James O'Keefe, right? Yeah. You just like, tee them up, baby. Here we go. Sure. I mean, and part of it, I mean, it's sort of relates to the overlooked, I mean, overworked Twitter joke of the week. If you can be out there first and if you were, you know, a person with a platform,

and you can be out there first with just the most perfect dunk, then that, you know, that might be on your tombstone. Yeah, I'd also say there's another, yet another category for like, you know, just, again, I don't know if this came to the fore, if it's just being done really well right now, but sort of the really good magazine piece that explains some aspect of Trumpism. Yes. Jason Zangarly and on Carter Page as we sit here.

Uh-huh. Bing Yorker piece on Mike Pence. Yeah. Which is really sort of interesting and helped understand a lot of Molly Ball. wrote over the last year about Democrats and Republicans alike. Okay, Coppins at the Atlantic. Like, there's just like this, that genre to me has been kind of reinvigorated. Or maybe I'm just like, maybe it's we're all just pouring through it more now.

Yeah. That's going to have been kind of a heroic mold. I mean, I think certainly in the era of Trump, those things are on the, you know, the community radar more so than they might have been under previous administration. Either passed around like Somistat, you know, like here, here's the truth. You know, read this New Yorker. I mean, and we're mentioning all those names. Let's not leave out Tanaasi Coates, who in some ways sort of blazed the trail of, you know, the long-form essay or work of journalism that in the modern world, in the modern media world.

Not like James Baldwin. Yeah, no, no, exactly. But that, you know, can argue a case down to the minute detail and sort of get everybody who engages with it and then subsequently engages with Twitter or the online reaction to it sort of standing and at attention. He's his own category. Sure. For rogue journalism, the truth, in the Trump era. Yeah. I mean, I still remember when he wrote the case for reparations.

Yeah. Having been a veteran of the new republic, which let us say did not endorse the case for reparations when I was there. And everybody all of a sudden was like, yeah, that sounds right. And you're like, what? Wow. Not everybody said that. Not everybody said that, but lots of people on the left who were skeptical of that idea came over to it.

And it showed just his amazing power. Yeah. and his amazing writing ability in the way he could make arguments. Yeah, I mean, and one of the kind of undercurrents behind all of this is just the sort of, you know, the black and white nature of journalism in general now, that depending on what side of the political spectrum you're on,

you have your heroes and your villains, everything is split, you know. So you mentioned Jamel Hill earlier. She's obviously not strictly, I mean, politics, journalists, by any real definition, but, you know, she took a bunch of big hits this year but became more of a hero in the process. Oh, sure. And I think that you see that on, you know, in politics and in sports media too. I mean, it's, it's a, if, you know, there's going to be people taking swings at you and if you can stand up to it, then it's sort of, that's in some ways sort of legitimizes the entire journalistic endeavor. The last heroic journalist microgenre.

got to be the conservative apostate, right? Charlie Sykes. Yeah. David Frum. Long time apostate. Yeah, because it's like somebody, I was thinking it was actually David Frum wrote about this the other day that like there was this group of hardcore never Trumpers. And a lot of them have become, have kind of melted away.

Yeah. Some of them have just become Trump fans because that's where the market is. Yeah. And some of them have become, you know, the kind of thing of let's just attack liberals all the time. Like Trump is, you know, Trump is terrible, but your argument is a few degrees off here. So I'm just going to attack you because my audience likes me attacking the libs. But the true conservative apostate, sure, who is kind of hung in there when the Fox News contract dries up. Or he gets attacked and suddenly realize he doesn't have an audience.

That's an interesting type of 2017. Yeah, I mean, you can look at the conservative talking heads that have all found homes on MSNBC, for example. I mean, Jennifer Rubin, who's got a regular seat over there. Did not see her being an apostate. Yeah, I mean, Hugh Hewitt has a show on MSNBC, although he's the fur, I mean, he's probably the least of, you know, in the apostate category of all the people that we've mentioned. He's still, you know, defender of the conservative cause. He basically just works for MSNBC. Yeah.

That's his apostasy. But there's, you know, there's a lot of those people over there. David, we're recording this before Christmas. So we will not have an overworked, Twitter. joke of the week this week. I know people are shutting off their phones and disgust right now.

