The Press Box - Trump Allies Troll the Media, Andrew Luck Takes, and Joe Walsh for President | The Press Box

Episode Date: August 27, 2019

The pro-Trump group scouring the social media history of media members (03:00), the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week  (23:15), the retirement of the Colts' Andrew Luck and the bad takes it produced (26:00), Joe Walsh running for president (39:15), the Houston Astros trying to run a newspaper in Detroit (48:45), and more. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelly and welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. NFL preseason is in full swing and the Ringer NFL show is now airing four shows each week covering the latest news stories, training camp updates, fantasy football advice, and more. On the site, Robert Mays, Kevin Clark, and Danny Kelly offer up their insight on the 2019 season as we inch closer to kickoff. You can read their pieces on the ringer.com and you can listen and subscribe to the Ringer NFL show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. David, some of the worst takes about quarterback Andrew Luck's retirement over the weekend devolved into millennial bashing. I don't even have a question.

I just, could we just retire? Well, I guess this is a question. Can we just retire millennial bashing? Do we have quorum to vote on this here? Because I hope the answer is yes. I mean, that's, that's what we could. Let's just, let's just get rid of that. It's so every generation loves to have a shorthand to talk.

shit about the previous generation or about their children's generation. And when you give it some like some sociological sheen like millennials, and it feels like it's okay to be like my daughter's friends or idiots and feel like you're actually saying something insightful. Yeah. And you and I are very generously speaking pre-millennial, like way pre-millennial. Oh yeah. And we're tired of it. I felt like I was watching the Quentin Tarantino movie where I had all the hippie, anti-hippie stuff. And I'm like, we're now doing this again like 50 years later. It just seems like the worst. And by the way, you and I, you and I are situated kind of, I think, between Gen X and

Gen X and I think we should just go back to Gen X bashing. Or even baby boomer bashing, right? Can't we go back or even, hey, let's keep going. Let's go greatest generation, right? A couple of guys around leftists. Why single out millennials? Why not bash everybody? The greatest generation had it right.

What you've got to do is get out ahead of the naming system and just call yourself the greatest or the best something. So if someone's just like, if millennials had just been like Generation Awesome, then like, you know, everybody who's talking shit about them would feel really, it would be just this incredible dissonance. Like, I can't believe how terrible Generation Awesome is to work with. We are the lost generation of media podcast.

This is the press box, a part of the ringer podcast network. Hello Media Consumers, Brian Curtis, and David Shoemaker here. Tons to get to today. We're going to talk about how the retirement of Colts quarterback Andrew Luck produced a Super Bowl of Bad Takes. We'll talk about our new candidate for president of cable news. I mean America.

Joe Walsh. Plus, the Houston Astros are trying to run a newspaper in Detroit. A deadspin editor says farewell. And that thing people do at the end of long Twitter threads. But David, I want to start by talking to you about the news from Kenneth Vogel and Jeremy Peters in the New York. Times that a pro-Trump group has been scouring the social media history of members of the press. The group plans to dump what embarrassing stuff they find when the media reports on Trump in a manner which they don't like, which is pretty much always.

Case in point on Thursday, the Times published a profile of New White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham. Vogel and Peters report, quote, soon after the profile appeared online, Breitbart News published an article that documented and anti-Semitic and racist tweets written a decade ago by Tom Wright-Persanti, who was in college at the time and has since become an editor on the Times Politics Desk. Now, follow along with me. The New York Times wrote a piece about Stephanie Grisham. A pro-Trump group apparently passed tweets to Breitbart from a different New York Times employee

who didn't edit the Grisham piece and wrote those tweets when he was in college. So this is the opo hit quote unquote here Kind of going a different thing But I guess their point And I want you to help me figure this out is It muddies the waters enough So that people like Sebastian Gorka And Sean Spicer can be quoted in said Breitbart article

Saying how evil and hateful the New York Times is Is that the point here? Sure. I mean I'm sure that the original pitch for this whoever it came from to whatever Trump, you know, was the open set of ears was, I'm sure the pitch was that it would be a sort of closer to one-to-one thing, right, that it would be the writer or the editor and we could take them all down because they're all vulnerable, but, you know, that's not how it works out. And yeah, mudding the waters. In some ways, mudding the water, the mudding the waters is weirdly more effective because you have to constantly reaffirm the connection to the story,

even when there's not one, right? I mean, it's like every news. outlet has to say it was in reaction to this piece. Yes. But yes, I think you're right. Mudding the waters has been, the water has been muddied rather effectively. There was some piece that surfaced on social media somewhere from the conservative blogosphere that actually conflated these charges with the stuff that was said about Times editor, Jonathan Weissman.

So you're just like in this washing machine where you have no idea. They're like, wait, when somebody at the time said something bad? and I don't know who it was and that means everything in the paper is bad. It just, that is clearly the point. Now, I think,

I saw that connection. I saw that connection made in, like, I think the talking points made that connection. I mean, everybody's making that connection. You know, I mean,

it was, it's a, there's two totally separate things. Um, in, you know, in one sense, but there, there's a,

there's a connection there. And it's not like both haven't been used as, as weapons. The, um, I guess when these kind of, kind of stories come to the fore. We always say, well, they're trying to intimidate the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, their chief antagonists, or so they think in the media. But the funny thing is like, I don't, I think the intimidation part of this is actually the least effective part. Because there's nobody at the New York Times or the Washington Post or wherever that's going to say, boy, let's, let's take it easy on Trump. Because what if they, you know, publish some embarrassing tweets we had when we're in college? that's just not going to happen.

