The Press Box - The White Man’s Wordin’ and the Art of the Campaign Flip-flop | The Press Box

Episode Date: June 11, 2019

Trouble at The Atlantic (03:00), Joe Biden and the art of the campaign flip-flop (21:30), Pablo Torre and Bomani Jones on Jalen Rose’s New Yorker interview (31:00), and Alyssa Bereznak on Steven Crowder and the policies that govern YouTube (37:45). Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Alyssa Bereznak   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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David, there was a controversy over at the Atlantic this week about 10,000 word magazine cover stories. What I want to know is, of all the 10,000 word Atlantic cover stories you've read, how many of those words have you actually read? Oh gosh really put me on the spot here, man I think rule number one is did Tana Hasi Coates write the story? Yeah, Tana Hosey Coates is, yeah, I mean there comes a point where you, you know, you understand that you have to eat your vegetables and you clean your plate. I would say the average Atlantic cover story of which it's been a long time since I say

since I've read like two back to back, that's for sure. I've consumed quite a number over the years. I would say on average, if each one were 10,000 words, I'd say on average I read, I'm going to give myself a gold star and say like 5,500 of those words. I don't know. I'd say that's pretty flattering. I'm just amazed at how 10,000 is the perfect number to sound like a totally interminable cover story that I would never read. It does sound interminable, that's for sure. If you said 7,000, you know, my eyebrows kind of go up and I go, oh, is it a good story?

But 10,000 just feels like story I won't finish. No, 7,000 feels like, and maybe this is being on the insight, 7,000 feels like a number that you have earned, that you've gotten to, because it's a little bit more arbitrary, right? It's like, I set out to write a story. You know, I got to 4,000 words and I just couldn't stop. And I got, then it ended up at 7,000 words. 10,000 is like you reverse engineer it, right? It's like when you sign a book contract and you're like, we're not going to pay you all this money unless you write 100,000 words or 80,000 words or something like that. Five digits is also a kind of a sign of magazine hierarchy.

I got to five digits. It's a 10,000 work cover story. That's just so many words. We are the John Hershey's Hiroshima of Media Podcasts. This is the press box, a part of the Ringer podcast network. Hello Media Consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoeaker of the Ringer. here. Lots of great stuff to get to on today's show, including Joe Biden and the art of the campaign flip-flop. We've got Pablo and Bommani, Alyssa Bresnack stopping by to fill us in on an online

throwdown, and David the Rock has become a journalist. It's just in as we go to press here. But back to the affair over at the Atlantic, David. I'd like to start with a tweet from Andrea Long Chew that reads, but I would write 5,000 words and I would write 5,000 more just to be the man who wrote 10,000 words that no one asked me for. That is a tweet of the week. Just to put us in the mood there. Before we discuss this, I think it's probably worth reminding people that the story in Neiman Lab, which kicked off this whole thing by Laura Hazard Owen,

was actually praising the Atlantic for promoting women. The story was called promoting based on potential how the Atlantic is putting a lot more women in charge. And Hazard Owen has lots of staff. saying in 2016 women made up just 17% of the editorial leadership over the Atlantic today. It's 63%. Adrian LaFrance is the first female executive editor in the publication's history. I encourage you to read the whole interview. But the record scratch moment was this quote by Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg.

It's really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story. There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males. What I have to do, and I haven't done this enough yet, is again about experience versus potential. You can look at people and be like, well, your experience is writing 1,200 word pieces for the web, and you're great at it. So good going, he goes on to say he's got to create a pathway for women who may be good at writing those 1,200 word pieces to then step up to the plate and write the big thing for the magazine. What was your initial reaction to this whole embryo?

I mean, I mean, I think I had, I think I absorbed it. I think I got to my end point pretty immediately, which was, I understand what he meant to say. And that, and I cannot. And this is an Olympic gold medal winning feet of putting one's foot in one's mouth. Like, I don't like, of misstating the thing that you, I mean, without actually saying something incorrectly, I can't imagine something being said more incorrectly. I sat down for an interview about how I've promoted and encouraged women to flourish at the Atlantic, and I left the interview as a smarming member of the patriarchy. Is that about it? Yes. Yeah, that's about right.

But again, I want to be clear that with a different, like, you know, paragraph break, with some sort of like artificial editorial desk punctuation, this could have been a whole lot of an entirely different situation. But yeah, I mean, he said these things that were, I think, sort of justifiably misconstrued. One of the big things that happened afterwards, and I think made the situation much worse, was that Goldberg first claim that Hazard Owen had misquoted him in the story, which is a shitty thing to do to another journalist that didn't misquote you. That's one way to put it. And then he backed off and said, no, no, no, he'd just been misunderstood. So the initial reaction was not to come out and say, whoa, that looks weird on paper,

But what I am saying is that, you know, we have this screwed up system where somehow only the white men get to write the cover stories for all these magazines. And I am actively trying to disassemble that system. It is to say, no, no, the female writer of the piece misquoted me. So that's a bad thing to do. Some of this is surely that people have issues with Jeffrey Goldberg about many, many things. And what better time to remind the world of them. than this, as you say, when he sticks his foot in his mouth. I had a bigger reaction, though.