We thought we'd try a little something new. Call it funny headline crystal ball. You ready for this? All right. How's this going to work? Well, you and I are both obsessed with punny headlines, by which I mean pun-filled headlines.

Yes. We're the only two people in the world who live together and just kind of made up weird puns of weird pun headlines and just gave them to each. I hope that it's not true, but maybe. Yeah, maybe we're carrying the flame. Anyway, what we're going to do is read each other a brief, a brief sort of summary of a

news story that's happening in the future. All right. And then the other one's going to have to guess the funny headline of this hypothetical news story from the future. Are you ready? Okay, I got it. I got it. Okay.

Here we go. You ready? Sure. February 1st, 2018. This is not very far off in the future. A semi-disgraced former. Minnesota Senator runs for the seat he vacated

despite the protests of women and Senate colleagues. What is the funny headline? All right. I got the context. I'm going to go with all right, I'm going to go with Franken, colon, my dear, I don't give a damn.

Wow. You got it. Thank you. Drilled it. Perfect. Wow, that was amazing. All right. All right, I got one for you. Okay, go for it.

Let's say this is September 1st, 2037. Okay. Wow. 20 years from now. All right. A disgraced former morning show host is spotted in the French Riviera. Wow. A disgraced former morning show host is spotted in the French Riviera.

is spotted in the French Riviera. Yes. What is the funny headline? All right. I think I got it. All right. Where in the world is Matt Lauer? All right.

That is correct. That is correct. Got it. All right. Got another one for you. June 1st, 2025. Wow, this is a shocking story. Former President Trump apologizes to and announces he would like to enter into a business relationship with noted NFL protester Colin Kaepernick.

Wow. Wow. That's a heck of a story. Apologizes too and wants to enter into a business relationship with Colin Kavern. It's a great scoop. Whoever gets this in 2025. All right. Let me thank Trump. Get your puns working here, buddy. Man. Oh, wait, I got it. The Art of the Neal. Yes. That's correct. K-N-E-E-L.

The Art of the Neal. Oh, my God. That's good about that one. All right. You just got promoted at the ringer. All right. Last one. Let me turn.

Okay, here we go. December 21st, 2117. Whoa. A hundred years from now. I was going to say. A full century from now. A hundred years from now, a group of devoted fans

offer some touching words at the funeral of our very own sports guy, Bill Simmons. What? Yeah, this is at the funeral of Bill Simmons, a group of his diehard fans get up to send him off in the most emotional way possible. Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay, this is way down the line. Way down the line.

A group of devoted fans offers touching words at the funeral of the sports guy Bill Simmons. What would be the funny headline? I think I got it. You ready? Yes, go. Yep. These are my eulogist. That is correct.

We will accept that. Yes. Drilled it, baby. All right. That is funny headline crystal ball. Can't wait to play that with you again in 2018. Our second topic today, David, is another 2017 retrospective. The journalist, not as hero, but as menace.

Ooh. So that's a flip side, right? Yeah. If we had journalists canonized and lionized and as brave truth tellers, we also saw them shat upon, if not fired. Right. And called all kinds of things like fraud. odds and in the tank politically and everything else.

Once again, I know this is going to surprise you as an observer of the media, but this starts with Donald Trump or flows from Donald Trump, right? The failing New York Times. All the stories that, you know, people in the media won't investigate, which are the stories that aren't about him. Yeah. All the lying, quote unquote, the journalists are doing. Uh-huh.

And it's funny because, and I'm sure these things are directly connected. but in the year where journalists were lionized like they haven't been in a long time, they were also smeared like they weren't in a long time. Sure. And that's amazing to me that we saw both as like the massive comedy and tragedy at the same time. Yeah. No, I mean, and even on the flip side, I mean, there was, you know, I mean, the takes on on conservative media establishments like Fox News or even, you know,

so there are some Fox Sports personalities that were one sort of, you know, hand-waved, way as almost comedy are now being engaged with as a sort of malicious misdirection. Yeah, because it seems like the stakes are bigger. Yeah. I mean, in the only case of somebody like Clay Travis, it seems like he's talking about things that aren't about sports. He's not having hot opinions about Marcus Mariotta. Yeah.

