The Press Box - ‘The Press Box’ —Stop The Presses! (Ep. 388)

Episode Date: December 1, 2017

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker break down the firings of Matt Lauer (03:00) and Garrison Keillor (11:15). Then they recognize the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week (19:00) before getting into the University of Tennessee's handling of the Greg Schiano situation (23:00), the ESPN layoffs (31:00), the failed attempt to bust The Washington Post by James O'Keefe and Project Veritas (38:00), and the purchase of Time Inc. by the Meredith Corporation (44:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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David, normally on the press box, we talk about three subjects. But this week, there are about 9,000 gigantic media stories. So can we just list the ones we don't have time to talk about today?

Yeah, shoot. What are we not going to cover? I'll go first. How about the New York Times' soft-focused Nazi profile? Oh, man. Yeah. If only we hadn't taken last week off.

What do you have? Well, I mean, local news, the mystery owners, who have just fired seemingly most or all of the editorial staff of LA Weekly. We will not be covering that in great detail. Maybe next week. Peter Thiel may be buying Gawker. We'll keep tabs on that one for later.

What about the deplorable alleged indiscretions of Glyn Thrush and Charlie Rose? A topic for another day, certainly. How about CNN boycotting the White House Christmas Party and Sarah Huckabee Sanders being happy about that? Donald Trump says he turned down Times Person of the Year award. And of course, we also won't be talking about Donald Trump. Trump claiming the Billy Bush tape is fake or Trump retweeting anti-Islam videos. We got to know. And they're not caring whether they were real.

We got to save Donald Trump on the, on the Billy Bush tape for its standalone episode at some point in the future. There was the whole Gothamist and DNA info scrap. That seems like last year at this point. Yeah, absolutely. JJ Reddick coming to the ringer. Oh, yeah. Local news. I mean, office news.

Nice topic. Yeah. We will not be getting to that today. Nor will be touching on the Deadspin awards. I want to go to that one of these years. How have we never been? I don't know. I don't know.

Never invited. I think I was invited. I'm sorry. You weren't invited. All right. Now we're going to actually talk about stuff. This is the press box on the ringer podcast network. The press box is the media podcast.

We are not allowed to use the phrase, the increasingly blurry line between news and opinion. We are Brian Curtis and David Schuemaker of the Ringer. And David, now time to talk about what we are going to discuss today. The number one, the Matt Lauer scandal. number two, the Garrison Keeler scandal. Number three, Greg Shiano and the quote unquote Twitter lynch mob. Number four, the ESPN layoffs. I think another ESPN layoff.

Back to scandals with number five, James O'Keefe. And finally, Time Magazine and the Coke Brothers. Told you was a loaded show today. What world to re-end that ESPN laying off 100 people is like the most firm ground for me to comment on at this point? And I felt like I had 2 o'clock yesterday. Everybody had forgotten about the ESPN layoffs. It was incredible. All right, we will start with Matt Lauer because that's what everybody's talking about.

We wake up late here on the West Coast. But if you flipped on the Today Show Wednesday morning, the first thing you saw was Savannah Guthrie telling the world that Matt Lauer had been fired. Just moments ago, NBC News Chairman Andy Lack sent the following note to our organization. Dear colleagues, on Monday night, we received a detailed complaint from a colleague about inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace by Matt Lauer. It represented after serious review a clear violation of our company's standards. As a result, we have decided to terminate his employment.

And we have spent the last 24 hours or so learning the increasingly grisly details, allegedly, of what those indiscretions may be. Yes. And, oh, boy, I don't even have a question. I don't even know if I have an answer if you had one. Yeah. First of all, just to say, this was absolutely shocking. I mean, you don't ever, you don't even have to watch morning television, which I don't,

to realize how big a deal it is that not only Matt Lauer, that Matt Lauer is gone, that Matt Lauer is gone within 24 hours. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of hard to do the TikTok on this because there's so much we don't know. You know, the statement from NBC said that on Monday they got their first ever, or at least first ever under the current ownership, directorship, whatever. As they made clear to know.

He has a complaint about Matt Lauer. We know that both variety in the New York Times have been pursuing pieces. Yeah, Variety's piece came out, you know, an hour after the word of Matt Lauer's firing came out. And the word now is that they've been working on this for two weeks at least, you know,

and so certainly NBC was aware of it. I don't know if there's just like a sort of, you know, Occam's razory answer to this, which is like NBC knew this was going on and the HR department threw up their hands and said, well, somebody please file a complaint so we can fire this guy. I don't know how his contract works.

You know, we don't know the details of this stuff. But certainly all these things are very intertwined. And this was, you know, it wasn't an open secret in the way that Harvey Weinstein situation was, but certainly enough people knew that it trickled down to the New York Times and variety to be reporting on this. Yeah, God, I just, we had this open secret conversation every time now.

Yeah. Because it's increasingly hard to believe that nobody knew. Well, when you read the stuff about Matt or that somebody had a sense of, you know, I don't know that people knew for sure. There was this idea, oh, well, we knew he was kind of a cad. Yeah. But we didn't know that he was, you know, doing this stuff. I mean, that's, that's, of course, been something we've heard about a lot of these guys, too.

