The Press Box - 'The Press Box’ — Lies, Damned Lies, and Locker Room Quotes (Ep. 382)

Episode Date: November 16, 2017

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss the allegations against Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore and the age of new-media denial (03:00), the most groan-inducing headline puns (19:45), Tina Brown and the twilight of the magazine editor (22:30), and postgame locker room quotes (37:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Bill Simmons. Wanted to make sure you're listening to the Bill Simmons podcast this year. We stepped it up with the guests. I don't even have time to list all of them. But let's just say we have had a who's who of A-listers, A-minus listers, B-plus listers in sports, pop culture, movies, music. I mean, where else can you get Kevin Durant, Steve Balmer, Jimmy Iivine, and Charlie Staren in the span of six weeks? Nowhere. The answer is nowhere.

You can find that literally nowhere other than the Bill Simmons podcast. We are in year 11. It's been an honor to do it. Hope you subscribe the Bill Simmons podcast. Check it out. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. David, Donald Trump thinks he didn't get enough credit for getting three UCLA basketball players back from China

after they were accused of shoplifting. Oh, man. And we're not going to talk about that story on the press box this week. This is a monumental press box development. It really is. What an ignorable story that is for meta-media analysis. ways it fits perfectly into our rubric and yet you're right it's just so easy to ignore. If we were headlining the faux highbrow media piece on this, what do you think it would be?

Oof, I'm constructing the newspaper headline. The Times headline? Oh my gosh, I have no idea. The great balls of China or whatever doesn't quite convey the shoplifting charge. I'm not quite sure. Yeah, I was thinking if we went highbrow, it was Donald Trump, Leangelo Ball, and the dawn of the March Madness Presidents. See? I don't even know what that means. There's a thing piece anybody would read.

Yeah. For UCLA, there's trouble brewing in China. Oh, no. This is the press box on the Ringer Podcast Network. This is the press box, the media podcast, where you're not allowed to use the phrase, the power of the press belongs only to those who own one. I'm Brian Curtis Ringer at large. He's David Shoemaker, Ringer's art director, writer, podcaster.

David, three topics for your inspection this week. number one Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore and the age of new media denial how's that for a highbrow headline I'm into it man second Tina Brown and the twilight of the magazine editor I wrote lots of faux

faux highbrow headlines this week and finally fun with post game locker room quotes and a special segment this week we normally do overlook Twitter or excuse me overworked Twitter joke of the week this week headline puns let's do it man

number one Roy Moore David there was a November 9th ninth piece in the Washington Post that contained the testimony of one Lee Corfman who said that when she was 14, 32 year old Roy Moore, who's now, of course, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate race in Alabama had a sexual encounter, as the Post put it with her. The post named three other women ages 16 to 18 that more pursued during this period and then later a fifth woman, Beverly Young Nelson came forward and charged more with sexually assaulting her when she was 16 years old.

the post piece was about as devastating and solid a piece of reportage as you can imagine. Sure. And then we fell down this weird media rabbit hole at which point an alleged sex scandal became a media scandal of sorts or at least a media story of sorts. I think we should stipulate up front that what we're talking about strictly the media angle on this. I mean, this is, you know, this is, this is, you know, part five and a one million. part series about sexual indiscretion and media. But, you know, less we be seen as, you know, erecting a copy of the Ten Commandments in our front yard and then get called out on something in our own lives later on.

We're just covering the media side of it. Oh, absolutely. Which I think was a weirdly a fascinating story in and of itself. Before the post piece was even published. Uh-huh. Breitbart, whose leader, Steve Bannon, of course, helped push more to victory. in the GOP primary, ran a story saying that the post story was coming. Right.

So this all started before we even had the hunk of investigative journalism. It's a little bit shades of Donald Trump Jr., like releasing his emails before the story on his emails could come out. Was that the sequence of events? There was leaks of it. But getting out ahead of a story that you know is coming is sort of the new way of like preventively not having to deny the story? or it's some evidence of it's the implication of denial without the substance of denial. Yeah, it's the pre-denial. Yeah.

Because they called it, the more campaign in this initial Breitbart piece called it fake news. Right. But this is before it was news. Yeah. And then Axios later reports on November 12th that Steve Bannon and Breitbart had sent two reporters to Alabama to, as Axios said, discredit the Washington Post reporting. So the post piece is out by this point. Right. And now Breitbart is sending reporters to Alabama to try to gather information.

Right. So Roy Moore is the Breitbart candidate in no uncertain terms. Steve Bannon recruited him to run for the Senate. He appeared on his behalf at campaign events and celebrated with him when he won the election. Yes. Right. And Donald Trump endorsed Roy Moore's opponent. Right. And then the Breitbart anti-mainstream media stance is similar.

I separate from this, although clearly like inextricable from this in this particular story, the fact that they're trying to take down the Washington Post as a specific cause in react, because of the connection to Roy Moore. Yeah. But it's part of a bigger tapestry of

the more we can discredit the mainstream media, the more power we seem to gather for ourselves. The streams are crossing in the Ghostbuster sense of we like Roy Moore because he is a Trumpy candidate. Right. Populist candidate. And we like taking down and sabotaging the mainstream media.

