The Press Box - The Stormy Daniels Affair, "Unplugging" From Twitter, and ESPN's Nostalgia Problem | The Press Box (Ep. 440)

Episode Date: March 13, 2018

The Ringer's Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss the media spectacle surrounding Donald Trump's alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels (03:00), the controversy following New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo's social media experiment (22:00), and how Michael Smith's departure from 'SportsCenter' reflects ESPN's programming problem (34:30).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Download Birch, B-I-R-C-H and the application. App Store and sign up for free today. David, Axios' Jim Vanda High thinks people hate the media because cable news won't stop covering former Trump aide Sam Nunberg. But former CNN anchor Soledette O'Brien thinks America hates the media because Chris Saliza wrote some column on CNN. Is this why America hates the media? No, I think at the moment America probably hates the media because the media keeps talking

about how America hates them so much, right? It's like a bad, it's like bad borsch belt comedy or something. It's just like, whoa, is me. Take my media, please. No, that's totally true. And isn't it so clear that whenever we say this, first of all, we just pick an article we don't like. And they say, that's why America hates the media because of what you did, bad writer. Exactly.

And the other thing is like, you know, if you're really mad at Trump, aren't you just mad at Trump? Then you just blame the media for Trump. Exactly. And if you're a Trump fan, you blame the liberal media for all the things you hate in the world and becomes the thing. And if you hate Trump and you also hate the media for not doing a good, job of hating Trump and does your proxy. It's an easy target. What follows, David, will be 43 minutes in which to hate the media some more.

This is the press box on the ringer podcast network. The press box is the media podcast where you're not allowed to use the phrase, this is why America hates the media. We are Brian Curtis and David Shoeemaker of the Ringer. If you want some recent content by us, check out David's most recent episode of the Mass Man show, which features what, David? We talked about this great Cody Rhodes profile that I edited in The Ringer put up last week, who is Cody's making his way,

becoming the biggest wrestling star in the world, not employed by WWE. Mike Pollucci did a great job writing that. And we got a lot of other cool wrestling content like Kenny Herzog's piece today about how Xavier Woods may or may not have had a spinal contusion on Sunday night. Wow. All right. What a sell.

All right. We're on today's topics, David. Three big ones for you. First of all, how did Trump's alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels become one of this? stickiest news stories of this particular cycle. Sorry about that. Nice.

Second New York Times columnist Farhad Manjew unplugged from Twitter, only he didn't totally unplug. Controversy ensued and we debate. And finally, Michael and Jamel's 6 PM Sports Center came to an end. What is ESPN's nostalgia problem and how can they turn the tide? Plus, as always, our overworked Twitter joke of the week. Yeah. Good stuff this week.

All right. But first, David, let's start here. Sometimes the story comes along that turns the entire Washington press corps into screaming hormonal teenage boys. Have you seen how many people have written the scene piece from Stormy Daniels' strip club in the last couple of weeks? Have you seen this? I saw a couple of them.

If you're a working member of the press and you're listening to this pod right now and you haven't written a sceneer from Stormy Daniels strip club, just raise your hand right now. By old pal Denver Knicks did it in Rolling Stone, Hadascold did it in CNN. It's really amazing. Anyway, two ways I want to talk about this story. First, of all the scandals swirling around the Trump White House, Why do you think this scandal has gotten so much traction?

The pat answer, and with all things Trump, a lot of times the pat answer is the best answer, is that this is the case where he sort of met his match by taking on somebody who is willing to fight as dirty as him or has as little to lose as him? Yes. I don't want to sound too dismissive, but it's sort of like you remember back to all,

you remember all the Republican debates when the other candidates, It literally had no idea like what vocabulary was appropriate to deal to take, you know, to respond to Donald Trump. And you, and they, you saw them sometimes literally flailing in front of the television cameras. I think now Trump has a, has a kind of accidental adversary who sort of speaks his language. It's like the old Michelle Obama thing. They go low. We go high.

Yeah. And Trump finally found somebody who went lower. Yeah. Or went to some place that he couldn't go. Sure. Right? Because they won't comment on this. Yeah.

You know, they've denied the scandal. So to talk about it anymore. I think that's right. And I also think Trump-like is the way her lawyer, Michael Avanotti, has played the media. Amazing stuff. To use the great phrase from the penguin in Batman Returns, played it like a heart from hell. Oh, my gosh, right? He's on cable news all the time.

He is never, you cannot, you cannot, who could turn down an interview with this guy, right? But every time he comes on, he just has like a little tidbit, right? Just a little more. Maybe, you know, there was that thing of maybe there's some photos. or other evidence that would confirm the affair. I'm just going to say that out there. And then here he is on Anderson Cooper last week, talking about an email Michael Cohen,

whose Trump's personal attorney sent using his Trump org email address. The initial email in the string, which is at the bottom of the page, is an email exchange between a representative of First Republic Bank to Mr. Cohen, alerting him to the fact that they have effectively carried out his wishes and transferred money from one account at First Republic to a checking account at First Republic.

He turns around then and forwards that email to himself. And so that email from the bank was sent to his Trump Organization email account? Absolutely. And your viewers can see it on the screen. He then turns around and forwards that to his personal email account, which is the next email on the string, above that what's being shown on the screen right now.