Yeah. That's what we heard about Charlie Rose. Yes. A couple of weeks ago. There are a lot of parallels. One parallel that jumped out at me to Harvey Weinstein, and I'm sure there are other people on this list that are the supplies. to as well is that we allowed ourselves to not see the kind of gruesome truth because the conventional

wisdom that this guy is a jackass sort of subsumed all of the other indiscretions, right? Like Matt Lauer, like, was quote unquote, like, so protective of his spot of the Today Show, that that became an acceptable answer for like the ongoing procession of women leaving the show, you know, of all these like personality disputes, of all of these, I mean, we don't even know about know how many, you know, producers, female or male, were shown the door over the years during his tenure there, whatever. But it's a similar thing with Weinstein that just like people will defend themselves from not knowing saying, yeah, I knew he was a jackass. I didn't know all the stuff. Oh, we just thought it was misogynist.

Yeah, exactly. We had no idea about the other stuff. Yeah. That's a really interesting point. I think it's also just, I mean, I couldn't help but remember when Ryan Williams was the disgraced NBC News anchor for, as turns out stuff. those on a totally different order of magnitude. And Matt Lauer was the guy welcoming him back to TV conducting what everybody thought was an incredibly softball interview at the time. You sort of wonder what was going through Matt Lange.

This is the other question. It's like, did the people, and of course we learned also Matt Lauer talked to Bill O'Reilly and gave a kind of a little bit more of a fastball interview with O'Reilly? Over the last six months since you're firing, have you done some soul searching? Have you done some self-reflection? And have you looked at the way you treated women that you think now or think about differently now than you did at the time? My conscience is clear. What I have done is organized a legal team to get the truth to the American people. So if you go to newsmax.com or Bill O'Reilly.com, you will see an article about one of the accusers of me, okay, who was arrested for filing a false police report.

You will see that article. And I want people to read it and make up their own mind. And that happened back in 2015. And I just want to mention the two things can be mutually exclusive. She could have filed a false report in 2000. And I don't. You don't know. She could have filed a false report in 2015 and still be telling the truth about you.

Look, anything's possible. All right. But it goes to credibility, doesn't it? Do these people, do you think, are they sitting there thinking, oh, man, this could be me? or have they just processed, you know, they just, in some state of denial that they think they'll never be caught? I don't know.

That's another fascinating question. No, that's, I mean, everybody's got to be thinking about that. I think it's somewhere in between. I mean, I think that there's certainly a huge level of denial. And also, I think if you're Matt Lauer, you're this sort of like, you know, the paternal, the saint of the softball at the NBC News or whatever, like you're the, you know,

when this kind of interview opportunity comes along, be it O'Reilly or Brown. Ryan Williams or Hillary Clinton, you know, you take this interview because that's your job. And that's part of what comes with, I mean, it's a prideful thing, but it's also a contractual thing. You know, that's that's his job. Yeah. He does the big interview, right? Most of the time.

We haven't had a ton of jaw-dropping defenses of the accused since we started this run. Right. Other than maybe Lena Dunham. But yesterday we got Geraldo. Comes through with this tweet. News is a flirty business, and it seems like the current epidemic of hashtag sex harassment allegations. By the way, how often was the hashtag sex harassment allegations used yesterday? Maybe criminalizing courtship and conflating it with predation.

What about hashtag Garrison Keeler? He had a series of tweets, which then Fox semi-apologized for and said this is not our standard. That was weird. Yeah, I mean, it kind of makes me think of your previous question. Like, what is occupying Geraldo's mind, if not his time, that this is how he decides to spend an afternoon tweeting this stuff? Well, I think all of us, when these accusations came out, is that, oh, this is how it always worked in the news business. Yeah. Sadly, or the movie business, whatever.

And Geraldo is basically confirming that this is how it worked in the news business in a terrible way. Your old boss, Jacob Weisberg had a good comment on this. I think a really, to me, a really penetrating comment on this on the political GabFest Slates podcast. We're living through a revolution. This revolution is long overdue, and I very much welcome it. Revolutions are very messy, and revolutions inevitably go to excess. And part of that excess is a loss of proportionality about how bad different things are. Punishments are meted out unjustly.

And I think that that's, I mean, yes, this is how, I mean, maybe this is how some office environments operate, But that isn't a defense. No, not at all. I was also fascinated by the detail that maybe Megan Kelly is going to get Matt Lauer's job. Megan Kelly had been doing so badly in her 9 a.m. hour. And now through some triple bank shot would wind up as host of the Today Show. Wouldn't that be strange and amazing on a number of levels? It would be really weird.

Another moment of kind of necessary dissonance that's come up with the Matt Lauer thing. is how, like, everyone that's publishing stories about Matt Lauer being fired and the sexual harassment allegations and everything else, it's like in the sidebar of every periodical almost is like, who's going to replace Matt Lauer, our top 10 picks, you know? So it's a real concern about the Today Show is who's the new host of the Today Show. Which is for me, it's always so funny because it's somebody who didn't watch those shows. I, and I think a lot of Americans only experienced it as a Game of Thrones. Yes.