And this is one of those stories that gives us the chance to do both those things at once. Yes. Yeah. So should we crawl further down the rabbit hole? Keep crawling, man. We're not done. No, this keeps going. November 12th, this is the headline, exclusive on Breitbart, still on Brightbart, exclusive.

Mother of the Roy Moore accuser, Washington Post reporters convinced my daughter to go public. So as many people noted on Twitter, yes. The Washington Post people called and convinced her to go on the record in an article. Right. This is what is known as journalism. Yeah. I mean, it also, I mean, it shouldn't be, you can't really, you can't really separate that from a lot of the sort of weird, weirder parts of the internet that are criticizing some of the women have come forward with other sexual allegations of sexual indiscretion, the Weinstein stories, whatever else. There's a lot of, there's people out there all in message boards.

far and wide in comment sections that are that assume that some of these people are lying strictly because they came forward at a time of great media attention. Right. And also with the Senate, not quite hanging in the balance, but the Republican advantage in the Senate hanging in the balance, right? Yes, absolutely. This would take it down to 51. Right.

And yeah, the implication with that piece about from the mother was that she would only, like, that the Washington Post is kind of gaming this. that they're pushing these stories so as to discredit Roy Moore and so as to lose him the election because the Washington Post are implicitly liberal. That is, yeah, that has been Roy Moore's contention, of course, too, for the entire thing. Let's go further. Keep going. This is from Slate on his radio show Rush Limbaugh reminded listeners that Moore was a Democrat at the time his misconduct allegedly occurred. Did you know that before 1992, when a lot of this was going on, that Judge Moore was a Democrat,

You didn't know that? So his mind was perverted. Yes. By the fact that he was a Democrat and later became wrong. Part of the really confusing post-Civil War switching of parties narrative, I think. I don't know. Right. So then still later in this story.

So now we have the pre-buttal to the Moro-M-Moy story. Yes. We have Breitbart actively trying to find information to knock it down. Right. We have Breitbart sort of learning what journalism is. We have Rush Limbaugh Democrat thing. Now, to continue, there is. A Twitter account randomly claims that a friend, quote unquote, this person on Twitter,

was offered a thousand dollars by a Washington Post reporter named Beth. Beth Reinhardt was one of the post reports who actually broke the story. So is alleging journalistic malfeasance just randomly, which of course was then picked up by elements of the right-wing media. And actually retweeted by a GOP congressman named Billy Long from Missouri just retweeted the accusation. Who made this accusation? Some random person on Twitter. Okay.

Some random person on Twitter. So now we have this just kind of, you know, this person's, this reporter's, you know, honesty being called into question by random Twitter account. But in the world we live in, that becomes a thing, right? Right. Then, and now we're rounding third here, a robocall, this is how the Washington Post describes it. A pastor in Alabama said he received a voicemail Tuesday from a man falsely claiming to be a reporter with the Washington Post and seeking women to quote, willing to make damaging remarks about Roy Moore in exchange for money.

And the reporter's name, the fake reporter's name on the robocall was Bernie Bernstein. Not loaded at all. No, sir. No, sir. They actually, this is the readout of this. This is how fake this was. This is what the call said. I'm a reporter for the Washington Post calling to find out if anyone at this address is a female between the ages of 54 and 47, willing to make damaging. remarks about candidate Roy Moore for a reward of between 5,000 and 7,000. What is a strange stilted way to just put that? The other thing that was amazing to me about this from the media angle is that the weird media hero, or at least not anti-hero that emerged, was Sean Hannity. Oh, yeah.

Who not only kind of conducted a fairly decent interview with Roy Moore on his radio show, but then goes on Tuesday, 9 on Fox and says, for me, the judge has 24 hours. You must immediately and fully come up with a satisfactory explanation for your inconsistencies that I just showed. You must remove any doubt. If you can't do this, then Judge Moore needs to get out of this race. Correct me if I'm wrong. First of all, let's not give him too too much credit for the radio interview. Roy Moore was tripping all over himself in a way that it was really, you know, this was not like, like, you know, Hugh Hewitt, you know, definitely dragging Donald Trump through the intricacies of geopolitics or whatever.

Roy Moore's performance was pretty laughable in that. But the second, the 24-hour statement by Sean Hannity was, did the yearbook come out in between those two things? And he was reacting to the, to the- Yes, the fifth accuser. The fifth accuser was Beverly, yes, Beverly Young Nelson, who had evidence in the form of a high school yearbook that Roy Moore signed at a Waffle House or something. And that was finally what spurred Sean Hannity to say, you have 24 hours to really convince me or, you know, get out of the race.

Exactly. Now, you know, Sean Haney can say get out of the race. He's not obviously a member of the Republican establishment in an official way. And even if he were, you know, members of the Republican establishment asking Roy Moore to get out of the race doesn't seem to make any difference for the more campaign. But it weirdly feels like a bigger blow to lose Sean Hannity than to lose Mitch McConnell. Sure. Yeah. Which is kind of, which is another weird element of the world we now live in.