One, which is the Atlantic is still a magazine. There's this whole giant gang of writers over there who are writing like five pieces a day. And yet in the middle of it is still this curated paper magazine that comes out. And what's funny about that is just, and maybe this is you and I, you know, coming from Grantland and now the ringer as we do. But what a strange anachronistic thing, quote unquote, writing a magazine story is, you know, in this world we live in. That you would do this thing. And by that, I mean, this thing that has an opening scene and then a nut graph and then that second section, right, where you reset the subject's biography. And then the third section, you go back to another

scene and then you have a good kicker at the end, all that stuff. You have a lot of secondary interviews. That's kind of funny in this in this world right now because I just feel like if there's been any lesson that especially you and I have learned from Grantland slash the ringer, it's that stories should just kind of probably be what they are. And I love a good magazine story as much as anybody. But what you're essentially saying is we need to train people to work in this strange and disappearing art. And I don't know. That just struck me as very, very funny because it's like, certainly writing a cover story for the Atlantic is great.

But what is, what, again, what a just weird and very specific thing to talk about at this moment in history? Yeah. I mean, you're right. I mean, we, we, and, you know, neither of us are decision makers by and large in the editorial side of the ringer. God. We, we, we, we is a, as a journalistic enterprise, I feel like are, are approaching this, just by virtue of, of being new and of kind of starting from scratch in the modern era, or approach it from the completely, like, opposite point of view, you know, it's sort of like, I mean, how long, how long can, how long can, how long can, how long can, I mean, writers can turn in, could turn in 8,000. words. The question is like how many of those words are worthwhile to read, not like how can we push them over the 10,000 word mark, right? Or how can we designate this thing, this thing that's designated a feature? How can we make it live up to the legacy of features pass? I don't even

know what the mark, what the, what the, what the benchmark is exactly. Um, there's also this whole this, this weird, I mean, on, on the one hand, I, I think that he philosophically, if we take him is sort of like, at his word what he meant to say and the things that he did say minus those weird couple of lines. That, you know, I think that philosophically he's coming from

more or less the right place and sort of like helping, seeing, looking at people in their potential and not just what they've, not their track record and that sort of thing. But I think that also there's this, I mean, again, maybe this is a virtue of being,

living in sort of new media culture. But it seems like you could just look people and help them do what they're going to be best at doing and not just seeing if you could imagine a future in which they could write 10,000 boring words. That's exactly right. And that's exactly what I'm saying. I just think at some level, one of the one of the exciting parts about blowing up the print magazine and that said a lot of bad effects, many of which are people don't have jobs anymore. But one of the exciting things about, you know, going into this world after magazines is that stories can just be stories. And I think that will naturally lead people, at least

people that are open to it, to hiring more women and people of color to write them. Because you don't have to have this strange skill set that you can only acquire by writing for other magazines. You can have a skill set that you just acquired by writing and being a good writer. And by the way, it's not just by writing for their magazines. I mean, to be clear, it's by being an unpaid intern in New York City. There you go. Yes. Starting at the age of 19 or 20 or 21 or 22. You know,

I mean, there's a, there are a lot of hurdles to getting to this really kind of static place in one's, you know, professional career. Which you get to by going to the right school and et cetera. We could trace that all the way back to the beginning. No,

I think that's exactly right. It is funny that the whole 10,000 word thing, I feel this is flipped since we started in this business nearly 20 years ago, which is the old boast, if you were a magazine writer, was, I got to write a really long story because it was still magazines. there were still static number of pages.

Like, I'm getting to write a 6,000-word story and everybody would be like, wow, that's amazing. Now with the internet, everything is long form. So the new boast is about time, if you've noticed. Spent four months working on this story, and I'm really excited to share it with you. I spent nearly six months working on this story. Now, if you like, the new power,

sort of the new power like sort of boasts is, I got a lot of time to work on this because everything goes so fast, as opposed to I got a lot of space in a static environment. Well, and implicitly, I mean, time, time means money, right? I mean, if I said, if I just tweeted, I'd spent six months working on the story, I think most people would rightly read it as the ringer paid David Shoemaker to sit at home for six months, put it like just writing the purplous prose he could imagine. Can we do that? Is that, has that been a sign? I'm going to ask Sean Finnessy about that tomorrow. I did like this one tweet,

one of the many stories that came out of this whole Atlantic thing was from Alana Similes, who covers economics for time. She tweeted, I have been a journalist for 15 plus years and was a low finalists three times for work including long form Atlantic pieces. But when I asked if I could work with an editor to write a feature piece for the magazine in the next year, I was told that was not possible. So I left.

That tweet got a lot of response. One that came out that I saw down the thread there was from Greg Easterbrook, a long time Atlantic contributor, football writer, etc. I used to know him from Slate Days. He writes, Alana, I am genuinely distressed to hear this.

For what it's worth, some accomplished long-form white males aren't real happy either. Now, can I just pull the phrase accomplished long-form white males out for a second? Oh, you God. Has it been a better, I wish everyone a happy and long life, but is there a better tombstone phrase? Here lies an accomplished long-form white male. That's incredible. I just love it. Oh, my gosh.

Is there something that I'm just missing about the institution of the Atlantic cover story, that it has to be a certain length that it's something that everybody that passes through the walls of that office or that passes within 100 miles of it is drawn toward, like is there, I think the most interesting

10,000-ware piece I could read right now is about the cult of the Atlantic cover story because I don't understand. I think the baffler just assigned that one. Maybe he already did. First of all, I mean, I know that there's probably some like really leg, like some old school,

maybe not interesting to the average reader issues of like, they've sold ads against these 10,000 word pieces into perpetuity. You know what I mean? But like that would be really interesting. Like I would be more interested to see rather than to hear Jeffrey Goldberg, I mean, no offense to the man, rather than to hear about Goldberg's like struggle to groom people to perform this,

to perform these pieces, to perform these pieces, I'd be more interested to hear a young, new editor kind of at his or her wits end about having to deal with the institution of the Atlantic cover story, right? having to deal with having to have the legacy of publishing these things and figuring out how to, you know, publish around their expectation. No, I think that's exactly right. I think it's funny. I mean, I think when you ask your question, like, why, it's just the nature of the magazine, the sort of happily, thinky, nerdy, high-minded.

