The Press Box - The Veep TV Auditions, Olympics Takes, an (Almost) NBA Rights Deal, and Remembering Evan Wright

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

Hello, media consumers! Bryan and David kick off the show by discussing the opening ceremony of the Olympics, which included celebrities on the sideline, AI Al Michaels, and Dwyane Wade and Noah Eagle’s commentary (0:40). Then they discuss the running auditions for Kamala Harris’s running mate (12:29). Later, in the Notebook Dump, they discuss the final stages of the NBA media rights deal (25:16) and take time to remember journalist Evan Wright (34:30). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Tara Palmieri. I'm Puck's senior political correspondent and host of Somebody's Got to win. Brought to you by The Ringer and Spotify. The 2024 election has been upended with Joe Biden off the ticket and Donald Trump facing a new challenger, Kamala Harris. If you want to hear what the insiders are really saying about the race, join me Tuesdays and Thursdays as I break it all down with lawmakers, journalists, and political strategists. We'll go deeper than the headlines to the anxieties at the highest levels of power. And of course, we'll chew over all the hot political gossip as we head into this historic election. Be sure to follow. Somebody's got to win at Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. David?

Yeah. How much have you allowed yourself to dip into the summer Olympics? I've been watching a fair bit, not in a very organized manner, but I've been tuned in quite a bit to this year's Olympics. Did you make it into that marathon that was the open? CEROMES Oh, Absolutely. Yeah.

My five-year-old is very interested in the Olympics as a concept, just or, you know, kind of what is the Olympics. And so, yeah, the opening ceremonies were a must watch over here. Did you remember how long the opening ceremonies was? I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure that I really knew. I think I've only really watched, I don't know if it's the highlights or just the, you know, NBC aired like last 20 minutes of it or what.

It was much longer than I was expecting. Were you thrown at all that the announced team for the opening ceremony consisted of Mike Tariko, Peyton Manning, and Kelly Clarkson? A little surprised, but I can't say I was disappointed. They did a bang-up job. David, the only resident of Twitter who is happy with the work of Kelly Clarkson, apparently. It's amazing how much NBC has leaned into the celebrity thing. Yeah.

you can really feel the terror that people were going to tune out the Summer Olympics. Yeah. The people just don't care anymore. So I'm watching Water Polo on Saturday. And they're like, oh, let's see what's going on over in the stance here. Ah, it's Flavor, Flav and Jill Biden. That really happened. And then we've got Colin Jost covering surfing from Tahiti, which is the awesomest assignment ever.

Yeah. I don't if I've ever told you, but I have always wanted to go to Tahiti. Like, like, is it a childhood holdover? Like, you just heard of Tahiti and wanted to go and now you still want to go? Yeah, and enough that I bought a lonely planet at some point. Oh, wow. Okay. Like the South Pacific generally, but Tahiti specifically.

Mm-hmm. And I'm not jealous of anything about Colin Joe's life. And I mean anything about his life, but I am jealous of him getting to go to Tahiti. to cover surfing at the Summer Olympics. Apparently he's a big surfer. Opening ceremonies were fun because we didn't do it in a stadium, David. We did it on a river. Oh, yeah.

The Sen. You find your French pronunciations are 40% better since you've been watching the Olympics and hearing announcers say these. Dude, I was watching, I was watching War of the Worlds last night, the Stevens-Fielberg, Tom Cruise, modern classic. I don't even know if that counts as modern anymore. and I don't know if what you remember of that.

I know you're, you know, Spilberg Efficientano, but I don't know how well you remember the movie, but the first inkling of the invasion comes on news reports from Ukraine. And they have these real newscasters who pop in the screen. They're like, news from the Ukraine. And I was like, how far we've come.

As a country, as a community, we learn to drop the the. This is what always happens. There's big news in a distant part. of the world. We're like, of course, the capital is pronounced Keev, not Kiev. Like, you did not know that two years ago. So we did the opening ceremonies on the Sen instead of marching into a stadium. Every boat that came down the river had a different country's delegation, which was pretty cool. I will not say that I missed delegations marching into a stadium and then just kind of

walking in a circle. There were a few TV challenges. Greece came first, as they always do, because the birthplace of the Olympics, and Janus was the Greek flag bearer, or one of two flag bears, at the front of the boat. But because we're trying to shoot a boat from the bank of the river, there was never a picture of Janus on the screen. We could not get a shot of one of the most famous athletes in the world. Yeah. Also kind of a weird rhythm to the whole thing where we'd see like,

here's a boat. Okay, Bahrain, here we go. you know, Armenia, we're going, we're going. And then they would just stop and be like, and now a musical performance on the bank from Lady Gaga. We're a modern twist on the can can. And it really had a Macy's parade. Oh, sure.