It's very, very strange. The Senate majority. leader is less powerful in this case than guy on Fox News. Yeah, I mean, sir, this isn't the first time that we've had a god-fearing, righteous politician who has had a sexual indiscretion in their past. I mean, that's broadly defined. Obviously, this is a pretty particular situation. This isn't cheating on your wife. But, you know, I think for people like Kennedy and certainly for other Republicans, this is the finest line that they have to walk, especially if you're someone like Kennedy or even Breitbart, you know, although they're, you know, they're, you know,

they're selectively secular, I guess, over at the Bright Bar H.Q. But, yeah, I mean, I don't think Hannity can afford to just be blasé about these sorts of accusations. Do we think this whole strange war on the post and on the various women who've come forward is mostly accountable by Donald Trump declared war on the media? Like many Republicans before him, but to a greater degree. And that this is, you know, a front in that war. Yeah. I mean, I have a couple of just kind of disparate thoughts on it. One, I mean, one thing that you left out, and maybe you did this on purpose, because how deep, we don't want this rabbit hole to get just impossibly deep. But the new, my new thing that I, that I spent way too much time, uh, breeding last night was this sort of, I think somebody called it yearbook truthorism on Twitter today. But it this, there are just hordes and hordes of people on Reddit at other places who were trying to prove that this yearbook signature is false by, handwriting analysis and the color of the ink and all this kind of stuff.

And there was one just like, you know, brave journalists who just got a copy of the yearbook and was just saying, I'm not going to say this is true or false, but let me just page by page, or instance by instance, explain why some of the things here are real, you know? I mean, just like how this is an act. This could have been a yearbook that came out around December. It's just so bizarre. I think that it's all evidence of hyper-partisanship. I mean, in that case, the idea that anyone would spend any significant amount of time trying to disprove or trying to find fault with the color of ink and the pages of a 30-year-old yearbook and not spend a single moment actually wondering whether or not Roy Moore could have done any of the things he's charged with is evidence of blinding partisan. Yeah, the Tommy Veter, who was an Obama official and former ringer podcaster, pointed out on Twitter that 29% of Alabama voters, according to one poll, said they were more likely to vote for Roy Moore. Right.

After learning what they learned. In their defense, I mean, this is not a full-throated defense, but no matter what you think of the, you know, fake news, lying media meme or line of thought. journalists defending journalism in vague terms is not a winning argument, right? If you turn on MSNBC and there's people on there who are just like, this does a disservice to good journalism.

Like that doesn't convince even the people that are watching MSNBC because they're liberals and they like to channel. It's a tough sell. It's a tough sell. I mean, just the concept of good journalism is just inherently self-righteous, right? I mean, it's just like,

we're all working so hard at this. please don't disparage the form. Yeah. It is both righteous and self-righteous. Yes. It's also righteous, but it's just really hard to get anybody to pay attention. Right. I like what you said about hyperpartisanship, because you know what this reminded me of was Bill O'Reilly, in a sense?

And to go back a couple of scandals ago, he created, Bill O'Reilly created this universe where everything could be read as a partisan gesture. Yeah. Everything that happened is, oh, those liberals going to get you. This is conservative. This is conservatism. Boy, you know, here we go. And when you create this kind of self-made universe, then anything that happens to you, right? Any investigation about something you allegedly did, you go, ah, it's a liberal witch hunt.

Right. There are some people who are afraid of me, afraid of my power, and they're out to get me. Right. And that's essentially what Roy Moore's doing. I mean, if you read his quotes, that's exactly what he's saying. But you've created, you person have created the world that is so hyperpartisan where everything can be read as a partisan gesture. So then you get this get out of jail free card, maybe not literally in this case, but where you get to just anytime someone criticizes you or reports about you, you just describe it as partisanship. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, it's the, the, you know, this is this is a weird parallel, but hey, it's the press box, so let's go there. It made me, my mind went to Jay Cassby and Kang's very good piece on Barstow Sports in the New York Times this week. and the kind of recurring chorus that ESPN just doesn't speak to people of that of my generation anymore, right? I mean, there's a lot of ways you can look at that. And this is something that we've talked about before. You know, it used to be that ESPN watching was a thing that you picked up from your dad watching at his knee or, you know, whatever, that it was something that was passed down.

Now it's clearly not that like that when given an alternative, in this case, something like like Barstool, Barstool is making this populist case that we are, you know, we're everything that they don't want you to have or like this is, we're trying to bring sports back to where it should be. But the idea that ESPN doesn't speak to me that like you can just blanket say that this institution is not catering to me in this way is it's a similar sort of partisanship, right? I mean, it's that you look at this, like you can look at the idea of like the Washington Post and think that they're like actively trying to, trying to, you know, cater to someone who's not you. No, they're providing news, you know, if there's slants,

then so be it. But like, they're not trying to get you to change the channel or to stop reading the newspaper. It's just sort of crazy. Yeah, and it's probably even easier in this case because everybody has watched ESPN at some point. Everyone has at least an idea of what ESPN was or is. Right. And some person who just happens to vote an election may have never read the Washington post. Sure. Even online or just glanced at a couple articles. What doesn't know what the institution is at all? Sure. I mean, and to make the case that there, the other is, it's probably a lot of easier. Sure.