There's just no way that that's even going to happen a little bit. So the only use of this is as just as, as you say, to just confuse the issue enough that voters who are concerned about such things or have that on their checklist of things, then just kind of throw up their hands. Even though, by the way, the New York Times is not running for president. This is what you always remember, right? Trump wants us to think that the chief political battle of our times is Donald Trump, Republican versus New York Times representing leftism, socialism, Democrats, immigrants, everything else. That is actually not the case. But I guess it just confuses everybody enough that they throw up their hands at the end of the day or that is what the Trump people hope. I mean, to some extent, I think that even the target audience for this is engaging in a sort of performative throwing up of hands, right? I mean, I think that there are some people that probably believe that. this believe fully that, you know, given this new information, the New York Times is a disreputable outfit or whatever, but I think the vast majority of people for whom this is,

you know, the vast majority of people who are receptive to this know that this is, you know, a small, you know, just a tiny thing and insignificant thing and know it's sort of a, and, like I said, it's, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's not, it's not, no, no one's actually changing their mind because of this. It just makes your, makes, it makes your, you know, Twitter reply a little bit snappier when you can reference this sort of thing. It's amazing. I guess we knew this, but it's amazing how quickly this stuff gets ricocheted around the right wing blogosphere.

And I know this because the Breitbart article helpfully amended itself to show at the end how many times it had been shared. But, you know, but like the fact that like Ted Cruz, you know, picked up on this. Donald Trump Jr., according to the Times,

tweeted it two dozen times. I mentioned Sebastian Gorka, something called Students for Trump, Jack Prasobiac, Katrina Pearson, Arthur Schwartz, who was the mastermind, and I use that term very loosely of this operation apparently, according to the New York Times, and is a friend of Donald Trump juniors. So this Lynn Patton, a name who has come up on this podcast before, but this is the kind of thing. It's in an, I think Rush Limbaugh and other people have picked up on this. it's a very, very efficient media machine that sort of takes a little pellet like this and just circulates it around. There's something very, don't you agree, a little bit trolly, gamer-gated about this? This all feels in the same zone. I mean, more than a little, I think, I mean,

the first thing that I thought of was Mike Sternovich going after James Gunn, and that was just like a flex. The director of Guardians of the Galaxy who was fired and then subsequently rehired for some extremely off-color Twitter jokes. But Cernovich's attachment to it was, like I said, it was like a sort of definitional flex. He just wanted to see what he could do, sort of wanted to prove that he had the ability to get him fired, more so than any sort of like political disagreement or payback or anything like that.

And I think that in some, and there's a way in which that's the case here too, you know? I mean, it's maybe it's, you know, maybe some people would be tempted to, you know, say this is a symptom of a totalitarian mindset, but regardless, it's like, this is just, you know, let me show you the power that I have to do a thing. I think that the difference, you know, if you want to say one between the sort of Gamergate parallels, and this obviously predates James Gunn and all that stuff, but going after Gawker, for instance, for, you know, just

totally misrepresented quotes by its, or tweets by its writers, et cetera, is that it worked briefly, you know, the kind of meet, the campaigns that they were running, you know, to, Targeting Gawker's advertisers worked for a minute. And then Gawker was able to go back to the advertisers and be like, listen, these people are operating in bad faith. This is a bunch of bullshit. Let me show you how. But the difference is it took someone who had a real vested interest in it, which in this

case was, you know, like the people who stood to make money at Gawker and who were losing money, right? They went back and they said, hey, no, you know, we're going to argue. against this. We're going to show you how this is wrong. And it seems, in some sense, like the, in some ways, like the New York Times and whoever, you know, the newspaper journalism establishment is too, I don't know, too scared or to make the case on their behalf or maybe there's just, you know, not as much to be gained to make the case to the general public. I don't know. I mean, it's, I don't know, I don't know who the, the firm pushback is going to come from in this case.

Yeah, I think, I think the Times is probably. also just has more of that kind of established brand thing in the public mind, or at least in the advertiser's mind. So it may not be as necessary. You know, it's not, it's not like if I told you the, the Trump administration has attacked the New York Times or a particular New York Times editor, who's going to get the vapors because of that? We've seen this happen a whole bunch of This has happened virtually nonstop since Trump became, you know, a serious political figure in 2015. So I don't, I just don't know that it's even that necessary. I don't, it's not, it's not like somebody's going to be like, I'm never, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not advertising in the New York Times anymore.

I'm pulling my movie ads from the New York Times. Sure. Because you found something an editor tweeted in college. Right. And that's not. And the, right. And the target, I mean, the, the target of these things is not the, the pockets, right? I mean, it's not the advertiser so much as it is just the times.

to say, I mean, one would assume to say, I mean, to make people afraid of going after Trump and the Trump administration, which isn't going to happen, like you pointed out. But that seems to be the target here. Yeah. You know, you sent me this response that Hamilton-Nolan wrote really smart response on Splinter News today. And I want to talk about this. I want to talk about this whole piece, but I think specific to what we're discussing right now, the question that I keep asking myself. And maybe it's rhetorical, maybe it's, maybe there's not an answer for it. But he kind of, he alludes to it and it sort of, you know, runs in the, you know, kind of undergirds a lot of what he wrote, but, but, um, about halfway through, he writes, the real problem, the one that

lends this entire conversation about basic media reporting tactics is the ridiculous overtone of this is an improper activity rather than ha bad tweets. That lies with, with the respectable media outlets themselves. And I do think there's something kind of central about that. And that to me is the real parallel in the James Gunn situation, although again, reprehensible tweets, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it's that to be so kind of weak will, to be so risk averse, to be so worried about what the next step of public outrage might be that you actually have to take it seriously or, again, performatively take it seriously, seem as if one is taking it seriously, mitigate losses. I mean, that's where the real problem, I think, comes from. And

maybe the New York Times or a similar, you know, Bastion of Media establishment is unable to say L.O.L. Right. But maybe they should be able to. Well, it's, to me, there's a difference, right? There's, there's worrying too much about what are the external ramifications of this. And are these bad actors on the right, some hypothetical corporation, some hypothetical interest group, are they going to get mad at us? But then there is the internal implications of this. Like to me, it's, you know, I always rage on this podcast, but this idea of, oh, this is bad optics as opposed to just bad. What Jonathan Wiseman was tweeting in that other previous Times editor outrage was just bad.