Style stop and start to it. Where there was a thing going on, a literal parade of boats going on, but then we had to stop and have a musical performance. Not to mention that whole produced thing. I don't know if you tune to the beginning, but they had this, like, very movie-ish thing start off. Did you watch any of this? No, I don't think so.

It ended with a bunch of kids holding the Olympic torch. Oh, right. Getting into a boat in some underground waterway in Paris, and they were being pushed along by a boat captain who was wearing a mask. I'm not making any of this up. Then the actual parade of boats began and the masked boat captain would just appear at random times holding the Olympic torch

and just dart in and out of the frame and was later doing parkour. Yeah, he was not. Yeah, that had a very, very creepy vibe at the beginning. But then he would just like appear once in a while like it was like a game. And of course my kids who are 11 and 8 are sitting there watching this being like,

this is amazing. Because as soon as we got bored with whatever was happening on the screen. There's that guy. Either the hero or the villain of the piece. It wasn't quite clear coming back with a torch and it was a way to keep younger

people involved in the Olympic opening ceremonies. Remember when the mascot was like the biggest deal in the world? Yes. Like just nominating the mascot, designing the mascot. There was that one that year called What Is It?

What's it? Was it what's it? Was it what's it or what is it? I might be confusing this with just like other characters from my childhood. I'm not exactly sure. It's Atlanta 96.

What is it? Known for short as Izzy. It's kind of a non-medic. This guy's only going to be in your life for like 25 minutes. We don't need nicknames. We don't need abbreviations. Just give him the name.

In those days, he would be on glasses for McDonald's. I mean, he was everywhere. Yeah, that's true. There was that backlash. I don't even know if we'd to go into this, but if we need to dial up the press box as official religion correspondent here, that apparently part of the opening ceremony was somehow interpreting in a very French way,

a very gallic way, to use the only journalism word, the last supper. Right. And there was some backlash. But that turned out to be untrue. Well, at least it, according to the art director and many art historians who know better than I, it was actually a reference, the point of reference was a painting called a Dutch painting called the Feast of the Gods, which was, which may have been, I mean, which is presumably inspired, took inspiration itself from the Last Supper. But I don't think it was a deliberate attempt to slight all of Christianity and some people took it. I don't remember a blue smurf lying in the middle of the table in any depiction of the last supper that I'm aware of.

It's one of those cases too where just social media is so awful because in the past, If you're watching the opening ceremony of an Olympics in Paris and you see something that is extremely French, you're just confused. Yeah. And you turn to the person next to you on the couch and go, what the hell is going on? And then you turn off the TV after a while.

There's no need to tweet or have a reaction about those goings on in France. I've been dipping into some of the NBC coverage, David, including AI Al Michaels. Oh. First of all, I would recommend to every listener of this podcast, immediately get on the Peacock app and sign up for it because the first thing that happens is you press Olympics recap with AIL Michaels and it says, what should I call you? Okay, so I typed in my name and then when AIL begins to recap the day in Olympics for you,

he says, hi, Brian. Yeah. In Al Voice, welcome to your personal Olympic recap. now David I have had Al Michaels call me Brian to my face before I have had that experience and let me tell you which one was more fulfilling well probably the personal interaction rather than the AIL doing it over my phone but let me tell you something dude that sounded like Al Michaels yeah I was a little bit of a disbeliever I was thinking this is going to be kind of okay

but mostly a train wreck, it sounded like Al. Mm-hmm. So maybe the fear here is not that AI is going to be really bad, but that's going to be really good. Yeah. I mean, it was,

it was, you know, and he narrated highlights. It wasn't very long. He kind of did, you know, a little bit, you know,

a couple of minutes he or it or whatever we're calling AIL, did a couple of minutes and then it just went to unnarrated highlights. Yeah. So if you wanted to watch the goals from soccer, that kind of thing. but what a weird experiment. Over on the basketball courts, David, Noah Eagle and Dwayne Wade were calling the action. Oh, yeah, they were.