So that's being shown on the screen, basically says that the money is in the account. Correct. It's from the bank employee to Mr. Cohen. And why would Michael Cohen then feel the need to forward that email to himself, to his private email address, to then communicate with Stormy Daniels' attorney? I don't have an explanation for it, quite honestly,

because if there was nothing to hide in connection with this email string, then Mr. Cohen could have forwarded. this email directly to Mr. Davidson and would not have had to take the interim step of going to his personal email account. What we believe happened, and this is speculation, but I think it's pretty good speculation, is that he sent it to his personal email address. He was then going to send it from his personal email address to Mr. Davidson, but he forgot to delete the middle portion of the email that showed that the communication had taken place with his email at the Trump organization.

And then I also loved him. Here he is, this is Avanotti, clambering up to the moral high ground in the New York Times. We're going to consistently advocate for the American people being able to make their own decisions as to who's telling the truth and who's lying to them. She wants a forum to tell her version of events and let the chips fall where they may. Truly an American appeal, right? Yeah.

It's just free speech we're talking about here. Why can't this woman tell her story? It's masterful. The thing that this reminds me of is we talked about. this some time ago on the show, it was Michael Wolf when his book Fire and Fury came out. Because weirdly it seems like, you know, maybe it just fizzled out because the news cycle moved so quickly now. But it did seem to me that sort of what the downfall of the Michael Wolf PR tour, at least, was when he started like insinuating that there was more stuff. You know, he started

like, quote unquote, leaking the tell. If you read between the lines, you'll see this, you'll see this. Nikki Haley and us, yeah. And the media who had embraced him, you know, so eagerly at the beginning, sort of had to fall back on the principal stand of, okay, he's just playing us now, or he's just, he's, he's, he's, you know, violating whatever bond that the, you know, the journal, of journalistic integrity that we share. And you also see the media, you know, deal with this with Trump, that they don't know how to Trump himself, that when he's, you know, less than truthful or when he's, I mean, obviously there's the Chuck Todd thing this weekend, but when he's, you know, crass, the press doesn't know quite what to do with it.

And so he ends up getting sort of a pass on it. Yeah. Now with Stormy Daniels and her attorney, we have another, we have, there's no journalistic integrity, you know, there's nothing. And this is just pure media spectacle. And just like Trump was able to get over doing that, you know, now Ms. Daniels is able to do the same thing. Yeah, it's true.

When he insults Chuck Todd, you know, we're left with Tom Brokaw kind of, you know, shaking his head wearily. Oh, yeah, it's disgrace to the American, to the American president. It's a great impression. But with this, it's weirdly because they haven't, other than to deny it, they have barely touched the story, right? I left to Michael Cohen to defend himself. Now, to back up for people who don't know, allegedly, Trump had an affair with this woman. Michael Cohen paid $130,000 to secure her silence in which being called a hush agreement, right?

Cohen is claiming he did this out of his own goodwill to Trump. But it's still denying that the affair took place. Right. That's the second rail of this. Exactly. But Trump did not, you know, pay him to pay the woman. He paid her off. And then there's all this, all these kind of little small things within that. I think the other amazing part of the story is it's an unusual scandal in that we know what happened allegedly between the two of them. But there's also this mystery, right? She can't tell her story. She has prevented. And if only she could get out of this agreement or we could get the agreement invalidated because Trump didn't sign it, right? They've been saying on television. So it's actually, we know the answer to the riddle. But then there's still the riddle, right? Right. It's really It's funny. I mean, the legal maneuvering on the, I mean, by the Daniels camp is like you said, been really, been really smart. And not just the media side, but I mean, it's all interconnected. And the news today, as we record this on Monday afternoon, was that she's offering to repay the $130,000 to free her to talk about it because, you know, when presumably, again, it's a free speech issue. She wants to do a good turn for America and the world. But also, she's probably realized that she can make a lot more than $130,000 if she, you know, writes a book about it or. you know, has a TV show, TV appearances. Or just that the GoFundMe would instantly, you know, give her back the money.

Yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, there would be no problem. That's the thing is. $130,000 seems like nothing for what she was, you know, agreeing to stay mom about. Yeah. But that was back when it was still candidate Trump, right? He wasn't going to win the election.

And then imagine if he lost, like this would be the most worthless story. Yeah. You know, like who cares, right? That's true. I mean, it's funny. Like, she's had some couple of moments to Hadass gold, CNN.com piece, which I referenced earlier, ends like this. Asked if she had a.

message for the president, Daniels, put her hands on her hips, cocked her head, pursed her lips, and smiled. End quote. So mysterious, right? And a few weeks back, there was Clifford's sort of Stephanie Clifford, her real name, excuse me, coy non-answers with Jimmy Kimmel when she was on that show. Did you sign this letter that was released today? I don't know. Did I? Wait a minute. That you can say, right? But that does not look like my signature, does it? It doesn't look like your signature. So you're saying perhaps this letter was written and released without your approval. Do you know where it came from? Do you have any idea?

I do not know where it came from. So you did not... I came to the internet. So you did not have anything to do with this matter. I also work for the FBI and I'm a man, according to the internet today. Is that right? Yes.

Well, the Kimmel appearance was the real sort of icebreaker is the right term. But that was the first time where it... I mean, it was sort of shocking because it wasn't... You realized it wasn't just going to be... printed innuendo or people reporting second and third hand based on sources. This was actually going to be her going out in front of the camera and doing this sort of, you know, shrugged shoulders emoji to the whole world or just with a little coy smile and letting the story, you know, catch fire.