And if that was informing the Times' coverage of politics, that was bad. That shouldn't, those kind of dumb ideas shouldn't inform their coverage of politics. And in this one, it's a little bit of a different calculus because the guy claims I was doing humor that was really gross in college. And I thought I was being edgy by saying anti-Semitic stuff and putting anti-Semitic stuff on Twitter. And, you know, I think in the Times, there is a self-ind, again, this is just purely internally. Would the Times like to know that about an employee who may be destined for big things at the paper? Probably. you know, even even if it just amounts to the employee saying,

look, this was just me being a complete idiot in college. And that's it. But the internal part of this is so much more interesting to me than, then again, just like we're trying to wave our sword at somebody who's coming after us or something like that because there is an internal part of this, right? If you sit down with this guy and say, okay,

it's just you being a complete asshole during college and trying to show your friends how, you know, funny and over the line you could be in a public forum. Okay. But we want to decide that, right? We don't want to just, we don't want to not decide that. That is something that we need to get straight amongst ourselves. A couple of very minor points about that. One, I think it's conceivable that he tweeted those things and completely forgot he tweeted those things, right?

I mean, that the specific things he tweeted were not, you know, something that he like, I think if he woke up at any point in the past 10 years and said, and remembered that tweet, he probably would have gone back and deleted it, right? I mean, I think that regardless of whether or not he still thought it was funny, I assume he is wise enough to understand that there's, you know, potential downside to that. The other thing is, I mean, and maybe this is hopelessly naive of me, but I always wonder in these cases how, like, there's not a person in HR whose job it is to read tweets of new hires, right? I mean, to hire somebody of this generation, of this, you know, kind of the sort of person who's applying for these jobs, I will say in a very Broadway and to not be interested, and to have had one Twitter account that is consistent

from the days of college until now, it beggars belief that you would, that there, I mean, of course there's going to be something in there, to not go back through or not, or at least to have some policy where you demand that people delete their entire Twitter history or something, you know, it's like, it's like, you know, interviewing somebody who, who openly, you know, affirms having a criminal history, but not doing the background check, you know, I mean, it's like you, it's, it's, it's silly that, I mean, to put this on anybody except, I mean, if you're going put it on somebody, the Times can look into that themselves, right? Yeah.

I think so. I mean, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not saying, I'm not, I'm not saying, like, it's, if you, if you did this stuff while you were in college, that it's impossible to work at the New York Times ever, or that you should be fired for, I'm not, I'm not arguing. I'm just saying that the interesting discussion to me is how they figure that out. how he sits in Dean Bacay's office or whomever and says, what do we do about this? Right?

Yeah. Because that's offensive. That is, I bet there is a 100% chance. People at the times are human. They understand. They all did things they didn't want to do. But there's a hundred percent chance that offends people at the times.

The kind of stuff that dude was playing with. So you've got to be able to get it right internally. But again, that to me is a much more, you know, that's a different process than the Trump. I will say, what do we do about the Trump campaign be or Trump,

you know, allies being mad at us. And this is maybe an, I mean, this is probably an unnecessarily, unnecessary qualification at this point talking about this specific story. But I do feel like a lot of the, the moderate or left-leaning blogs that I saw covering this thing, referred to the tweets. I mean, we would kind of take it for granted that the tweets are racist.

And in this case, they were pretty, they were, you know, pretty rough. But we're going to see some tweets from the same outfit that are like, nominally racially, nominally address race, and they're going to be called racist, and people are going to just, like, parrot the word racism for the sake of, like, trying to win their argument.

I just think it's important at some point to be able to say, like, this is just a really, really poor taste joke. This is a bad joke, and it's not an outward expression of, like, racism. But anyway, maybe that's beside the point. No, but I would say it as a related point, when I saw this story, when I saw the story that this was,

this group's this group was gearing up to embarrass journalists and this was the first thing they came up with with a relatively low wattage person who had nothing to do with what they were ostensibly mad about yeah i sort of thought maybe this is the best they got you know maybe this is maybe this is the one that you can hold up and at least as you say with with a lot of hardworking bad faith interpretation use the word anti-semitic or racist or whatever you want to use for it this is this is the best you got and the rest of the stuff is so gray zone that people just most people just ignore it i don't know yeah i don't know maybe that's true but i think a lot of it is is the willful most representation and then the blind adherence to that right i mean that is what that is i really am reluctant and have been forever to draw a straight line from gamergate to the presidency of donald trump but there is a lesson from gamergate which is will i mean a lot of the attacks on Gawker rested on the very deliberate and willful and like sarcastic misrepresentation of ironic tweets.

Yes. And as straight serious as like utter seriousness. And then it's not just the people that are doing that because that might be enough to sway, you know, an advertiser for a week away from advertising on a website. But it's that the audience is full of people who are who are very receptive to the to the, to the, the unironic reading of the tweet. And so it's a sort of, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, going forward, even as we see more of this stuff, for some people, all they need to see is a third party tweet saying racism exists at the New York Times. You know, here's another racist thing. I don't

need to go into the tweets to get the details or I will, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your willful misrepresentation of said tweets. Anyway, I think, I think, I think that's right, though. I think I think those people probably already think that, because they've already been told that by Sean Hannity at some point in the last 10 years. And so this is a confirmer rather than something that's changed in their mind. Here's one thought experiment I'd like to leave you with before we move on. If the if Gawker splinter remains of Gawker, ghost Gawker, whatever we're calling it now, found that James Gunn tweet.