Every time there was like a problem or is Matt getting fired? or is Matt's contracts like late night? Yeah. You experience it much more as like a woge bomb than you do as actual television. Absolutely true, yes. Yeah, and here we are again. Toping number two, David, as we were processing the Matt Lauer News, Minnesota Public Radio announced it was firing Garrison Keeler,

the formerly beloved homespun storyteller for what it called, quote, inappropriate behavior. Garrison Keeler does not host a Prairie Home Companion anymore. He does host a show called The Writer's Almanac. I don't know if you were aware of that. that one. The best of a prairie home companion, too. Those shows are gone. What was interesting about this one is the allegations against Matt Lauer are pretty wide-ranging and beyond disgusting. They're a little bit different for Garrison Keeler. Right. He said in a statement to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, I put my hand on a woman's bear back. I meant to pat her back after she told me

about her unhappiness and her shirt was open and my hand went up at about six inches. She recoiled. I apologize. I sent her an email of apology. We were friends and we continued to be friendly right up until her lawyer called. This is another, I think, a couple of thoughts. Thought number one is as we go through this terrain that you talked about being messy and terra incognita, right? And media, we're going to get a whole spectrum of things. And this is on a different place on the spectrum, allegedly, than Matt Lauer is. Yeah. In this case, the result was the same. Sure. I mean, going back to the Lauer thing, I mean, I thought what was interesting, and it was NBC's responses, you know, when they had one formal HR complaint, they said, well, but we're sure, we're confident that this is not an isolated incident. And some of that was the, I think the complaint entailed discussion of previous times, you know,

and they knew this variety story, the New York Times story. I'm sure they'd seen other allegations in less formal venues. But part of it was, you know, the allegations, or I'm sure that everybody there was on some level fully aware of, that Lauer was, you know, openly making sexual comments on the set. Yes. You know, giving it appropriate gifts to people as sort of jokes. You have to wonder with, you know, when something like the Garrison Keeler thing happens, when he gets fired, if there's not a sort of institutional knowledge that this problem is bigger than. this one incident. I have no idea. I mean, it all seems very, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

spectrum. A lot of this, you know, a couple of, uh, couple of, uh, couple of weeks ago. And I go back to a rule that she, I don't know if we can call this the Kim Masters rule, but I'm going to go ahead and call it that right now. The stuff you hear on the front end of these things is often not the worst stuff. Yeah. I mean, if we go back and look at that very first Harvey piece in New York Times, sure. It was both devastating and comparatively mild to the things we learned later about Harvey Weinstein. I don't say mild and unexpected other than we learned much, much worse as it went on. So every time we say, oh, well, if that's it, if that's all Al Franken did, if that's It's all Garrison Keeler did.

There's often chapter two, chapter three, chapter four, chapter five to come as more people come forward. It's just have to really tap the brakes before you, you know, make any sort of assumption like that. Yeah, it's tough. I mean, there's, I think there may be more that we find out. There might not be more, you know, I think what, I mean, I think just, I don't want to get into, like, dangerous territory here. But I think that, you know, the longer this thing.

goes, the more I have this feeling that demonizing, like, demonizing the, all of the, you know, the quote unquote villains in these stories to such a degree is actually not a helpful way to process it because it oversimplifies the larger problem. And just like, and I mean, to use the term demonize, I mean, just like with, you know, some people have very, religion describing like great you know that blaming the devil for all the problems in the world it makes the problem too simple i mean these are going to be these are human beings and it's not to defend anything they did but it but it from our position from from the from the perspective of the onlooker or from the victim um you know you look at savanna guthries the way that

she was breaking down announcing yeah i mean it's it's it it over simple of I mean, evil exists in so much as it exists. It exists inside of human beings, you know, in all of us. And that's part of why we see the problem, you know, continuing the way that it does. It was funny because I was, I looked askance a little bit when people are making in the New York Times is done. I think Time Magazine has done it to a list of all the people, of all the men who have gone down in this thing.

And on the one hand, it's a handy reference guide because you forget. And on the other hand, you're just putting a lot of very different problems and a lot of very different transgressions into one thing, in one kind of almost clickbaity kind of list. Sure. And I just don't know how helpful that is other than as a reference guide. A couple of other things about Keeler, one. Several Facebook posts last night were you aware how multimedia Garrison Keeler was before this.

I was not aware. He said he was going to move out of the country in one of them. He didn't deleted that post. He said he wanted to come back because he wanted to write a couple of movies in a weekly humor column and a book called Gratitude. Also, I just sort of assumed that Garrison's, Gerson Keeler wrote everything on Fool's Scap or something. I didn't know he was actually at a Facebook page.

Also, I was a little bit surprised at the media Chadenfreude about Garrison. I didn't know that that many people hated him. I kind of have no opinion about Garrison Keeler. Were you kind of shocked at how many people are like good ridens? Yeah. Weird time for a take. Weird time for a take. Also, this is alleged we don't quite know at this point, but a Prairie Home Companion will be retitled the Chris Thiele show.

Yeah. After its new host, Chris Thiele. and this is one of the, we should also note that Garrison Keeler had just written a Washington Post piece suggesting that Al Franken should not resign. Well, there you go. Prompting one of the greatest updates of all time at the top of the column. What does it say? I don't have it in front of me, but it was update there. You should read some stuff about Garrison Keeler before you plow through this defensive, semi-defense of Al Franken.

Oh, man. I was also reading the Star Tribune, which is sort of owned this story, a giant story in their back. and they sent a reported to Garrison Keeler's hometown to gauge the reactions of men and women on the street. And the headline was one of those Minnesota things I've ever read, quote, Minnesotans confess, quote, very turbulent feelings over allegations against Garrison Keeler. They confess that they have these turbulent feelings. I thought that was so Midwestern. Oh, man.

