The Press Box - The Times and Kavanaugh, a Mysterious Trump Scoop, and Covering Eli Manning | The Press Box

Episode Date: September 20, 2019

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss the media aftermath of the New York Times story on Brett Kavanaugh (03:00), the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week (22:45), the week the media decided Elizabeth Warren would win the Democratic nomination (25:00), an intriguing Washington Post Trump scoop (36:30), and more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, guys, it's Liz Kelly, and welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. We hope you enjoyed listening to Break Stuff, The Story of Woodstock 99 on Luminary. Now continuing with our 99 theme, I wanted to let you guys know we've got all new episodes of the rewatchables 1999 starting back up right now. Since we've returned, we have rewatched eyes wide shut and election, and up next is never been kissed and many more 1999 classics. So make sure to check out the rewatchables 1999 on Luminary. David, this week the New York Giants announced that longtime starter and New York sports legend Eli Manning will be riding the bench in favor of rookie Daniel Jones.

What I want to know is, even if you know nothing about sports, isn't this being covered like a regime change comparable to the American presidency within the New York tabloids? I mean, I mean, it's not like Eli, Eli's been with us for so long that he just seems like the quintessential New York quarterback. But there is, I mean, he, you know, he's a Southern boy too. So I don't, I don't mean to, but maybe it's just that this New York quarterbacking is just like the, the blank canvas for like the perfect New York story, right?

It's like you get off the bus like Axel Rose, the beginning of the Welcome to the Jungle video with like your suitcase. and your tousled hair and you're just like woefully ill-equipped for what's about to happen to you like there's no way this is going to go well and yeah I mean I think that the whole story for the New York Giants for Daniel was from the moment

he was drafted it was Daniel Jones like small kid and the big small city kid coming to New York and a small town kid and now this is front and center this is what we care of I mean it's like every picture of him and I know this is from the art director's chair every every photo that

come across of him is sort of more unintentionally funny than the last. When they announced that he was when he was going to be starting on ESPN, I was watching live and the graphic at the bottom of the screen had the headshots of Eli and Daniel Jones side by side. Eli's was just the standard,

completely centered, head-on, perfect headshot. And Daniel Jones seemed to be, it's almost like he started laughing at the last second when they were taking his ID photo and his head went like a quarter of the way he like tipped it off camera. He's like grinning and not in the frame, which seems like the easiest thing to fix,

except that it's just Daniel Jones. It's totally fine. This is huge news. It's huge news. There's never been somebody like Daniel Jones. And there's really no, there's no way this story can really go except for him becoming the best quarterback

in NFL history. That's how it better go. We are the Jeff Hostetler of Media Podcast. This is the press box, a part of the Ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here. Lots and lots of stuff to get to today. We'll talk about the week the media decided Elizabeth Warren is going to win the Democratic nomination.

We'll talk about an intriguing and mysterious Washington Post-Trump scoop. The local news from Anaheim, how to cover a regime change of NFL quarterbacks, plus listener mail and the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But David, I think we need to begin with the story about Supreme Court just Brett Kavanaugh that appeared in the New York Times, which then seems to have lit itself on fire in about three different ways. The story is interesting because it tells us something not only about how newspapers work, but just how complicated these stories are to report. And as it turns out, tweet the piece by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly originally appeared in the September 15th Sunday review section of the Times. was actually an excerpt from their new book,

The Education of Brett Kavanaugh. We read during Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings that when he was a freshman at Yale, he'd been accused of thrusting his penis into the face of a fellow student named Deborah Ramirez. Well, on Sunday, Kelly and Pogarbin reported, quote, at least seven people,

including Ms. Ramirez's mother, heard about the Yale incident long before Mr. Kavanaugh was a federal judge. Two of those people were classmates who learned of it just days, after the party occurred, suggesting that it was discussed among students at the time. So that was revelation number one that this story was more corroboratable, corroborable than we might have thought during Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings. Moreover, Kelly and Pogerman continue, we also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Mrs. Ramirez's allegation. A classmate, Max Steyer, saw Mr. Kavanaugh.

with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party where friends pushed his penis into the hands of a female student, etc., etc. So that appeared in the New York Times on Sunday. It is important to remember, David, that the initial backlash or at least raised eyebrows about the story were from the left rather than the right. Over at Slate, Tom Skokka wrote a news lead that just sort of brought the salient facts from the piece to the top. and then there was this problematic tweet which the Times used to peddle the story the tweet read having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party

may seem like harmless fun but when Brett Kavanaugh did it to her Deborah Ramirez says it confirmed that she didn't belong at Yale in the first place so that was the first way that Times undermined its own scoop what was your reaction when you first saw that tweet making the rounds? Yeah, you always tee me up with something real special every time.

Well, no, no, I think that's a good, I mean, it is a good place. I mean, I should say just like taking a step backwards that like I encountered the sort of hidden news. I mean, people tweeting about the revelations in the story before I encountered the indignation about the lack of, about the times. headlining and, you know, forward face presentation of the story. Me too. So when I realized, so I kind of had to back into the controversy, and when I did, it was, I don't know, I mean, maybe shouldn't be, I shouldn't use the word shocking, just, you know, and something that could be sort of a mechanical error, but it did seem pretty shocking.