Yeah. And who knew that that would be so beguiling to do the shrugged shoulders emoji on camera? Also, speaking of which in that same genre, Anderson Cooper has interviewed her for a 60-minute segment, which hasn't aired. But Avanotti took a picture of the three of them, like, I guess, at the site of the interview, and tweeted it out. And now, you know, BuzzFeed's like, oh, is Trump going to try to seek an injunction or Cohen seeking an injunction to prevent this segment from airing, which nobody thinks has

much of a legal prayer of working. No. But that's also the shrug shoulders, much of like, look at this. Yeah. More, and she may not have said anything to Anderson. Well, that's just a great. She might have told him everything or she may have told him nothing. We have no idea.

Yeah. I mean, the great, I mean, the gambit at the heart of all this is that there's really nothing that Trump or Cohen and whatever, the Trump camp broadly defined can do because doing anything would implicitly admit that an affair had taken place. Oh, absolutely. So, I mean, it's. They don't know anything. Or knowing that there was a payment being arranged for this woman, right?

Yeah. They don't, their stance has to be, we don't know anything about this. It's amazing. I mean, I think that there's probably another, you know, layered all this that we'll never fully understand and whether it's a, why this. particular scandal seems to have unsettled the Trump camp to the degree that it has. Maybe it's because there's a lot of other stuff going on. Maybe it's just because it's a deeply personal thing in a way that a lot of these other

things were. You know, the Access Hollywood tape, you know, was not a specific instance of adultery. And so maybe that's something that Trump and his wife, you know, that would affect them to their core, as it would many, most other human beings. But yeah, it's very interesting to see the way that it's, that this is. reacting. And that also walks us up to my second question here, which is what kind of scandal is Stormy Daniels, which is interesting to me. I mean, to me, on one hand, it's actually a simple scandal, right? It's a sex scandal, right? It proves that a politician who is capable of many

abnormal scandals is also capable of normal scandals. This is the oldest political scandal in the book is something happened romantically and then I try to cover it up. Yeah. Like this is just like, this is, this is, this is conventional. This is, this is the 1990. Bill Clinton playbook being pulled out of the drawer. Exactly. And one of the most interesting things in me is when you flip on the talking heads on cable news, the Trump supporters, you know, and none of them are any more eager to support him in this, you know, in this instance as they were about gun control or anything like that.

But they have an easier job. They're prepared. Like you said, they have the Bill Clinton playbook, you know? I mean, they're all like, there are people out there that are just like, well, you know, JFK had orgies in the White House. That was the famous one. Like Trump said, whatever. I mean, you know, comparing him.

to the past, this is actually an easy defense in the talking head world, but it's a much more, for some, for whatever reason, it seems to be a much more difficult defense in the real world of the Trump White House. Totally, which is really weird. Yeah. I mean, to me, it's too, it's like, you know, the Russia scandal fright. Even if the maximalist theory of Trump guilt in the Russia scandal turns out to be true, it's not going to be as simple as, you know, Trump and Putin shook hands at Mara Lago and said, let's, let's throw this thing, baby, you know, let's throw this election. It's going to be incredibly complicated with all these going to be. betweens and, you know, messages and winks and everything else, right?

This is pretty simple. Yeah. It's pretty simple. You know, and I think that's part. I think also, too, is just, you know, part of the thing about Trump is all these hangers on who have been absorbed into government. Yeah. Or at least absorbed into his orbits. We talked about Sam Nunberg.

So many people leaving the White House, Rachel Maddo has to have that big list, you know, on the screen. But so Michael Cohen becoming a figure in that. Yeah. And we see like the Trump flunky, you know, so that in a way it's a flunky scandal too, right? Yeah. People doing things allegedly on. on my behalf or, you know, as Cohen insists not on his behalf, that I think illustrates something about the scandal as well.

Sure. I mean, and there's also the sort of like inherent incompetence of like if you couldn't handle, if you couldn't handle one hush agreement, then we know, like, what does that say? Are you really going to be able to negotiate with North Koreans? Yeah. I think that there is, I think there is probably a thematic correlation to the Russian scandal, too, because the further that it goes, the Russia of whatever investigation, the further that the Mueller investigation goes, you know,

more people that are that are kind of brought into the net. You know, it makes for good daily news when you can just be like, oh, here, Sam Nunberg, whatever. I mean, just the people just get lined up, you know, for all these former Trump associates are bringing brought in day by day. But the accumulation of it is much, becomes more and more complicated, right? So now this, the Russia scandal, as you rightly said, is going to be this incredibly complex web of what, I mean, Even if it's a nothing burger and even if it's a, you know, country altering situation, it's going to be really complicated. What we have here is the simplest of scandals. And it's just so much easier to tell this story.

And I think that's part of why it's so appealing and so damning to, you know, allegedly to President Trump. If we had to take bets on the Russia scandal, I think I would short nothing burger and bet heavily on John LaCarray novel as the eventual outcome of that. All right, David, it's now time for our overworked, Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. All right. Now, before we get to that, can I take us on a slight detour, excuse me, to the overworked late night joke of the week.

Oh, please do. So last week we learned that Trump had not signed this so-called Hush Agreement on Stormy Daniels slash Stephanie Clifford. Via the New York Times' soap on Deb and New York Magazine's Jesse David Fox. we learned when that news came out that every single late-night comedian just about every single late-night comedian made the same joke that night.

The same joke, let's hear a little bit of it. In other Trump news, adult film star Stormy Daniels is back and this time she's suing Trump claiming that a 2016 hush agreement preventing her from discussing their affair is invalid because get this, Trump never signed it. This is amazing, mostly because it's the first time Trump has ever not put his name on something. How incompetence are you if you didn't sign your own NDA?