He's having hot opinions about race and often despicable opinions. Yeah. But yeah, everything seems more freighted. Everything seems more, you know, it just feels like there are bigger things in the balance. Yeah. Even in our little corner of the world. I mean, I think that, you know, talking about the journalist as hero or as, you know, villain, in some ways they go to the same thing, which is the sort of like humanization of the journalist, right? And they're not, this isn't a new idea.

But, you know, if your goal is to tear down the journalistic establishment, it's much easier to point out the foibles of specific people or people's, you know, inherent biases than it is. I mean, and in doing so, you can take on an entire industry. Right. And that's the motive here, right? Right. To take away the quote unquote MSM or, you know, sort of toxify it in. and destabilize it so much

that people just listen to you instead of listening to the MSM, whoever you are. And it's happening at this moment and we'll get to this in a minute too where lots of people are getting laid off. And lots of media institutions aren't making any money. So the MSM is destabilizing itself and then it has this sort of roundhouse left

from the political establishment. Yeah, I mean, I think whether those things are related or not is, you know, a much longer conversation. But certainly if you are, you know, if you're, if you find yourself fighting against the mainstream media, then, you know, a round of layoffs is an easy thing to applaud and to apply to your argument. Sure. Well, you just, you just, you just come in with, hey, this is the, see?

Yeah. They're too liberal. Now they had to lay off, you know, 100 employees. Exactly. We saw that with the ESPN. Absolutely. Layoffs twice. We saw that at various times.

So now they're sort of kicking ass, but the New York Times and Washington Post, like, ah, America's finally decided I can't trust these news organizations. Like, or, you know, the media is just really changing. Yeah. That's also what happened. Sure. Sometimes you get to find a cheaper office. That doesn't mean that the entire enterprise is crumbling. Yeah, they become data points.

I've been amazed. I think it's really funny because about like when I was starting in journalism 17 years ago, I was amazed that when in the early blogosphere, that press criticism was like a huge topic. Yeah. And more specifically, the political bias of the press was a huge topic. And we're talking like there's like a handful of influential political blogs at the time. This is the era of Instapundit, Mickey Kouse, people like that.

But those people were really obsessed with the lefty media. Yeah. And again, partly because they wanted to be listened to and not those guys, but also I'm sure some of it was genuine perceived quote-unquote bias. And that topic, and then you have people like Bernie Goldberg, you know, flogging that thing. Sure. Just all kinds of, it has been a steady topic.

But it's amazing to me to see that basically just become this huge thing that the president of the United States is tweeting about. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. I mean, that is one of his many, many obsessions, but it is probably like top five. We talked last week about the sort of fan becoming the journalist and you're switching places with the journalist. And this isn't fandom in any sort of direct. way. But it's definitely like one of the things that the internet has allowed us to do is,

I mean, there's more space to write about more things and to find and to discover these avenues that readers are interested in reading about or that, you know, other writers are interested in reading about. And a lot of what, you know, Instapundant or Mickey were writing about back in the day were things that journalists would talk about at the bar. I mean, this is a going part of conversation. You know, now, I mean, the reason why the press box, this podcast exists, could probably be traced back to conversations we've had at the bar where someone standing nearby would say you guys should do a podcast. You know, I mean, like, it's a part of the media world that just didn't exist because, you know,

there was a limited number of pages in the newspaper and it was unclear if there was an appetite for it. Oh, I don't exactly remember that happening, but it's a nice sentiment. It was the waiter. He came over and he was like, you guys should have a podcast. And also we're closing up, so please leave and go do your podcast. That's certainly part of it. I've been amazed.

We are both very small, very dim stars in this sky of journalism. Yeah. But that we, I don't know about you, but I get like MAGA tweets. Yes, so absolutely. The liberal Curtis. You know, MAGA, hashtag. Like, how did I get? How did I get drawn into this?