It was amazing. The Washington Post thing is crazy. I mean, you know, there have been a lot of people writing op-ed opinion pieces over the past several weeks that are sort of a lot of female writers, mostly female writers that are sort of, you know, suggesting that we tap the brakes on the on the witch hunt, you know, to the extent that it is one. Because a lot of people are getting brought in, as you were saying before, to these top 10 lists that they're not always the same thing. but when you're I mean just as a man if you're if you feel compelled to write an article to write an op-ed in defense of someone

being accused of these things maybe examine your own motives right why do I want to weigh on this right now how do I want to be loudly on the other side right now I hear that old piano from down the avenue It's time, I smell the green grass. I look around for you.

It's time, David, for our overworked Twitter joke of the week. And just like we've got 100 media topics to talk about this week, we've got about 1,000 overworked Twitter jokes of the week. So I actually have runners up. Oh, my gosh. Your fourth runner up. Holy. I know, right?

If you reacted to the firing of Grizzlies Coach David Fisdale with any version of Take That for Data, Congratulations on That's from listener Justin Schooner Going back a bit Since we've been off For a couple weeks On November 15th

Reacting to his Rejection by Senate Majority Leader Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore tweeted Dear Mitch McConnell Bring It On

Which led everyone in the world to note that Bring It On is a movie About high school cheerleaders Everyone made that joke Including the director of Bring It On

Peyton Reed The first time I saw that tweet, I'd laughed. I have to admit. The comeback tweet? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It was a good tweet. It's a good tweet. But then it was like a billion times on Twitter. It was amazing. Usually the overworked Twitter joke is funny. Yes. It is often funny. Our second runner app, will, you'll remember this on November 24th. Our president,

Donald Trump tweeted Time Magazine called to say that I was probably going to be named man, perin, person of the year like last year, but I would have to agree to an interview, blah, blah, blah. Thanks anyway. So many people just rewrote the Trump tweet for their own purposes. Oh, right. Sports Illustrated just called to say I was probably going to be named cover model for their swimsuit issue. That was NFL writer Benjamin Albright. Thanks to Joshua Dixie Walker.

By the way, for pointing that out. Our first runner up, David, we're getting close to the top here. Prince Harry got engaged the American actress Megan Markle. Yes. And if you made any joke about, oh good, I'm free in May to go to the royal wedding or about what you would wear, that day, you not only indulged in the overworked Twitter joke, but he really just made a dad joke, right? That is just, that's just the most base humor. Yeah.

I'm going to the Royal Wedding. You can do better than that. Come on, people. All right. And finally, our winner, a group prize, David, to everyone who exploited Garrison Keeler's Lake Woe-Bagon IP to make jokes about his demise. Oh, no. Up to and including Lake Woe Be Gone. Woebegone, if true.

That made me laugh. And so far, all the Garrison Keeler joke tweets have been below average. Before we talk about Greg Shiano, let's take a quick break. I'm Mallory Rubin, deputy editor of Theringer.com. Joining me today. Now that he's finished gazing upon the Porzing God himself in his care of magical creatures class, It's Ringer Staff Writer and your maister, Jason Concepcion! And we're here on urgent business.

Is it urgent? It's urgent! To tell you about Binge Mode Weekly, our triumphant return to our true home, our true Dragonstone, your earbuds. We are back! Yeah! On Binge Mode Weekly! Jason and I will be taking our trademark deep dive into the topics that are occupying

our minds and hearts, the events of the moment. Love the scholarly expertise and accessibility of Binge Mode Game of Thrones. Then you'll love Binge Mode Weekly, where we'll touch on everything from our favorite books and movies. To the shows that are obsessing us at a given moment. To the sporting events captivating us from week to week. Binge mode weekly starts this Thursday and every Thursday thereafter on the same feed as Binge Mode Game of Thrones. Oh, Thursday. And...

Dund, da, da. Dund, da. Give you that haggard-sized drum roll. Stay tut. For binge mode, Harry Potter in spring, 2018. Akio binge mode. Protect Heggling. Jason, I have some very distressing news for you.

All right, David, on Sunday, the world learned that Greg Shiano, your favorite former Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach. Oh, man. It was about to be hired as the head man at the University of Tennessee. And then all hell broke loose. as a rag-tag collection of opponents, later denounced as a, quote, Twitter lynch mob by several critics, got together to stop this.

It included Clay Travis. I was actually impressed how broad this coalition was. Clay Travis, our old pal, former Tennessee defensive tackle Albert Hainsworth, and numerous Tennessee politicians. They noted a couple of things, one that Greg Shiana was accused of having some knowledge of the whole Jerry Sandusky scandal back at Penn State. And number two, yeah, deep sigh, number two, that he wasn't a very good football coach.

Anyway, they succeeded in foiling it. He is not going to be the coach at the University of Tennessee. And a lot of people got really mad at this. Right. This is the press story here, right? Yes. There were some incredibly over-the-top reactions to the fact that this whole thing, had been foiled.

Yes. The speed at which the narrative arc took place in this story is maybe the most compelling part of it, right? I mean, the distance between word leaking out that Tennessee was going to hire Shiano and then the chorus of loud voices emerging online in various forms. And then the chorus of defenses of Shiaado coming in largely from the source. sports writer contingent. It seemed like it all happened.