They were searching James Gunn's tweets. They would probably, they would do nothing with that. They would probably recognize that as a gag, right? that was pulled out of Twitter out of context and used against him. What if they found this New York Times editor's tweets from college? Is that a Gawker? Is that a splinter piece? Maybe, right?

I actually think James Gunn is a better piece because there's, because it's a body of work. I mean, it's like if it would be, I don't think it would be fire James Gunn. I think it would be Jesus Christ. James Gunn has a terrible sense of humor and then, or used to have a terrible sense of humor. And then they could catalog the 40 instances of,

of it. I don't think that. I don't think it would be presented in a manner in which to get somebody fired. I probably it probably would be presented more of a way of like, man, Disney's bad at doing their homework. But, but I think you're right. If they, to take your question at face value, if they found those tweets, would they write about him? I mean, I kind of doubt it, but I don't think it would be. Is it not a story? I mean, as Hamilton Nolan says in this in this piece, like it is a classic New York Observer Splinter Gawker story. This guy has some bad tweets.

Now, they're not going to write about it in the bright bardian way, like the evil New York Times, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, that this guy was trying to do a lot of really horrible jokes back in 2010. And within a decade, he's a political editor at the New York Times. I don't know. I don't know if they do that story or not.

But I think there's a pretty good chance that they do. To me, rest on whether or not the ethos of the place has a sort of gives a blanket pass to joke somebody made in college, you know, or something like that. And I don't know that I don't, I think it'd be, I think it's so tenuous to draw a straight line from who he was then to who he is now that that you would have to have something more recent than that to make it newsworthy. But maybe not. Maybe you're right. All right, David, let us move to a forum where we always take things out of context. 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.

excuse me, send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received. The actor Russell Crow, David, went to one of the USA Australia-Fibah games last week. Congrats to Australia, by the way, official country of the press box for winning one of those games. Russell Crowe was not happy with his seats, which were on the floor level, but actually below the basketball floor. And he tweeted $1,500 for a ticket for this view. jokes on me.

If you weren't among the 50,000 there and you chose to watch it on TV at home, good decision. It was an overworked Twitter joke to ask Russell Crow, are you not entertained? Thanks to J. Kyle Mann for that one. Did you see the picture, David, of Tom Brady wearing a hat? Flat hat. No. Hat with a big brand. See the flat hat. Hurriedly Google that Tom Brady hat as I set this up for you because it was an overwork Twitter joke to compare him to Lyle

Landley in the monorail episode of the Simpsons. And I could do the lines for you, but let's leave it to the late great Phil Hartman. The name's Landley, Lyle Landley. And I come before you good people tonight with an idea. Probably the greatest... Oh, it's not for you. It's more of a Shelbyville idea. Now wait, just a minute.

We're twice as smart as the people of Shelbyville. Just tell us your idea and we'll vote for it. All right. I tell you what I'll do I'll show you my idea I give you the Springfield Monterell I miss Phil Hartman so much

I really do especially at moments when Tom Brady comes to resemble him at Patriots training camp finally David on Saturday night Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck surprised just about everyone in retired

and nine seconds after that our mentions blew up. The basic move here was to write the Colts luck just ran out. Okay. That was like, that was the lowest form of overworked Twitter. Slightly better giving luck's stated reasons of self-preservation was for love of the brain, for love of the brain. And what actually turned out to be one of the least bad takes of the night,

O.J. Simpson went on Twitter to complain about having just drafted luck in his fantasy football. draft. It was an overworked Twitter joke to say OJ should have run with a Bronco. Thanks to John McLean, Patrick Higgins, MGA, Bill, Ben Gibson, bards against and Solaris Prime for pointing that out. If you use Lux

retirement to once again reboot the OJ Chase, congrats, you made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, time for the notebook dump. And let us segue immediately into an Andrew Luck take fest, because on Saturday, this was a football story that immediately transformed into a

weird media story. First, the football. This is the voice of a 29-year-old NFL quarterback who is retiring way, way, way before he wants to. But I'm going to retire. This is not an easy decision.

Honestly, it's the hardest decision on my life. But it is the right decision for me. For the last four years or so, I've been in the cycle of injury, pain, rehab, injury, injury, pain rehab. And it's been unceasing and relenting, unrelenting, both in season, both and off season. And I felt stuck in it.

And the only way I see out is to no longer play football. Luck choked up several times during that press conference. First thing I think we should hit here is just how this caught everybody off guard, including luck himself. Adam Schaefter broke the news while luck was on the sideline during a Colts game against the Chicago Bears. He had planned to tell the world at a later date. Fans in the stadium,

they're in Indy found out about it during the game and booed Andrew Luck as he left the field. Yeah. But, you know, people were talking about how it's the most shocking sports story of X number of years or of their lifetime or whatever it is. but it just strikes me that it was an interesting sports story to watch because nobody had a script ready, including luck himself. I mean, I think that that's it, right? I mean, it's not, I don't think the story itself is shocking.

We've actually had this story happen before. Now, you know, maybe not of a star of his widage, maybe not the exact place in his career, maybe not, certainly not on the precipice of what could have been his best season, as some people were sort of sketching it out to. be I think this is another instance where our expectations play a large role in our reaction to what happened because certainly you're not expecting this to have it's not the normal time for a football player to retire at the end of a season not at the beginning of one and certainly not you know as you're literally preparing for you know your first at your first game now he was going to sit out for a little bit but it just came as a shock you know that. the timing was weird and and to double down on the timing was weird the timing came at an amazing time

in the sports calendar when nothing else was going on so not only was it shot that that that speaks to the fact that we don't expect anything to happen but then when something does happen we have an entire sports media complex to mobilize in in mock or serious alarm at something like this going on um and yeah i mean and listen he he was i think that andrew looks a sort of singular figure year. He came obviously in as a replacement on the Colts for Peyton Manning, and we have a very special place in our heart for the sort of Pantheon quarterbacks of which, you know, a level of which he never quite ascended, but that is the narrative we're wrestling with here. And I think there's a lot of different feature. I mean, the factors that sort of complicate the story.

