The Press Box - 'The Press Box’ — Viva La Mothership (Ep. 368)

Episode Date: October 24, 2017

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker sit down for an emergency discussion about ESPN's cancellation of 'Barstool Van Talk' (02:00), the 'New York Times' interview with the cofounders of 'The Athletic' (21:30), and the end of Jemele Hill's suspension (33:30). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Bill Simmons. I wanted to tell you about Black on the Air. Hosted by the one and only, the great one, Larry Wilmore. Even though he's a Lakers fan, I still like him and he's talented. But he has all kinds of guests on from Neil deGrasse Tyson to Al Franken to Bernie Sanders. You name it. They're coming on, pop culture, politics, newsmakers. And then at the beginning of every podcast, Larry does a little riff about whatever is either sticking in his car or things that he's enjoying.

Although he has been enjoying much lately. the way the world's going. But Larry will riff on anything. And then he has guests on it. It's great. If you liked everything else that he's done, comedy-wise, if you love this Comedy Central show,

you will love this podcast. It is a medium that he has built for. It's called Black on the Air, hosted by Larry Wilmore. Get it wherever you subscribe to your podcast. David, Alex Matherer, a co-founder of the Athletic, told the New York Times today,

we will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we're the last one standing. I ask you, what publication would you like to see bleed out in front of your eyes? It's a tie between Mad Magazine

and the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Both of those, like those A-holes, I could not, the way that they've wronged me in my life, I'm just kidding. I love both of those publications that I didn't know, I didn't realize

you were a subject of a Mad Magazine cover. I just remember NYPD snooze or stuff like that. No, when you folded the back cover together at one point, it was my face and it was a really, really bad, bad rendition of me. My choice is easy and I might be because I've read this for 1,000 continuous, you know, nights in a row at bedtime, National Geographic for Kids. Oh, man.

Die. Yeah. Right after highlights, get the hell out of here. This is the press box on the ringer podcast network. David, this is an emergency edition of the press box. We're here. Do I sound like stool presidente? Yes, it's an emergency press conference.

Oh, my God. ESPN needed us more than we need them. So the press box is our media podcast. I'm Brad Curtis, Ringer, Writer. He's David Chewmaker. Ringer, our director, podcaster, writer, everything. And we're in the office today because there's tons of sports media news. Sports media has crawled out of the sub-basement of American journalism.

Today we rule. Front page, baby. Let's take this podcast global, man. Three topics today. Number one, bar stool canceled. Number two, these are like everybody knows it. I barely even need to say it. Athletic guy sounds like a dick.

And number three, Jamel Hill's back. Yes. Jamel Hill is the number three sports media story of the day. She's probably relieved to hear that. Oh, nobody is happier. Trust me, then Jamel Hill to not be in the number of. Number one or number two slot. All right.

So let's start with the number one. Barstool Van Talk, the late night Tuesday program about which so much has been written. Got canceled after one week today. And here's ESPN president John Skipper in a statement. While we had approval of the content of the show, I aired in assuming we could distance our efforts from the Barstool site and its content, which pretty much sums it up, right? Right. It bears mentioned that he says in the same and he canceled it unilaterally. was not a, it's not based on anyone else's opinion or particularly ratings or who knows what

his rationale was, but he was like, this is on me, it's over. Right. Immediately. Yeah. So I think it's helpful. This was sort of like shocking both from the blue news today, but it's actually helpful to maybe go through the couple of things that have happened since this show got reported and or announced. Yeah, break it down. Well, there's a couple of things, right? One thing is, is that Barstool asked Elica Sadeghie, college football television personality to sign a release saying she could be offended in any way humanly possible. Right. That came out.

She tweeted that. That's number one. Number two was the day before Van Tog goes on the air, and this is probably the most important thing. Sam Ponder, who ESPN has a ton invested in. Most of their Sunday football NFL countdown goes on Twitter and just goes after Big Cat, slightly erroneously, but goes after Big Cat and Barstool because of things they have said and written about her.

In the past, yeah. Which were pretty terrible. Oh, yeah. Which are really, really terrible. The Big Cat didn't. It turned out Big Cat, one of the co-hosts of the van of Van Tog did not actually say, but he was laughing in the background, apparently, for some of the statements. And, I mean, her point stands if she had phrased it correctly and just said, you know, these are the people we're getting into bed with, you know, in a more broad sense. You know, kind of parsing out the fact that she got that wrong.

I was just saying to you before the show. I mean, she might have just thought Barstool was just like a blog that one guy wrote. I mean, who knows what she thought. But parsing that out sort of misses the point that she's right. They said some really offensive stuff about her. Yeah. She's like, this is a nest of vile misogyny. And she was not wrong.

And number three, I think point number three is just Harvey Weinstein. This looms over everything. We're talking about the way this looms over everything in the media. Yeah. And I think right now, if you're going to venture into any territory that just is demeaning to women in any way possible, you don't want to do it. And ESPN, if everybody, hopefully people are sensitive to that anyway. But I would just think there's a heightened sensitivity about that right now here as all the news comes out of that crazy story. You're right in the, I mean, that's 100% right in the abstract.