The same guy who slaps his name on everything. Buildings, vodka, the least sexy twilight vampire. Everything! Now Daniels is suing Donald Trump over the confidentiality agreement, alleging that it is invalid because while both she and Trump's attorney signed it, Trump himself never did. So this is the thing Trump thought was too sketchy to put his name on.

What about Trump University or Don Jr.? Isn't that amazing? That's incredible. And again, it's nothing sinister about it. It's just like our Twitter thing every week. Everybody just came up with just like all the great comedy minds in America went to the same place. I miss the days when somebody would just get mad on Twitter because they say that like Conan stole one of their jokes that they submitted to him or that they tweeted earlier.

Yeah, they sent it to email the info at Conan O'Brien.org or whatever. Yeah. How dare you use my joke? Yeah. It turns out that everybody's got the same jokes. It kind of proved that, right? There is no such thing. All right, David, now back to Twitter.

You'll remember our Overwork Twitter joke of the Week a few weeks ago, where everyone included before I mentioned Conan O'Brien was saying they got traded to the calves when that thing was going on. Taylor Pryson in the news that that overworked Twitter joke got a gritty reboot this week. after Friday's flurry of trades involving Jarvis Landry and Tyraud Taylor, everyone is now joking that they got traded to the Browns. Yes. So we all go here, right?

Yeah. There's a flurry of trades. Your Twitter go to is I also got traded to that team. Yes. Me, sports writer, media member, whoever you are. But this week's runaway winner via the college and pro football writer Alex Dunlop. Last week, the well-muscled NFL referee, Ed Hockeley, announced his retirement. after which everyone in the universe tweeted with Ed Hoculey retiring,

they finally succeeded in taking our guns away. Actually funny. That's really good. Oh, my gosh. I don't know how I missed that. And the great combo, right, is really, really live wire political issue combined with funny sports thing, right? Yeah.

We're talking about gun control in America, but you can combine that with Ed Hoculie. Except it's not just a little bit of peanut butter, a little bit of jelly. It's a delicious, it's a delicious sandwich. It like puts it all together just right. Yeah, I think you're looking for that old Reese's commercial, right? Chocolate and my peanut butter is that what you're talking about? All right, Dave, before we talk about Farhad Manjew and unplugging from Twitter as a news source, let's take a quick break. Hey friends, it's Robert Mays from the Ringar NFL show. With all of the NFL news that's happened

over the past few days, we will be recording our show tomorrow afternoon reacting to the latest trades and news, plus a little bit more previewing a free agency. On Wednesday, Today, Mike Lombardi and Tate Frazier will be reacting to the start of free agency on GM Street. And on Thursday, I will be out of here. So Kevin Clark and Danny Kelly will be breaking down the transactions we've seen so far. And Danny will be ranking the available quarterbacks from the draft and free agency. So look out for that and more. And please subscribe to the Ringer NFL show podcast feed on the Ringer podcast network.

All right. For our second topic, David, on March 7th, New York Times column as Farhad Manjou claimed he'd unplugged from the digital news noise machine, trading in Twitter and social media for print newspapers and the economist. As Manjou wrote, I was trying to slow jam the news. And it seemed to work. He continued, in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery. It's kind of funny. And I think became a more attentive husband and father. Well, last week along came Dan Mitchell in the Columbia Journalism Review, who noted that despite his Twitter news cleanse, Manju, quote, tweeted nearly every day during the 58 days of the experiment. And during the first two weeks

of February, he tweeted on average more than 15 times a day, close quote. So once again, let's think of this on two levels. The idea of unplugging generally, and this relatively, I think we would agree, smallish scandal if that's actually the right word for it. But let's start with there. What did you make of the actual particulars of the case? Okay, when I first saw his piece come out, I had that little spider sense go off. Like, I'm pretty sure that I saw him tweet within the past bit, but maybe I just didn't know

the parameters of his dates, right? Right. And then when I saw the Dan Mitchell piece pop up, I honestly assumed that they were going to expose Manju's fake Twitter account or like secret Twitter account. Because you had all kinds of other scandals in mind. Just because first of all, it does come at it from a very conspiratorial angle, right? I mean, but the fact that it was just his own Twitter account and he was just, you know, tweeting on a regular basis where he knew he was going to be print, you know, going to have this column coming out saying I'm offline. it just seems, it beggars belief almost. I mean, I don't know if I saw this, if this was a tweet or something that someone put in Slack

or something that someone wrote. But if you're going to do stunt journalism, the first rule is you have to go through with the stunt. You have to do the stunt. Right? That's exactly what I think. I just think, what's the point? What's actually even the point for yourself if you don't do the stunt?

Right. You know, somebody said, well, maybe he should have written a column that said, I tried to do this. and this was as close as I could get to forsaking all, you know, digital, to forsaking social media and Twitter was to tweet 15 times a day. Yeah. And, you know, maybe write the column about how you could not quit. And it should be said that it wasn't just, there's certainly a case for him to say, you know, my Twitter presence is, is, you know, part of my job. And so I just like, I tweeted into, I tweeted into the abyss, you know, I read the newspapers, but then I tweeted. but there were instances they brought up of him directly responding to other tweets,

him saying there was a whole tweet, you got to read this thread about Trump. And he's like, you have to read that. I mean, it was undeniable that he was engaged a lot more than he would let on. Yeah. I mean, first of all, I just don't know how technology columnist from the Times could just go basically two months without reading Twitter. I just don't, you know, using Twitter as a news source. Like, I just don't think it would be human. I would have to be a vacation.