Can you imagine, though, like a writer like Atlanta Simul is coming to you and saying, I would be interested in writing a cover story. May I please do it? No. And then just saying, no? I mean, surely there's maybe there's more to it. Who knows? But like, what?

That doesn't make it. Like, what is it about? that like, I don't know. See, again, we just have this incredible luxury of working on the internet where if someone says, I want to write the most important piece of my career, you say there is infinite space for this. Sure. I guess in print and, you know, Dead Tree publishing, that's not always the case. This just in, David, the Baffler, has already assigned this piece, March 2012 on Omniscient Gentleman of the Atlantic. Whoops. I can't wait. So anyway, congratulations at the baffler on your 10,000 word cover story. All right, David, time for 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 please send nominees by the way to at the press box pod where I will be grateful from them. David we're going to talk in a second about Joe Biden's flip-flop on the hide amendment

he was for it before he was against it it was an overworked Twitter joke unfortunately this week to write Biden can run but he can't hide can't hide I know I know I know it's just out just reporting the news here.

This is Marv Albert Boyce from the world of baseball. According to Newsday reporter Eric Boland, Yankee shortstop D.D. Gregorius taught himself to play the piano, David, while recovering from Tommy

John surgery. Okay? It was an overwork Twitter joke to write. Later, doctors realized that in a bit of miscommunication, he had actually undergone Elton John surgery. Thanks to reader ASG for that one. And by the way, I looked. Elton John surgery,

subbing it in and in for Tommy John surgery, a very long-lived joke. Like it was a Letterman top 10 list kind of back in the day. There's like a New Yorker cartoon of a pitcher with big glasses on and on the pitching mouth. I guess he had Elton John surgery.

Anyway. There must be a Twitter account that's just old Letterman top 10 list jokes repurposed for modern culture. I think so. We need to bring that back. Finally, David, there was the rich subject of Trump and the Moon.

I'm sure you saw this tweet. back on June 7, Trump tweets, for all the money we're spending, NASA should not be talking about going to the moon. We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on much bigger things we are doing, including Mars, perin,

of which the moon is a part. So, so many rich ones as you can imagine. One was, as JFK famously said, we choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is Mars.

Another one was Republicans want to even gerrymander the moon. our old friend Tavon Free references the children's classic book, Goodnight Moon, of which Mars is apart. Finally, over the New York Times,

Dave Itzkoff reminds us of this very important line from the movie Total Recall. This is the plan. Get your ass to Mars. Get your ass to Mars, David. If you compared a Trump tweet with a movie that should probably be

an episode of the rewatchables, congrats. Yes. You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. Yeah. All right, Dave, before we get to the notebook dump,

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Get your first two months of access to Luminary's premium content free when you sign up at Luminary.com. After that, it's 799 a month. That's Luminary.com slash channel 33 for two months of free access, Luminary. dot link slash channel 33 cancel any time terms apply all right David

time for the notebook dump and can we start here let's see can we start with the journalistic rallying cry of the week yeah I want to take you to Sunday night's Tony Awards where Brian Cranston won the award for leading actor in a play

and he played news anchor Howard Beale I'm Mattes Hill and I'm not going to take this anymore in the Broadway version of Network and listen to who got a shout out in Cranston's acceptance speech. Howard Beale is a fictitious TV newsman who found his way in the line of fire because of his pursuit of the truth.

And I would like to dedicate this to all the real journalists around the world, both in the press, and the print media and also broadcast media, who actually are in the line of fire. with their pursuit of the truth. The media is not the enemy of the people. Demagoguery is the enemy of the people.

Thank you very much. Good night. So that was really rousing. But do we agree it's probably a bad sign for journalists that we have to be defended on the stage of the Tonys? That only happens when things get really bad, right? Brian Cranston is coming to our defense anyway. Thanks to Brian Cranston for reminding people.

such a high approval rating, I think, across the board. He could have, like, dedicated that award to, you know, like, the pharmaceutical industry. I've gotten, like, a round of applause. I was careful where you go there. Pharmaceutical industry was a good villain without being too villainous. Congratulations, David Shoemaker. This, David, from the Department of How to Change Your Position on Abortion in the middle of a presidential campaign. So last week, Joe Biden dropped his support for the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal funds for abortion.

I think this is pretty fascinating for us because it shows how a candidate tries to finesse and then completely change his unpopular issue position through the media. All right? So follow along with me. Got a couple steps here. On May 4th, a voter walks up to Joe Biden and asks about the Hyde Amendment. Listen to their exchange. I'm an ACLU rights for all voter. And I have one quick question for you.

And that is, will you commit to abolishing the Hyde Amendment, which hurts poor women and women of color? Yes. And by the way, ACL, you remember, I got a near perfect voting record my entire career. I heard you did, but I'm glad you just said you would commit to abolishing the Hyde Amendment. Right now, it has to be, it can't stay. Okay. So Biden is mumbling there, but it sounds like, at least initially, he's coming out against the Hyde Amendment. He's going to change his long-held position. Well, then Biden, or maybe Biden's gut, issued a proclamation some weeks later saying he was not going to change his position. He still supports the Hyde Amendment.