What did you make of that new pairing? They're great. They're great. I mean, there's always, once you pass a certain level of competency and then skill, mobility, whatever, it's always kind of nice to hear new voices or new pairings. You know, I mean, I think we go through this cycle a little bit subconsciously with every, every, you know, time there's a new big NFL announcer and we're just like, oh, it's just nice to hear somebody new, a new point of view. And then, you know, a season later, we're like, get this fool off my TV screen. It's the same five stories. Or yeah, like, whatever, you know, but, but yeah, Dwayne Wade has, well, I mean, we've, you know, he's been, he's been doing T&T stuff

for a long time. I mean, for a season, he's, he's obviously very good at what he does, but he's got a really good just sort of understated fluidity to everything and I've really enjoyed him calling the games. I had a producer once tell me that when a color analyst first starts doing games

and these are really Wade's, you know, these are similar. He's done as you say TV work, but let's say these are his first sort of concentrated, you know, suite of games. They enter this state where they're just talking. Yeah. They don't know that they're supposed to sound like a sports announcer. Uh-huh.

They're just talking about basketball. Yep. And it's so refreshing. And the producers like, that's the point we're like, okay, whatever you're doing right now, don't watch TV and learn something else. Yeah. We'll need you to do some ins and outs. We need you to talk sometimes for just five seconds or 10 seconds and stop.

But just keep talking. Yeah. Don't ever actually learn the business so that you sound like a robot. Yep. Like Greg Olson had that quality when we started at Fox. He was like, oh, he's just talking. Yep. He's talking football.

He's happy to be talking football when I was watching the Olympics. I was like, oh, Dwayne Wade's just talking. Yep. In a very, very happy way. All right, speaking of talking, David, coming up on the pod, the public auditions to be Kamala Harris's running mate. We'll talk about Harris's media reset, a press box party, an NBA rights deal will sort of farewell to a great magazine writer.

All that and much more on the press box. A part of the ringer podcast network. Hello, media consumers. Brian Curtis David Shoemaker and producer Brian Waters here. In election news, David, we're having some Kamala Harris vice

president auditions. Running made auditions, if you will. Since Joe Biden dropped out and endorsed Harris, which, by the way, was eight days ago, eight days, no kidding, eight days,

Harris has been locking down support. which means we're not going to get a proper democratic primary or contested convention, which a lot of political journalists saw as a potential content machine, but we are going to get a vice presidential primary. We've seen these people auditioning to be Harris's running mate. Andy Bashir from Kentucky, Tim Walls from Minnesota, Pete Buttigieg, who was tearing it up on Fox News yesterday, Josh Shapiro, Mark Kelly, and they've been auditioning by doing TV hits.

Yeah. Which I suspect is a normal thing. Do we think when Bill Clinton was scouring the Democratic Party or George W. Bush that people would raise their hand when meet the press calls? I can do that. Yeah. I can go on there and show them what I got. Yeah. What's new about this, I think, is that we are being fed clips from these shows on resistance Twitter.

Yeah. And then in some cases, the appearance has been cropped to like the best and most flattering two minutes. Tim Walls was a problem. Here's what he's got. Yeah, that was great. His weirdos thing was great. Pete Buttigieg on Fox had its own news cycle. Like there was like a CNN segment that I saw about when I tried to rewatch Pete Buttigieg.

judge's appearance on Fox News. I found the CNN segment about Buttigieg's appearance on Fox News. They've all become little many news stories in and of themselves. The Walls thing was really interesting because by auditioning to be Harris's

running mate, he wound up changing the trajectory of the Harris campaign. With what you mentioned, the whole, they're weird stuff. Yeah. So I'm not going to call them like enders of democracy, even if they might be. I'm just going to say they're weird.

Yeah. They're really weird. And then the weird started appearing in Harris press releases right after that. Mm-hmm. I'd never seen that one before. It's almost like when you try out for a journalism job and you have to write a memo. Yeah. To the editor.

And even if the editor doesn't hire you, they've just gotten like a free memo about how to improve their publication. That's what the Harris campaign got from Tim Walls. Yeah, that's true. This isn't vice presidential, but did you also, just in terms of the way this thing is being choreographed in the media, did you see the clip that was either, well, it was either real, or it was staged of Kamala Harris discovering her campaign slogan in real time on the stump, which he was just like said, like, we're not going back. And then just sort of like appeared to just like register in real time that that was a good line and it was getting a reaction and just started repeating it. And then it was sort of put out there as like, like, like, you know, in terms, and like, like, me. form is like watch Kamala Harris

figure this out before our very eyes or whatever. There's, whether or not it's real, I'm not sure it really matters. That's just sort of the way the stories are told now. I know we're not allowed to say politics is wrestling, but that's what a wrestler does in the ring, right? Yeah, exactly. Throughout some catchphrases, see what gets over with the crowd.