And in the specific, in these specific examples, Dave Portnoy, founder and El Presidente of Barstool, was on his radio show seemingly defending Harvey Weinstein the day before. Oh my God. I forgot about that one. He was, he was, he was, I mean, his, his defense, you know, whatever, it's defensible. You can make a case either way, I don't care. But he was like trying to make some sort of equivalence between like if the, if the Harvey Weinstein's victims were like agreed, had agreed to it, then it would have been a trans. I don't, again, waters you don't need to wait into. And what we've seen from point out, port noise since you broke the story about, you know, ESPN and Barstool teaming up has been this like string of, you know, you'd call it.

a self-destructive behavior except for the fact that like this isn't so far out of the ordinary forum. No. And it's like even and even a bad story gets worse. Like when Sadeghi, when that story came out, he gets on one of his emergency press conferences and just refers to as a girl the whole time. Yeah. This girl we wanted to work with. Yeah. This girl did that. I'm just like, what, what year is this? Yeah. When is this happening? And then kept blogging and tweeting about her by it with her initials. I don't want to give her any publicity. She's just out here for the publicity. that sort of thing over and over again. And it was, I mean, just, I mean, honestly, to the extent that people immediately realized,

I mean, she didn't tweet anything. She didn't tweet the word barstool. No. To the extent that people immediately figured out it was barstool, I think the penetration of that into the actual barstool readership would have been pretty minimal, like, infinitesimal. And Portnoy is, you know, defending his honor as he sees that or whatever, and probably defending their name against future business partners or whatever else. but he does it just absolutely the wrong way.

That's also just content, right? I mean, that's what it's all going to come around to. And the thing about this is I think that at some point ESPN realized, even if Barstool, even if Big Cat and PFT are what a sports media person the other day referred to me as harmless barstool, quote unquote, we're going to have to apologize for harmful barstool. Like, we're going to, every time they do something, either internally we're going to hear about it from our employees. who are offended or the press is just going to come knocking on the door and say, what do you think about this?

What do you think about this? You've got a show with Barstool in the title. Barstool Sports themselves is sort of insulated from that. I mean, who knows if their ownership group or if they're feeling the heat from any of that. But it does seem that because this is, even the worst examples of some of the stuff we've talked about are sort of part of Barstool's identity for better for worse, they are insulated from that sort of criticism, even from the advertisers. advertisers know what they're getting into, you know, that sort of thing.

That's the brand, right? That's not unusual. But ESPN is going to answer to it. And there are, I mean, and, you know, we didn't even mention the fact that their Facebook show, the Barstool Tailgate show was also ended sort of unceremoniously this week, or last week by Facebook. Now they say it was a mutual decision that Barstool's statement, I think, was that it was a logistical nightmare getting in and out of tiny college towns every Saturday. You know, it seems to me that it's, you know, Saturday afternoon evening is a weird time to be trying to attract Facebook viewership of college kids or, you know, men in their 20s. So for whatever reason, it didn't work. It's not, it's, it's, it's an odd look to have two shows kind of go kaput in the span of one week.

Let's take the ESPN side of this first, which is interesting. And we'll do the barstool side of it. Here's one thing when I was watching their maiden voyage episode, which for a show that was put together, as they, I think, even admitted in like five minutes, wasn't that? the worst thing in the world, also was not the best thing in the world. I'm like, doesn't ESPN have tons of funny young employees? Can't they just do this in-house? Like if the idea is to get younger and cooler, I don't act. People are like, oh, you know, even Portnoy mentioned this today, like, oh, they want us to be cool and stuff.

I don't, is ESPN have a cool problem if you take all their talent? Not just the people who host TV shows, but like people on Twitter and funny on Twitter. To me, I see lots of funny people. Why don't they just get them to cook something? Yeah, it's a really good question. I mean, I think part of it is that you have, I mean, with the exception, maybe of, of, you know, the hosts of the six, you have a whole lot of youngish, you know, potentially vital people who are acting like stodgy 65-year-olds all over ESPN and breaking them out of that mold might be a little bit difficult. But yeah, I mean, it's the, it's the same thing that we talked about. The first time we had a conversation about Barstool jumping on ESPN is that.

that, you know, they hired her, they hired them and they hired Katie Nolan at the same time without seemingly a great idea for either of them. I mean, without the right idea. I mean, but Katie Nolan's a sort of person that you should hire and put in a position like this. You know, give her the opportunity to succeed in a show maybe at a better time slot. But yeah, it's, it's, it was a very weird. It just was a very weird decision. I want the Spencer holiday night show. What's he doing?

What's he? Was he busy? 1 a.m. Tuesdays? Can he just, can he just go into this line? Who would you put in this position? Yeah. Maybe a van wouldn't be the right vehicle, but I'd see what Spencer would do. The Barstall side is so funny.

One of my friends, Peter Buchowski, who hosts the Locked-on Packers podcast, who I love talking sports media when they told me, this was like Obi-1 holding the lightsaber and closing his eyes. You know, it's like you, if you strike me down, you'll make me more powerful than ever from Barstow's point of view. Because, oh, what a, what a just glorious day for them. I mean, just for content, right? Like it proves like if they're if there as he as Portnoy said to his press conference that the reason they exist is because we can't let PC America get the best of us right which is just ludicrous but if you start with that ludicrous premise this is ludicrous evidence to prove it.

Yeah. I mean for presumed I mean I don't know none of us not the contracts work. Maybe you do. I don't know but presumably for for PFT commenter and Big Cat you know this is a this is a you know. a hit to their wallets. Yeah, they're not happy. I mean, I'm sure for Barstool, I mean, the contract, according to Barstool,

the ESPN deal was with them, so it's presumably a hit to their wallet, you know, their corporate wallet as well. But just from a, from a, you know, character point of view, yeah, now they have a big bad, you know? I mean, it's like they're, they've been, they've been fighting, they've been running their business as if they're in a,

in, you know, a mortal battle with ESPN for a long time. Sure. Some of the true stooleys, I think, believe that. But I think that it's fair to say that there were a lot of, you know, a lot of the ESPN brass probably had very little idea who they were until someone pitched the show, you know? And so now they actually have a conflict with them. Now they have someone to fight against. The big bad is exactly right.