I'm strongly in favor of abortion rights, but I don't believe federal funds should be used, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. Now, to argue this sort of twisted position, last Wednesday, Biden let Congressman Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, one of his campaign co-chairs, go on CNN with Chris Cuomo. Here is Cuomo and Richmond. If he funds reproductive rights, that means he funds it with federal dollars. The Hyde Amendment restricts the federal dollars so you can't fund reproductive rights. I don't get it. I don't get the conflict with his faith.

I don't get the difference between the Hyde Amendment and Roe v. Wade if it's a matter of faith. And I don't get the funding argument if it's about access. Well, that's why I think you have to look at his record in totality, Chris. He has always been for a woman's right to choose. he has always supported playing parenthood. He's always supported sex education. So what Cedricman is doing there, David, is taking one for the team. Okay.

I was wondering what the phrase for that was. Yeah, I was going to say eating a lot of shit, but taking one for the team because there are a lot of advantages to signing up with the presidential campaign early. The downside is we have a problem here, and you have to go argue an untenable position on television. You get to go and try to explain something that really, makes no sense at all. Okay. So Biden was against the Hyde Amendment. Now Biden via Cedric Richmond is for the Hyde Amendment. That was last Wednesday. On Thursday, Biden went in front of

the DNC dinner in Atlanta and says, never mind what Cedric Richmond said on my behalf. I now oppose the Hyde Amendment. Yeah. So since May, this is our, apparently our third. Let's map this out. our third position. And I think it's funny because there's a certain art to this. Art may be too nice a word. But one thing you do when you change your position right in the middle of a Democratic primary, as you say, it's not me that changed. It's the world the change. Right.

Right. So it's not me. It's Alabama because they're passing that restrictive law. And I'm trying to kind of, I just had to, you know, I had to change with the times. Okay. But the other thing is Biden's brand doesn't allow for apologies or really even position. changes. So when he was talking to that DNC dinner, his quote was, I make no apologies for my last position and I make no apologies for what I'm about to say. So I'm going to change, but I'm not going

to apologize for changing and I'm not going to apologize for thinking the other thing before I changed. Yeah. This feels like a Joe Biden production does not. Anyway, please continue. It just feels like a SNL sketch that they haven't written the punchline for yet. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I'm a little bit exasperated, you know, by just the entire primary process so far. Dude, we got a long way to go. And we got two episodes a week. We got two shows a week to cover it. But no, I guess I met this day in particular, I'm at a point of minor exasperation.

I will say this. Joe Biden as the panacea to, as the Democrat answer to Donald Trump. Yeah. The panacea to Trump is. the way, don't get those. The Democratic, the Democratic answer to Donald Trump. I mean, this is an abject failure on that count, right? I mean, if the one thing that you learn, the one thing that you should learn from Donald Trump is not the way that you stand behind the podium, because he's not doing that the same way. It's not that you have a certain, like, twinkle in your eye. No,

it's that you're just, number one, unapologetic. Number two, it's devil may care about the ramifications of the stances that you take. And I think that what we're seeing Joe Biden do here is not be able to, I mean, I don't think this isn't like some like deep thought. He can't extricate what he believes or what he thinks he should believe from what a lifetime of politics have taught him is feasible or not feasible, right? And that is a huge problem in a primary. And whether or not it's, whether or not that should be a problem, whether or not that's, you know, I mean, whether or not we should be able to look at our potential nominees and say, well, I understand why he feels that way because he knows how the system works. You have to be able to thread that needle. And before you launch your

campaign, you have to be prepared to do that. You have to be prepared to go out in public and say, listen, I know this isn't a popular thing, but like, I know how, I know what it takes to get X, Y, and Z done and it's going to be, and even if you have to come out and say, listen, this is bullshit. We all know what's bullshit, but the only way I'm winning Pennsylvania is if I'm pro-Hyde Amendment, you know, and people will accept that. Or you come out and you say, I'd love to hear that speech. That'd be amazing. Maybe you don't say bullshit. But, or you come out and say, you know, ideologically, yeah, let's tear it down. I don't care. Like, nobody wants the Hyde Amendment. And then when you get into office, you say, but I do have to govern. You know,

you make that quote, but you can't, you can't hold all these things in your hand at the exact, at the same time at this point in the campaign trail. And the fact that, again, Joe Biden has seemed so utterly unprepared for this sort of thing to come up. And to give him the benefit of the doubt. It was caught on a hot mic. He's talking to some supporters. He probably says yes to whatever people ask him. Yeah, but he claimed he misheard it or didn't understand that. But the follow-up was fumbled, but the follow-up was like hilariously fumbled. That's the, that's the, that's the, what's the problem, you know? And I don't know. The whole thing just seems like everything. It's just a comedy of errors. And hey, maybe, maybe I'm wrong. And maybe the lesson of Trump winning the White House is that voters want a comedy of error. But that's not my read on the situation. That's the takeaway. The dynamic of the Biden campaign so far, and I believe until we start voting in January, is, How does he square Mr. Authenticity with the direction of the Democratic Party in 2019? Is he going to apologize for the crime bill?

Is he going to apologize to Anita Hill? We could go on and on. He's going to apologize for NAFTA. We could go on and on and on. And your whole brand is, I don't make apologies for who I am. But the Democratic Party now is over here. and they are all these, you know, 19, 20 other candidates are demanding that I come over here and asking voters, why isn't Joe Biden doing X? So do I have to apologize and at least take a half step that way?

He's done all the environment, by the way, too, because he said, what do you say? The middle ground was where we are from climate change, and then that didn't work. So he unveiled this whole big policy. I think that the bigger problem for his candidacy, and this is, you know, this is whatever, just meta horse race bullshit. to take it for what it's worth. But it's tough when your legacy of a lifetime of being, of being, you know, of governing on what, you know, is, it's hard for an older candidate, I think, to pull off to kind of, especially who's part of a party who is moving and moving further to the left. It's hard, it's hard to sort of say, I know how to, I know how to make the trains run.