The tweet itself, like I said, kind of having to reverse engineer the controversy a little but the tweet itself seemed like utterly unbelievable, right? I mean, like try, like, I think I, I mean, I literally took it as a joke. Because it, not, not that someone was tweeting, not the New York Times was tweeting in jest, like I was not being presented with the actual tweet from the Times. That was my assumption. Because it's just so off base, you know?

I mean, it's, I mean, I guess I guess you understand how someone got to that tweet. Yes. just the sort of abundance of caution gone completely awry. But it's really, it's not one that you read and you're like, well, I see what they were trying to do. It takes some like work to get any kind of like logical progression there. Did you think as I did as stuck up journalists that my initial, you know, sort of move was to blame the social media person? That, oh, you know, this is a case where you have some nailed down. serious reporting and somebody on social media, whoever on social media for the Times has decided to sort of jolly this thing up a little bit.

And just tonally, it went to totally the wrong place. I feel bad about thinking that in any case because social media people don't deserve that. But I feel really bad because it turns out that Robin Pogrebin, one of the authors, wrote the tweet herself. She wrote it. the same person who was doing all this reporting for her book here's how Pogrebin

explained her thinking on the view what happens at the times is you know the reporters are asked to draft tweets we also ask to draft suggested headlines they don't always get used they don't always get sent out they often don't I drafted this with this in mind to have actually the opposite effect

which is to anticipate those who would say a guy pulling down his pants at a part when they're drunk, is on the spectrum of sexual misconduct, it's not sexual assault, it's not rape, what's the big deal? And to try to put in context, Deborah Ramirez's experience and to say, actually, it was a big deal, and that this can be quite meaningful.

Depending on what you come from, you know, maybe for me, a New Yorker, I would have said, get that out of my face. You know, she was coming from a very sheltered Catholic upbringing in a lower income kind of community, and she was a person of color, and she felt like maybe she didn't deserve to be at Yale in the first place.

And so having that happen and have people laugh at her and target her was actually hugely meaningful and made an impact on her life for the rest of her life. So for those who minimize it and dismiss it, I was trying to help them understand that. It had the opposite effect and it seemed to undermine her experience. So she's trying in that tweet. Yeah. So she's trying that tweet to anticipate the objections. Anticipate somebody who says really what's the big deal about this. and I guess and then but you know of course as we've learned one million times

when you try to do that on Twitter it doesn't exactly come through no and in defense of the blame the social media team argument I mean it's just sort of like it's like talking about how the writers don't put their own headlines in the story I mean in this case obviously they did but and sometimes it's I mean often I feel like that is a useful thing to do it's not to blame the social media team or to blame the headline writers specifically so much as it is just like to separate that part of the conversation out. So we're not arguing over definitions and terms for 45 minutes, you know.

But in this case, it's actually a really salient critique because, like you said, the writer wrote it herself. And, you know, again, one can see where one, you know, how one could get to that tweet, or could get to that argument. But you're right. It's just, it's not. that nuance is hard on Twitter. It's just like that's, that line of conversation is completely

inappropriate for Twitter. The tweet, as it turned out, was the least of the Times' problems. Because by Sunday, Kelly and Pogerman's article was appended with this. An earlier version of this article, dot, dot, dot did not include one element

of the book's account regarding an assertion by a Yale classmate that friends of Brett Kavanaugh pushed his penis into the hands of a female student at a drunken dorm party. The book reports the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident. So the allegation got into the excerpt, but the salient fact that the alleged victim does not remember it, according to friends anyway, which is in the book, which is in the book, did not get into the excerpt. Now, you might ask, wait a second, how did that fact drop out of the

article. Let's listen to more of Pogrebin on the view. But you are the authors of the book. Did you just miss it in the book? It's a little. No, I miss it in the New York Times. And we first and we first had it in the piece. And so it's about an editing process, which is iterative. It has a lot of different drafts. And, you know, I think actually the way it happened was the editor's being concerned about naming her because the Times has a tradition of not naming the victims and really has to deliberate whether or not to do that. In that sentence that had her name, it also had that she doesn't remember it. They took out the whole sentence and in removing her name in order to kind of protect her and make sure we weren't sort of sending people to her door. We also took

out the fact that she didn't remember it. So again, when you hear the full explanation, I guess you can kind of understand in a way how you got there, right? You're going back and forth with these drafts and things are coming in and you're trying to balance so many things like the victims, the alleged victim, excuse me, right to privacy, right to not having her name in there, and all these things with, you know, at the same time, which shows, and by the way, this goes back to the conversation we had earlier this week about Jody Kanner and Megan Toey's stories about Harvey Weinstein. These stories are fucking hard and they're hard to report and they're hard to edit and they're hard to get into print in airtight form. But all that said,

it's got to get in the story. It has to get in the story. And, you know, this is this is the job of the editor and the writer is to make sure a fact like that doesn't drop out even under you know, the usual heated crazy circumstances of newspaper editing. Yeah, I mean, I agree with all that. I think of all of the errors, I mean, maybe this is just, you're right, maybe I'm just in too close to be, to have a good perspective on this.