Would you wait for like wired to come in to get your news about technology? Like, how would he just do his job and. keep up with his job. I have no, I have no idea. You and I could not do that. What are you going to wait for the wrestling dirt sheets to arrive in the mail? You get your news for your column. I just think like reading his column, I actually wanted if he had done that experiment or in whatever way he had done it, I would have actually wanted that to be longer.

Yeah. Because I think in a way it's easy to see, it's easy to say I read a newspaper and I felt good about myself. Mm-hmm. Right? Um, but it's much harder to say, here are all. the awesome things I read in my print edition of the New York Times. And in here, which an assistant or friend or whomever compiled from here, all the things I missed on Twitter that day. Yeah. And actually seeing the comparison, because some of the things would be like just ludicrous and dumb. Right. Like an argument

between two people like that, okay, I could have just missed that of my life. Right. That was a waste of time. But there are some, some, some, a lot of things that you would have missed. Yeah. Well, you and I have talked about this off, you know, offline off the show, um, that that the, you know, the, one of the most important jobs of a newspaper since the inception of newspapers was waiting stories, right? What goes above the fold on the front page? What goes and, you know, what's on page 12? What's, you know, like they are, I mean, they funnel us our news in a very deliberate way. And that's why you used to have stories about how did this, why was this story only on page

A15 of the times? And then it's steadily made its way to the front page. And in the social media era, those decisions are made by by likes and retweets, right? The things that end up being funneled onto your homepage or into your brain are things that the rest of the world has approved of and encouraged you to read. So you're right. There would be incredible. That's a really interesting thought experiment, right? What are the things that I learned because I was reading the newspaper that was not getting retweeted, you know, that were not getting, you know, upvoted on Facebook and put into my, you know, and so they were right in front of my face?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And do at the end of the day, maybe I'm a better person for reading all those things. But am I better at what I'm supposed to be doing every day? I mean, that's to me the challenge, right? We all say, well, we read these. We read Twitter. We read all our friends and all the stuff.

And it's this news that's very like tailored to what we're already interested in. But there's also a certain value to that. Yeah. Because at the end of the day, you just only have so much time in the day. And it's like there's a constant. I mean, look, we all said it's in our jobs, right? There's a tension between being a better person, a better, more. well-rounded, well-read person and being a more effective employee a lot of the time.

Those things usually don't go together unless you're like a jeopardy champion or something like that. What would it possibly be? Yeah. And I mean, the one place to take this a little bit different direction, the one place where those two things do meet is reading the work of your friends and coworkers in the journalistic world where there is a certain, like, just like, you know, obligation, emotional obligation to be able to compliment somebody honestly on something they've written.

Sure. But that's not necessarily the most important thing you might want to read that day. The other interesting misconception I think about unplugging is that the world we live in online is chaotic. There's too much news. We're being flattened by the news. You know where else there's too much news in the newspaper? Can you just, I'm going to get my, I have the physical news. Oh, wait.

Ryan is presently walking across the studio to pull a newspaper out of a backpack. I want you to, this is the New York Times. I was reading this morning. Is this Today's Times? Yeah. All right. We think I really like four day old people. papers? I don't know if you just got the Sunday subscription, the Weekender. You know, I don't know.

I read this. I opened this today. And you know what the first article? Look at this for just a second. I know people on the podcast are appreciating this. Look at how much news is in this. Yeah, he's flipping the debate. I mean, this is, this is more pros than you read the week. This is international. China's legislature formally ends term limits. Okay. Formally, excuse me. Fish instead of flaming hot Cheetos and feeling lost. A dispatch from Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Wow. I mean, you talk about news. In Britain, letters call for a, quote, punish a Muslim day.

Mid-East plan is nearly ready. We'll either side read it. And on and on on. That's just the international pages of the Times. The other thing he wrote in this thing is it said, I spent 40 minutes reading the paper. 40 minutes. And I'm not talking about reading every word. Even flipping the pages and reading what catches your eye, I don't think you'd read the Times in 40 minutes.

There's tons of news everywhere. Yeah. So really, you're just picking one kind of. of news over the other, which he talks about. But I think you're also like, I just think like you're going to be, if you're, if you want to, you're going to be swimming in news no matter where you are. Yeah, it's totally true. I mean, and in some ways, in some ways for me, it's easier, I mean, it's easier to log off.

I understand the pressure of the, you know, the internet age. I am deeply embedded in it. But for me, at least, it's easier to turn to close my laptop and, and leave that behind than it is to deal with the light emotional toll of like the stack of New York. magazines on my coffee table. Isn't that everybody's proof that even when you pick old media that you still don't actually read it, but it is the unread New Yorker?

Of course. It's absolutely true. It's also like there was also this piece in the Times this week about this guy Eric Hagerman. I'm glad you brought this up. So right? And at the dawn of Trump, at the administration, he decides I don't want to know.

So I'm going to, even in a cafe, I'm going to listen to white noise on my headphones while I listen to my, do I drink my coffee just because I don't want somebody saying something out loud that's happened. I just don't want to know anything. Yeah. And he watches Cavs games with the sound off.

I think that was my favorite. That's so great. So concerned that he would get a little bit of current events from, you know, Reggie Miller or whoever that he just wouldn't even turn the sound on during Cavs games. Yeah. But that's like, that's to me, I mean, he's doing it for a very particular, very arcane purpose in his case, right? I just don't want to. I don't want to know anything that happens. Yeah.

I don't want to know the results of the day's news. But you know, with normal people, and I think journalists, there's this real romance for old media, right, that runs very strong. And it's funny. It's like when you see the tweet all the time, like a big sporting event happens and everybody tweets the front page of the sports page. Like, look at this. And it's just a picture and a bad headline half the time. Oh, wow. Look at this. It's not really good.