I know how to, you know, I know how the machine, the beast works, whatever the turn of phrase, the torture turn of phrase you want to use is. because when you're when you're when you're tacking to the right for the sake of governance and that's really the most generous reading of a lot of this extremely generous when you're tagging to the right in the in the name of governance you you risk sounding like the sort of like it's like if you or I would like defend our grandfather saying like yeah he used some really offensive words but for his time he was a really a forward thinking person right you don't want to be that for you can't be that for his time guy when you're 70 something years old

It's just not, especially when you have someone like Bernie Sanders just standing right there next to you who just seems more authentically very liberal on some on some issues than you are. And it's, it's going to be really hard, I think, for him to get traction. Now, again, never underestimate Joe Biden and never underestimate somebody with that kind of, I mean, with the career that he's had, especially the modern career that he's had. He really is beloved. And I think that he's earned that. But this is, this is just troubling, you know, I mean, it's from a campaign standpoint. I hear you. but also, by the way, never overestimate Joe Biden,

especially when he's running for president. I think we could argue both sides of that. Brian, I make no apologies for the last position. I make no apologies for the opposite of it either. After Biden's reversal, fellow Democratic presidential candidate, Seth Moulton, tweeted, it takes courage to admit when you're wrong, especially when those decisions affect millions of people. Now do the Iraq war.

Welcome to the 2020 campaign, Seth Moulton. That's great. Off the top rope. David, Department of ESPN, last week, Pablo, Toray and Bumani Jones were talking about Jalen Rose's interview in The New Yorker. And Jones was making a point about how the NBA front office culture is prising not just nerds, not just analytics types, but certain kinds of nerds, a very specific kind of nerd. Let's listen to a little bit of that.

It's conspicuous that we don't have more people of the race of those who make up the vast majority of our game in our front offices. But what's sort of clear bow, going back to the winning versus. losing who won this thing. This isn't changing. And I agree, the hedge fund world is deeply troublesome, but it is not changing from that quantitative perspective. And the only remedy is for the power brokers to begin to feed people and encourage them into that path. I have two master's degrees in economics in the Sloan conference invited me to be on a panel on activism. Do you have any degrees in like math stuff? I have, not only do I have no degrees. I was really bad at math. What panels they ask you to be on when

you go there? Well, I'm a moderate. I'm not a panel. No, but even still, what did they ask you to do? I have moderated basketball analytics. Yeah, okay. Multiple years. I thought all that. Right, but my point remains, if you ask most people to walk in this room and say,

which one of these dudes is good at math, who do you think they're pulling? They're pulling you. Absolutely. They're absolutely pulling you. And that is not something that I'm comfortable with. Right, right, right. Right. But the point I'm making is if you want to know how these pipelines get that way, think of that

very simple example. That was a great segment. Wow. I encourage everybody to watch all five and a half minutes of that. It is fantastic. A couple of reactions. One is they are going into, I will not insult either one of them by calling this

politics in a dumb Clay Travis kind of way, but they are wandering into a very, the kind of topics that I want those guys to talk about. Yeah. And I know, I know we just have this constant, just unending conversation about ESPN and all stuff. That is the kind of stuff I want those guys to talk about. They're really, really good at. Number one.

Number two, I love that show, which I embedded on for a few days when it started, has sort of, you know, over the last, now, gosh, that's been over a year, which is incredible. Yeah. Kind of tried to figure out its way. It went from an hour to 30 minutes, moved on schedule, all those kinds of things. Part of the, that show grew out of Jones and Torres' relationship. It grew out of the relationship those guys had, the talks those kind of guys had. And then it's about recreating that on television. It's amazing if you watch that segment.

Pablo goes into kind of point guard mode a little bit. And he's kind of setting up Beaumani a little bit. And Beaumani takes it somewhere and then it goes back to Pablo. And then Bomani takes it another place. Yeah. And it goes back to Pablo kind of refined. And then and then Bomani takes it really to a different place. And I would be shocked if their private conversations didn't often have that dynamic.

and I'm like, just like you need to get, you know, Michael and Tony on PTI into a couple of times a show where they're kind of goofing on each other, rolling their eyes at each other. If I'm, if I'm Pablo and Bimani, I'm like, how do we get this dynamic in a couple of times a show? That dynamic creates good stuff, right? That pushes, that allows Bomani to go to a great place. And it's a subtle thing, but, you know, it's like every time you have these shows, right? it's about bringing out the most interesting part of the relationship. Yeah, I mean, well, vulnerability is the big thing, right? It's not, it's not just the incisiveness of the point, in this case, the point that

Bonwamio Jones is making, but it's the vulnerability, it's the willingness of Poblatory to let him go there, you know, and to be the counterpoint, you know, to be. And that's a real conversation people have, right? Yeah. I'm putting myself out there and I'm saying something that's good-hearted, but a little bit imperfect and the other member of the conversation is refining it and kind of course correcting it a little bit and hey makes for good television yeah it's true it's true you know it's funny in a lot of ways i mean you could say we you're right to say that they should try to get there

more frequently on the show at some point it'll become a little bit forced i mean we've seen that with every iteration of trying to do something different with the ESPN talk model or the sports center model or whatever else and in some ways it's just the the the the set the the receive necessities of those shows of covering every story of covering all the hits of filling up an hour of programming that's the 10,000 word cover story albatross that they're saddled with right I mean that's that's what's keeping them from fully being a modern thing if they were just doing three to five minute like you know video highlights for Twitter then I think they would have a 100% approval rating and be you know just like on fire every day but they got to do a lot of

other stuff you know it's part of just it's part of the job and it's and it's and But I agree that this is, this is, this is the ideal for them. And it's the aspirational ideal for anybody else who's doing that. You can't do it about when you have a conversation about Mike Trout, probably. But yeah, I don't know. Yeah, you're right. Maybe it's not every show. It's certainly not every segment.