You know, it's like, it's just amazing. It's like there's one crazy batchet conversation. happening about journalism. It's not nuts that Maggie Haberman would get dragged into it or Jake Tapper but you and me

but it's true everybody does everybody does I mean to be when we cover ESPN or Jamel Hill in particular yeah there's a certain

there's a certain segment yeah there's a certain segment for whom they only the only appropriate commentary is loud cheering or booing and and to actually try to parse out the details of anything

is seen as biased I saw that when like Dave Portnoy was having a party when John Skipper resigned the other day. Uh-huh. You know, just like on, I mean, a virtual party. Sure. And he had some tweets along the line. So I know this, you know, you may say I shouldn't do this, but, eh, you know, this is my anime. And that feels like it's all tied up in the same political, cultural stew.

I mean, they've got a specific gripe, which is about Barstole Van talk. But it just feels like it's all of a piece, you know? Oh, yeah. No, I mean, that's part of being a public figure in 2017 for many people is picking your enemies and imagining a battle whether or not one exists. You know, you have to, you wage the battle whether or not the other side is actively engaging in it. My old boss and spiritual advisor, Jack Schaefer, likes to point out that trust in journalists has been going down for a really long time. And it's pretty much mirrored the decline in trust in lots of American institutions. like the military and the church and all those kinds of things, right?

Like, Americans just have less trust. And he's always made the argument, which I subscribe to, which is that that's okay if people are really, really skeptical of journalists. You know, we should have to earn their trust. Yeah. Which isn't to say all the attacks are fair or good or warranted, but it's just like it people don't have. Journalists, when we talk about journalists as heroes and journalists of villain, journals shouldn't necessarily be exalted. No. You know, when the moment you, because you have a byline somewhere, especially now.

I think that I think by and large, you know, political journalism in particular was caught flat-footed by a lot of the byproducts of Trump's campaign and eventual presidency. Because they should have been listening to Jack Schaefer. There were a lot of people who didn't, who thought that the exalted institution of journalism still existed in the way that it did in, you know, movies like The Post. You know, I mean, that the most, that just the most extreme version of the, you know, the pure journalistic enterprise was how they reviewed. And that certainly, you know, was proven to not be true. It's also funny how the kind of slacking that places like the New York Times have taken and some of the cable news networks has resulted in a lot of cases in record ratings, right? Yeah. Or, you know, the Times, which is like constantly having money troubles over the last 10 years, you know, trying to borrow money and all these.

kinds of things. Yeah. All of a sudden, their new publisher the other day is standing up before the assembled group and saying, we don't have any, we don't have any layoffs coming anymore or any buyouts. Uh-huh. To take us to a targeted number. It doesn't mean anybody's not going to, nobody's going to get fired.

Right. But we have this kind of thing, you know, and I thought that was fascinating. And it's, it's a part of this. It's like if you demonize these people, there's going to be a certain segment of the population, it's like, oh, oh, they're your enemies great. Yeah. I'm going to subscribe now. Yeah, absolutely.

It's out of Roy Moore, you know, in the Washington Post, right? That was a huge feather in the cap of the Washington Post to be able to report. And even though Roy Moore is saying people are framing me and this is true and all that stuff, it just makes people want to subscribe to the post even more. Yeah, absolutely. I can't imagine. There's probably, the New York Times probably couldn't have had a better ad for renewing subscriptions than Donald Trump constantly saying that they're failing. Yeah, it's great advertising, right?

Absolutely. We get a huge Twitter again tweeting about us every, like, every 24 hours. Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, when you talk about it. about the flip side of the, we talk about the flip side of the hero, you know. Mm-hmm. There's also the flip side of the, of the journalist villain.

Yeah. Right. I mean, there's all, if you go into conservative media or if you go into people that are just sort of Trump-friendly media, they have their own ideas. Sure. About who is, you know, who's bad and who's good and that kind of thing. Yeah. You know, former, former hosts that have betrayed us and, you know, kind of things like that.