But this is the thing that despite how galling it is, this is the part that I'm most sympathetic to, it may because of how calling it is, you know, because, you know, all of us in the business have been there on deadline in the weeds, having, just making an error, I mean, in an error like this just presents itself or, you know, maybe you just assume that someone in the next, the, the, the next desk over, it's their job to catch it. So you're just going to concentrate on the one thing you're working on, whatever it is. But one would think, one would hope that something that is integral

to the story, I mean, so integral to the story and specifically to the news that the story is breaking would not be overlooked. Now, maybe the problem, maybe this brings us

to the next point, is that the Times also seemed a little bit blissfully unaware that they were breaking news in this piece. Or at least, they didn't feel like

that was the thrust of the piece. No pun intended. Yeah, I think that's right. I think there's a couple of interlocking problems. here. One is the trickiness of a book excerpt where really

if you look what's in this story you would say, geez, what's important here? There's an interesting portrait of Deborah Murmirez here and what her life was like at Yale. But really, it seems like you're trying to make the, you're trying to give readers

a flavor of the book. Oh, she was in this strange world. There's all this drinking. There's all this sexuality that she's not used to. Whereas what's maybe more important than that in the kind of immediate newspaper way is the news. So you're trying to balance, you know, instead of like two lines, here's what we learned. You're trying to kind of encase it in this portrait, which maybe would make readers more

interested in buying the book. That's tension number one. I think the second one is if they, if we, if the New York Times editors looked at that second, the second piece of the story, okay, somebody has a memory of Brett Kavanaugh doing this. this, but the alleged victim does not remember it. Okay. Does that make the paper at all? Or would that just have been taken out completely? I don't know the answer to that. To me, it's hard to believe it would have been in the paper. Well, I mean, there was all there were stories that the authors pitched the news desk on this stuff first and that it was, and that it was more or less rejected.

Right. I mean, that's the reason why it ends up in the Sunday review. Yeah, I mean, I can understand the argument from the editorial side that whatever this is might have felt. like a piece of a bigger story and not you know not not something to to not the nail to hang the whole thing on hang a hang a whole new report on but it does feel like it's less i don't know again maybe i'm reading too much into it it feels like it's less an issue of editorial discernment and more an issue of being stung by the reportage of the previous round the round of the round of cavanaugh stories or the reaction to the way they reported the previous round that you know the media reported the previous round of Kavanaugh stories, right?

That they're more concerned with the perception that they would be witch hunting than they are about the actual news that might be worth breaking. Right, because it's a tough one because there is this kind of weird sense in political world that once somebody is confirmed that everybody should just move on, you know, minus something. Oh, didn't we litig? You know, that's, of course, what Republicans would say and have said about this. so you're right there is this kind of weird political tension to it but it's it's totally normal that you know we know those as and we talked about it here that those confirmation hearings were you know very quick those investigations were not always as wide ranging as they should have been so it seems totally normal that two authors who went back and spent months and months

would turn up new and interesting material of course so you know that just seems to me And of course, this all immediately then sort of passes into. And again, this is before this, you know, addendum comes onto the story. This passes right into the 2020 campaign. Elizabeth Warren tweeted on Sunday, last year, Kavanaugh nomination was rammed through the Senate without a thorough examination of the allegations against him. Confirmation is not an exoneration. And these newest revelations are disturbing like the man who appointed him, Kavanaugh should be impeached. Julian Castro.

It's more clear than ever that Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath. He should be impeached. And Congress should review the failure of the Department of Justice to properly investigate the matter. So there was that. And then I love this summary from the Washington Post, Paul Kane. He says the Kavanaugh saga has evolved in a familiar refrain. Seemingly credible accusations get made. Democrats pounce and demand investigations.

Republicans grow quiet until some. other allegation emerges that appears to go too far. Then Republicans go into full umbrage mode, pushing Democrats back until the nominee is confirmed, or in this week's case, until Democrats change the subject. We have had that happen like three times with the Kavanaugh saga. And here we are again.

And I don't know if you watched any of the Mitch McConnell, you know, victory dance about this. The quote that stuck out to me was, I'm distressed by the declining journalistic principles so much on display. Yes, I'm sure you're distressed by that, Senator. But, you know, doing this weird sort of victory celebration of, aha, aha, we got them. Even though, again, all this information was in the book. And I guess that's what makes this,

you know, adventure, whatever you want to call it, catastrophe, adventure, ridiculousness so insane is that stuff was in the book. But now Republicans can point to a New York Times. Times excerpt and say, see, the paper's out to get us. See, they're not telling you the full story. No. It's not even, it's not even that. It's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the, the, the larger scale obfuscation that now you can just say whenever someone says, a true fact that was that, that was reported out and, and, you know, and backed up and triplicate by the book. Someone can just say, know that story was fake. Here's, remember the New York Times lied about it. Yeah. Remember they retracted it or they, they corrected it or something. Yeah. You were texting me about the now. obligatory paragraph that appears

whenever anybody writes a story about New York Times scandals what was it? Where did you say it? This is the sort of thing that happens when like a musician

will get charged with like three or four different crimes in an 18 month span that aren't necessary related and don't really build up I don't really amount to one narrative

but they have to put in the paragraph at the end that's like by the way you know I mean not even by the way it's an assumed by the way way where it's just like, whatever, Chris Omeda was charged with two counts of leaving the scene of an accident as well as thieving, stealing stuff teddy bears from the toy store.