Online is whatever the golden age of news is, it's happening online right now. Like that's the best. It's amazing. And by the way, I also think, I'd love to do. this experiment. Instead of doing the New York Times and Wall Street Journal in San Francisco Chronically, so try with the Fort Worth Star Telegram. Just that's all you get every day. Nothing wrong with the Fort Worth Star Telegram, my beloved hometown paper. But that's it. Yeah. You could get through that in 40 minutes.

Yes, you could. It's like, that's all your news. What if somebody had to, who was, you know, living somewhere else and also didn't have six, seven hundred dollars a year to spend on the print times, which it costs to get every day at home, you know, chose that. That's the affordable option. You wouldn't quite get the news. You know, you wouldn't get what you want. I thought, I mean, just before we get away from the subject, the piece about Eric Hagerman by Sam Dolnick in New York Times was incredibly compelling. And it didn't really, my only complaint with it, you know, as a written exercise is that it didn't really have much of an ending. He had this weird, this weird utopia planned out. Yeah, with the lake.

Yeah. But I think that that's part of, you know, in some ways, this illustrates a difference between stunt journalism and, you know, finding the great story itself in real life. it's not quite as neat you know when you find this when you find a subject like Hagerman but there's parts of it that are just so I mean but the the emotion and the turns is so much greater

just hearing about how he walked into coffee shops with like white noise yeah that's amazing that part was amazing and weirdly the part that got me was it turned out he was like a former Nike executive or something like that yeah which was not that was not what I was expecting the entire way up to that point I was just like oh this is just a guy who lives off the grid or something

You know, one of my old bosses on Twitter was like, oh, my friend Eric Hagerbman has chosen a really different path of his life. I was like, you know this guy? It's not like a survival. It's a fantastic story. It was amazing. And it was also like, and also that we would go to go visit a friend in San Francisco, I think it was San Francisco. It would make all these arrangements that the friend would have the TV on. I was pushing a little bit too far.

I don't know if I just turn off the internet and the television. That would be a fantastic excuse if someone was coming to visit me to be like, you know what? Let me get you a hotel room. I think my final note on Manjew's thing is that he talked about. So basically his consumption news came down to trying to read the newspaper every, the print newspaper every day. Yeah. And relying on certain things and tweeting for him a minimal amount of time. Let's say light engagement with Twitter.

Sure. Fair? Fair enough. I think that's my news diet now. Yeah. And I don't claim to read every page or even half the pages and newspapers every day they come home. They stack up. I don't get through them.

But that's what I kind of try to do. And so I feel like I like this idea, you know, but I also feel like by doing that, I'm often also really behind. And, you know, and then I give it up because I'm like, I can't. I just can't survive like this. I honestly hadn't even thought about that until you said it. But you're right. What he accomplished was living out my media consumption life, which is sort of. Your utopia, your lake.

Well, I don't know if I'm, I don't know if that's it. I don't consider this utopia, but it is just another one of those moments where you're like, how old must I? be if someone's version of reverting to the Stone Age is just what I do every day. Yeah, someone's news cleanse was your daily life. All right, David, Michael Smith, Michael to most of America, had his last day on the 6 p.m. Sports Center on Friday credit to Richard Deich with breaking that story, Jamel Hill, his TV partner whom he rebooted the show with last February he had already left. So let's start this discussion of ESPN nostalgia by reminding everyone of how I think Michael and Jamel called this, right? So when I interviewed him last summer, they told me one of the things we tried to do, first thing, when we got the job, West said, go to executives and say, let's not call this Sports Center.

Mm-hmm. You know why? Because if we do a totally different version of the show and play on the chemistry we had on his and hers and try to reinvent it, everyone's going to get mad because it's not sports center, not the Sports Center that's been going on for nearly four decades. Yeah. That they know. Yeah. Right. That they're not watching, but anyway.

Yeah, right. Exactly. Exactly, by the way, another good point. But anyway, they said, like, let's call it Sports Center presents his and her. Let's just call it anything else. ESPN was very invested in sports center. They knew there was a nostalgia problem coming, right? We can say a lot of things about why the show failed.

We can say, didn't work. You know, basic versions of it didn't work. I can get into that in a second, too, but we can say racism and other weird, you know, political stuff, Trump, whatever you want to say. But, like, part of it, I think is ESPN, because it was so good and because it was so dominant for so long. I'm not saying it's not good anymore. Yeah. But because it was so dominant for so long, it has, it gets clobbered by its own nostalgia. Yeah. As much as any media pop culture institution that I can think of. Yeah. I mean, Saturday Night Live is the other thing that always comes to mind when I think about this. Okay. Okay. That's number one. Only because I, you know, we hear people talking on staff and talking about SNL all the time. And it's, you know, but there's just this kind of like feeling that there are these glory days that may or may not have ever existed. You know, no one, no one here. remembers what, I mean, there was no Twitter to chronicle people, you know, talking shit about Bill Murray back in the day, but I'm sure they would have if Twitter would have existed, you know. Yeah.