And this is a specific big bad. It's a humorless big bad, right? It's the big bad that wants to censor us. You know, that's for Howard Stern, right? That big bad was like Tom Chasano or the FCC or something. the letterman, it was NBC, GE, right? Yeah. These are those old corporate suits.

I don't want, I'm not doing, please do not think I'm analogizing Barstow with them. But this is that kind of big bad. Yeah. We want to say stuff. We want to make jokes. We want to, you know, see what's really on our mind. And they won't let us. They kicked us off the air because they have concerns about, you know, stuff.

And that's, it just perfectly fits into their hand. It's just really bizarre. The whole situation is really weird. I don't know. I mean, a lot of, yes, you know, Portnoy has spent the past couple of weeks making it very difficult for ESPN or any company of their size to do business with Barstool. But the argument on the other side, you know, holds water as well. You know, ESPN was, you know, knew what they were getting into.

Absolutely. Had to. And, you know, I mean, I guess, I guess there's a sort of middle ground here where if Portnoy or whoever else at Barstool or just Barstool in general had just sort of. of like kept a low profile and not done anything outrageous for what like a month and let the show get a footing then maybe they would have been in a more comfortable place i mean i think that sam ponder's tweet made that you know really difficult i think uh awful announcing reported that sarah spain had had you know it had some stuff too and they and i'm sure many other people you know

at espn were were it had some objection to this to this partnership um but you know the ratings were you can kind of paint it both ways for the rating. We can't believe that with the television ratings. There would be multiple stories you could tell with television ratings. Just like Mark Twain's old saying about there being lies, damn lies, and TV ratings. But yeah, I mean, they did better than the shows before and after them. But worse than an airing of Jalen Jacoby did the week before. But the lead-in from Sports Center had a higher rating the week before.

So, you know, everything's it. Not enough day. I don't think they didn't cancel the show because of low ratings. Sure. That's not. No. I guess there's a hypothetical in which a million people watched it that, you know,

maybe Skipper would have taken another week to make this decision and it possibly is shaken out differently, but that didn't happen and that wasn't going to happen. So that's kind of beside the point. I do think it's dodgy for their business prospects in terms of doing stuff outside of the house. I mean, one question with Barstool is, as you grow, you just want to do everything inside? Yeah. You want to get really big and say, we're going to hire people. We're going to hire, you know, nominal TV people and come let them do stuff for us.

We're going to keep our brands such as it is, Insular. Or do we really aspire to have a show on Comedy Central like they did before the Super Bowl last year? Which did well. Have a show on ESPN late night. Yeah. Like, is that a big deal to us? And to me, I would think that other people are going to be skittish after this. If ESPN backs out and says we don't feel comfortable, I mean, I just think that's going to be a harder sell next time.

Oh, that's absolutely true. I think that that's, you know, in some level of question that a lot of different media companies, the ringer included, are dealing with when you're, you know, there's the option of do we just, like, stream live video to our site all the time and try to get an advertiser to put their logo in the upper corner? Or you, you know, or are you, you know, going into business partnerships with not just networks, but, you know, the Facebook, like the, like the tailgate show or, you know, Twitter, like we've done YouTube. People are looking for content all over the internet. when you have a brand like Barstool, there's so many different options.

One of the problems with, you know, you can reach a much broader audience. One of the problems is, yeah, you're kind of like dicing yourself up and spreading yourself out in all these different directions. And it's impossible to predict how much that's going to end up as a, you know, a boon to the company at the end of the day. And it's never as pure as it was. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I mean, if you watch, if you watch the tailgate show, it's impossible not to think how that it would have been more successful as basically as just like, like a podcast live show.

Like, why do we have to brand this differently? You know, why do we have to go somewhere so far away where it's a logistical nightmare, as they said, right? I mean, can't you just like, just do this on a weekly basis or a monthly basis? It's the same thing. It just doesn't have to have, like, a separate cast for everything you do.

It's everything, I mean, but that's the problem. You're growing at the rate, they're growing, everything gets diced up. Guys talk about college football. Like, that's the concept. Yeah. That's the concept for everything else they do. Yeah. Guys talk about blank.

Yeah. So why would you then have to be on the road and all that stuff. I'll tell you one thing. Portnoy alluded in his press conference today they might go to a partial paywall model just so they can say whatever they want to say. That was weirdly thrown in at the end.

And a lot of weirdly, I just took a cursory glance at Barstool Reddit. People seemed a little bit more up in arms with that than of the show getting canceled. They'll tolerate a lot, but they won't tolerate a paywall. But yeah, I mean, if you're talking about, I mean, the problem, as I see it, ongoing that route. And, you know, we'll talk more about paywalls in a bit.

But the problem with going that route, when your business model is built on a constantly replenishing supply of 20-something men, right? This isn't the Wall Street Journal's business model. This is every guy when he gets to college and starts paying attention to his college team, starts clicking on barstool sports every day and a percentage of them become stoolies, you know? And if everything's, if you got to pay to play, it's going to be really hard to keep growing at the rate they're growing. What a weird little chapter of ESPN history this is.