And it's just very funny. Yeah, it's definitely true. And, I mean, you can see this is not. limited to the conservative side. But you can, you definitely see people who are happy to tweet, you know, laughing at demise of the New York Times and then, you know, retweeting the New York Times five minutes later and the story fits their narrative. Yeah, this has been this great thing lately where people have said, I wish, was it Trump today or came up as Trump senior or junior who said, hey, CNN and NBC, maybe you should investigate this and literally tweeted out a link to an NBC news piece, as Hallie Jackson pointed out. That was great. That's become an amazing thing

Where you use, yeah, you use something in the mainstream media To tweet about how the mainstream media is not covering something Yeah, exactly Wait, you just linked to this Yeah I just love that Yeah Before we start praising and complaining about media top 10 lists

Let's pause for a quick break Podcast fans, we stepped up the ringers video production in 2017 With weekly videos like Cousin Sal's Best Bet Slow Newsday, NBA desktop, no BS, Table Reeds, director's commentary and Captain Morgan's Makebelief Casino as well as our video podcasts and many movies like Take Hunter,

Ringer 360, and Claytheism. Coming in 2018, we got new stuff, a weekly video mailbag from Bill Simmons, Mallory out of a hat, I'm very intrigued about what that could be, and a slew of other new digital shows. Don't miss anything. Just go to the ringer.com

or even better, please subscribe to our channel at YouTube.com slash the Ringer. Our third topic today, David. Okay. Professional press critics, around this time of year. We have a little tradition.

Actually, it's not even just press credits. Everybody. Everybody. Best of? Yes. Worst of. Yes. Media awards.

Top ten lists. We're not going to do that. No. We don't want to do that. We don't believe in that. No. No, we don't. Let me tell you why we don't believe in it.

In case you don't know. Go ahead. I just find this to be one of, let me say this is a couple of things. Movie lists, top ten movies of the year. Knock yourself. out. Yeah. Yeah, my favorite books. I find that a little weird and silly, but doing it about journalism has always struck me as just kind of one of the most bizarre things ever. And especially in recent years, I saw the mediaite had some, the top 75 most influential people in news and

media. Yeah. Did you realize that Trevor Noah was one step, one spot behind Savannah Guthrie? Is that important to you to know that? The Trevor Noah is slightly less influential. It's not necessary information. Yeah. Another thing I would not like to do this time of year is the predictions for journalism for 2018. Funny headline crystal ball aside. I was told this way about sports predictions is when you do this, you're just inviting the writers that you employ and pay well, hopefully pay well, to just look like a jackass.

Yeah. Predict the NFL games. And then they get them all wrong. It's like, wow, why should I listen to that? that guy anymore, of course, because no one can predict the NFL games well. Right. So I'm just sort of against predictions, but media predictions are really funny. How many media predictions would anyone have gotten right about this year?

I mean, they might have gotten some right, but if they were trying to, you know, put things in the top 10, probably zero. Yeah. I mean, I guess you could have predicted some media Trump interaction sort of stuff or whatever. Yeah, that would have been highly predictable. Yeah, but as far as the things that we've talked about on this show since we've been doing it the past several months, I mean, we could, we would have predicted about none of them. No. Matt Lauer wouldn't still be the host of the Today Show.

No. John Skipper still wouldn't be the president of ESPN. No. You know, that kind of think the specific kinds of things that New York Times would have able to break about Trump. You know, we might have said it would have been a really wild, newsy White House. Yeah. But we don't think we would have been able to predict all those things all that well.

Yeah. I mean, if we had pitched this podcast a year ago and said, we want to do a podcast that covers. Harvey Weinstein and Jamel Hill, I don't think anybody would have had any interest in putting it on me. Those would have been two great subjects of 2017. Yeah.

Yeah. It's funny, too. I mean, I often think, you know, when we do these lists, there's the whole best American sports writing thing, which comes out every year. Which, you know, in a younger, more innocent age,

I was, you know, just, oh my gosh, it would be great to be in there. I'm going to send them stories and all this stuff. And it's funny because at best those collections are here's a good, here's a bunch of stories that you like to read. But the sort of downside of them is it becomes like here's the definition of best. Yeah. And you get this definition of best which is pounded into people's heads year after year, which is a very, very peculiar, small definition of what best sports writing looks like. Well, sure.