And that was after he, you know, left a dirty phone call on his friend's answering machine. And then, but none of these things have to do with one another. But, you know, it's just the explanation that a lot of stuff is going on. The New York Times has officially reached that status because in reporting about this, in this exact story, the Washington Post had reported at the very end of a lengthy breakdown of this whole Kavanaugh thing said in recent months, the Times has faced scrutiny over editorial

decisions and its staffer's social media interactions. The newspaper amended a front page headline about Trump following mass outcry in August. That same month, the Times Washington editor, Jonathan Wiseman, was demoted after sparking controversy with tweets that were to announced as racist, and columnist Brett Stevens was widely panned for his role in the now infamous bedbug exchange. What is that?

Bill always talks about the Tyson zone, you know, when somebody enters it. The New York Times has entered the New Republic zone. Remember the New Republic was the king of the... Yeah, it's like everybody... The obligatory paragraph, yeah. The more that goes wrong, the more oblige you are to, like, reach further into the past. right? Like as soon as a fabulous and returns, then it's like, oh yeah, remember

Stephen Glass? That was a thing too. Yeah, exactly. Because they were in the zone for a while to be like, Leon Weaselteer did something horrible and Chris Hughes was a feckless owner and remember that Stephen Glass guy who made up all that stuff? You're like, wait, these are like three different, completely different things.

But it's the when you've hit a rough patch as a publication when you reach the obligatory paragraph stage. I think that's what we need to name it here. the obligatory paragraph of shame. Congratulations, New York Times. You have now qualified.

All right, David, time for the overworked Twitter joke of the week, where we celebrated gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Please send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received. Quality tweet this week from the onion, David. They put up a picture of a modern open plan office where everyone's working side by side.

and they had the headline working in general vicinity for eight hours a day misinterpreted as friendship. It does not apply at all to the ringer's New York office. It was an overword Twitter joke to tag your coworkers

with that tweet. That is thanks to Matt Sinovich. It's probably a good time to mention that my desk is next to Kevin Clark's in the Ringer L.A. headquarters. I kid. I kid. Always like stories like this one. the new head of talent relations at Fox

is named Lisa Simpson I'm not kidding Lisa Simpson Brayden Orr tweets Bowser runs Nintendo Lisa Simpson is going to run Fox This is the strangest timeline Do you remember the story of

Doug Doug Bowser was running Nintendo? I think we had that many many months ago then Doug Bowser himself, president of Nintendo of America, tweeted out the announcement of Simpson's appointment with a comment. Seems like a natural fit to me. Anyway, unbelievable. Thanks to Pete McHugh and Scott Tobias, who we forgot to credit on one last week. Sorry about that, Scott.

And speaking of 90s bands, because David, when are we not speaking of 90s bands? Tom DeLong, the vocalist and guitarist of Blink 182, is filing for divorce for his wife, Jennifer. They've been married since 2001. It was an upward Twitter joke to write. I guess they couldn't stay together for the kids. Thanks to Stephen Oberlander for that one. Yeah, see, it's total silence from Chris.

We're too early in the 90s. But hopefully some chuckles from other ones out there. All right, David, time for the notebook dump. And I have down here first, this was the week Elizabeth Warren became president. or at least the Democratic nominee. Because when we look back in election 2020, let this be known that this was the week.

The media reached a kind of rough consensus on who's going to win the nomination. On Wednesday, Matt Drudge tweeted a photo of Warren speaking under New York's Washington Square Arch and said, it's Elizabeth Warren's nomination to lose. Over at New York Magazine, Jonathan Chaitwrites, Elizabeth Warren is not leading the polls yet, but she is on a trajectory to win the Democratic presidential nomination.

Number Cruncher Steve Kornacki, everybody's favorite number cruncher tweets. I think the most significant development in recent polling is that Warren, while still running far behind Biden, now clearly has a pulse with black voters. This kind of an interesting why now question here that we could cite poll numbers. we could cite kind of what happened in that last debate, especially probably Biden's performance in that last debate. But to me, I think the biggest imperative here that covers just about everybody, including us, is we all want to know as soon as humanly possible, or I should say we all want to declare as soon as humanly possible who's going to win the nomination. That's the thing. We do this with football, right? You hear Bill and Sal do this all the time.

who's the favorite to win the Super Bowl? Who can we rule out of the playoffs right now? This is like such a natural human emotion. And I think I even asked you this on Tuesday, like, who's going to win the nomination? That's what we want to know immediately because we want to construct. Here's the word I hate a storyline or narrative or whatever you want to call it that puts everything in order for us. And I think I think reporters have been itching to do this because they don't believe Biden is actually going to win this thing. so now I feel this was the week, whether it's polls, whether it's a debate, whatever it is, that they decided that Elizabeth Warren is probably going to win the nomination. What do you make of that?