I will say, before we, you know, just to make sure I say it, there were a million bad takes about this, about Andrew Lux's retirement, about, about, about the fans. reaction on the field. I want to suggest a bad take of my own, which was I would like to defend the Colts fans who were present at the game for booing Andrew Luck. This is a shockingly bad thing to happen as a diehard sports fan. The people who were there, was this the post fourth quarter? People who stayed to the very end of a preseason game. This is the most diehard kind of team fans you could possibly imagine. They get a get the worst news that could possibly happen to their team at a time when they weren't expecting

it. And it's not as if sitting up in the stands, you have the ability to say, wow, this caught me off guard, right? I mean, you only have about four possible noises you can make in mass. And one of them is the quintessential expression of unhappiness. And that is a boo. It is okay to boo in a situation like this. I know it hurt Andrew Lux's feelings. And you know what? He's going to come back on week eight and he's going to go to the middle of the field and the fans are going to give him a standing ovation and we're going to pretend like it's a direct line from this point and maybe it is. But it's okay to boo when something terrible happens to your team right in front of you when it's the most important thing in your life. 100%. I completely agree with you. You know what?

You know what I think every time something like this happens, I always think sports media people A have renounced their fandom in a deeply unnatural way. And B, they never sit in the stands at game. They don't know what that's like. I will not condone racism, very personal specific misogyny or any kind of that kind of taunting of players, just about anything else I'll forgive fans for or throwing things or whatever. You know what I'm talking about. The stuff that is clearly bonkers. But anything else, I will forgive temporary insanity. Go sit, go sit, go root for a team and sit in the stands and then present the world with a recording of how you sounded during a game and all the stuff you said and all the all the all the noises you made you just do

it because i don't want to i go there watch a couple of cowboy games here a couple of texas games a year there's no way i will tell people what i what i did in the stance absolutely not let's hope some trump supporting a active activist droop doesn't get a hand of one of those recordings could you imagine that i'm i'm yelling at the oklahoma sinners and i turn around and matthew boyle from bright part standing right behind me with a recorder run wouldn't that be the worst Oh my gosh. It would have been so much. I mean,

it would be really sad to have to think of you as a former co-worker. I am sympathetic for fans, but not so much for media members. Like Dan Dakin. Former college basketball coach and talk radio guy. He tweeted this, hate to say I told you about luck, but as all the local and national guys

were making excuses for him, I told you this guy was not real. Doug Gottlieb, analyst at FS1 and Fox Sports Radio. Oddly, another guy from the world of college basketball rather than football, says retiring because rehabbing is too hard, quote unquote, is the most millennial thing ever. The response to Gottlieb that got all the attention came from his Fox colleague, Troy Aikman last night, Sunday night.

That's total bullshit, Doug. What qualifies you to decide how someone should live their life? So now you're the authority on what motivates Andrew Luck. And if his decisions don't fit to what you think is best for him, you rip him. Guess that keeps you employed on FS1. one nice. We have a fun day at the Fox lot or Beverly Hills. By the way, that was the one that got all the attention, but I don't know if you

looked in Gottlieb's mentions. All these famous blue check marks appeared like Daniel Dale, CNN's fact checker, who replied, you only appear on my feed when you have an extremely bad take, which unfortunately means you're there all the time. Doug Gottlieb made the Canadian fact checker angry. How bad do you have to be? And I'll go you one further, David. Britt McKinrey

mad in his mentions too. With all the pro football you've played, I can see where you're coming from. Dot, dot, dot, dot. Britt McKinery was trolling, Doug Gowley. You have truly, you have truly gone off the Twitter deep end when that happens. Can I say something without implicating anybody

specifically but Twitter generally here? Yeah, please. If this retirement had come down on a Monday morning at 10 a.m. when we're all drinking our coffee, I think maybe there's like a first take or undisputed Kairon that says, did Andrew Luck walk out on his team? And one of the hosts kind of gamely plays along with that idea. But this comes out on Saturday night. Everybody's at home. Everybody's, let's say some people have had a couple of beers, right? People are just relaxed. That's to me when the Twitter bad really comes out. Because you just, you just shoot. at that point. And the takes get like 30% worse before they're even typed. I think that had some to do with it anyway. Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, listen, I think Doug Gottlieb is an idiot.

And I think he's also, you know, doing this deliberately. He's trolling. This is not the first time, let us remember, the Troy Eggman has taken a vocal stand, or at least a Twitter vocal stand against a, against a co-worker, an FS1 co-worker. I'm not sure that he has any worries about his, you know, his career standing from going after the Skip Bayliss's

and Doug Gottlieves of the world. Oh my God, I'm just looking right now on Luis Minch also when it Doug Gottlieb in the Minch's here. This is really fantastic. Wow. Even worse. But yeah, I mean, I think that it's a,

I mean, this is just one of those times where, and this is why Doug Gottlieb's take felt so utterly wrong, but also why the response in general has felt so a little, has felt so confounding in a lot of different ways, is this is one of those instances where our sports cliches are really being outmaneuvered or really losing the battle to the basic concepts of humanity. And it is hard to conduct a first take segment on those,

terms and it's hard to have a Twitter conversation on those terms. But as a, as it is anybody watching this? And maybe it has something to do with the, maybe you're right, maybe it has something to do with the fact that, that our conversation wasn't guided in the first 48 hours by television. But it's, but it, but it is difficult to look at this situation and not just be in a position of sympathy, right? I mean, you can't watch this press conference and not be like, oh, wow, that's a real human doing a very human thing. and, you know, as much as I would love to have a fraction of the money that he gave up by walking away, I think we can all sort of sympathize with where he is in life right now.