And also, I think the ESP and people had a longer run. I mean, there were guys like Boomer going. Oh, yeah. As long as he did was like the equivalent of Belushi having lived and stayed for three and a half decades. And the number of hours of sports center with or without, you know, the original cast has just, you know, institutionalized it in such a different way. Yeah. But it's just, I mean, I think it's funny.

like, as you said, Sports Center in its original incarnation, here are the scores and highlights, doesn't work anymore. ESPN executives will tell you that. Scott Van Pelt will tell you that. Everybody will tell you that. But it will always be used

as a comparison to whatever the newest iteration of Sports Center is, to whatever they try to, whenever they try to innovate. And to me, that's where you have a nostalgia problem issue, whatever you want. Can I ask you a question? Yeah. As the media insider here on this podcast,

What do you see as the timeline to Michael Smith's separation from SportsCenter? Now, he has followed Jamel to the undefeated. That's the, at least the announced exit plan strategy, whatever. Did his time on SportsCenter come to a close because there's now new management at ESPN? Was there an inciting incident that led to this happening? Or was it literally over as soon as Jamel, he left, but they didn't want to make both those announcements at the same time, so they dragged it off until now?

My sense would be that they just, the beginning of the end is already happening before Jamel left. Right. And they're just on, they're somewhat separate on, they're on different timelines. You know, Jamel's leaving at that moment for her reasons. Yeah. She's not going to, they're not going to necessarily hold hands and jump together. Uh-huh. I thank all you guys.

I don't want to mistakenly not mention anyone. So I'm just going to mention you as a group. And to you, Mike, thank you so much. This year has been interesting to say to least. A lot of ups and downs, a lot of highs. while we won't be doing this show together, certainly our friendship is not ending. We'll be happy.

Thank you. We're all proud of you. And as your friend, I'm happy that you're happy. That's the most important thing. Thank you. I'm bringing it in for the real thing. Thank you. All right.

Y'all still go see Mel TV. I'll see y'all on Monday talking Super Bowl. You ain't getting rid of both of us. I don't think it has much to do with new management. Yeah. Other than that would have been if they had cheated or, you know, if that had kept going on, that would have been part of new management's first thing. Yeah.

I think it started when they decided that the original incarnation of the show, people at ESPN, wasn't working. And they decided to try to make it more like just, you know, regular sports center. Yeah. Them, you know, interviewing people and reading highlights. As Michael said on Jim Miller's podcast, you know, we didn't get to talk very much. Yeah. You know, like we didn't get by play was their whole, the whole point of doing it. Of course.

It's funny. To me, it's always, I think of that as just like a failure of production. There wasn't a producer who came in who could. say, I really like you guys. Yes. I really treasure you. I'm going to figure out how to make this, how to make what you're so good at work within this frame.

Yeah. When I was there, they were doing a lot of the producing themselves, an incredible amount. I wish I made more a big deal of that when I was there. But it was obvious that they were, you know, producing a lot of the show themselves. A lot of good people they liked and worked there and were, they were happy. But they just were, there was no, there were no person came along. By the time that person came along, they didn't want, they didn't like Michael and Jamel. Yeah.

They were trying to take them out of them out of them. other show, if anything. So do you think this is, I mean, this is obviously not a thing specific to ESPN, right? I mean, if you're talking about the kind of the failure of imagination and production, right? I mean, I remember when this is probably way longer ago than I like to imagine. I remember when Chris Hayes' MSNBC show was starting on a nightly basis. And he went on this big media tour and he was just like, listen, this isn't going to be your standard talking head show.

It's going to be more of a roundtable. I'm going to dig deep on issues. You're not going to see me wearing a tie. and then, you know, two weeks in, he's wearing a tie, cameras head on, it's exactly the exact same format as everything else you see on TV. I'm a big fan of his, especially his basketball commentary. But, you know, it does seem like people get a really short leash to try something different, and they're probably not given all the tools that they need to succeed at trying something different.

And then if there's any momentary lapse of confidence at all, it's right back to the thing we're comfortable doing, the thing we've been doing forever. And the thing that ostensibly we were trying to get away. get away from by hiring you. It's tough for networks to break out of these boxes, right? Yeah. Another great example you could say with Stephen Colbert, right? We're going to try something different and then eventually it's like,

let's get a producer in that just, you know, is like puts him in a position to, of course, Trump, you know, happens and he's, you know, because he can sort of go off on Trump. We're going to make this into a pretty conventional talk show. Yeah. Instead of like Jeb Bush and all these people, we're just going to have some movie stars on here. And you can also talk about Trump and the monologue. And then we're going to get to the movie stars. Yeah. And who sit on the couch, right?

Like, I mean, I think there's just, there's this thing. that pulls you toward that. What interests me about ESPN, Bill and I talked about those on his podcast, Jason Kay a couple weeks ago. Bill was at the time floating a, I think you were, we were musing out loud about a return of Dan and Keith to the sports. And I am advised today that that's not going to happen are very extremely unlikely. But we have seen, there have been stories that ESPN and Dan Patrick were talking again

about his radio show jumping to ESPN. And Keith Oberman for all. Has done some things on ESP. PTI did some things in the Super Bowl, some pieces for some. And people have implied that he is that he is all but employed there, maybe just because he doesn't have another specific thing going on. Pardon the interruption, but I'm Keith Olberman, and I'm happy Tony invited me here because I have some things I want to get off my chest. I'm Tony Kornheiser. Good evening and welcome to the end of our careers. I think he is willing to do stuff and they are willing to have him do stuff like that's about the level it is.