And you see the same people that sort of rail against the mainstream media from this position of populism are happy to, like, like, Bannon, are happy to take that walk right into the New York Times headquarters to get the giant profile written about himself, you know, the same thing. I mean, like these barstool guys, I'm sure we'd talk shit about the New York Times all day if given an opportunity or a cause, but they're very happy to have a lengthy profile of them written in the, in the mainstream media that's catering towards people. people that's not their audience. Absolutely. The Siren Song of Media. Yeah. So usually at this time, David, we do the overworked Twitter joke of the week. A little cleanup from last week.

We talked last week about Atlas Shrubbed. That was, remember, the overworked joke about Rand Paul's fight that might have involved lawn care. Marcus Gilmer tweeted this week at us to also note that the Bowling Green Massacre was a well-used Twitter joke last week. Remember, that was offered by the Trump administration as a terror attack that did. didn't happen. Raim Ball's thing was actually in Bowling Green.

So the Bowling Green mask here. Thank you. Thank you, Marcus, for that. But today we're going to talk about headline puns. I was the Kenneth Branagh reboot of Murder on the Orient Express came out last week. And Joaquin Nagel tweeted, noting that literally every negative review of the movie declared that that went off the rails, veered off the rails or jumped the rails in one case. I saw another review call it a train wreck. And even a kind of positive profile of brain I was reading,

all aboard in the headline. So I thought we should just talk about headline puns for a second, which is always just amuse me as a journalist. That's so great. I mean, talk about overwork, some of the most overworked excruciatingly so things ever in journalism. Right. Had an old boss, Edward Felsenthal, who's now the editor of time.

He once told me that every story ever written about aquariums is titled, this is the dawning of the age of aquariums. I'm not sure how many aquarium stories are actually ever been written, but what an easy puns. Anyway, I came up with some bad headline power rankings. You ready to read and read here a few of these? Let's do it, man. Okay, here's some headlines. I just wince whenever I see.

The sun also rises. S.O.N. Oh, no. Sun. Any story about George W. Bush, Donald Trump Jr. will do. This recently the San Diego State basketball coach, whose dad was also a coach, got the sun also Rises. Also, there's a Pierce Brosnan and AMC show called The Sun. Right. There were some headlines that The Sun also rises.

Wow. Great headline. Great headline there. Number two, any story about Vladimir Putin that is called Azar is born. The new issue of The Economist has that. Oh, no. The 2007 issue of time that declared Putin the person of the year also the also carried the headline. Zara is born. Number three, any story about a pro wrestlers outside the ring issues that is called

wrestling with dot dot, dot, demons, shadows. Reality? Reality, there's a good one. Also, I noticed there was a recent Booker T article on his run for mayor of Houston called Wrestling with Success.

Wow. So wrestling with. Number two is a particular one, to me because I've read so many NFL draft previews in my life. When you're talking about defensive backs and your little mini section is called the safety dance about safeties. And I know that that sounds really obscure, but it was in the LA Times last week. I swear. Safety dance. Don't ever call that. Number one, with a bullet, lies, damned lies and blank. Yes. Recent ones are and political money and White House generals. Okay.

You know. Wow. Yeah. Don't ever use that, please. I think I made that joke last week. Topic number two, David. On Tuesday, the legendary editor, Tina Brown, published the Vanity Fair Diaries, her previously private chronicle of her years editing Vanity Fair.

Tina happens to be my old boss. I remember. We were roommates in the Lower East Side when you were working for Tina Brown. Yeah, at the Daily Beast. Yeah. Remember that? I remember it well. It was.

I remember a lot of really, really early mornings and a lot of really late nights. There was a stretch where I didn't see you very much. It was an amazing thing about Tina. She's getting a round of tributes, big piece in the New Yorker this week. But yeah, when I would wake up in the morning an incredibly early hour, I would notice that she had emailed me at like 1230 after I had gone to bed and then also at 4.30 in the morning. So she had been emailing me after I went to sleep and before I woke. up simultaneously. I always loved that also when I met her when she was interviewing me for the job in 2008,

some of the center of my clips. And she said, Brian, I like you, except for your unfortunate preoccupation with sport. Singular sport. I love that. My other great memory of her is that she was always working. She always seemed to be pushing so fast, so furiously, you know, just trying to do so many things. that in her email, she eliminated verbs. She just didn't use verbs.

She was just like typing stuff at. Let me give you an example. So one time I had a piece that I had edited by Mike Schaefer. And she wasn't familiar. It was a really funny story. And I sent it to her, you know, the night before something. And she wasn't familiar with her and said, wasn't familiar with Mike. So she wrote back and said, this inspired who this and how it happened.

That was sort of Tina without verbs. I love that. It's an amazing week to think about her because I feel we're at the end of this era of the great well-paid taste-making Lincoln Town Car writing creature known as the magazine editor. Yeah.

Graydon Carter stepping down after 25 years of Andy Fair. Sure. This giant Joe Hagan book about John Winter and what a colossus he was in his time. and the Stylana Went to it was still at a moss, but we're at the end of this, right? This is this this is passing from the world, the person that Tina Brown was and could be, and you couldn't even be that if you wanted to anymore. Yeah, it's really amazing.