And, you know, that is not an arena in which hot takes, for the most part, are really very effective. Can I move us from one hash mark here to the other and say, so we're all agreed, or every one of us except Doug Gottlieb has agreed, that you can't troll a football player for retiring too early. But can we also agree that you can't troll a football player for retiring too late? Because in alternate universe, Andrew Luck stumbles around for the next four years. He gets hurt all the time. He's clearly a shell of his former self. And then isn't the standard take, geez, it's time for Andrew Luck to hang it up. I mean, come on. Come on. Now, this is just got, Andrew, it's embarrassing. It's time to retire. You are, you are. Isn't that what we've been saying

about Eli Manning for like three years? and why is it not okay to do number one, but it's okay to do number two? Yeah, no, I think that's a good idea. I think that's a really good point. I think that there's a lot of people who were being, who I saw being interviewed. I mean, Richard Sherman was giving interviews

in defense of Andrew Luck, and I couldn't help but think that that's going to be part of his eulogy. Not that's the wrong word, but that's going to be part of his legacy when he retires is that he maybe hung around a couple years too long. And I think in particular right now with quarterbacks exclusively, maybe quarterbacks and middle linebackers weirdly that it's just like you do get that you know the concussion and the just a physical toll really concussions and other you know life life lasting

lasting physical tolls um become such a part of the narrative that like yeah you would rather your you would rather guys retire soon you know retire early um then absolutely have the con had that other conversation potentially have the other conversation on the back end and by the way i'm sure it doesn't need to be said, but that's where Troy Aikman is coming from, I'm sure, with his, like, loud reaction to Doug Gottlieb, is that he was a guy who was forced out of playing, you know, by concussions in an era where that was really uncommon, where, first of all, he probably got, you know, because of the science was so primitive at that point, he probably took a few concussions that he shouldn't have taken. And also, he was treated, like, I mean, there was a chorus of Doug Gottlieb's out there saying that he quit on

his team. And, you know, thank God we're not in that world. war. In 2020 news, David, Seth, I'm polling at literally zero molten left the presidential race last week, but never fear because we've got a new contender joining the Royal Rumble. And he's on the other side. He is Joe Walsh, the former one-term congressman and tea partier from Illinois, who has spent his post-congessional years as a talk show host and a guy who tweets things from at Walsh Freedom, like the fact that he's declaring war on Obama and Black Lives matter. Finally, a reasonable alternative to Donald Trump, the world says.

Here is Walsh announcing his GOP candidacy on this week with George Stephanopoulos. George, no surprise. We've got a guy in the White House who's unfit, completely unfit, to be president. And it stuns me that nobody

stepped up. Nobody in the Republican Party stepped up because I'll tell you what, George, everybody believes in the Republican Party. Everybody believes that he's unfit. He lies every time he opens his mouth. Alex Perrine, our old pal, tweets, Walsh isn't running for president,

he's running for Joe Scarborough, which is great. So I guess my question is, is there any way in which this is something other than generating a bunch of cable news hits in the form of a candidacy? I mean, far be it for me to, you know,

scoff at a redemption narrative, but I feel like I would be more compelled by just about anybody other than Joe Walsh. he's he I mean I haven't obviously been following the Joe Walshaw with with any any bit of my brain over the past several years but um I I believe I have him properly categorized as someone who is who is threatening a revolution if Trump lost the election last time. Um that's right and and certainly there are a lot of people who have come to term or you know who have who were Trump supporters at some point that don't like the direction

that his presidency is taken. But yeah, I mean, it does feel a little bit opportunistic. This is the guy who called Stevie Wonder, quote, another ungrateful black multi-millionaire, end quote, for kneeling in support of Colin Kaepernick. After the controversy about calling different countries shitholes, Joe Walsh tweeted, quote, Haiti is a shithole and it's run by blacks, end quote. He called Obama repeatedly a Muslim. And in that interview with George Stephanopoulos where he announced his candidacy, he said, I had strong policy disagreements with Barack Obama. And too often I let those policy disagreements get personal. You see, by calling him a Muslim over and over again, that was getting personal with a Barack Obama.

But now reinvented as a challenger to Donald Trump, he sort of sounds like a Democrat. I want to play for you a little clip from the personal announcement he made from his Twitter account. Tell me if this is a guy running for the Republican nomination or the Democratic one. We cannot afford four more years of Donald Trump. No way. What cannot wait is all of us having the courage to finally say publicly what we all know privately. We're tired. We're tired of a president waking up every morning and tweeting ugly insults at ordinary Americans.

We're tired of a president who sides with. Putin against our own intelligence community. We're tired of a president who thinks he's above the law. We're tired of a president who's tweeting this country into a recession and we're tired. We're so damn tired of a president who is teaching millions of American children every day that it's okay to lie and it's okay to be a bully. Enough. Joe Walsh apparently recorded that in the orchestra pit as the symphony was tuning up.

for performance. What weird music that was. The person he is describing running against sounds a lot like the Joe Walsh Twitter account. Maybe change a few of the specifics. But this idea that we would wake up to the Joe Walsh presidency and not worry about what he had tweeted that morning. Sounds pretty far-fetched based on the Joe Walsh post-Congress career, which was a lot of bad

tweets. So I don't know. I don't know if I believe Joe Walsh. I don't know. A couple of things at the risk of taking his challenge seriously. A couple of points I thought were interesting. One is from Clara Jeffrey, editor-in-chief of Mother Joan. She says, the thing about Walsh running for president isn't that he offers a less racist,

less NRA-Bholden way for the GOP. It doesn't. But it's another signal, see Nikki Haley, that folks in the GRP are starting to position themselves now for a post-Trump future. So essentially, Trump's either going to be there for four more years or very likely he gets defeated in 2020. And you see Republicans now, while making lots who had made lots and lots of supportive noises about the president, now starting to tack a little bit and say, what am I going to do for a years? What's my brand going to be? And, you know, am I going to be either on talk radio or as Haley would as a candidate potentially being the guy who delivers us from Trumpism?