If you weren't paying attention, it all happened at the same time. Yeah. And a lot of, a couple of the reactions said, you know, this is unprecedented what's happening here, that people, that fans, crazy Twitter people, Clay Travis, should be able to rise up and get a coach knocked out of the thing. But to me, it's like the speed is what's interesting, as you say, this has been happening for years. Yeah.

Remember fire coach? so-and-so.com. Sure. Remember when that was the thing? When I was at the University of Texas and we had our bad football coach John McEvick, there was like a plane that flew over the stadium that said flush the John. That was a good one. That was the overused Twitter joke of the week, circa 1981 or whatever that was.

Overused plane, joke of the plane flying over the stadium joke of the week. This is, people have been exerting, you know, influence on these things, if that's the word for it. Yeah. Forever. It's not new. Well, what's new is that the the way that, the actual hiring process, the fact that it happens in, you know, almost complete darkness to the, to the fan base and the general public, now there is a means of responding to it in time. With the speed, you know, with almost the same speed at which is announced, you can express, you can express your discontent with that selection. Whereas even five years ago, you know, the fastest response was the column and the sports page the next day.

Absolutely. And we know they were going to hire him Sunday night. Right. The plan was to announce the hire. And this was what also made me cringe at some of the responses was essentially what you're saying is the press shouldn't have time to vet this idea. Right. Even if you ultimately come to the conclusion that the Penn State accusation is basically hearsay, there's no proof of it.

We're comfortable with it, right? Sure. We're uncomfortable with the accusation, but we're comfortable with the idea because we've talked to Shiano and he assured us that it's not true. Right. You are bringing that scandal from a different school into your public university to some level. And why do a couple of decision makers at the school get to decide this with no buy-in from MBS? And if that's the case, why is the press rooting for that to happen? That's the craziest part.

I mean, all of these football writers should be saying, you know, I disagree with, I mean, for whatever reason, I disagree with all these voices of fans and commentators that upended the deal. But please get like, like, allow, like I should have been able to make this case a week ago. Sure. You know? Even to defend him. Exactly. Let's have this. And the whole thing is they're saying this issue is so explosive that if we talk about it for a couple of hours, his whole thing will be his whole.

you know, job will go to hell. Yeah. And it's like, well, maybe if it's that explosive, maybe we should talk about it. Exactly. Maybe we should talk about it. And by the way, the other thing I saw, saw this from Pat 40 in his column about it says, oh, all this Penn State stuff was really a cover because people don't think that Greg Shiana was a good football coach. And they're using the Penn State stuff because they want John Gruden or they want whoever, you know,

they're not going to get him either. But they want somebody else. By the way, if you thought that hiring Greg Shiana was a bad idea because you don't think he's a good football coach, that was also worth discussing. Yeah. That was also an argument worth having. Sure. Why don't people that went to the University of Tennessee or people that cover Tennessee get to have, get to hash that out?

It's kind of crazy. I don't understand. I don't like why, I just don't understand why those people get to pick and nobody else gets to have any say about it. We only find out after the fact. Yeah. I mean, I think that a lot of the anxiety about Chiano as it relates to Penn State is similar to, you know, I mean, there's a lot of parallels you could draw. for some reason my mind went, I mean, you know, back to Jerry Jones hiring Greg Hardy. I mean, Greg Hardy's a very different case.

But, you know, there's a lot of times when people potentially get hired and you can wish they weren't hired. You can wish they weren't signed. But I think, I mean, at least for me, what I need, what I'm most desperate for is some acknowledgement that the person signing this paycheck is aware that these concerns exist. Right. Right? Have a press conference and say this. You know, say like, we've talked about this and this is why I'm okay with giving this person this much money. Or leak it three days in advance of the hiring.

So that you can, so that everybody else can have a discussion. Yeah. Because if you, if you, if you, the way they're doing it now, you leak it, you know, an hour before the press conference, then you're leaving yourself where the only option is for it for the whole thing to be tossed out. Right. Right. There's no, there's going to be no intelligent. discussion with the timeline set that way.

We've seen this all over college football because there's this whole diaspora of former Baylor assistants. Yeah. Including one low-level guy who got hired by my beloved University of Texas. Yeah. And guess what? Everybody on the message boards freaked out when they found out about it. Yep.

Because, and again, the guy was claiming, I didn't know anything. I just had no idea what was going on, similar to Greg Shiano. But it's like, shouldn't we talk about this? Yeah. Shouldn't the head coach answer some. questions about this before, you know, again, I mean, there's so many levels, there's a level of morality. There's also a level of, do I want my school mucked up in this other scandal?

Right. I mean, it's just like, no, why are we? Why can't we talk about this? If it's okay, if he really knew nothing, let's, let's have a couple of, let's have, you know, some time to process it. It's sort of like, I mean, just, it's, it's, it's the feeling that all this stuff is going on in secrecy, right? I mean, like, if the coach of, if, you know, if the head coach is not willing to just come out to reporters and say, I'm contemplating hiring Casey Horny or whoever, you know, this Baylor coach.

I think that he was, I think that he was innocent as it regards all the stuff that went down to Baylor. And I firmly believe as a Christian that, you know, everyone deserves a second chance. You know, and this is a thing that I'm contemplating right now. I'll get back to you with word in a week. Yeah. Just to open it up to sunlight, I think it doesn't absolve anybody of everything that's been done. But it certainly makes you feel like you're involved in the process and so much as a single fan deserves to be. And I think that's the real anxiety.