I mean, there's there, I think, you know, you and I both came up through, you know, the New York media world in an era where we, I mean, it was already fading, but there was, But, you know, I don't think anybody of our age bracket didn't, you know, in New York in those years, didn't imagine themselves in Tina or Gregon Carter's corner office one day, right? I mean, that was the job that everyone aspired to. And as, you know, is discussed in the New Yorker profile, Nathan Teller's New Yorker profile of Tina Brown, all of the stories are kind of up from the bootstrap stories. You know, you sort of imagine yourself as this, as this protagonist that somehow achieves really the seat of power. And I think that, you know, they were holdovers from a not too far, not too long ago era. And this is what I think is really key in which reaching the heights of the literary or journalistic world was as good as being any other kind of superstar.

Weirdly, right? Yeah. I mean, she was, she talked about there, there's a, there's a, there's a lot. in the New Yorker piece about she kind of apologizes for all the celebrities in the 80s, you know, that she mentions in her. And she's like, oh, it was the 80s. But it was also, I mean, yeah, this was, this was the era of famous writers like holding court at the biggest clubs in the city. You know, I mean, this was, it was a real, it was, it was an aspirational moment, I think, in the journalism and just literary world at large in a lot of different ways. And, yeah, if it's the twilight of the magazine editor, it's also the twilight of the overpaid magazine writer. Yes. Yeah, for sure. Six-figure salary, book deal, movie deal after your pieces. And both, I mean, and Green Carter had been at Vanity Fair for the longest time, you know, had a stable of writers who had been his writers forever. Spine and the observer and everything. Yeah, the people that he, you know, he made into wealthy, successful people and Tina Brown the same way. Obviously, you know, Tina Brown was at Vanity Fair in a previous, you know, a previous iteration of Tina Brown. But, uh,

But yeah, I mean, she, her career is just really amazing. And I knew who she was when you were working for, but it took me, like, it wasn't, I mean, it just seems so alien that you would be working for someone like Tina Brown, right? Just this sort of like grand figure of publishing. And it's interesting now that we're, that it's already, like you said, the era is ending. Yeah, I mean, she was so big. I remember, you know, you and I were provincials, right? Growing up in Texas, we were not the sons and daughters of these magazine editors and writers and all the stuff, right? And I remember at UT going and buying the first issue of talk because it was such a big deal.

I think I bought it like a Barnes & Noble. I was like very intent on buying. It even penetrated to us that she was doing this big thing. And that was amazing. I mean, it's amazing to me that the new model of this is Simmons. It's Benton Smith. Yeah. It's Lydia Polgreen at Huffpo.

Yeah. And it's still an amazing job, but it's just totally different because, I mean, I think in the sense, you know, I mean, Bill's sensibility is all over the ringer as it was all over Grantland for sure. But there's just so, you publish so much now that you just can't, that no editor can have their hands on every piece of text. Yeah. And every photo caption. Sure. like, you know, Graydon Carter and Kurt Anderson did it spy.

It's just impossible. Right. Well, you could write the whole magazine with two people and a bunch of pseudonyms or something like that, you know? And it talked about Tina. Tina Brown in her early days in this New Yorker piece writing,

was it at the Tatler that she was like, you know, writing like social, you know, pieces about the social life under a pseudonym herself. Mm-hmm. I think she told me one time

she always dreamed of having a column under the name Sasparilla. Or what's Sassarilla? She could have made that happen. Yeah, I mentioned this to you before we were recording, but one of the most kind of breathtaking just concepts in the piece was the idea of, you know, Tina Brown kind of forming each episode, I mean at each episode, each issue of Vanity Fair.

And sometimes that would mean cutting multiple features, like five features at, you know, just to get the perfect balance of the different element, you know, the different types of stories she wanted to tell, the different genres, the different subject matters, certainly very little sport, you know, in that mix. But just like, were saying with all the stuff that people, I mean, just the idea of our boss, Sean Fennessey,

taking five feature stories and just put, and just like putting them in a drawer or just try, you know, put dropping them in the garbage can. Can you imagine? And still paying, you know, paying the kill fee or even the full amount to the writer. I was saying, oh, well, sorry that didn't work out. Yeah. Yeah. Just try something else. That just didn't fit in the ringer on, you know, December 1st, 2017. Here's a plane ticket, fly somewhere else and write something. You know, it's too. And I, I saw it as a Daily Beast, too. You know, she was known for having this great spitey sense of what was going to be interesting. Sure. You know, what would be, where she could look around the corner in a way other people

couldn't. And I saw this at The Daily Beast, like when Madoff happened, like the night that the night he went down, she was in the office saying, this is going to be huge, you know, understanding in a way that I was looking at a Wall Street Journal story going, what? Yeah. Of course, it did become huge. But everything just moved too fast. You know, and it's hard, again, you can have writers that I think can see around corners and leave. you to these things and trust, but it's hard for an editor to do everything. So I think that's one reason, you know, the job's so different. And the other one is so we publish so much. It's just like there's just no way to get your arms around everything now. I mean, all the mistake