But getting to that place somehow, some way, I like it. It works. All right, David, I've got a note here for disastrous magazine cover of the week. I got this from the obituaries for notorious New York heroin dealer Nikki Barnes. By the way, between Nikki Barnes and Frank Lucas has been really bad month for notorious New York heroin dealers. They both passed away. Anyway, back in 1977, the New York Times Magazine

was doing a piece on Barnes who had been indicted but not convicted. He posed for the cover of the Times Magazine in a suit with his arms folded over. Get yourself to this point in our Google Doc. By the way, if you're not looking at this right now. Looking right now. Yeah, and the cover line was Mr. Untouchable.

It's an amazingly cool magazine cover. If you were currently under indictment, it is probably an unfortunate magazine cover. Indeed, as the Times explains, the cover is so affronted President Jimmy Carter that the White House ordered Mr. Barnes who had been indicted only weeks before to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole. So disastrous magazine covers ranked. Number one, Nikki Barnes, Mr. Untouchable. number two better O'Rourke, man, I'm just born to be in it. That's our definitive ranking. All right, last week we ran into a very confusing media story, the contraempts that involved Vox's Carlos Maza, conservative comedian, Stephen Crowder,

and the policies that govern YouTube. And when we get a story like this, there's no better person to come on the pod and explain it to us than ringer staff writer, Alyssa Boresnack. So David, let's inaugurate a new segment called and get ready for the strain pun. Yeah. Alyssa explains it all.

All right. I'm sitting right here next to Alyssa. We're trying to figure out how we could cover this story. If we should cover this story. The answer was that we should cover this story. This is a media podcast. Brian and I are two old men sitting in the balcony, throwing tomatoes of the media. We don't quite understand what's going on here.

So can you explain what's going on with YouTube and Stephen Crowder? The short answer is that it's just a huge mess. but we can go step by step I was right about that let's start with who Stephen yeah let's start there he is a conservative shock jock of sorts

he has like 3.8 million subscribers on YouTube which is a lot of people a concerning amount of people you might say and he has like a late night show that it's like a mix of pop culture and politics

it actually comes on YouTube at night. Well, yeah. I mean, he's just like kind of like, that's when he films it. It's a night vibe. Yeah, night vibe. Who knows when he acts? Maybe it's in a dark room at 8 a.m.

Sure. And he, if you don't, if you're extremely online but not extremely on YouTube, you probably know him best from that, like, one booth where he's like sitting with a cup of coffee under a banner that says male privilege is a myth, change my mom. mind or something. Oh, right, okay. Yeah. You remember that meme, right?

Yes, I do. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, you know, he got famous for being annoying on the internet. Surprise. And I'm sorry, this is, I'm sorry, I'm splitting hairs here. Is he actually a comedian? Like, is he, is he, is he a funny, he's a funny guy? Like, that's his thing.

He tries to, I mean, I think whether or not his humor is funny, depends on like whether or not you hate minorities and stuff like that. All right. He uses the vernacular of a comedian. but he is offensive and not funny perhaps. Is that, is that fair enough? Yeah,

that's fair to say. And that actually, like, leads us to the next question in all of this, which is who is Carlos Maza? Right. And he is a Vox journalist who does YouTube explainers that, you know, that deal with progressive topics.

And oftentimes he takes on conservative figures like Tucker Carlson. He, it's snappy stuff. The videos are very straightforward. word. And for some reason, Stephen Crowder just got obsessed with Carlos Maza. I've seen the clips of him talking about Carlos Maza and insulting him and everything else. It seems like he's dedicated. And again, maybe this is to be, this is a different sort of extremely online than I will ever be. He seems to be much more aware of Carlos Maza than I am

aware of almost any of the written things on Vox.com. Right. Exactly. I mean, I am impressed with like how. directly he engages with all of Carlos Maza's work. Yes. Carlos Maza seems to have become an unwilling character on his show. Definitely. And I will say that this happens in the YouTube universe. Like, YouTubers just like to have dialogues with each other and create beefs because

it like, you know, helps them gain followers. Drama is in high demand there. So it's in the concept pursuit of drama. Most people or many people listening this may have seen the Twitter video that I saw, which is just Stephen Crater, just launching homophobic. epithets one after another in Carlos Mazza's direction. And Carlos Mazza edited together, as far as I know, he personally edited together this video of Stephen Crowder being, like harassing him, basically. Yeah, a homophobic supercut. Right, homophobic supercut. But is everything that I need to know about

Stephen Crowder's conduct towards him in that supercut video? You know, I haven't watched every Stephen Crowder video. I did not do that for this segment. I'm sure there's way more. And in general, his humor is like pretty juvenile. It's rooted in hate often. So, you know. So explain for the people who haven't seen it, what goes on in that Supercutt. Sure. I mean, he just says he refers to Maza

as like a lispy queer. He ridicules him for his heritage and he's a, I think he's a Latino heritage. And he

yeah, I mean, like he just kind of intersperses that with his criticism or quote unquote debunking of Maza's points that he makes in his videos. And now what happens when they take this, refer this whole thing to YouTube authorities about whether this is okay to do on your quote unquote late night show? So that super cut that Maza made was actually a last stitch effort. He'd been flagging these videos for years. Every time he was mentioned in one of these videos, the millions of subscribers to Crowder's channel would harass him in some form. you know, all of his mentions would be filled with just kind of terrible vitriol as per yuge. And he got fed up and made this like big thread. He made that super cut and he said