I think that in some ways, Walsh is even more, I don't know, vocal a canary in the coal mine. Is that how would the canary and coal mines make noise? Is that how they signal themselves? Anyway, I think,

I think he's even, he's more yellow a canary than all the rest because he has a real, uh, financial stake. This isn't some like vague, vague, you know,

prospect of future employment. This is, um, you know, uh, this is a, if you want to take it as if, if you want to,

you know, assume that this is a, that this is a, that he's doing this in a, calculated way, the calculation is how can I make the most money? And he, in some ways, I think, is going to encourage a lot of other people to follow because he's, you know, I mean, he's, he's bold enough to make the bet. Why shouldn't you be? And I think that's right. I mean, I think that's, I think the other important thing is that for all, I mean, we've talked many times before about how the media is, you know,

relies on people, relies on getting quotes to say things that are true. And, and, and also, you know, I think it'll, I just think it'll make it easy for mainstream news outlets that have difficulty covering the president to now point at him, point at Joe Walsh and say, and even for the Democratic candidates too, to kind of take the things like his tweeting, his temperament, his other, his just like lack of conservatism, baseline lack of conservatism, it almost takes that off the table and makes it implicit for newspapers and for the Democratic candidate. So you can, you can actually argue on policy points, which he has, you know, very little defense on. and hopefully

the candidacy of someone like Joe Walsh who makes that just sort of makes all that stuff a little bit easier to cover or deal with. We got a few requests, David, to talk about Megan Greenwell's goodbye story from Deadspin. As we talked about a few shows

ago, Greenwell, who was editor of Deadspin, left for Wired.com when her bosses at Geo Media decided to turn her former site into a bad reboot of For the Win, or try to anyway, Greenwell, and I don't think this counts as pure sports content, David.

Uh-oh. Wrote a story saying goodbye to her bosses. It was a really great piece of writing, full stop. But really skillful in the way she reframed her exit in such a ways to hit these guys where it hurts. She writes, The tragedy of digital media isn't that it's run by ruthless profiteering guys and ill-fitting suits.

It's at the people posing as the experts know less about how to make money than their employees, to whom they won't listen. She notes that Jim Spanfeller, the CEO there, wanted to double and then quadruple the page views, which is to web metrics at this late date what counting RBIs is to baseball. She notes that that even with that post at the Concourse Deadspins vertical devoted to politics and culture and other topics that are not sports outperform posts on the main site by slightly more than two to one, which I thought was really interesting. So essentially what she's saying is it's not the staff of deadspin burning the American flag and these money guys coming in and go, whoa,

let's calm down so we can all make some money. It's the staff of debt spend saying, no, no, we know how to make money. You have a dumb plan to make money, which is to squeeze the site as much as you can to try to get this short-term payoff instead of building something that's going to make money and last for years and years.

years. Did I get that right? I think that's right. I think that's right. I think that, you know, and it was a really good piece. I'm glad it was written. You know, maybe this is really, maybe this paints, I'm going to show myself to be as idiotic as, you know, anybody running a blog company in 2019, but it doesn't really help the case for Spanfeller and his cohorts that they can't figure out a way to not let posts like this go up on the site they're trying to micromanage. it. Strike one. Strike one.

So still non-sports content appearing. Let's not say that too loud because then they might start taking it off. Got a quick story for you from baseball, David. Last Wednesday, there was a game between the Houston Astros and the Detroit Tigers. But what was interesting was the pitcher for the Astros was a former tiger, Justin Verlander. And Verlander has a problem with Anthony Fenwick, who is a Tigers beat writer at the Detroit Free Press. Verlander did not want to talk to Anthony Fenwick after the game. So he did a couple of things.

First, his team of professionals, or I guess his agent, called the Detroit Free Press and said, please send someone else to cover the game. The free press declined and sent Anthony Fenwick. After all, he was their beat writer. Verlander pitched the game, and afterwards, when the press had been let into the clubhouse, Fenwick found himself barred at the door by three Astro Security officials.

And yes, there is a picture of this. that looks as ridiculous as you can imagine. Fennick called Major League Baseball. MLB then called the Astros, Gene Diaz, who was the president of communications, and Fennick was belatedly let into the clubhouse. Now, this was a small thing,

but it's important because the issue here is not Justin Verlander, not wanting to talk to a reporter, which he, of course, has every right to do. It's Justin Verlander and Gene Diaz of the Astros not being allowed to run a newspaper sports page and decide who gets to cover a game. that's not how this works.

You don't get to call the ringer and say, hey, you know, we'd love to have David Shoemaker at cover the Laker game tonight, but you can't send Brian Curtis because we don't like him. If we were both accredited basketball writers, that's not how it works. They don't get to pick.

Who does that? So it's an important point because if they did get to pick that, this would happen all the time. Because we know. athletes can be big babies about this stuff. They get mad at a piece of journalism. What would they say? Well, can you ban that guy from the locker room?