By the way, a lot of unfortunate media vacations this last week. I think we made fun of Chris Hayes being like, hey, I know there's huge news. Biden's out, but I'm on vacation. guys, I'll see you next week. But the Daily Show was off last week, too. Yeah.

They tried to sneak in that vacation between the conventions. Turned out to be a tough beat. There's a good story in Semaphore by Max Tanny about Kamala Harris's media reset. Mm-hmm. That I wanted to talk to you about. She got, you remember, very negative headlines early in the Biden administration. Mm-hmm. When she got headlines at all, sure.

When she got headlines at all. Yeah, that was the weird part. And Tanny notes this, that nobody in the Biden administration leaked. But when they leaked, they leaked about Kamala Harris. Also had that rough interview with Lester Holt about immigration and her, thankless, not a czar job that Biden gave her. Well, according to Tanny, she's done a couple of things. One is she started doing more and more interviews so that the stakes of every interview she did got lower. basically the opposite of the Biden strategy.

And in fact, we know reporters were so frustrated with the fact that Biden was doing a record low number of interviews. Well, here's Harris doing interviews, which makes the media happy. She was also doing off the record hangouts with journalists. She knows it's very flattering. Yeah. Oh, hey, you know, it's a real person just like me. We can sit down and have dinner. Yep.

She had dinner with Joe and Mika. she had dinner with Kristen Welker of Meet the Press and according to Tanny she was not just schmoozing in these encounters but she was showing how adept she could be talking about policy which has been one of the things she's done so far on the stump as well off you saw this but there was also that clip going around that I think originally played at Comic-Con where she was quoting a Simpsons tree house of horror episode

yes that's something that Joe Biden was probably not going to get around to in this election cycle. No. Even if he had been running for president. Tanny also said that Harris didn't complain about stories to her staff. And boy, what a happy world that is for a journalist, right? Yeah. Write a story that's critical or that has a few critical comments in it.

and instead of getting the nasty gram back from the media team because the candidate asked them to send you a nasty gram. Exactly. Yeah. They just shrug it off and move on. It's really interesting. And, you know, it's funny. Like, we've seen this response, both in the fundraising and then among Democrats in some of the early polls about Harris. But you could say the same thing about the media too. perhaps the most important fact is that she is not Joe Biden.

Yeah. And not just the part about Joe Biden being kind of uninspiring and Joe Biden being old, but she's interested in the media. She is a content provider, maybe is the better way to say it, in a way that Joe Biden was not. Mm-hmm. Like you could imagine,

you can imagine, sure, and I'm sure they'll roll her out for some national interviews pretty soon. But as a reporter, that's just a completely different experience than you had with her predecessor. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and that's to say nothing of the sort of baggage of what the coverage of Biden's age had become, right? I mean, it was a, it's a, there was the internal baggage of like there should be reported this sooner.

Was there, do we get this wrong sort of stuff that I'm sure weighed on a lot of the reporting that came after the debate? And also just the sort of drudgery of that being the, you know, the only conversation. Because as much as like, you know, coverage of the presidential race is veryly is not as much about the issues as one might like. Those are still like the angles that reporters are taking in, right? I mean, I don't think there's any reporter out there. There was any reporter out there who is like deeply excited by the notion of like trying to diagnose Joe Biden over the, you know, in print. Yeah, it was all, it was, it was, there wasn't a lot of ground to stand on. Speaking of Harris and the media, David, at the Democratic convention in Chicago,

we're going to have a big party. Actually, we're just going to have a modest party. But we are going to have a press box party. You sent me an email. You got the details of this last night, but I will share it here on the press box podcast, David. The Sunday before the convention, which is August 18. 3 o'clock central time, we're going to have a meet and greet at the crushed by Giants Brewing Company in Chicago.