of all websites at some level is just trying to do too many things. Sure. And, you know, I remember her just being at the Daily Beast. It's like, what are we going to do? You know, we could do anything. We could be about politics. We could be about culture. We could be about everything. Yeah. And it's just really hard to then steer that ship when it's going like in 15 different directions. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's exactly right. Yeah, I mean, you talked about comparing it to the sort of Tina Browns of the modern world and, you know, who those people would be. I mean, the fact of the matter is that it's at almost every institution that's multiple people, right? To have the same person, to have the same person who's literally edited, like line editing a piece or even just conceptually editing

the shape of a magazine, being the same person who is reaching out to get, to try to score a photo shoot with President Reagan and Nancy. You know, like, there's two very, very different parts of any media corporation right now, you know? And to be clear, she had distinct people doing those things

in the good old days, but it was not, and she was not line edit, doing a ton of line editing. All right, but still, I mean, it is, it's a much more manageable job. And there's the sort of con, I think it was mentioned in the New Yorker piece that she was, you know, she wanted one, one, something in the magazine for everyone, right? The implication being that, like, you would pick up Vanity Fair because of this story or that story and then conceivably read the whole thing. Sure. You know, imagine in 2017, it reading five feature-length stories that you had no, that you didn't think you had any intention of reading. Right.

Right. Imagine a magazine. Exactly. Like, just imagine like that. It's crazy. we're all, we self-select everything that we consume now. Yeah. The only time you ever read anything that's like you wouldn't normally read is when you get

the third recommendation, you know, on Twitter about something. Totally. And she's and in her idea is like, okay, you're going to buy this because Darrell Hannah's on the cover. Yeah. It's like a great picture. But then you're going to go, ooh, a James, you know, James Wolcott column. And, you know, and then Dominic Dunn. Yeah.

And then my big, you know, high-flying feature writers, you know, that's just, yeah, that's that idea. I mean, the idea that you could be this person that's taking all these discharacterial. disparate elements and putting it under one roof. You know, these things are totally not just running a bunch of stuff, but putting it all into one package, as they say. Yeah. That used to be the great packaging, you know, it's a magazine term that you don't hear

very much anymore. The real compelling thing to me as a former, a recently former New Yorker was just the sort of love-hate relationship with the city, which I think everyone who's lived in New York for any stretch of time, you know, can associate with. Was that part of her personality when you knew her or had she settled? No. I think she's very much a creature of New York. I think that comes out in the, in the, in the, in, I'm sure in her, in her diaries, but certainly in the, in the piece.

Yeah. I think she, I think she had, she was from, she had moved from London to edit Vanity Fair, essentially. So I think she had probably those, whatever those yearnings were, she had long since buried them. Right. By the time I knew her. I found a couple of interview quotes from her funny and she did an interview with time. I don't miss the dinner parties. I mean, I just remember Tina having endless parties.

When I worked for, they would put the furniture in a moving truck and drive it around the streets and then have big parties in their houses, in their house. And you're looking at me like, I'm crazy. That's actually what happened on the Upper East Side. You invite people to your townhouse. Yes. You need to make space. Yes. And the absence of, you know, easily functional addicts or basements as most people in the world, you know, in America.

have. You have such limited space. You load all of your furniture into a moving truck. And that doesn't even go to a storage facility itself. It just drives around for five hours. I hope I'm not repeating an urban legend, but I'm pretty sure that was that was the story. The other thing she said is I can't, I was always envious of men who could wing it. I can't wing it. There's something about British journalists that they're always winging it. You know, that's British journalist, right? One can we call that hackery. But on the other hand, it's like, to me, to me, Tina was constantly winging it, like, in a good way. I mean, that was her thing, right? It's like, she wouldn't know about a lot of the stuff, but she would, you know, could kind of figure it out.

And that's what magazine, magazine, great at magazineers are always winged, bringing them something unfamiliar. And they're saying, here's how to tell that story within the confines of our space. The whole concept of the pitch, right? I mean, you need to convince someone this is a story worth telling. The other thing I think it's amazing about those old days that we don't see anymore is the credentialism. And the fact that there was this elite writer class. And I saw this, you know, the six-figure salaries and, as you say, writing, getting paid whether your piece runs or not. Yeah.

But, you know, I saw this to The Daily Beast. We had all these amazing young people, Max Reed, Marine O'Connor, Ben Creer, Sam Jacobs, Liz Good. And all these people went on to do amazing things. And they were kind of largely, unfortunately, banished to the corner a lot of the time because it was like, wait, let's get Carl Bernstein to write something. Let's get. All right. Osama. We took out Osama, let's get Salman Rushdie to weigh in, you know, which would just cost like 10 grand and not really result in anything better than young person could have whipped together from aggregation, you know, in five minutes and then you could have gotten a great column of that.

I mean, it's just that whole thinking of, you know, when people come to the web, really what they want is this just gargantuan byline rather than a great piece and who really cares who wrote it. Yeah, it's very, it's so alien to what we do to do. The closest thing that we have to that now is probably people with successful podcasts roping in their other famous friends to also do podcasts on their network. You just need a retweeted by famous people. You don't need a written by famous people. Maybe a text message to encourage a retweet. You know, that's sort of thing. All right.