And I mean, I think in the, you know, I agree with you, top 10 lists into your awards. have fun. I did some year-in-a-wards on my other podcast just the other day. But there's certainly a tenor that has changed, you know,

the tenor has changed in that Best American Sports Writing or, you know, your local film critics top ten list are very valuable for saying, like,

here are some things you might have missed that are the best things of the year, right? But when it becomes, you know, when it's winnow down to like a Twitter argument,

it's not about things you might have have missed or holding these things up as the best. It's about why my opinion's right and yours is wrong. Right. Right. Why my idea of journalism is right in your rights. And if it's just another avenue for hot takes, you know, I'm going to put

Deadpool in my best movies the year list just to see what happens, you know? Don't at me. You know, that's a whole different enterprise, you know? I mean, you see the proliferation of these things all around the Internet of all the different sorts. you know, for a lot of them, for movie lists, for even book lists, TV shows, whatever else. I mean, in some ways, this is the most important thing that, one of the most important things that a journalist is going to do all year, right? Kind of distilling the entire year down into one package and making, you know, a sort of a broader argument of quality.

I don't know if it's important. But one of, it'll be certainly one of the most red. I mean, it's not, it's one of the most red, yes. Yeah, but that's the whole thing is if the, if the purpose is, you know, lauding great art or, you know, great performance in a field. That feels like one thing. But, you know, if the purpose is more crassly clickbait, that's something else. Well, it's like, as journalists, like, I think we're taught, we don't want to, we don't want to be reductive.

If somebody said, Brian, come up with the top 10 sports writers of all time and rank them, I would just say, like, you pay me to not do silly things like that, right? you pay me to not assemble weirdo lists and stuff like that. But if the same journalist, let's say, let's call him Brian, found a list where he was in the top 10 or top 100 of anything. You're saying, oh, well, they got it, really got it right. Thank goodness somebody finally recognized by talent. That's great. We want, when we do journalism awards, the kind of reductive thinking we reject when we write, we embrace it totally. Because we won.

We're on the list. All the movie reviewers around the world who have rejected. the star rating system or the thumbs up, thumbs down rating system, putting their, putting their, you know, the entire breadth of their year of criticism into a top 10 list does feel a little bit unnecessarily reductive. Yeah. Well, I used to love it when every movie critic's top 10 list are with a sense, while it would be impossible to rank them in order, well, it would be possible.

And then they would just pick 10 movies. Yeah. So you sort of have ranked the movies. Sure. I love that. Just like, I'm so uncomfortable with this, but I have to, I'm just making this. I'm making this top 10 list as good as I possibly can. Making the best of a bad situation.

Sort of false embarrassment of that was always my favorite. I also like the sort of auto top 10 list that we now have on Twitter, just all a billion times this week. Yeah. The, you know, the like self top 10. Here are some of the best pieces I wrote in 2017. Oh, yeah. Wow. I mean, I will forgive young journalists who are trying to, you know,

stamp their print. But like, honestly, seriously. your favorite pieces of the year that you wrote? Yeah. Like my own top 10 list? I mean, I just, I know, I'm out. Maybe as a Christmas gift, I'll just rank yours for you and, and put that around the internet. Please don't.

I saw Albert Bernanco had a very funny thing where you just had a, he said, here's a link to the top of the best pieces I wrote and you went to it and it was just a bearer that was, shall we say, touching itself. I think you know the piece of video I mean you know man we're not going to have overworked Twitter joke of the week on this episode but you know one the winner probably would be also the the ironic top 10 list or just the the header of top 10 reasons why fill in the blank and then just there's only one oh yeah that's a good joke yeah the takeoff on the top 10 list that makes a joke about top 10 lists and the subject is good yeah how many top 10 list did you actually consume this year Um, shockingly few.

I mean, this, you know, Christmas, as we're recording, this is around the corner. I usually save my top 10 list reading for time spent in airports. But, uh... When I was in college, I love top 10 lists. Oh, yeah. I was so excited to get like EW and see what theirs were. The Ebert list every year was really big. Yeah.

It's probably because you just didn't have very much information about things. Yeah. In that, in that tender pre-internet, mostly pre-un internet age. Yeah. And so you'd just be like, I guess I had some of, internet for reading Roger Ebert. But you'd just be like, oh, my gosh. You know, here are like 10 movies and like four of them I've never heard of.