All of these details will be tweeted out. Now, unfortunately, you've got some wrestling responsibilities that weekend. They only let me travel a certain number of times a year. No, they do, but the problem is there's a fanatics convention. Is that what this is in New York that weekend? It could be some masked man content. but I'm going to be there. I'm going to bring a few of my media

and maybe even political friends and press box listeners will be there. So come by, grab a drink, hang out, chat about anything you'd like. You don't need RSVP. You don't need a ticket. Just come by and bring anybody you'd like to. David, to the first,

I was going to say annual, but really just first, press box meat and creed. You can make an annual. What are we going to do when there's not a Democratic convention next year? have a really sparsely extended meeting greet

I don't know do we just keep going back to Chicago no matter what or do we move it around the country no let's just move it around and just have it wherever we are and then just assume that everyone else will be there too

in a just in completely blindered fashion perfect Princeton New Jersey Fort Worth Texas and other capitals of America featuring the press box meeting great in future years all right coming up in 30 seconds what's this we finally have an NBA rights deal well, sort of.

But first, David, let's do the 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. Senior nominees to add the Press Box Pod where they are always, always gratefully received. I trust that you have heard something about J.D. Vance and Couches. A joke or two, yes. So this started with a funny tweet.

which posited that J.D. Vance had written in his book, Hillbilly Elegie about moving relations with a couch or couch cushions. Yeah. It even cited the page number, which turned out to be entirely fictitious. And the Associated Press published a fact check column called No, J.D. Vance did not have sex with a couch. And then unpublished it apparently because there was some kind of. story where it didn't go through the right editing process.

No. God only knows. I guess they couldn't validate that when we're the other, right? They could validate that that wasn't what was written in the book. Do you think there was a whole thing of like, look, are we really Snopes? If something is a funny tweet, do we feel like we need to knock this down because people are making jokes about it? Are we just giving it more oxygen?

Would you like to hear some of the best? Twitter jokes about J.D. Vance and sofas. Please. Joke number one. I did not have sectional relations. Number two, no J.D. That's not what intersectional means. And finally, I just hope it was a committed

relationship with furniture and not one night stand. Wow, I did not, I did not see that one. That is amazing work. Thanks to Dr. Rosen Rosen and Sloan, If you drove the AP completely baddie, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week.

All right, the notebook dump, David. I don't know if we have like a horn sound effect that Brian can throw in here. Sound of confetti being popped, but we finally have an NBA media rights deal. Or do we? No, we do. Oh, good one.

So the NBA said yes to ESPN, NBC and Amazon. Yeah. as we covered more than 95 times on this podcast. Then Turner, which was a previous rights holder, said, aha, we have matching rights as part of our contract. So we would like to match the offer made by Amazon. We elect to match it.

And here it is, here's the money, here we go. And then the NBA came back and said, actually, you didn't match it. So the package is going to go to Amazon anyway. Yeah. And Turner said, see you in court. So that's where we are. Oh, man, I would just like to say, you know, sometimes covering media, we're out here on the island and the Ringer family of podcasts. It's nice when we cover the NBA rights that we got.

It's a gang's all here sort of situation. Bill's talking about it, the NBA show, the town, Matt's talking about it over there a lot. It's a, it's fun to be part of the conversation. That's all you had. It just brought us into the Ringer podcast family a little bit more. That's pretty much it. No, it's, I mean, listen, it's a supremely weird situation that they're in. I don't, I have one question, one point of order about this.

Okay. The story that everybody repeats, and we've repeated on this podcast several times, about how, in the exclusive negotiation window, Turner and the NBA were just a couple of million dollars apart, right? Turner said, this is, or time we're in discovery, said this is as far as we'll go. The NBA said, no, we want whatever. Was it some, I mean, it was relatively small. It was like 3.2 versus 3.5, whatever. It was a relatively small number all told.

Tens of millions of dollars. Tens of millions of dollars. But Time Warner Discovery said, well, we won't go in a inch further. And NBC said, you know, and they were like, okay, go shop it then. NBC did. And I mean, sorry, the NBA did and went and sold the rights, as we all know. Are we sure? Is that story accepted by all parties to be true?

Has time Warner Discovery and the NBA both acknowledge that to be true? It's a really good question. I don't know and I don't know that we've had enough inside the inside the room reporting from Turner and from Warner Brothers Discovery to confirm that. Because it certainly is being used as a cudgel in like the conversations about the, you know, the failure of timeware discovery to land this deal, right? It's like, yeah, you said no, and you were so, you could have had it.

You know, you could have had it for less than you're going to pay for it now. Or you say you're willing to pay for it now. So I was just kind of wondering if that, if they were on board with that characterization or if that was just, you know, one of those stories that we all just accept because it has the ring of truth to it. It's a really good question because they were in that exclusive negotiating window. Yeah. And what we know is that they didn't want to pay as much as NBC was willing to pay once that window closed. So it's pretty likely perhaps that they were looking to pay something more like Amazon's number, which was $1.8 billion instead of $2 billion in change. Yeah.