Where are we? It's like a week-long chapter of ESPN history. be in history. But, and I also think, by the way, the Jamel thing, I think when you, when we're talking about free speech and when we're talking about ability to express yourself, you say, Jamel Hill is suspended for saying blank. And it's not, obviously, it's not a perfect analogy. But these guys work with people who said, you know, other thing.

Yeah. That's just got to be, you know, in-house. That's got to be annoying and if not aggravating. Absolutely true. If you're, I mean, especially when you're producing things out of house, I mean, the whole thing just seems like, I mean, and, you know, if Skipper was convicted of this, then kudos of him for making this call on his own and, you know, and not letting it drag out or anything else, I guess. But yeah, I mean, this and the Jamel Hill thing both seem like the evidence of a pretty

dramatic misreading of not the audience, but of your family, of your people, right? The way that people in house have reacted to both those things, I mean, you can't always do exactly what everybody on staff wants you to do, but those two things stacked up is a little bit damning. It's time for our overworked Twitter joke of the week. Yeah, let's talk about something funny. Where we, you know, dip into Twitter and we find the joke that was just there for everybody to make. Do you remember when the Golden State Warriors lost on opening night, made it to the NBA season? I do. I was watching, yeah.

Would it have been just the most obvious joke right in front of your face to say that the 0-1 Golden State Warriors were in the last place in the NBA? That's a joke. That's a joke I wish I had made. I feel that is one of the great overword Twitter jokes for anything. Like, you know, the Patriots lose week one. Right.

The Jets are in first place. Exactly. Like, it's just a great cheapo. Sure. Cheapo Insta humor. Yeah. Irrationally extrapolating sports statistics is always funny. But that in particular is, that's the furthest extent of that joke.

That's great. And then if they lost like three games in a row that would turn to like the actually serious. Like, what's wrong where the Warriors takes? Yeah. At 0 and 3, we're allowed to make serious takes. Serious jokes. All right. Before we move on to topic number two, let's take a quick break.

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Topic number two, David. By the way, I'll start this by saying a friend of mine who actually works somewhere in the athletic empire. It sent me know today and said, I was wondering when we would end our 15 minutes because barstool came in handily and just blew this story out for a while. Kevin Draper's story at the New York Times. He went to profile the athletic and find out what they were doing. I read you part of the quote from co-founder Alex Mather earlier about letting newspapers continuously bleed out. He also went on to say, we will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment.

We will make business extremely difficult for them. It's better to read this in Emperor Palpatine voice, I think. He also took some shots. He said Bleacher Report is, quote, empty calories. SB Nation is empty calories. The newspapers are doing nothing. So everybody was rooting for the athletic, right? It seemed like a nice thing.

You know, sports writers who are laid off, were getting hired, getting good jobs. And now, thanks to somebody who is not a sports writer, it is not one of these people that we were rooting for, their weird sort of meta-narrative as these guys are trying to kill America's newspapers and bleed them dry. What did you make of that? Yeah, I mean, you can't, the first time that we heard,

Who was the first hire, the first big hire that the athletic made? I don't even remember. The first time they started popping up on my radar, there was a little bit of like, who the hell is this? And then almost immediately, once everyone, once it sort of sunk in what they were doing, it became this bastion of goodwill across the entire media landscape. All of these, it was like this big, you know, in wrestling terms, it was like the hero running in at the end of the match to make the save

after the other good guys have been beaten down for 50s. 15 minutes, you know, all these great writers getting laid off by newspapers, by magazines, by websites. And then this startup comes along and they're like, oh, we're just going to hire all of them. And we're going to find a business model that'll make it that make, that'll make publishing them viable. By God, that's the athletic music. Yeah, exactly. And then to come out, I mean, we've seen this so many times. You know, there was Joe Lakeup last year, the Warriors owner, that you just, it's like these people who are just off message owner.

Off message owner. As soon as you put a microphone in a certain owner's face, it just all goes to hell. I was just why? Why? First of all, a couple of funny things about this. First of all, the idea that your competition, let's say that you really did want to bleed newspapers dry. Their product is a lot like what newspapers do. You know, they're doing many of the same things, hiring men and the same people.

But their competition, they cannot think their competition is newspapers. in 2017. Isn't it? Barstool affiliates? Sure. Podcasts. Talk radio, whatever, you know, things like SB Nation. What's your paid message board?

Yeah, right. Rivals. Yeah, rivals. I mean, there is the paywall aspect, I think, that, which is why you would, why you would face them off against newspapers. But yeah, their competition is the sports internet. Yeah. It's a very weird thing.

I mean, it's just, first of all, it's, it's, not weird in the sense that, to stipulate, one, you know, most owners of media outlets, if you want to, you know, bring that into just like online sports media outlets, probably have similar thoughts at certain times of night, right? I mean, it's not, if you got somebody in confidence off the record, they might say something, if not so, you know, dramatic or villainous, they would say something along those lines. Around a bar, sure. Sure. Around a bar, sure. And then, When we talk about Silicon Valley, you know, I mean, these are certainly, this is certainly the way that these conversations, you know, when you're talking about like disrupting whatever in day-to-day life, you have to talk in these dramatic terms, right? You have to sell your idea as if it's a world-changing thing, even if in this case, it's a, you know, different form of sports blogging. Yeah. I mean, so Patrick Redford made that point that's been today. And I thought that was exactly right. It's like a revolutionary gloss put on the most non-revolutionary thing ever.