YouTube, like, why haven't you done anything about this? It was a lot more accusatory than that. It was like something like YouTube, you don't care about the LGBT community. You're a piece of shit YouTube. Like lots of stuff like that. Right. And YouTube sort of just like dawdling along eventually replies to this thread and they say, okay, thanks for reaching out. We appreciate it. We're going to review these videos. And then they come back and they say, well, these don't violate our policies. And the policies on YouTube are pretty straightforward. They have an anti-cyber bullying policy, which says that content intended to harass others is not allowed on YouTube. And there's just like very explicit, like, things to say, if it's inciting harassment, if it's a personal attack, if it's an insult, that's not allowed.

Yeah. And this seems to meet all of those qualifications. Yeah, exactly. But if you don't specifically say, go after this person and harass them, then that's a get out of jail free card? Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. It's open for interpretation, right? There's an unknown person at YouTube, probably a PR team, if we're being honest, that's evaluating what's okay behind the scenes. It's not necessarily like an elected board of officials or like judges on the Supreme Court. It's just like YouTube corporate hacks probably just trying to save, you know, the company's reputation.

I mean, I guess you can see from their point of view that if they were just like, I mean, there are 3.8 million people, I mean, give or take who do, you know, subscribe to Stephen Crowder and view him as a, if not a respectable news source, just some respectable, I mean, a source of entertainment to them. Yeah, like a Stephen Colbert type. Right. and that if they were just like, you've made fun of this man

for the last time and shut him down, then a lot of people would view that as an infringement on his rights or on a, you know, there'd be some violation of what YouTube's vague pledge to as a neutral platform, right? Sure. And that, to be clear, like,

I don't think the threat was ever de-platform this person. I think the consideration was to demonetize him, which is a different thing altogether. You know, Alex Jones was like, deep platformed. Right. But to demonetize this to just basically make it impossible to make money from ad revenue. For all of his videos or just the ones in which he is... For all of his videos. I'm sorry, his entire channel. No, it's his entire channel. All right. So what did YouTube finally do?

Did they do, did they take any action at all? So they replied and they were like, we don't see a problem here. And they framed it like, he, you know, this is a journalist and he's a late night host. It's a common dynamic. And I just don't think that they really quite understood the intricacies of what was going on here. Anyway, people got really upset. And, you know, lots of think pieces were written about, like, why YouTube is terrible. In the meantime, the right words like crying censorship. So you could imagine that's one of the reasons YouTube didn't want to take action on this. And eventually, YouTube just comes back and they're like, actually, we changed our mind. We're going to, we're going to demonetize. And so, like, you know, and that was like within the span of a day or something.

They demonetize a channel, meaning he can't use his millions of views to earn money for ads. And they say it's because of a pattern of actions that have harmed the broader community. It's probably the vagus company line that you could possibly use. But then they like get really confusing. And because Carlos Maza is like, you know, engaging and sort of arguing with them online, they say, actually he just needs to remove a link in his profile that sells homophobic merchandise. And the merchandise says socialism is for fags. Oh, right. I saw that shirt on the video.

So, and then everyone's like, what are you talking about? YouTube has taken three positions within the span of two days. This is fantastic work. Yeah, the Joe Biden of internet companies. Truly. It's just amazing incompetence from a tech company. I'm just sitting there in awe on the internet this entire. time. And then 30 minutes later, team YouTube on Twitter says, hey, again, hey, sorry for the

confusion. The channel is demonetized because Crowder violated all these things and he needs to change that to get the monetization back. Do you think there is a deliberate effort by PR departments to like if you, if contradictory stories appear in the media within 24 hours and like the vast majority of readers are like me and they just like are unable to comprehend the existence of either one, It's just deliberately confusing the issue to the point where like nobody cares anymore. I will say like if you're extremely online, this is a fascinating thing that's unfolding. But if you're not extremely online, it's like, why would I read through an entire article explaining all the dumb things YouTube did? So what happens after YouTube makes its final decision here?

So I mean, just at this point, there's been so much media attention because people have had to keep, you know, reporting the changes in YouTube's decision. And so the far right gets really riled up about it. They're just, you know, they're like, oh, my God, this is just part of a larger effort to deplatform conservatives. This is censorship. Have you thought of silk and diamond in all of this? Which is silk and dime, if you're not familiar, is like this Facebook page that was brought up at the Facebook testimony. Like way too many times. Brian and I ask how we compare.

What simple diamond would do every time you record? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and, you know, there was just like way too many terrible interviews. You know, AOC got involved and she was like, yeah, this is an example of like the bad policies of large tech companies and Glenn Greenwald got involved and made a fool of himself. Yeah. Did Donald Trump get himself involved? Yeah, he tweeted about it. He didn't say any, he didn't like call out the specific YouTubers in question, but he said something like, this is a big mistake or something.

Yeah, and that's one of his big hobby horses. This is conservative as being de-platformed, quote unquote. I think I understand what this story is about now. And it's probably not much more complicated than I thought. But thank you for cutting through some of that just fog. So what is the takeaway? Can I continue to be worried about the power that YouTube exerts over? Should David be worried, Alyssa?