Yeah, I think that's right, and it's operating on a couple of different levels. I mean, Jonathan Chate's piece that you mentioned was declarative. I mean, he was making the case that Elizabeth Warren is probably going to win the nomination. I think the homepage headline writers were even more definitive when they subtitled the piece in assessment of the now likely nominee. And there's a bunch of other. content on the on on on new you know on the site it's kind of piggybacking off that piece there's you know one of the number one piece in the site right now is how electable is elizabeth warren anyway

oh no that's that's that's the same piece sorry there's a different sorry let me take that again there's another piece uh piggybacking off that one that says no one knows whether warner sanders is in second place you know you know it's a it's a bunch of kind of reiterative content and that's that's the way these things go but i think that that that sort of piggybacking is is uh helps explain you know from a different perspective, a bigger perspective, what's going on? I mean, as soon as somebody calls the race, just like if this were election night,

everybody else is racing to call, is racing to get in too, right? So as soon as somebody starts talking about Elizabeth Warren with any kind of definitive prediction or predictive terms, then, you know, every other opinion writer, every other pollster, whoever,

who had an inkling of a piece they wanted to write next week is like rushing that piece out to get it on the, the conversation. There's a multiplier effect, yes. Yeah, and the narrative argument that you're talking about is disheartening, but I think really real. I mean, I think in so much as there's any validity to the notion that the media was in the

bag for Biden, you know, up until, I mean, now or whatever it was, I think that in so much as that's true, it probably has everything to do with that kind of desire for a definitive narrative, right? that you want that he he enters as the frontrunner and the story is simplest to tell with him cruising to victory right um and yeah i mean i mean we i said this on the show on monday or was it last week that i said that i think we we don't know it was going to win but i think it's going to seem like a given in retrospect that it's either going to be biden or it's going to be elizabeth warren um in her inevitable you know defeat of biden or conquering of biden and and i and i'm not saying

that I encourage everyone to write this story. I mean, God knows. But I think it was at the point where it was getting a little bit obvious. Now, I think that it's natural for us to want this. I think you're right. I think for us to be looking for this narrative and then to be, you know,

it's in our nature now to be more definitive than ever about these things, at least in headlines or in pitches or in everything else. And yeah, I mean, but I think that the difficulty is, No matter how entrenched the polling numbers seem, no matter how it's, how impossible it seems for someone else to jump out of the pack, it's not in any of the candidate's best interest

to help that narrative along, right? I mean, as much as we like to, if you want to talk, go back to the Bill and Sal point of reference, as much as we wanted to talk about Castro versus Beto in the first debate being a loser leaves town match, well, they're both in at two debates later, right? I mean, neither of them is going anywhere. And I think that, you know, I mean, we can, I think most people would say with some confidence that one of the biggest things that Trump had on his side four years ago was the, was the inability of the rest of the field to gather around one candidate, right?

Or the opposition to gather around one candidate. And that was because it was in no one's best interest, personal interest, to drop out of the campaign. So really anything could happen. Anything could happen. But it is interesting. That's where we're going to get into the end of this. But in conclusion, anything could happen. Yeah.

I love that. Now, talk about narrative. No, I agree with everything you said. I think the one thing about Biden, I'd say, is I think that the simplest story is actually probably just one click of the dial further. It's that Biden is the frontrunner and he's going to lose, but he's going to lose. Right. You're adding just a little drama to that.

And if you read Ryan Liz's Politico thing on Biden, a lot of what his advisors think the media is doing is how to you know the fall from grace of the frontrunner of Barack Obama's vice president is a great story to write so they have been they have been waiting for that story to happen now that that's just natural now I guess the other question I hit and we're going way down the meta rabbit hole here is if Elizabeth Warren becomes kind of the de facto media frontrunner how does the coverage of her change because she's been in this strange position where she started the campaign. She mishandled the Native American stuff.

It was it looked terrible. She looked completely. Her campaign looked completely dead in the water. She was allowed to kind of come along is on this comeback trail, right? That was a good story for the media also to write. Elizabeth Warren seemed to have bottomed out. Now she's taking 70,000 selfies. She has a plan for everything.

She's quietly just, you know, hitting the American people over the head with policy until they can't take it anymore and now she's coming back but does that change now remember it's still a long time to go before anybody actually caucuses three months so does that change if she is the prohibitive frontrunner in the race and i think it probably will in some way and that's another interesting part of this so yeah this is the next point i mean this is the the the the logical like next question in the argument that i was just making i don't think that i think that the one thing that i mean the the reason why Beto, I mean, the reason why Beto's campaign was sort of, you know, taking critical hits before it could even get a footing was because of the sort of presumption inherent in the way that that, you know, the, the rollout of the campaign was just seemed like they, they were being presumptive, right? There's a lot of the, and a lot of the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the perception of presumption that he was, that he was.

you know, determined to, I mean, that he was the obvious choice. I think that you can look at, you can see a lot of that in Hillary's campaign four years ago. I think that that's, there's nothing that voters at this point hate more, at least especially like the hyperattentive class of voters, be that on Twitter or primary voters or whatever else, is the, is the presumption that like you're going to vote for them no matter what. We want, you know, volition means something different now than it has in the past. And it's a, it's, there is the voters, I think, to take, it's, to take anything for granted, I think, is this is a slap in the face to anybody with a vote. I mean, that's the way it's perceived. And I think there's a lot of truth to it. So Elizabeth Warren has got to continue fighting this kind of running this sort of, this insurgent campaign, no matter what her poll number say, you know, no matter how inevitable she may, her campaign may feel that she is. Um, she's got to run this, she's got to run it like she's like she's an underdog. And frankly,

she might be aided by the fact that she doesn't match up necessarily as well against Trump as Biden or some of the other candidates. So she might be aided by the fact that Trump in a lot of quarters seems insurmountable, right? I mean, she might be in fact better position to keep running an insurgent campaign than anybody else up there on the stage who has even, you know, a shot in the dark of getting the nomination. But we'll see it, guys. Yeah, I mean, the sort of Biden thing is.