But so I guess we can say that for sure that, yeah, they got out of that window without making a deal. And that no, they didn't get to that number because if they had gotten to that number, maybe Adam Silver just says, sounds great. Let's do it. Yeah, I think, Mike, I mean, listen, clearly the NBA is not interested in being. in business with Timor Discovery at this point, despite them being a long-term partner. Obviously, the ownership situation, the leadership situation is significantly different than it was, has been in the past. But I guess I would wonder if my only question is to what degree the NBA was interested in being with, you know, being in business with them during the negotiation

window, during the, you know, the exclusive window. Whether or not it was, it's feasible that they were out before the conversations even started. But, I mean, I guess that all remains to be seen. And it really doesn't matter for where we are now. There are, you know, time where discoveries, like you said, we'll see you, we'll see you in court. And they will either, they'll either be up to a judge to decide that they get to retake that Amazon package and put all their stuff on max and whatever else. Or that, you know, as a lot of people are theorizing, there will be some sort of financial settlement in it in favor of timeware discovery. It is very strange.

The whole situation kind of was very strange. You know, there is all the discussion of the fourth rights package, which I guess could still be in play, but isn't really being discussed that much anymore. And, and yeah, I mean, you know, you look at it from one side. It's the, it's, you know, TNT filing suit, timeware discovery filing suit, to force the NBA to stay in a relationship, you know, which just seems kind of precarious. and then and I don't know if that's just playing out cards at this point you know well certainly if you're in it if you if what they want as a financial settlement then this is

exactly what you would do right but if but but also like you know on some level it i mean obviously it's it would be beneficial to keep their to keep the NBA right i mean oh yeah absolutely and apparently they want it for 1.8 billion yeah so you could say you could say yeah that they're happy to have it at that price and have a package where Yeah, it's the third best suite of games, but you also have the conference finals every other year. Still a pretty big deal. You get to keep inside the NBA together.

Well, and I think that's kind of the more sallion point, right? It's just like the way that this has progressed. It's like inside the NBA. And listen, the way that we watch games. I mean, I watched basketball in T&T, the amount that I did this season, I don't think it had any real relation to who was playing. It was like there's a game on.

And I know that inside the NBA crew will be there to talk about it, right? And I mean, I don't want to get too in the weeds here, but like, you know, there's a lot of good teams. A lot of famous players even on the teams that aren't going to be that good. You know, there's like every game. It can be a big game if you're a basketball fan. So, yeah, I mean, it's a very bizarre situation. And I love on one hand the kind of defiance of the NBA to say, oh, no, we have a rights deal. It's all.

We're done. You know, and then just sort of like announce it to the, world and then um time we're discovery such an easy villain you know it's such it's at this point in media history um and certainly like wheeling charles barclay out there is like a you know sympathy engendering attack dog for this whole thing it's just like it's it's easy to sort of roll your eyes um but you know the strangest thing of all is how it's like they we have a whole other year of the NBA. A lame duck year.

Yeah. The whole lame duck year. And if they don't get any rights package, we'll spend a lot of that year, imagine it, you know, fantasy booking Charles Barkley's next job. Hell, he'll probably announce his next job before he's done over there. Oh my God. Do we want to talk about him anymore? Because he did come back out of the woodwork this week, breaking his no interview pledge after

literally weeks, weeks, David, of Charles Barkley not giving any interviews. though I think he may have given one at the celebrity golf tournament Lake Tahoe. Do we want to discuss this or do we want to just have AI Brian go through his points about Charles Barkley one more time? Because people get mad. I have people that register displeasure when we talk about Charles Berkeley. I think everybody likes Berkeley. Yeah. They don't want to be on this corner.

They get mad that we're too negative about Berkeley? Well, I think they just say, okay, you've made your point that he's, you know, he's just changing his mind with every interview he gives. and he's turned the entire media into his LinkedIn page for his next big deal. Because in late spring, he was saying, I'm going to be a free agent. This is fantastic. And then the NBA finals, he said, I'll never work for anyone, but Turner, I'm retiring. And then this week he came out and said, well, I'm still thinking about retiring. But if Turner winds up losing the league, as everyone expects, then I will be a free agent next summer.