Before we move on to topic number three, let's take a quick break. Hey, it's Bill Simmons. I want to tell you about the ringers gambling podcast. It is called Against All Odds with Cousin Sal. And you're not going to believe this, but it is hosted by Cousin Sal. The biggest degenerate gambler that I know, he's such a degenerate. He has three other degenerates that he calls the degenerate trifecta. And they break down every conceivable gambling thing you would ever want to gamble on.

They even take you to Captain Morgan's Make Believe Casino, where Sal makes up props on all kinds of things, sports, pop culture, you name it. You are going to want to get your gambling advice from these guys. Cousin Sal, he's been a staple on the BS podcast for the last 10 years. So good that we gave him his own podcast. Check it out against all odds with Cousin Sal. Subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Topic number three, David, locker room talk, but not the Trumpian kind.

This is a different sort. I thought of this because I was reading through the NFL wire stories on Monday morning. What did I miss? And I came across what might be the longest but emptiest quote. in the history of professional football. Oh, I love this. By Bucks coach, Dirk Ketter.

He was talking about Ryan Fitzpatrick, who pulled out a win over the Jets. This is what he said. Gritty, that's what Ryan is. He's a get it done kind of guy. He's going to make some plays that you don't expect to, and he might miss a couple plays you'd like him to make.

He's a tough guy. He's a competitor. And you can't have enough those kind of guys on your team. There are just no content in that at all. No content. Yes. And it was included in full in the story the next morning.

The same piece, this is just an AP piece, quoted Josh McCown, losing quarterback. Very frustrating McCown said, adding, we understand this is the National Football League. First of all, just imagine writing that down. We understand this is the National Football League. You've got to bring your A game every week. We just didn't come out and play at the level we're capable of. Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing because I sort of think we're past the era where you just write down really boring non-insides that players say.

But they still float out there among us. Right. Or slightly spoiled, again, by the way we consume media now. Because, you know, there are intrepid, old-fashioned newspaper readers like yourself and like people, you know, older than us. I think that. young end of the curve. I think that there's, I think that,

you know, a huge percentage of people today can, will consume their, uh, beat reporting through other, through unaffiliated sports blogs who take the greatest hits of that day's beat reporting, quote the best paragraph and write,

you know, some just additional fluff before and after. Yeah. Or just say God, Josh McCown suck last night. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

You don't even need the quote. Yeah. I think I'm in like I'm inoculated for most of this stuff. Yeah. So I think there's two, two, at least two forces at work. One is the players don't say anything.

Sure. They don't have any, there's nothing. Certainly say less and less as the decades go by. Nothing in it for them, right? Just not, why, why would I say something interesting after the game?

Yeah. When you're just going to quote the bad thing and there's no upside. All you can do is get your, get yourself into trouble. And if you have something good and uplifting to say, say it to the Players Tribune. But the second thing is this continued tyranny of the quote in writing. Yeah.

And I even feel this as a reporter, you're going along, typing along, type of paragraph, type paragraph. And it's like this little bell goes off in your head. Ooh, this should be a quote. It's about a beat. A quote should go here. A beat is a good word. It's a beat in the flow of the story. Yeah.

And it should like it should punctuate like every third paragraph. And if you're not quoting something, you're doing the wrong thing. Right. And the story should always end on a quote. Right. I mean, there were some amazing examples this week. This is about the Rams game. They're talking about the Rams wide receiver Robert Woods.

Here's Jared Goff, quote, the LA Times. He's as big as anybody on this team. The way he works, the way he brings guys along, his attitude daily, and the way he communicates with me is impressive, okay? Now, that's, again, talk about non-insights. But here's Sammy Watkins, two paragraphs later. The way he practices, the way he plays the game, the way he does everything, kind of

moves this wide receiver's group. He's a pro. So they actually were not only were neither of those insights about Robert Woods. They were the same non-insight. Sure. quoted back to back. Yeah, I mean, I think that part of that is just the, I don't know the details of those teams or those writers, but, you know, we see around our corners of the journalism world that that's, a lot of it's functional, right?

That if you want to write a piece about, you want to write a piece about, you know, name a player, Ryan Fitzpatrick, then you call the, you call the Buccaneers press office, right? And you ask them permission to talk to various players of theirs about Ryan Fitzpatrick. They decide who you can talk to a lot of the time. You can ask for specific players. But they're the ones providing you access. The players know ahead of time what you're going to be talking about. And the whole thing comes together in the most sort of like anodyne possible way.

All of that is even setting aside the fact that you're setting out to write a piece about Ryan Fitzpatrick. And, you know, it's like, that was your first mistake. I'm just saying like, yes, exactly. Like instead of spending time in the locker room and seeing what you get and seeing what, chasing a story. A lot of the time, you're like pitching a story to the team and having to make do with what,

you know, the thing we talk about. Well, if he was in also, I would just say after the game, he's the winning quarterback if he did something relatively extraordinary. It's like people want to read a story about Ryan Fitzpatrick, whether anybody says anything or not.

So you kind of have the, you have the framework of the story and you're just, it's a story in search of the beat, in search of the quote that's going to fill in that gap. It's Madlips. It's just sports writing Madlips.