funny because I also think that this will change Biden. So there's the Warren part that you just mentioned. Then there's the Biden part. Biden is going to probably change tactics if he's not running well. And by the way, don't think the media doesn't want to write the story how Uncle Joe got his

groove back. And you know, he was tongue tied. He wasn't campaigning. He wasn't giving interviews. Now he's in don't give a fuck Uncle Joe mode. And he's going to do that. They would love to write that story too. Because that would be, that would be a great story. And I was always kind of, I understand like the whole idea of narrative and,

you know, the way it was practiced in the evil, awful Mark Halpern way is it can be so dumb with politics. But mostly it's just people trying to make sense of the state of the race. And there are good reasons to it, right? Money goes to people who are, who are doing well, resources, endorsements, all that kind of stuff. But it's just journalists trying to make sense of what they're covering at its heart. You know, know, and they're trying to figure out, like, who, who, what is going on? I'm out there reporting. I'm observing.

I'm talking to people. What's going on? What is the state of the race? And it just seems at some level like a completely natural thing for people to be doing. And again, it could be abused and it can be taken to just, you know, ludicrous Washington extremes where you're, you know, trying to, you know, sort of invent a state of play for every, every little thing that happens and trying to do game theory and all. the stupid stuff, but it is interesting. And like I said, I find it very interesting that everyone has settled on this week as the week Warren got in the driver's seat.

Should we spend a second, David, talking about this Trump scoop in the Washington Post? Oh, God, yeah. This will probably be slightly outdated by the time you listen to this. So remember that we're coming in early. This piece, which is by Greg Miller, Ellen, Nakashima, and Shane Harris. appeared yesterday afternoon, which is Wednesday. I'll read you the first two paragraphs because that's about all we know at this point. The whistleblower complaint that has triggered a tense showdown between the U.S.

intelligence community and Congress involves President Trump's communications with a foreign leader, according to two former U.S. officials familiar with the matter. Trump's interaction with the foreign leader included a promise that was regarded as so troubling that it prompted an official in the U.S. intelligence community to file a formal whistleblower complaint with the Inspector General for the intelligence community. Dot, dot, dot. And I almost want to just for us to just sit here for 30 seconds and appreciate this because it feels like we're observing a story in the larval stage. This is news. I'm not, I'm not shitting on the Washington Post piece at all.

But it's just like, this is the news still in the cocoon. what is this going to be? And when I tell you, Trump made a promise to a forward leader that was quote unquote so troubling that inspired a whistleblower complaint, it feels like, you know, where we were at various stages of Russia gate

or Muellergate, where it seems like, wow, this could be anything. It could also be something relatively stupid about trade or something like that. But don't you feel we're just, don't you feel that this moment is so amazing? because this is where everybody's imagination

and by that I especially mean liberal Twitter's imagination runs absolutely wild. Yeah, it's not just liberal Twitter. I mean, it's everybody, I mean, listen, I was watching the news this morning on MSNBC. They were just going on and on about it and it took me

probably the better part of an hour to realize that I wasn't just missing the meat of the story, that the meat of the story was actually just ephemeral, right? I mean, it could, like you said, it could actually, it could actually amount to something really significant. Certainly, certainly absent. How many times have we said that about Trump, by the way? Well, that's what I was going to say. In another administration, in another era, and I don't even mean this as a direct reflection on the Trump White House.

In another era, I think that we would almost assume that they were discussing, that the media was discussing something like this in such grave terms because they maybe knew more than they could say out loud. But that has not always been the case over the past couple years. Or at least it's not borne out to be provable that way. But yeah, I mean, it's happened time and time again. It's a little bit befuddling. Presumably we'll get some clarity on this in the not too distant future. Like you said, maybe by the time this podcast goes up because, you know, Congress is involved. And this is now a showdown with people who,

may be able to get their hands on this one way or the other, whether or not it becomes a public record or whatever else. But it is, it is very strange. And again, it has a little bit of the piggybacking that we discussed in the last segment because everybody's got to cover it with the same sort of volume that the competitors, the competition is covering it, right? And then even, and then beyond that, there's all the supplemental stuff. I just, I just Googled to see if there's any new news.

And the first thing that came up was an NBC news report that annual complaints to the watchdog hotline. have more than doubled in the Trump presidency, which is also interesting and also troubling, but like this is just news based on the same notion of a story that we don't really understand what it is yet. There's like a running live blog on CNN that doesn't seem to give that much information except for really we're talking about TikToking,

the machinations going on between Congress and the White House and noting all the people, listing all the people who Trump has spoken to in recent months, we don't even know with a time frame of this. The whole thing is so strange. Yeah, I do like that last part where they're trying to isolate on the foreign leaders. This is in the post piece that he's had contact with five foreign leaders in the last five weeks or the previous, the five weeks previous to the complaint, which is filed August 12th. And they are Vladimir Putin.