It's almost like to drain the swamp of stuff. You know, it's like all this stuff is happening. And we should have input and we don't have any input. Right. Or at least knowledge. We should have voice and knowledge. Not input, at least knowledge of what we're about to do or what the school's about to do. Especially in the era of social media where it seems like we have input on everything else.

It's little wonder that this happened and it's surprising that it hasn't happened before. And that's what I got so mad about because I was like this is when you do now, first of all, the idea of a Twitter lynch mob. Do we not make the mother's mom's basement joke? Yeah. Can we add that? Is this like the way we talked about the web in 2000 or something? But the reason there is a quote unquote Twitter lynch mob is because they are performing a basic background check at blinding speed. that you did not give the conventional press a chance to perform.

And if you are rooting against the press, rooting against reporting, rooting against the press, performing a background check, I just don't want to say to that. That's just crazy to me. Also, you're still allowed to hire him.

Yeah, that's what I mean. If you're reacting to the Twitter lynch mob, then you're validating the complaint. Oh, absolutely. That's what we've seen here. If you were that easily spooked

by a couple of hours of bad tweets, you know. Maybe you should rethink the process. Maybe you should rethink the process. Topic number four, David, is not a fun topic. ESPN on Wednesday laid off about 150 people. CNN noted that amounts to about 2% of their workforce. We had layoffs back in April that consists of lots of bold-faced names like Edward and Jason Stark.

This time, it was behind the scenes, production people, editors at the website, things like that, people that are not as well known to the general public. I wrote about this yesterday. the big question of me was, as I think about this and write about ESPN's layoffs, is just how do we think about ESPN post layoffs? You know, this ESPN that's clearly diminished, but is also still making money, not quote unquote dying as its critics would insist, some critics would insist. How do we think about that as an institution? I mean, I thought the most sort of affecting sentence in the piece that you wrote was this is how ambition is scaled back, right? ESPN has made, you know, so many moves towards global dominance in our lifetimes, right? I mean, just every, like prior to the past couple years, every press release from ESPN was how they were going to take over another segment of the world, right?

Right. And I mean, this is just the really sad part. During the first round of layoffs, all that was really discussed were the big names. And you kind of had to shoehorn into the conversation. There's also a lot of just regular people who are losing their jobs here, people whose names no one's ever heard of. And a lot of those people, by the way, probably moved to Bristol with the expectation that this was like the closest thing to a union job you could get. This is lifetime employment. Absolutely.

this round, it's almost exclusively those sorts of people. And to me, it's much more, you know, melancholy than round one was because of that. Yeah. A couple of differences, too. Like a lot of the people in April had big contracts or long contracts that were going to be paid off. Right. They're being paid till next year. Not every case, but in some cases.

Yeah. This year you have a lot of people who are just straight up employees who will get a severance package and all that stuff. But they're not, you know, going to make money until 2019. Yeah. You know, so it's just a totally different thing. Yeah, and you're right. We do think about those layouts differently because it's like, how can there be an ESPN without Jason Stark? Sure.

It was basically what we thought in April. And this time, it's just, yeah, the question is almost like, how can there be an ESPN that isn't just doing whatever it wants? Yeah, I mean, and, you know, not to be harsh, but like, you know, the flip side of that is that everybody who's a public face has any number of people online who have wished for them to be fired at some point over the years too. You know, like you people publicly contemplate the employment of, of. of public faces, public figures, right? Sure. You don't think about it in terms of, you know, the guy running the camera or editing the film or whatever. And I think a lot of it when you talk about scaling back ambition is hidden to us right now.

And we'll kind of and we'll never quite know, you know, sometimes they make an announcement. Say we're no longer going to be, you know, having our NBRA writers do X and Y. We're just kind of learn about it by osmosis. You'll flip on, you'll click on the website, you'll watch a TV, you watch some, you know, sports center. and you'll just notice that it's a little different. Sure. As John Skipper said yesterday, we'll do less. Yeah.

It'll probably be kind of imperceptible at first, but then you'll just know, oh, he's been not doing that anymore. Yeah. You know, they're not covering recruiting like they used to. Hockey, which has been a long time. You know, something they've sort of phased out in pieces over the years, right? Like, they're just not, they're not covering those things as much anymore.

Baseball, you know? Yeah. Um, yeah. I mean, I have so many disparate thoughts on this. I mean, on the, on the one hand, it's like, like, you know, you can imagine, you can like fantasize about fixes they could have to save money, right? I mean, just like, would Sports Nation be demonstrably, you know, less fun if it was filmed on iPhone cameras by interns? Like, I don't know.

But, you know, the flip side of it is, and not to demonize the mothership, what I mean, so many giant companies of the sort, you know, have multiple priorities, multiple things happening at the same time. But how many of these salaries, you know, could have been paid off if they had chosen to pay them instead of. of building a giant new studio in lower Manhattan. You know, or, I mean, how many... Or in Bristol. But that has to do with ambition, too, because there is still ambition, right? Totally. If the ambition were totally dead, they could probably maintain the status quo for a really long time.