Yeah. I was like, okay, well, that does combine. the first two answers that you gave to the question. He's like, you didn't let me finish. I was going to say this the whole time. He was on Dan Patrick's show doing this, and I'm like,

this is like become a tradition because I was doing a Barclay piece, well, I don't know, what was that couple months ago now? I was looking at Dan Patrick interviews he gave about going to live golf. Yeah.

He just has these places he goes. Well, let me make some news about my potential employment options. Mm-hmm. Okay. Let's just do it one more time. Let's say a few words, David, about the magazine writer Evan Wright. Oh, yeah.

Died earlier this month. He was 59 years old, died by suicide, according to authorities in L.A. County. Evan Wright was known for his book Generation Kill, written during the Iraq War, along with stories. He wrote for Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone and other places. He called journalism a refuge for rogues and miscreants, a phrase I really like and absolutely second. There was a New York Times obit from Alexandra Petrie that said that Evan Wright landed his first journalism job in 1995 as an entertainment editor at Hustler reviewing pornographic films and covering the adult film industry. From that auspicious beginning, he went to Afghanistan and then a rock for Rolling Stone. Do you think the Rolling Stone editor is like, did he show him his clips?

Is that how you get that show? I wanted to know more about the jump. honestly from hustler to covering war zones I feel like I know I've known a bunch of people that worked for you know playboy and even penthouse over the years is sort of like the literary editors you know or just like the kind of the very sort of mechanic space like I know I really do just like assign stories and go over copy but yeah that's it seems like a different thing reviewing pornographic films seems like more of a commitment to the publication

he goes to Iraq wins his first national magazine award for a series there called the Killer Elite that becomes part of the basis for his book Generation Kill which then becomes an HBO series that he wrote with David Simon

and Ed Burns had a pretty big TV career writing for Homeland and The Man in the High Castle and other TV shows he was really the perfect magazine writer for neglected subcultures

which is to say the perfect Rolling Stone writer Mm-hmm. When I think of that particular kind of magazine piece, it really fits so well in old Rolling Stone. Absolutely. He wants to tell the LA Times, they have to be,

he was talking here about his subjects, they have to be at least anti-heroes, if not true scoundrels. He also said in the same piece, several of my editors wonder why people tell me so much. I think it's because I'm from Ohio. What I really loved. When I saw the news about Evan Wright, I went back and read his story.

Pat Dollard's War on Hollywood, which ran in Van de Fair in 2007. And I will not hate you at all if you pause the podcast right here and go look it up and read it. It's online. Pat Dollar, David, was a successful Hollywood agent who repped Steven Soderberg and Scott Frank and other people, got into drugs and alcohol. And then he went to Iraq, kind of like Evan Wright had done. to embed with soldiers and make a documentary film about the soldiers. And in Wright's telling,

he did all kinds of death-defying things while he was there. He comes back. He gets all this attention in Hollywood, partly for the film he's made, and partly because he just walked away and literally walked away or got on a plane and flew away from the Hollywood lifestyle. Yeah.

And the film is going to be this anti-Feranthine 9-11 kind of a conservative pro-war documentary that really takes the measure of the troops that are over there putting their lives on the line. He winds up going back there again to try to make another film. He drifts into the conservative movement with Andrew Breitbart and Coulter and other people. And Evan Wright is just hanging around with Pat Dollar for months and months and months. Story was delivered to Vanity Fair a year late, according to his editor. It's 23,000 words long. And let me tell you, reading this, I could have told you afterwards,

I said, I was around about 7,000 maybe, maybe kind of a long piece. I had no idea. Because I'm just scrolling through the pages so fast and drinking it in. You know, sometimes when you read a great piece of magazine journalism from the past, first thing you say is, that was great, but that couldn't be done now. Yeah. The movie stars aren't available. The real estate isn't there.

That couldn't be done now. highest compliment I can give to him for the story is this could be done now. This was not some feat of a past time that has disappeared. Yeah. It's just finding a story going back and back and back and back to it, telling it very, very bluntly and very well and just letting it spool out. And again, when we talk about subcultures,

I mean, here's somebody who's kind of in the middle of Hollywood, but kind of not. Yep. And it also becomes a story that now, you know, from the vantage point of 2024, read so interestingly because it's about how people, very unlikely people drift into political movements. Yeah. And how movements accept them.

And what Pat Dullard is doing here with Anne Coulter and Andrew Breitbart, you could just imagine 800 other people doing with Donald Trump. Yeah. You know, like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we found this person. It was just, anyway, such an interesting piece. Hopefully you've unpause the podcast by now. But RIP Evan Wright, and I'll leave you with one more quote from them. I believe he also gave this to the LA Times.