Kim Jong-un. Okay, both those seem like have a lot of potential. The prime minister of Pakistan, sure. The Emir of Qatar, okay. the Prime Minister of the Netherlands. That's number five. Now, who wants to take the Prime Minister of the Netherlands in the pool? And what kind of odds would be like one million to one?

Yeah. Come on. Come on. And I may be wrong by the time you hear this. But I kind of think it's not going to be the Prime Minister of the Netherlands. That's not going to be the thing that really got the complaint filed. Anyway, go ahead. You were saying.

No, and I just, I think it's worth saying that, I mean, listen, I don't, I'm not proud to be, you know, an American in an era where where the president can literally profit off the presidency where you know there's I mean all that accusation but but but at the same time we've seen what the public reaction is to um you know lobbyist hanging out at the Trump hotel and it's just sort of you know that that sort of those sort of news stories seem to land with the thud time after time if this was Trump saying to you know Ukrainian president Zelensky like like the next time you're here, you can stay for free at Mar-a-Lago and someone in the White House clutching their pearls over that. Well, yeah, I mean, that's a serious violation that someone should

look into, but I'm not sure that that's like a 48-hour stop-de-presses news story, right? I mean, this isn't, that that's not going to bring down the Trump presidency, and I'm not exactly sure what the stakes are here in an era where I don't know what would actually bring down the Trump presidency. So, I mean, it's one of those things where, I mean, we just, We have to sort of measure our expectations and withhold our outrage until we have some concept of what we're actually talking about. Good luck. Good luck.

If you work for local, if you work for cable news, that's going to be fun. It's true. I almost said local news because that's the next item on the agenda. Fun with local news. This is from Sarah Welch, a reporter at KTLA out here in Southern California.

And I feel almost bad doing this because David, you and I misspeak all the time, as any listener of this podcast knows. Lord knows how many times we've done it today. But, but this is funny. Listen to Welch on a recent report doing some journalistic due diligence on an unfortunate story from Anaheim, California. We tried to reach out to the man who died in this pursuit. They were unavailable for comment.

You know what they say, David? Always make the extra call. even if your subject is deceased. I don't have a ton to say about this, but I will ask you this, what was the exact year that people stopped watching local news,

like actually watching it, and just started strip mining it for stories like this or the one about the people saying the leprechaun in the tree? I mean, what was the point it just became comedic fodder? I don't know.

I mean, yes? No, but I can probably, man, if I actually like sat down and thought about it, I could probably figure out the point in my life where the local news, like, basically only started existing after Sunday night football games. Like, it's only when a seasonal sporting event leads directly into the evening news, like, from the studio show straight to, like, the sports segment on the local news.

And then all of a sudden they're talking about, you know, murder numbers going up in some local neighborhood or some, you know, terrible house break in. I mean, it's just, it's all outrage. And really, any, any moment of the local news is probably worth the effort to strip mine. I mean, or could stand on its own as a meme, not, maybe not, it doesn't go up to this level, right? It's at this level. But, but yeah, I don't know. It's, it does seem like a totally different, a totally different way we consume, you know, the news at 10 or at 11 or whatever it is.

Yeah, the phrase you always hear after the big sporting event is stay tuned for your late local news, I believe. the time I kind of accidentally run into it is when I'm waiting for a big event to start as opposed to just stop, which is kind of a funny one. And I think it was the must have been one of the debates we were covering the other day. And I sort of waited for it. And it turned out to be the last story on the local news leading into the major Democratic debate was about a sea otter being nursed back to help. it was the perfect one and I also just found it on Twitter the Kyrun was rescued

Seaterpup putting on weight and it's one of those where the anchors can kind of go aw and then stay tuned everybody Democratic debate's coming up and then you know onto the business of the nation I love it

David in the world of sports big news this week on Tuesday the New York Giants the New York football giants announced that Eli Manning their long time starting quarterback two-time Super Bowl winner was being benched in favor of Daniel Jones, the oft-ridiculed rookie who was drafted

out of Duke with the sixth pick in this year's draft. The New York Post, of course, has been on top of this since April when they ran with a game of Jones inside the mind of the heir to Eli's QB throne on the cover of their post-draft sports section. You will not be shocked to see the photo that comes with that. On the cover of Wednesday's New York Post, they went with the fall of man. That was the headline. The fall of man. Anyway, these events allowed everybody

to get a bunch of bad takes off over on ESPN on get up. Paul Feinbaum used the opportunity to talk about how Eli Manning handled the past few years with quote, class, I guess because he got sacked all the time. Feinbaum then awkwardly segwayed and to talk about how Cam Newton is not like Eli Manning

and has, quote, never cared about anybody other than Kim Newton. Over at Fox Sports on the herd, Colin Coward said that Eli Manning would have been benched a long time ago if he'd been playing on the West Coast. Coward says, I'm from the West and I currently live in the West. But one of the things that always struck me when I moved to the Northeast in brackets, you would never have a Fenway Park out west. We would just blow it up and start over. The East is about 200-year-old churches and 100-year-old baseball stadiums and hierarchy and tradition.