We're not trying to get anything else. We're going to hang on to our X number of, you know, cable buys for, you know, until they all disappear. Yeah, and our core properties like SportsCenter, right? We're going to invest in those things, yeah. But, yeah, I mean, it's, it's tough, you know. They're not the only company who's laying off people in December 2017. It's sort of seems like a popular thing to do right now. But with ESPN, you know, like you wrote, this does sort of feel like a bellwether.

Topic number five, David, is James O'Keefe. All right. Conservative rabble rouser. He and his Project Veritas tried to bust the Washington Post. Yes. Which has reported brilliantly on Roy Moore. A woman approached the Washington Post, said that she offered herself up as another woman who said that she had been impregnated by Roy Moore many, many years ago when she was a teenager. This was supposed to prove that the Post would print any allegation right against Moore.

I think that was the underlying idea here, right? Yes. That they were sloppy. They were out to get him. What it wound up proving, thanks to the thrilling video to see of the reporter, basically telling the woman that they were on to the gag. Yeah. Was that they're really good reporters and they're really diligent.

And they don't fall for low-hanging fruit like this. Yeah. I mean, was that video amazing? or what? I mean, just to be, go ahead. What did you think

of the video first? Now I'll share my thoughts. I can't even, it's not just, the whole story is just like,

I mean, I think we were aware that this was the sort of, this was the project Veritas M.O., right? This is the sort of thing that they were up to. They'd released other videos

about the Washington Post in particular that, I mean, that were, that you could, you know, uh, we,

you could figure out the game plan pretty easily. It was like the depths of it that were so mind-blowing, not just impersonating a sexual assault victim. But then the article came out yesterday that the woman in question had been trying to infiltrate the post

and get these clips for months in various different venues and platforms, constantly showing up uninvited to going away parties for various post staffers and just sort of like chumming it up with like editors at the bar and just trying to catch them off guard.

And in this case, saying just like really anodyne things about just like the difference between the news and editorial operations at the post? I mean, like, what a... First of all, this sounds like a fun job. Project Veritas, give me a call. I can just drink with a camera in my pocket.

This sounds like, yeah, I think I can pull this off. But the, but I don't know. The whole thing is just mind-boggling. She's been to more journalism mixers than I've been to in my whole life. Absolutely true. I've never been to like the meet and greets. Like, what is that? I have no idea.

Let's got all the investigative reporters. I just don't know those things existed. Oh yeah, they're really low-fi ones. Like the New York, like, it's just a bunch of, like, young, up-and-coming people trying to network. And she's in there trying to get people put on some sort of blacklist for their politics. I don't know. The other thing that struck me is there's this movie idea of journalism, all the president's

man, spotlight recently. The Post coming up? The Post where these kind of dramatic moments happen within newsrooms. Yeah. And then you watch that video. And you see the Post reporter, and there's nothing. dramatic about it. There's no yelling.

There's no screaming. There's no finger being pointed. Gotcha. Yeah. She's just calmly laying out the idea that this woman is a fraud. Yeah. And that there's going to be a big story in the Washington Post, calmly giving her the chance over and over again to say something to comment for the story. This is your chance now if you want to really explain this.

That's how devastating journalism actually works. Yes. by calm, level-headed, dogged, detail-oriented people who just pour through everything and then go, okay, now I'm going to write something about you that you're not, you're going to really, really hate. Yeah. And here's your chance. And boy, that was an amazing video. I could watch that 100 times.

Yeah, it was really compelling. A couple other points about this. I love Matt Lewis's column, The Daily Beast, when he wrote about O'Keefe, who got $20,000 from Donald Trump, by the way, we should also note. and was making, I believe, over $300,000 last year. I saw that report, yeah. He made the point that if you're a young conservative journalist, essentially who's trying to do a startup, work in kind of a startup environment,

you're at the bidding of giant conservative donors. Yes. And if you go to them and say, I want to do, you know, essentially like a good government startup where, you know, something like just shoe leather investigative reporting. I'm going to make the next national review or something. Yeah. I mean, yeah, and that's like commentary.

But just like, you know, I'm going to do big, you know, big investigative pieces about our federal agencies. They're just not interested. But if you say, I'm going to go expose the secret agenda of the Washington Post, which is, you know, trying to concoct rumors about Roy Moore, they're like, ah, man, I love it. Let's do it. So it winds up leading people. It lines up funneling the money. toward crazy things as opposed to things that would be useful and would actually be successful. Yeah.

As opposed to just a complete cell phone like this whole thing turned out to be. Sure. And the people that are critical of the Washington Post, you know, have justifications in their own minds. But, you know, I think the parts of the Washington Post or the New York Times or CNN or CNN may be a bad example. But these big institutions, the things that they're exposed to through. conservative websites and, you know, message boards and everything else, that's such a small fraction of what the Washington Post or the New York Times or whatever does. The most significant

stuff they do is allow people to write the boring stuff, you know? And it's the same thing with this LA Weekly, all the LA Weekly laughs we've heard, the vast majority of people who are lamenting this online and on Twitter and everything else are like, these people were the only people willing to go to these like board meetings in LA. The LA Weekly were the only people covering the non-Hollywood parts of LA in a real human way. And, you know, increasingly our media as a whole is sort of in the grips of, you know, this sort of exploitative, you know, publicity mongering.

Speaking of in the grips, our final story today on Sunday night, the Meredith Corporation bought Time Inc. company that publishes Time magazine People, Sports Illustrated. And they did it with an infusion of $650 million from the billionaire Coke Brothers. Do you remember this is sort of a sidebar? Do you remember when time and people being owned by the same corporation seems sort of like a controversy? Like this was in our lifetimes, right? I mean, this is a conflict.