It's awesome that more people have sports writing jobs. But sports writing and podcasting and those kinds of things is not in itself revolutionary. It's a crowded, if anything, it's a crowded marketplace. My mind went back immediately to that, to a great tweet from over the summer by Stefan Heck that says every two or three weeks, a tech guy accidentally invents the concept of the city bus. And it's just like, yeah, some ideas are so great because they're ideas that have been had many times before. This is sports writing city bus. this is. And great. I like sports trading. We're happy than it exists. The content has been really, the content has been really good. And

honestly, I mean, it's important to achieve sort of like the peak version of the athletic that they want to achieve for it to become as good as it can be. It's not a website like like any other sports media website where you can kind of like sleep on one thing or another. I mean, they kind of have to be this full-throated version of themselves. But, but yeah, it's to go from a place, a seat of such, of just, just such, you know, excitement amongst readers and other media members to the place where they went after one New York Times interview is a stupendous feat. Yeah. And essentially also to slime, to make all your writers have to do PR for you today.

I was looking at Ken Rosenthal, Ken Rosenthal, Ken Rosenthal, one of the truly nice guys in our business having to sit there and tweet through it because everybody came after him. Yeah. You know, like, wait, Ken, you signed up for this thing to put all the newspapers out of business? Of course he didn't. None of these people did. These people have any interest in that goal at all, you know, accepted if it means that, you know, the athletics just doing great guns and everybody's happy. But there's no, you're imposing a vision on journalists that none of those journalists actually believe. By the way, as well, if we're talking about the public versus private thing here, you know, like what you can say publicly versus what you actually say privately.

I thought of this with the whole athletic thing because when it started, everybody on Twitter, yeah. Oh, yes. We got, you know, our favorite journalists have jobs and this is great and everything. But whenever anybody came to talk to me about the athletic offline, what was the first thing they said? I don't know that that model is going to work. I don't know. I don't think the model works. Yeah.

I don't think it's going to happen. Yeah. But they would never say that on Twitter, right? So it's actually what he did is, I think what you're saying is totally right. He just said the ghost thing, right? Yeah. But when people were talking with the athletic originally, they just said the ghost thing privately. Yeah.

No, I think that's totally right. And listen, the model might not work, right? Sure. But I think one of the reasons why people say those things in hushedones is because they actually don't know if it's going to work, right? That model might not have worked five years ago or 10 years ago, but in a world in which the athletic has gotten, you know, upwards of $8 million of, like, of investment money to hire these people

to kind of fast track all of their plans. I mean, that's evidence of it working. Now, it's a precarious, it's a, you know, precarious situation, I guess. But, you know, maybe it'll work. Who knows? Yeah, I would also say, but the crowing about hiring people, that's the easiest thing to do. Oh, sure. Right?

Fusion hired a bunch of good writers. Okay. The Daily Beast, when I was bystander to that, hired a bunch of good writers for a lot of money. Sure. And, you know, what's our sports? Like sports on earth, something like that? Oh. that's the easy thing to do.

The hard thing to do is that didn't do good stuff and stick around. Yeah. Giving a bunch of people a bunch of money and going, yay, look at this, you know. Yeah. And you have to prove you have a reason of being. And that's what's really hard for anybody for us too. Yeah. And I don't remember if it was Redford's piece and deadspin or where.

But like, yeah, I mean, obviously it's been pointed out a number of times that the business model for companies like these are is more often than not persevere for two or three years and then get bought by Yahoo or get bought by. or get bought by ESPN or get bought, you know, get, you know, you end up selling the whole thing. Now, the athletic has, has insisted that they're in it for the long haul and this is, you know, they're, they're going to keep doing what they're doing. They're not trying to, they're not putting themselves in the market. But, yeah, I mean, that, that, the, the pivot to being, despite what the ownership, what, you know, Alex Mather says, the, you know, the pivot to being all powerful is a really, really difficult one. Another big lesson here. everybody in journalism, not everybody, but I wouldn't exempt the two people at this table.

Lots of people in journalism who work for big companies have bosses that say crazy things. Like this is one of those things that's like eternal of journalism, right? Your newspaper proprietor, you work for Walter Annenberg. Yeah. Work for William Randolph Hearst. Yeah. Those guys were saying crazy things. Those guys were saying distasteful things.

It's also worth thinking about like, you know, when the New York Times calls to do a profile on you, just think through what the best, what they would have. happiest for you to say to get clicks and readership and just don't don't say that thing unless you're really convicted about it? You know, I saw a few people be like, oh, shut up. Shut up. No, no, no, don't shut up. Please, please keep talking. I think of this like Jerry Jones. I don't know more, please. Keep going. I want to know. I want you to tell Draper what you really think. Totally, totally true. And also. I don't want anybody to be quiet. Doesn't do anything for anybody. After trying, after spending most of today attempting to tweet through it himself, Alex Mather came out with an

apology right before we started recording this in which he just, you know, says, we're working hard to build a company that offers an excellent experience for writers and readers. It's just sort of this like a dreamier, more low-key vision, less blood, less guts, less calls for violence. Obviously, he didn't actually specify any people that he wanted to see bleed out in the streets or anything, so there wasn't anyone directly to apologize to, but he said specifically, I'm not rooting for newspapers to fail, but rather hoping to build a product that will give readers more choices, whether that's in their local market or nationally. Another thought that occurred to me when you're talking about newspapers failing and how short-sighted

that is, is like they're a paywall operation, right? The idea is we're going to hire any sports writer that gets let go that has, you know, greater than X Twitter followers and national reputation. Where are these future hires coming from if all newspapers cease to exist? Yeah. Right? You can't build an intern up to the next great basketball writer. If you had an intern that had the same jeans as Jackie McMullen,