Right. At the moment, as far as I know anyway. I think it's what's interesting to me about that is like, so you have, so you have, so you're getting. beaten up by your own nostalgia. How do you then reclaim that? Because there's all this goodwill toward ESPN over the last 30 plus years, right? So how do you, one of the challenges for the new management there, for Jimmy Petaro to me, is how do you take, how do you turn a nostalgia problem into using nostalgia for your own advantage, right? These is, this is the ESPN, the ESPN you grew up with is still going to be here in parts, right? Heath Oldman's going to pop up on PTI. We said,

I use this example with Bill the other day, ABC, right? Roseanne is back on ABC. Yeah. It is never going to be 1988 for ABC when Roseanne started ever again. They're never going to be in that position again. But when this comes on,

you're like, oh, yeah, remember that? Yeah. When network prime time was the stop, was the thing? Yeah, but they can do eight episodes of Roseanne and that nostalgia will carry you that far. Yeah, right? Right. It's a lot harder to do.

That's the X files, right? Sure. You know, that's what everybody's done. And a lot of it can be really fantastic work. I think it's a lot harder when you're trying to program a whole network, right? I mean, isn't that the ultimate problem of VSPN that, I mean, when you're talking about what they did with Michael and Jamel,

and everything else they're working on is that, you know, if your business is highlights, we've talked about this, the age of the highlight, you know, you just said it, we've passed this, right? It's a, that era is no more. But in a lot of ways, they're just finding new and exciting ways to package the packages, right? But if none of those, if you don't have the confidence that any of those are going to break out above beyond Sports Center, and if none of them.

of them can get more popular than a generically labeled SportsCenter, then what are you to do? You know, I mean, how do you, how do you move forward? That's a great question. That's what they're trying to figure out. No one's, no one's turning and tuning into ESPN specifically for SportsCenter, unless they brought back a month of nostalgia with, you know, with Keith and Dan. I think you might argue they're turning into midnight because they know the scores and stuff are going to be on.

Yeah. You know, Sports Center, right? Maybe late night. Sure. If you're rolling in. But what I'm saying is you're tuning in, you're tuning in for. for, if not for the highlights, then for the recaps, right? You're tuning it, you're tuning in for a concept, not for personalities. And if you try to program the network for personalities, then you're

sort of at loggerheads with yourself. It does beg the question that, you know, Michael and Jamel raises, why does this have to be SportsCenter, you know? I mean, if, if you're not going to do something that gets more eyes than SportsCenter, I mean, that if you're not going to, you know, bring in something that's better, bigger, different than SportsCenter, then what's sort of, what's the point? Yeah. And especially, you know, six o'clock was such a weird one, right? Because our no scores and highlights. The Indians won today. Okay, well, there's like a day baseball game.

You know, what are you going to do? Yeah. You know, that's, you know, that time is trades, woge bombs. Yeah. And in the modern media era, you can't even get that up in time in podcast form for people to listen to on the drive home. Like, you know, there's not, it's kind of a no-win situation. Yeah, it's a phenomenally weird thing.

But to me, it's like, it's funny because no one, no network has come along. Fox, FS1 could have done this NFL network or somebody could have said, you know what, you guys are, you know, Chris Berman's. kind of sliding away. We're going to hire Chris Burman full-time and say you do NFL highlights for us. Put him on. So we're going to take the,

we're going to steal the goodwill and move it to our network, right? We're going to put Keith on, you know, the show. That's not crazy, given the people who've been, you know, given shows at these networks.

Yeah. We're going to take your nostalgia and we're going to milk it over here. Yeah. To say, hey, if you like the old ESPN, it exists over on this, this channel now. Yeah.

No one's done that, really. You know, there'd been, when Keith went to Fox way, way back one, or something like that. But so ESPN has this opportunity. People are still out in the universe. It's just if they're willing to do it.

And if they can find, as you say, limited quantities, places where they can come in and do it. You know, Berman do it and, and, uh, TJ doing a couple of, a couple of highlight, you know, runs right around the Super Bowl in the conference championship games. Yeah. You know, it was like, that was fair. But oh, we love this guy. Well, you, you were mad at him like a year ago. Now Berman's back like one week.

Ah, yeah. Of course. The catchphrases are back. Of course. It's awesome. It's ESPN that saddled with a. nostalgia problem, right? But for the rest of the media universe, everything moves so much more quickly that I think

Fox stealing Skip Bayliss is their version of stealing ESPN nostalgia. Sure. Right. I mean, that's still old ESPN. Right. It's not 1979. That's, you know, 2008. Right.

The world just moves too quickly, but ESPN's got to, the ESPN's the one that has to look in the mirror every day. Colin coward, right? Yeah, exactly. That's the old ESPN I used to like, you know, before they changed everything. Exactly. No, it's true. It's just a funny thing to think about.

But I think it's, I think it's one of those things. Look, it's not, it's a subtle thing. It's around the margins probably. It's not going to, you know, float a ratings period or whatever. But I just think it's one of those persistent things, you know, it's like every, you know, there's so many reasons people criticize ESPN. So many of them are just cuckoo. Yeah. But about half of them come back to at some level, oh, the ESP, it's not the ESPN I grew up with anymore.

It's not this. So how can you just remind people that those people are still in your universe, right? And in your expanded universe. Yeah. That those personalities, how do they come and say hello once in a while? You know, how do you, how do you give him a show for a while? You know, like, like I said, Keith on PTI, you know, that kind of stuff. It's like, it's just a funny question to think about.

Yeah. All right, David, that's it for this edition of the press box. Thanks to our ace producer, Jim Cunningham. Yeah. Thanks, Jim. Yeah, you're welcome. I will see you next week for more hot media takes. See you then, buddy.

See you later, man. Excuse a question. Yeah. As the media insider here on this podcast. Is this today's times? Yeah. All right. We think are you like four-day-old papers?

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