Can I continue to be, can I go back to be worried about big tech? Or do I have to only be worried about big tech? I mean, should I be cheering on big tech's attempts to silence evil conservatives? What is the point of view that I should be taking right now? What a question. I think the end result of all of this is that we're just all supposed to be extremely disappointed in YouTube. Yeah. Like, it's like the one thing that's uniting the right and the left at this moment is like we're all just like shocked at how incompetent and disappointing this large tech company with a ton of power is.

It's unbelievable. Yeah, I would say that also it's like a. good moment to examine the way that every different tech company does this and try and parse out how YouTube is different. You know, Facebook has also avoided taking on any sort of ideological slant so that they can make as much money as possible. Same goes for Twitter, like still got some Nazis on that platform. And then, but with YouTube, I think their relationship is kind of unique because it's the one place where they're directly paying their creators. It's kind of like an employer-employee relationship. So to kind of like take the backseat here on YouTube's part

and be like, oh, we're not responsible for this stuff. Like we don't agree with these views, but it's still on our platform. I think that's like kind of incompetent and negligent when you start thinking about the employer relationship there. Alyssa Boresnack explains it all. Yes, that was fantastic. I am much more informed than I was 15 minutes ago. Thank you very much. Yeah, thanks for having me. All right, David, if it's funny that Stephen Crowder is considered a journalist. I present this tweet from Law and Crime News. Court rules that Dwayne the Rock Johnson is a journalist.

Oh, no. The actual story is a court ruling involving his HBO doc rock in a hard place. One of the corrections officers in the dock was charged with various crimes, and HBO and the Rock are trying to quash a subpoena for outtakes from the dock. But now that The Rock is a journalist, will he be doing the following things? Will he be tweeting details of his reporting process for a piece that nobody cares about? And when he publishes a story, will he tweet? Here are a few great quotes that didn't make the piece.

Do you think that will be part of the rocks? Do you smell what I'm cooking? Instead of just citing anonymous sources, if he would just begin to cite the source and then come in over the top and say it doesn't matter what your source is in it? All right, it's time for David guesses the Strain Pond headline. you have trust me on this one as soon as my Sunday LA Times landed on the driveway I get so excited about this headline wait this is from this Sunday's LA Times from this Sunday's print edition and then a reader named Alex sent it to me a couple

hours later so you know it's great potential all-timer here David this is on the front page A1 a fascinating story by Lewis Sahagen who writes about desert tortoises in the Mojave Desert who are being killed by ravens. As Sahagan notes, there's a raven population explosion in the American West. Okay, okay, stick with me.

Now, the point of the story is there is a new conservation program in which a drone flies over a raven's nest and sprays the eggs with oil in order to give our cute little tortoises a fighting chance, okay? The drone flying over the raven nest spraying the eggs with oil.

Wait, sir, can I get Alyssa back in here to explore? There is, the oil, the oil drone is killing raven, ravens in the, in the nest. Yes. So when you spray the raven eggs with oil,

the raven does not hatch. The raven dies. So then the tortoises live. Okay. This is like a deep, this is like, would you go back in time and kill baby Hitler? I'm not sure if I'm comfortable

with this story at all. But what is the pun headline for spraying the raven eggs with oil? to save the tortoise. You either have to go with the tortoise in the hair or you have to go with Edgar Allan Poe, right? Notting, vigorously?

I just want to go on the record and say I had a longstanding bit about why they never named the Baltimore Ravens defense the Nevermore defense. I don't know why no one ever got there when they are always looking for a name. But anyway, so it's something with Quotha,

I mean... Uh-huh, nodding, nodding. Notting? Both the Raven never... So you're putting oil on the eggs. You might call that a, when we apply paint, we apply a new coat. Oh, no. Oh, yeah.

Chris now made it is laughing with his tongue out from across the room right now. Coat the Raven nevermore? All right. It is coat the ravens ever more? Oh, ever. Question mark. Oh, I was thinking colon, never more. This might be one of the worst we've ever had.

Fascinating story, by the way. if you're looking at the print edition of the LA Times, do not be deterred. Coat the Ravens evermore. He is David Chewmaker. I am Brian Curtis. Research by the tongue wagging, Chris Almeida. Jim Cunningham is our producer extraordinaire.

More lukewarm takes on the media on Friday. See you then, David. We're now up to twice upon a midnight dreary. Spent four months working on this story, and I'm really excited to share it with you. The ringer paid David Chewaker to sit at home for six months, put it like just writing the purpos he could imagine.

That I would never read. I know how to make the trains run. I know how to, you know how the machine, the beast works. I know. Hey, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the lesson. We just have this incredible luxury

of working on the internet where if someone says, I want to write the most important piece of my career, you say, Yeah. Congratulations, David Chewemaker. Get your ass to Mars, David. Uh-huh. Fascinating story, by the way.

Yeah. Anyway. Would you go back in time and kill baby Hitler? What a question You have to be prepared to do that You have to be prepared to go out in public and say Get your ass to Moss What again, what a just weird and

Very specific thing to talk about Yeah At this moment in history Listen, I know this isn't a popular thing But like I know how I know what it takes to get You ask them boss This just in David Yeah

Who cares This is bullshit We all know what's bullshit But you get to go and try to explain something That really makes no sense at all Yeah. What was your initial reaction to this whole Embrolio?

I am corocchio. I don't get it. Is there something that I'm just missing about the... I just love it. It's not that you have a certain, like, twinkle in your eye. No, it's that you're just, number one, unapologetic. Number two, it's devil may care about the ramifications of the stances that you take. That's exactly right.

And that's exactly what I'm saying. Yeah. It's not me that changed. It's the world the change. Right, right, right.