no one in the greater world would ever find that out unless they're paying $40 a month to read your website. You know, like you need newspapers to be your farm team. God, yeah. And I think if I had to put the good gloss on what he meant, it was that when you read a newspaper, sports section these days. And I do, you know, when I travel around, I get a couple of the house, but when I travel around and it's like, it's depressing. Oh, yeah. And if you're a sports fan in those places through no fault of the newspaper journalist him or herself, their resources are shrinking. They don't have, you know, as much space. They're just, they're working in a model where they're

writing in a totally different way than just about anybody else in the universe. Yeah. And it sucks, You know, and it sucks for sports fans. And if you're trying to give sports fans in Chicago and all these places, I hope this is what he meant. I suspect it is what he meant. You know, trying to build something that's going to be better and more durable and all that stuff. Awesome. You know, that's great. If all those other sites are empty calories, then, yeah, there's a lot of local newspapers that are like vegan quinoa bars when the guy next to he's having a steak dinner.

Vegan quinoa bars. Those are a thing, right? That sounds like the joke about Los Angeles by the person who's never been to Los Angeles. He says while eating a vegan Kienwa bar. We're going to send you away for that one. Topic number three, Jamel Hill has returned to ESPN. Wow. Two weeks is up.

She was suspended for violating ESPN social media policy. It's obviously much more complicated than that because she had before that called Trump a white supremacist on Twitter causing or I don't know if it's causing a national uproars, right, since Trump sort of causes the uproars by himself. but that's what happened and now she's back do we think there any takeaways from this I think one really interesting takeaway

and this applies to the this is not a takeaway this is more of a question but this applies to the to the Barstool conversation we were having earlier is what is the relationship between the empire

and the personality in 2017 yeah right I mean for years the rap on ESPN is they wouldn't let anybody become bigger than the brand right there were a couple of exceptions absolutely no absolutely right but but that but you know that was the wrap now we're we're dealing we're looking at two separate but uh aligned by time and the universe

uh situations in which the espn is dealing with personalities that are if not bigger than the brand they're in positions where the personalities are sort of in conflict with the brand yeah and i'd add one little turn to that too which is that ESPN for years said sports center as the brand. Even Dan and Keith, you know, and Stu Scott and stuff, you work inside Sports Center. Yeah. You were smaller than that. And then they changed their brand to Scott Van Pelt's Sports Center.

Yeah. Michael and Jamel's SportsCenter. They took the personality and made it bigger than the brand on purpose, right, to try to sell those kind of things. Yeah. So that's something that they've done over the last couple of years on purpose. And now we see it sort of weirdly manifesting itself in this strange way. A couple of things are interesting to me about this whole thing.

One is, I mean, the unanswered question is what she's going to do, which I don't believe anybody knows the answer to. If you wrote about this week. I wrote about this week. And I think it's some people said, well, she's definitely leaving. I think that's if you wanted to predict something. I don't think that's bad prediction at all. If I had to predict something, I probably would predict that. Yeah.

But I don't think it's been quite settled yet. Number two is she's going back to the six. this show that has had now been under wild scrutiny, both for, you know, stupid political reasons, but also because they're trying to figure out what the show is. Oh, yeah. And try to define it. And you talk about 2017.

I was like, how do we do SportsCenter at that hour in this age and make it work? It's hard for me to imagine without trying to immediately trying to imagine the consequences or just the reaction to them taking the show off the air. It's a much different, it's a much different thought experiment than pulling a show off the air at, you know, whatever, 1 a.m. on Tuesdays. Right? Oh, yeah. I mean, you can replace that with a rerun of, of Jailen Jacobi, Jailen Jocobo, your sports nation or whatever. And, you know, the difference is probably pretty negligible, at least, you know, at least based on the one episode's ratings.

But just the outcry that would happen if they pulled Michael and Jemel off of the six. And, I mean, I guess would revert back to an old-fashioned sports center format? I would think so. I think that they, I think that ESPN would be wise to not think that like the very, very vocal group of people who, you know, hate Jamel Hill are, you know, a silent majority. I think it's probably the opposite. No. I, for that reason, I can't imagine them pulling them off the air. Yeah.

For any time in the foreseeable future. Now, is there a scenario where Jamel and Michael decided we'd rather go do something like our old show somewhere else in the ESPN universe where, one, everything we say isn't going to be put under the microscope? And two, we can actually just get back to doing what we want to do, which is argue about stuff and have discussions about issues. We can make some politics into it without everybody losing their minds. Maybe. You know, I'm not sure they won't. I don't know that they would do that, but that to me is actually a scenario

that would be something that you might like. Here's my counterfactual to that. Okay. It doesn't matter what they do. If they're still a part of ESPN, then ESPN still has as much problem from their detractors as they do as they do now. It's like you were talking about,

we were both talking about before with Barstool, that every time BarstoolSports.com writes an offensive blog post, then ESPN's going to hear about it if they're in relationship with them, right? Now, Jamel Hill is already the host of SportsCenter. If they decide with everybody's in agreement, we're just going to move to a different time slot, to a different channel, to a different format,

to a different whatever else. You know that Twitter trolls, that Breitbart.com, that Clay Travis, whoever it is, every time she tweets something, they're going to be on top of it and saying, ESPN's Jamel Hill did it again. Right. It doesn't matter what she's broadcasting.

or what the show is called or what, you know, where they're trying to, where they're, you know, siloing it off. Yeah, I mean, it's, I guess I would say that Twitter is a different, totally different thing than the show, right? Sure. And, you know, we all said about the Jerry Jones thing that she tweeted. If she had done that on her show as a segment, nobody would have cared. Nobody would have cared. There had been a Chiron that said, you know, should Cowboys fans mad at Jerry Jones consider a protest question mark? And Jamel even came down on the site of yes, which she didn't even really do on Twitter.