Yeah, that's just it. I mean, it used to be about informing people, you know, top 10 books of the year. You would have heard of, you know, three of them or something like that. And now anybody that's interested enough to read the top 10 list has already heard of all of the things you're going to be mentioning and all you're really doing is agitating for your point of view. Yeah, books is a tough one to rank. Yeah, of course.

It's like journalism, you know. It's like here's a great. sports profile. And here's a piece about the two people did about civilians killed in Iraq. You know, how am I going to rank these acts of journalism? I mean, in any anything about writing when there's that many options out there. It's, I mean, just the submissions, you know, the, you know, for your consideration list is basically just like what's been retweeted the most or something like, you know, just the things that are going to be on your radar are so skewed by the way you consume media anyway, that it would just be, it's impossible to really. rank anything. Yeah. I do like it now when there's kind of some, you know, excitement about a top

10 list appearing. First, I think Simmons pointed this out that top 10 lists just start appearing in like early December. Yeah. It's like Christmas starts earlier every year. Christmas top 10 list started earlier every year. You got to get those clicks. Yeah. I mean, like the New York, I feel the New York Times movie one was like December 1st or something like that. Yeah. He was really, really early. So you're like, whoa, I haven't even seen, like, I haven't even seen, like, I haven't a chance to see the Christmas movies yet. I remember as a kid, by the way, when those came out, I was so confused about how all these movies were on it that hadn't come out yet.

Just didn't understand. It was like December 15th. It was like, that movie opens nationally January 3rd. Like, what? It's on the top 10 list? Those are more innocent times, Brian. And the critic hasn't even reviewed it yet? Doesn't like written a proper review of it yet?

That was just so mind-blowing about top 10 lists. Yeah. No, no, it's, I mean, now it seems like dereliction of duty to have seen a movie and have not immediately tweeted about it. Yeah. I mean, it's also, there's just people in the world, especially our little world of journalism, that are just unrankable.

Like, there's a slate piece about how Zach Lowe is the best sports writer in America. Uh-huh, I remember. And the thing about Zach is, like, how would you rank Zach's pieces over the course of the year? I mean, you know, how would you put Zach in a, in a ranking?

No. Pretty sure he's never been in those best sports writing books. No. It's not the best. It gets like the Body of Work Award. Right. But that doesn't get reprinted. Right, because they're so,

they're so perfect and, useful and smart and well written in that moment. But you might not want to read it five years later like you'd want to read a profile of some athlete. Yeah. So why, but why is that worse? You know, it's not worse. It's just different and, you know, and perhaps less durable in terms of selling a book.

Yeah. You know, but that doesn't mean anything. So there's just certain things that are just like, or, you know, like frankly, if like there's important acts of journals, like one of them might be a woge tweet. Like, that was really important. And one might be that Adam Schaeffer and Mort thing about, you know, Roger Goodell wanting a private jet as part of his, you know, retirement package from the NFL.

That's a wild, amazing story. Absolutely. But how do you, you know, it's not like no one's going to award, you know, award something that for like literary quality or rereadability, but you'll remember that from 2017. Yeah. The purple pros is at a minimum, but the significance is up there. Yeah, absolutely.

All right. Well, we have, that's our non-awards list, David. I feel good about that. Yeah. Should I say what I'm doing for the first couple months of 2018? Oh, yeah. Just put that out there.

Yeah, for everybody's still listening after all this, they deserve to know. Yeah, my best trip would be living in Australia for a couple months. It's going to be great. And writing about Australia with my family and some other stuff out there where you're going to endeavor to continue the press box

from abroad. But if you hear me speaking in a slightly strange accent, requesting some unusual foods, that's the reason. David, have a great end of the year, buddy. This has been fun. I'm going to rewatch Crocodile Dundee and Crocodile Dundee, too, and think about you. Don't forget Crocodile Dundee in Hollywood either.

Yeah. The important, the rarely seen number three movie in that series. He's David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Thank you so much for listening to this little podcast over the course of the year. We will see you in 2018. See you later.