It reminds me of a, I don't even remember what the quote was, but there was some screenwriter, some TV writer who was saying something of the effect of, some people will write like an episode of ER and just kind of put blah, blah, blah, medical stuff, like literally write those words and call their doctor friend to fill it in. And you're probably better off having someone with actual medical experience that's less of a page-to-page writer because it just flows so much more naturally when it comes that way. But yeah, you're just like, if you're just leaving giant blanks where the most important part of the story goes,

then yeah, you're probably going to end up with something, you know, with a laffer or two in your resume. And we've seen two different approaches, right? There's the Bill Barnwell thing where he's just going to write something about actually how Ryan Fitzpatrick played. Yeah. And he's happy to write, they won the game, but Ryan Fitzpatrick sucked. Yeah. And shouldn't ever start a football game and organize football game anywhere again, if appropriate. Right.

The other way would just be to just take these out of the story. Yeah. I mean, in a weird way, almost forgivable, I always make fun of bad questions on, on TV, you know, after the games end. Yeah. But in a way, it's like when you watch a football game on TV, I understand television, you kind of want to see the guy. You want to hear him.

Even if he's, I mean, you can, of course, ask better questions, but even if it's just something totally anodyne. It's something about seeing the winning quarterback talking after the big star of the game. Sure. Seeing like, you know, sweaty Joe Flacco, even if he had a terrible game, it sort of like justifies your fandom in a certain way to see everything, to get that vibe of everything he went through during the course of the game. Yeah, yeah, the expression on his face.

Oh, that's kind of interesting. But then when it's put on the page, digital or analog page, it's just like, I mean, this is, can I give you a couple more? How about Brett Hunley after the Packers triumphed over the Bears? It feels amazing. It's truly amazing, especially a rivalry game. There was a lot going into this game. I just thank the team. He didn't even describe anything that he did.

He just reeled off like five things in a row. Can I ask you read another one? You have another one there. Oh, just one more. This is Tom Brady. It's always hard to win in the NFL I just like any references to the NFL or national football league

Certainly on the road We found a way to do it last year and we're off to a good start this year Okay I'm going to save my I'm going to save my related rant About just about color commentators and play by play people That use the phrase national football league When talking about the NFL on an NFL broadcast For another day

And also I mean listen Tom Brady I'm going to give that one a pass. Like if you're if you're you know, Tom Brady is is sufficiently a megastar that you would of course include a quote from him in any article, but you're also interviewing the world's most famous robot. So like I'm not quite sure that there's you expect anything more from him in any instance. But it's just a it's just a really weird world of, you know, there are these expectations from from the editors, you know, to get these quotes in the paper.

My question for you, as someone with much more experience between the two of us on this sort of thing, do you think that like professional athlete media training in 2017 involves teaching players how to say the most, the emptiest things possible? I know it does. And it starts in college or even before. Sure. You know, I think one of the things I'm, whenever I follow high school recruiting, I'm amazed at how young kids 16, 17, 17, 18 years old can use really anodyne quotes.

And it's because they've, in within their case, a lot of it's just experience. They've just been interviewed so many times. There's this new thing on college recruiting where a player, whenever he's asked like, you know, have you thought about your decision where you're going to commit? The recruit goes, this isn't a four-year decision I'm making. This is a 40-year decision. And like, but like I've seen like tons of recruits say that. Like they developed their own like glossary of cliche.

Yes. And I just think it's because they're getting, you know, first of all you have, they're interviewed earlier and earlier. So they just learn. And like, ooh, I'm not going to say anything controversial again. Yeah. And then in college they start like actual formal training. Yes.

Yeah. And I think there's also the element of seeing that the success that is that people like, you know, LeBron James would throw a name out there had by being, you know, every, it seems like a few years ago, there would be one or two, like, you know, NBA prospects where you would get the, like, this time during the college basketball season, there'd be a freshman where people would be just like, wow, he is really mature. He is really media savvy. And what they were saying was he's, he's already has the ability to say nothing, you know? He's already got it. Now, if you look at like the, you know, 2018 NBA mock drafts, you have guys like Michael Porter and Marvin Bagley who are,

who are as good as, you know, like a 15 year NBA. pro. I mean, it's all, like, this is, this is part of the process. This is part of learning how to be, learning how to be a pro. And like you said, people are, they're getting interviewed earlier and earlier and people are paying attention to them earlier and earlier. And, and yeah, I mean, it's just, it's that sort of preparation on the part of athletes that you described is just like, that's, in a lot of ways, that's killing, like, that's what's killing journalism. I mean, that's not, not the whole industry, but that's the problem with all these pieces. It's that they just don't say anything. Oh, yeah. There's not. And it's not, there's not, not even opportunity to like to veer your story to another direction based on something that someone says we have we you know at the ringer you it happens a lot more in football i think there's just so many more players and so many more so many of those players are you know you know kind of came up from nowhere haven't been haven't been superstars for that long and and uh you know they just don't get the same level of attention from the PR department um and and sometimes people can follow those follow those stories in different directions.

But it's just amazing. It's amazing how bland. It's amazing that old newspapers just don't speak to me in the way that Barsoil sports does these days. David does Sammy Walk instead of Robert Woods. You're a pro. Thanks for joining me this week. That's the press box. We're back next week with more hot takes.

But All Things Media. He's David Chewaker. I'm Brian Curtis. See ya. Yeah.