We need journalism that's a countervailing force to our image-driven media, he said. I try to overthrow a dominant idea about my subject with every story. We print people need to attack the Matrix. A great quote. All right, David, a little media piss test before we go. I've been saving some of these. We had a Texas congresswoman described. describing Kamala Harris

and her campaign and all the excitement around her campaign like this. This is potentially Obama on steroids. Obama on steroids. That's from our friend Johnny Verhovic. Listener Paul Grace of Perth, Australia found a letter to the editor

in the Sydney newspaper that was written after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. The letter writer said, now the rest of the world is gazing at American exceptionalism on steroids. Wonderful. And this comes from alert listener, Dick Bones, perhaps not his real name.

He sends along an episode of the Chris Jericho podcast featuring Kelsey Grammer. God, I miss that one. Have you done stuff like that before? Like when you're kind of rolling in the bush and shooting, yeah. You do what you do. You know, it is cowboys and Indians or, you know, or whatever. Copps and robbers. you know it's play pretend you know but you do it with with real props which is great sure it's

it's a it's a sort of a childhood imagination on steroids which is fantastic when a film set is one of the greatest places in world to be that's concludes david another edition of media piss test thank you for all uh of your submission and special thanks to kelsey grammar and chiroko for being a part of our show i had no idea that particular podcast episode exists but i'm glad i do now All right, it's time for David Shoemaker guests. The strained pun headline. Yeah. Last Thursday's headline about the trial of New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez was diners, drive-ins, and bribes.

Today's headline comes to us from a fellow reporter. He is Kyle Hightower from the Associated Press. He sends in a story from the Associated Press, David. Among those many celebrities with NBC and Paris, you might have seen Snoop Dog. The AP reports that Snoop Dog is seemingly everywhere during the Paris Olympics,

but on Friday morning, you could catch him carrying the Olympic torch ahead of the opening ceremony. Not a pun so much as Snoop Dog and the torch and some merry-making about that. What was the AP's

strained pun headline? Is this presumably some sort marijuana cigarette related joke. It's a very, very safe assumption given the subject matter here. What is the, is this, is there a Snoop Dog lyric that I can't think of? Well, there's a certain also, you know, a certain thing about the torch that is important. It's a, we have, there's, there's, you have one job when you're carrying the torch.

To keep it lit? Keep it. Snoop Dog keeps it lit. There we go. That is, that is from the AP, our friends at the AP. Not as edgy as Rolling Stone perhaps, but a very nice head. line. That's good. Nonetheless, he is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. By Brian Waters. David, we're going to do something that is probably a bad idea. We're going to take a little bit of a vacation here.

I recognize this might be a Chris Hayes scenario or Kamala Harris brings us Tim Walls or Mark Kelly. It was everything's going crazy and people are saying, where is the press box? Why did you guys go away right when the news happened? If that happened. we've got microphones we're ready to come back I was going to say you've talked to big game about not missing important news I know I know see that's why I put this at the end

of the podcast and nobody I put all the media bashing at the front oh that's great by the time people have already turned it off you do the sheepish climb down so we're going to be off this Thursday and next Monday I'm actually going to Niagara Falls did I tell you that no my mom and I go to Niagara Falls

to see the falls specifically as opposed to the I mean I don't know I don't know there I don't know there's another reason to go to we're going because

well it's next to Buffalo so there's a lot of like you know legendary wing bars and things like that beef on whack and not what I'm supposed to eat in Buffalo

could I ever tell you about the legendary wings place in Princeton go on Chuck's wings it's great highly they're Chuck's

cafe I don't think it's actually called Chuck's wings but it'll come if you search it It's right down there by Princeton University, formerly owned by one of the Menendez brothers. What?

Who had the brilliant idea before Buffalo Wild Wings to buy this wing spot and make it into a national chain. And then they killed their parents. Instead, I don't really know. But yeah, yeah, that's a... Wow, what a story. But he was working on this when the whole trial went down? It was one of his, one of his big...

one of his big business ideas. At least that's the way the story's been told to me. His parents are actually buried in the cemetery right behind that store. Right behind that place. But Chuck's wings are just the best wings I've ever had. So I had a joyous Americana update. And you had kind of a sad 90s update for our listeners. We will ponder wings and beef on whack and many other things when we return,

David, with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then. See you later, Brian. Thank you.