In the West, we don't romanticize yesterday. dot, dot, dot. It doesn't matter what grandpa did or what your dad did. Colin sort of going all Frederick Jackson Turner there on how quarterbacks are replaced in the NFL. Anyway, Daniel Jones said to make his first start Sunday against Tampa Bay. Surely the reaction to his debut on sports talk radio and on ESPN will be calm and measured. I give you great odds on that. Lister Mail, David.

We talked about the far side on Tuesday. comic strip possibly coming back. We got this tweet from at E LDM C MNO. If that spells anything, let me know. He says, what a miss. Is there any more appropriate medium for the return of the Farsight in 2019

than a newsletter, a daily comic in the newspaper returning in the form of a daily newsletter? Come on, guys, that's a layup. He's right. Thanks to this listener for remembering our own content more than we do because we talked about how

the new sign of power and journalism is the newsletter. So is Gary Larson going to do it as a newsletter? Would that work? Is there a newsletter? Is there a comic strip newsletter? Yes, I guess. This falls under the category of like tech bros reinventing the city bus. But like wouldn't that be great if you could just opt in,

opt in to like your six favorite comic strips and have those arrive in your inbox every morning? My mother-in-law personally would be the first subscriber to that. So let's pitch that idea. In other news, when it was announced that, Netflix had acquired the streaming rights to Seinfeld our pal Chris Sullentrop tweeted Duck and Cover generational think pieces

incoming and God is he right one of the great and most overworked gimmicks for such pieces as Chris notes is I never watched Seinfeld then I binged every episode and here's what I found that happens with everything right

right before the end of Game of Thrones I'd never see Game of Thrones so I watch it all last week. It's crazy. Let me tell you about it. That is going to happen with Seinfeld in like five minutes. Yeah. If it hasn't already. I mean, it's it's surprising how many people of our, of the generation of the Almeda's, uh, have, have not seen any episodes of Seinfeld. But again, that's, I have seen all of Seinfeld. Thank you very much. Okay, good. But that's it, but it's part of the cord cutting thing. We're like, we, not only do we watch it live, but we, we experienced it much more significantly in reruns, right? I mean, just like, every,

day on multiple channels. And, and yeah, if you, if you were somehow oblivious to that, it would make sense that maybe you hadn't seen it at all. But that's one where it's just like, I don't know. This is definitely the old man in me coming out. But if there's something that's like culturally significant that I don't have any, that I have not seen any of, that I don't have any take on at all, I don't think I would ever say that out loud.

I would certainly never pitch a story that was just like, hey, let me bask in my own ignorance. but you know, that's a different era. Yeah, it's a different era. Michael Perrault, another reader, or listener, I should say, tweets, Elizabeth Warren needs to win the nomination, then end the Afghanistan war so Brian and David can discuss the following strain pun headline, Warren, comma, peace. Oh, man.

Warren Peace. And that brings us, David, to your favorite segment. David Schumaker guesses a strain pun headline. Does that first sigh count as your side? Oh, there we go. Thank you very much. Tuesday's headline was Hale Fellows, well met. I actually want to go semi-retro today.

Let me take you back to July 6th, 2007. The publication is New York Magazine, and the piece by Joe Hagan is about Katie Couric, who was then anchor of the CBS Evening News. You remember her embattled. period as CBS News anchor. People were feeling very sorry for Katie Kirk during this period. David,

a kind of sadness that sitting in the Dan Rather Walter Cronkite chair was not going as well as it could. What was the New York magazine's strained pun headline? I'll give you this hint, Shakespeare. Shakespeare. Wait, what do it? It's just Katie Couric and Shakespeare? Well, let's say quoting Shakespeare.

Said something, what did, was anchors away, Shakespeare? I don't think so. Shakespeare. Anchors away. I'm just, I feel like you left anchors out of that sentence in a, in a, in a, uh, ostentatious way. You're over thinking. All right. Katie Couric.

Curric. Curric. Um, to be. Can I lead you to, can I lead you to Hamlet? Can, I was about to try to make. KD or not KD a thing That's good That's really good

That's not it but that's really good We can save that one for Kevin Durant KD or not KD That's about his burner accounts I think The um that let's Uh What is it? Oh damn

This is not I know what the answer is It's not a good pun This is not a good pun it's a last poor coric I knew her well or something Yeah Alas, poor Kourke. Alas, poor Korg.

I like it because you don't have to get the reference. It is. No, it works that. It works that way. I think that people, I think that there's two different ways to pronounce her name, and that sort of messes up the punnage. But that's, it's funny. That's definitely funny.

Alas, poor Kourke. This week's Strain Punt headline. He is David Shoehemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Research by Chris Almeida, production magic by Jim Cunningham. We're back Tuesday. Bright and early with more lukewarm takes about the media.

See you then, David. See you later, man. David? Wait. Has never cared about anybody other than David. I don't know. This is definitely the old man to me coming out. It doesn't matter what grandpa did.

I'm not proud to be charged with two counts of leaving the scene of an accident as well as... I love it. I'm not proud to be stealing stuffed teddy bears from the toy store. I love it. I'm not proud to be... This is... You know, left a dirty phone call on his friend's answering machine. And then reinventing the city bus.

So dumb. It could actually amount to something really significant. Yes, I'm sure you're distressed. Here's a word I hate, David? Okay. Yeah.