Nobody would have cared. Yeah. Nobody would have worried about that. But just the fact that it was a tweet somehow, you know, made it in this thing that was then got easily shared. And then it gets, you know, then ESPN can invoke the social media policy, whatever that means. And then she's in trouble again. Yeah. So it's like almost these things exist on two completely different planes.

It is. I mean, the fact that social media has just, this sounds like an old man statement. The fact that social media has such an outsized influence on what. media broadly defined on media, yeah, is just sort of mind-boggling, right? I mean, sure, Twitter is used widely for authors to promote their, you know, writers to promote their columns and for authors to promote their books. 16 or 17 times, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Columns, yeah. Oh, books? Yeah. 100 times. 150 times. Thanks to Kirkus for your new review of my book. In case you missed it, the Kirkus review of my book.

Or media hits. I was on this podcast. I was on this radio show. Hey, Omaha. In five minutes. We know that this is how people use Twitter, but just conceptually, Twitter should be, you know, ideally would be a place for public figures to just be a little bit more human, right? They're not constrained by the cameras and the suits and whatever else.

Public figures you're not allowed to be human in their day job. Yeah. Can come be human on Twitter? But it turns out it's the exact opposite. You have to be more buttoned up on Twitter than you can in your real job. Can we talk a little bit about social media policies in general? Mm-hmm. Because here's the thing.

I think social, these people who try to draw these things up, this is the worst thing you've ever got to do. Yeah. And not just because you're in the role of the big bad that we talked about earlier. Like, don't tweet that, David. Absolutely. Here's what's hard about it. Let's say you say no partisan political speech, okay?

You know, I'm not on there talking about, you know, various things. What is a sick burn of the president? Is that, does that count? You know, like if, like, you know, when Donald Trump, like the sick burn. being kind of the new currency of Twitter, the old currency of Twitter? Like, does that count? So, like, in New York Times,

if Trump tweets on the New York Times reporter comes in on him and, you know, points out some flawed and it or makes some funny joke about it? Yeah. Is that partisan political speech? I don't know, man. I don't know. And there's so many variations of it that you could just never,

even if you wanted to do this, you could never put your arms around it. Yeah, it's impossible. I mean, it's like, it seems like just a ridiculous task to try to regulate any of your employees' social media behavior, right? I mean, we're in a world where it's almost like, you know, every right, every public figure has a bunch of cameras.

It's like, you know, the subject of ed TV. And you're hiring writers based on whether or not they make fools of themselves after hours, you know? It's, it's just an, it's impossible, you know, and I, you do, you kind of feel for the people that have to put these, put these policies down on paper. But at the end of the day, you know, more than anything else, it's a corporate backstop. No one's enforcing these necessarily on a day-to-day basis so much as they are just like, you know,

these rules are in place so that if it's time to punish somebody, you have a means. It's funny. I had an ESPN employee tell me for that piece, but I wrote about Chappelle yesterday that the thing that she had accidentally discovered on everyone's behalf is the one thing you couldn't say about Trump because there's so many ESPNers that just go after Trump all day. Yeah. And she had kind of found the far end. You know, she had found the line.

Right. And all those people were kind of wondering what the line was. They're like, wow, I spend all my day, you know, I spend like every day making fun of stuff Trump does. Yeah. This is pretty new for a sports network employee's Twitter feed. All of a sudden, Jamel, the one thing we can't say. So in a way, it was helpful accidentally because now I know kind of what the limit is. Like I can't call him a white supremacist.

Yeah. I can probably say just about everything that gets me there, but not quite that. I say, yes. If I say this is an outrage, that's a major. Like, no one's going to do anything about that. I mean, part of that is that, you know, it's okay to make jokes. And this is another, this is the difficulty of social media in general. Jokes are not always clearly, clearly marked as jokes or whatever.

But, you know, there's a lot of jokes that you could probably, you can get away with making it or president or anybody else's expense. When you, when you say something, you know, really seriously, especially that pointed, I guess it's hard to imagine your boss is not at least bring it up in a conversation at some point. Hey, Jamel Hill was on that she caught on camera by TMZ this weekend saying that ESPN did the right thing. I would tell people absolutely after by Donald Trump tweets, I deserve that suspension. So what she said out loud was something that I had heard, which is she thought she should have been suspended for the first tweet. Yeah.

And the reason she was suspended for the second week is really suspending her for the first tweet. Sure. Like when she said that, she's like, I thought I probably deserved a suspension for that. Yeah. And it doesn't mean she thought she was wrong. It doesn't mean she was ever going to back off or apologize for saying that about the president. But she thought she deserved a suspension for that. Do you think conspiracy, conspiracy corner, do you think that after the first meeting this was their decision?

Why don't you go tweet something nominally offensive in like two weeks and then we'll suspend you and that'll be your punishment? Give us a reason to do it. No, because I don't think she had, I don't think she thought the second thing was, was, was, was, was suspendable. Yeah. I don't. I don't think she was, I think she was thought she was and was, you know, talking about an idea that people were, you know, how to, you know, if we're mad at Jerry Jones, how do we express that anger. Yeah. And that's just the idea that came up.