Can you just tell the Senate of the reporter? I don't like him anymore. No, no, no. Not going to do it. And that is the road to perdition. And the free press has complained and Major League Baseball, in fact, admitted that the Astros had made a mistake and, you know,

seemingly privately are taking steps. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I know that this is a, I mean, a serious issue. and Verlander's probably reacting to it or PR team or reacting to it because they understand the gravity of it. But I could have done without the like faux philosophical

like tweet of non-contrition. He was just like, listen, I gave him the opportunity. I did. I gave him this. This was a very, this was like a very, you know, standard ask and reasonable negotiation. And they just, you know, they just refuse to respond to me. I don't know what's going on.

Oh, wasn't that great? Yeah. There's no, there's no negotiation. You don't have a seat at the editorial table when we do our meeting about who's going to cover the game. And who's he trying to convince? Because everybody knows that what he's saying is nonsense. And the crowd who doesn't know that, I feel like would be at least, I mean, if I can speak for myself, you know, I would be more compelled for him just to say, like, fuck that guy. You know what I mean?

That would mean a lot more to me because at least it would show some sort of humanity and not just this like. just this idioty. There's like PR approved like silliness. I mean, come on. Oh, you can't do that. And the aster. Can we talk about,

I mean, the Astros are worse, by the way. The Astros are way worse than Verlander for this. I mean, baseball players have fits all the time. But as a team,

you got to, you got to go up to him and go, sorry, this isn't the way it works. This is, we have a responsibility to press too. You don't get to say.

And he was mad because he talked to, because the reporter talked about him watching a, an eclipse and then subsequently for trying to, he thought for trying to steal his, phone number or something? By the way, there was no like act that made it seem like he was trying to steal his phone number. It was he gave him his business card and in reaction to, well, I guess it was in reaction to a story that Verlander wanted to retract. He gave him an on-the-record interview and then it was just like, later on was like, now I would prefer you not run that.

And then when the guy was like, I'm going to run it, but here's my card. If you want to amend what you said, Verlander said, I think you're trying to steal my phone number. It's amazing. He would have to call him from his cell phone and then, you know, once the, Once a reporter has your cell number, the jig is up. I mean, the whole thing is just like so dumb, so dumb. Chris Thomas of the Free Press had a whole rundown of the Verlander Fennec saga, which we will put on our Twitter account. By the way, David, the result of the game,

Justin Verlander threw nine solid innings, gave up only two runs, but he didn't get any run support and the Astros lost two to one. That's a shame. One thing said to us by our European correspondent, our British correspondent, Hugh Hopkins, one of my favorite correspondents, was this bit about long Twitter threads. Okay. He asked, this is Hugh asking,

every time a person posts a long Twitter thread that's really emotional and really interesting, usually telling a story about their life, why does that thread end with an advertisement for the person's work? The latest example from James C. Dyer, who writes for Empire Magazine over in the UK, on Thursday, Dyer tweeted,

just went through LAX immigration, presented my journalist's visa and was stopped by the customs and border protection agent and accused of being part of the fake news media he continues the agent wanted to know if I'd ever work for CNN or MSNBC or other outlets that are quote spreading lies to the

American people he aggressively told me that journalists are liars and are attacking their democracy okay so this is this is fabulously interesting right Trumpism run amok and at the airport and immigration all the stuff then you go down down down and then

Dyer says while you're here, please subscribe to my pilot TV podcast. So if you like, if you like this long story about immigration and Trumpism, please, please also subscribe to my podcast. I just thought that's funny. I know we're all trying to advertise our stuff and everything, but, but it's a very good point. And it is often very jarring. Yes.

That you, that you see it tucked there at the end of the Twitter threat. All right. It's time for David Schumaker. Guess is a strain pun headline. Oh, no. Friday's winter was no marjor in for error. This one I loved. This isn't even strain.

This is genius. This is Harold Hayes Esquire level. It comes from Eric Reinerd, and it's from a New York Times story by Debbie Lockwood about an Australian woman named Blanche the Anastasi who studies sea snakes. Sea snakes, David. The scientist, this is what happened.

She gets towed along by a boat. she's wearing a snorkel and all that stuff, but she's towed along by a boat, and she finds sea snakes on the ocean floor and captures them for further study. Okay? She finds sea snakes on the ocean floor and captures them for further study.

That's all I think we need here. What is the New York Times strained upon headline about a woman who studies sea snakes? Aim high because this is good. I think Jim got it. Did he?

Okay, the first thing that pops into my mind, which I'm guessing is not high enough, and probably biologically incorrect, is the eel McCoy. That is biologically incorrect and also not correct. Okay, so what I'm using is it snake? I mean, there's strikingly few snake thing of striking few snake. idioms. I mean, snake in the grass doesn't work. I mean, is it sea snake? Is that what I'm working with? So the whole phrase. Why don't you think of famous tongue twisters?

Oh, is it Sally sells seashells? Sally sells. She sells, is it Sally or she? She sells, she sells, she sells sea snakes. By the, by the sea. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. By this, on the sea floor. is she studies sea snakes by the sea floor. That's fantastic work. Jim Slack to do. You got it.

Well done, producer Jim. And well done New York Times. See, there's a New York Times sub editor to celebrate. Yeah, yeah. Yeah,

that was really good work. I really appreciate that. Why doesn't Breitbart write an article about him or her? Let's give them some credit. Anyway, great stuff. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis.

Research by Chris Almeida. Production Magic by Kim Cunningham. We're back Friday. Bright and early with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, man. And while you're here, check out all the great journalism on the ringer.com. That was the end of my Twitter thread.

David? Fuck that guy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God. I don't even have a question. Huh? Huh?

Okay, so this is fabulously interesting, right? Why is it not okay to do number one, but it's okay to do number two? Wow, this caught me off guard, right? I mean, you only have about four possible noises you can make in mass. Oh, my God.