These two things are like competitors on the stands. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, this one's weird. I said before we started recording that, you know, the Trump White House could learn something from the Koch brothers when it comes to, you know, making a big move like this and somehow having very little negative response because they just do it at exactly the right time and exactly the most sort of lo-fi possible way. Well, they certainly don't do an end zone dance on Twitter. They have a win like Trump does. Yeah.

I mean, so we should also add that the Cokes, there was a lot of assurances from Mary. Meredith, that the coax would not have direct editorial control. Right. They're going to be passive owners. Passive owners. I mean, I think there's a general rule of thumb, just like the Kim Masters rule of Hollywood sex candles. The whoever Rupert Murdoch rule of this is that ideological owners of publications at some point will inflict their ideology on the publication. Yes.

Maybe we heard that Rupert wasn't going to do this with the, I think Brand Stelter pointed that out this week with the Wall Street Journal. did not turn out to be the case. Yeah. And Jeff Bezos coming up with the new tagline for the Washington Post. I'm sorry. That was fantastic. The, thank you. Thank you, James O'Kee, for that one. The other one is the Daily Beast story that suggested that maybe Meredith doesn't actually want the weeklies.

So there's actually two existential threats here, right? Okay. One is the Time magazine becomes, you know, fossil fuels, are great weekly. Yes. The second threat is that they just sell all the weeklies. That Meredith just wants the monthly titles. They publish a lot of monthly magazines.

And that somebody like David Pecker of American Media, which publishes the National Enquirer, gets his hands on time. Right. I don't know if, and he's a big Trump guy too. So I don't know if that's actually better or worse. Or I guess the third existential threat is that they just shut all the stuff down and say, boy, Time Magazine costs a lot of money.

Let's turn it into something that's not an actual weekly organ of journalism. Yeah, I mean, there's this sort of zoom out journal. I mean, just journalism and current year question of or issue of why the Meredith Corporation was the most attractive buyer for these properties, right? Not to say that the current owners of Time Inc. are ideological or not, but that they would, that they would, you know, make that sort of deal, you know, certainly the assurances of the Meredith Corporation. about the Koch brothers non-involvement is not the most meaningful thing, you know, is not enough to change your mind if you're, if you're skeptical. But, you know, there's not a, there's probably not a ton of interest in this sort of legacy media, at least not to the dollar figure that the Meredith Corporation is willing to offer.

But even if, you know, if you take the most sort of like arch perspective that the, the time does become fossil fuels are great weekly, it is, there, it is an interesting question. as to, you know, the way, the decision-making process for the Koch brothers about what they're interested in investing in, the sort of legacy thing, is this just doubling down on the sort of, you know, golden age set of, you know, the Fox News audience that's like, you know, demonstrably older than the people that are watching network TV at night or whatever. Those are probably largely the people who are still consuming their news through weekly or monthly magazines delivered to their door.

Right. You want to get the geyser set, basically. Yeah, I mean, that's the question. I mean, I can't imagine that they're projecting some sort of like massive revitalization for any of these magazines. It's really strange. There's also this is in Joe Pompeo's story in Vanity Affairs website, which is that at Time Inc, he quoted an anonymous source there saying it's like, it's just been so unsettling to work at Time Inc. Yeah. That in a weird way, this is like, well, this may be less than ideal.

this may actually turn out to be bad, but at least it's something, rather than when are we going to be sold? Yes. Which is what they've been going through the last couple of years. Will we have money? Well, we shut down. Yeah. And that just struck me as such a sad mournful cry from, you know, the world of not even just print media, but media, which is that even a potentially bad future is better than constant uncertain future. Yeah.

I mean, that just sort of says a lot about the media landscape right now, at least a legacy media landscape. landscape. It's kind of more fun, more fun than fossil fuels are great weekly is to imagine what like the, if, you know, if the Koch brothers really bore down on Sports Illustrated and just like put all their ideology, put all the kind of arch conservative conservative ideology into that one, what we would get. Oh my God. It would actually probably be a pretty fun magazine in its own way. Yeah. What do you, what would you think about Lee Jenkins's takes on tax breaks for the wealthy? Would you want to read that? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. The point after, you know, every day is about how government has gotten too large and we just need to scale things back.

Yeah. At the point of the last, the last page every week is what cabinet office can we eliminate? Yeah, exactly. That'd be really weird. Let's not even think about this. It's just depressing me totally. Even SI becomes even S.I. Yeah.

It's like S.I is somebody at S.I. Is like speed reading Jane Mayer's book, you know, to see if the coax are interested in sports at all? Yeah. They play golf? Squash. Yes. What do you think? I don't know, man.

I'm excited about new editor-in-chief Tim Tebow. I'm saying. All right. On that semi-depressing note, that's a press box this week, David. We got through it, man. We did. It was a marathon. It was a marathon.

I think we'll have 9,000 more topics next week at this rate that the world is moving, but we'll be back and we'll cover all of them. I just got an email, the Webby Awards email, to say that we're going to be the podcast of the year, but we have to agree to an interview and photo shit. Next week, we'll definitely not be talking about the Webby Awards. He's David Chewaker. I'm Brian Curtis. See ya. Project Veritas, give me a call.