I don't think she thought that she was, she was overstepping a line. I think people saying, oh, she's trying to get fired something. That's ridiculous. I don't think it's true at all. By the way, here's the biggest check on media, uh, Twitter, you know, in terms of. of like a social media policy kind of why you don't actually need the policy. Do you know what? the biggest thing that restrains media personalities on Twitter? Careerism. Yeah. They want to move up. You know what? 90% of those ESPN people want, they want to stay at ESPN and get really

big jobs. Do you think the problem? Yeah, and I would say that you had New York Times reporters. Do you know why they're not going in on Trump every day? Because they want to advance at the New York Times. They want to work there. And they want Trump to answer the phone when they call. And the more important thing to them, and no judgments, but the more important thing to them than going in on Trump is career advancement. And, you know, hey, everybody's got their thing, right? And so that's going to be the guardrails for 98% of your workforce is they don't want to get suspended. They don't want to get fired. They want to keep moving up, get better jobs, get pay raises, all that stuff.

Yeah. Yeah, it's true. And I think one of the things that makes Jamel unique at ESPN is, she's been this way her whole career there. She just, she has other things on her mind. And, you know, everybody, I think probably just about everybody there thinks about politics, thinks about big issues. I don't want to denigrate anybody there. But I think Jamel is the kind of person who thinks in her mind has certainly thought over the years. If I ever get to the point where stuff I really want to do, I can't accomplish here on an ESPN sports debate.

show, I'm going to leave. I'm going to go someplace where I can, where I can do that stuff. If it's that important to me, then I'm going to go do it. Do you think that she would be more effective somewhere else? If that's just taking that argument at face value, do you think if she had an MSNBC show, if she had a, or, you know, whatever, she starts her own website or she's just on the Facebook video every day or, I mean, just pick your platform. Do you think that she could be more effective at the, you know, goals that she has? I think that's a really hard question.

I think it's a great question because I think it's such, I'd have to know the gig, because the current thing is such a big job, you know? Yeah. We can whine about the ratings and all this other stuff, but do you know how big a deal it is to have Michael and Jamel hosting Sports Center to their fans? Yeah. It is a big, big, big deal. And for them to get into some of the kind of stuff,

there's not a very political show at all, but for them to get into the things they do, that's a huge deal. You know, and if you tell me, it's like, I'm going to be a correspondent who's going to be on MSNBC, you know, once a week or something. I don't know. I don't think so. I don't think that's as big a gig. So I'd kind of have to know what it is.

But I think probably somewhere in her mind, I want to characterize the way she thinks, but somewhere in her mind, that's probably the decision, right? At some point, it's like, if I were to ever leave, would the next thing be, give me the kind of platform that this gives me? Yeah. I mean, you see that all over the place. But this is going to be, I mean, this is this for many, many people hosting sports center is the pinnacle of their career, right? So why would you, why would you want to mess that up? Yeah, that's what I was saying.

Yeah, that's exactly. That's like, why would you want to get taken off? Cudos to her for being, you know, more or less unfiltered on Twitter. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And I think that's pretty much the only way, you know, she's going to do it. One thing that, one thing that Jamel and I think just about every employee of Barstool have in common. is unfilteredness on social media.

Okay, if we had to find one thing that those two, that they had in common that. By the way, I mentioned this very clearly, very quickly the piece, but I do feel bad for Michael Smith in all this. Or I feel like, I mean, he's a guy who I think, you know, given, you know, if you sat, talking to somebody at a bar and said,

how do you feel about what has happened to Jamel? There would be a much fuller. Oh, yeah. version of it than he can give right now because he's a guy who's got to figure out what he wants to do too.

And whether it's a ESPN or else, you can do lots of things. But, you know, I think in a way he's hemmed in, it was funny because he hosted the show by himself while Jamel was gone

after the first day. And Jamel sent this tweet saying, your great father and friend and husband and I truly don't deserve you. And I thought that was just so obviously a message to say, don't, whoever,

is criticizing Michael for doing the show by himself, you know, that's not the right thing. That's that we're not, we're not, we're not, you and I are not at odds here. Yeah. We're not the adversary. It's an important point to make, but it's, it's a really, really specific situation when your careers are sort of, you know, in public, publicly at least tethered together. What do you think it's going to happen in sports media news tomorrow, David? I don't know, man. I don't want to, I don't want to sound like I'm, you know, making light of Barstool a situation.

I'm sure there's some people who are, you know, negatively affected by this. But it's worth, I mean, I have to point out that the Barstool Van Talk has already appeared on the Wikipedia page for a list of television series canceled after one episode. Can you give us some other highlights? A home of other standouts like Coed Fever, the CBS 1979 CBS sitcom that attempted to imitate Animal House. It lasted one. Wow. It was a sitcom?

Yeah. Cool. South of Sunset, a CBS private detective show starring Glenn Frey of the Eagles. Wow. I don't remember that.

That's kind of awesome. 1996 gave us public morals as Stephen Botchko produced again CBS sitcom about a vice squad unit of the NYPD. It was a famous dud. Yeah,

that's a really great one. Let's see. What else? Emily's Reasons Why Not? More recently, The Will 2005. Wow, there's just quarter life. I remember that from 2008 MSNBC, just NBC.

There's Breaking Boston. This is probably the way to end this. A reality show, 2014's Breaking Boston, a reality show produced by Mark Wahlberg for A&E about four young women working to change their lives in the titular city. Who knew that just moving it to Albuquerque who would make it a giant hit in the most beloved shows in TV history?

That's really, really great. That's a press box for this week. Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker, back next week with more hot takes. Wow, what's going to happen, man? Man, we'll just, we'll be watching. See ya.