The Press Box - Trump vs. David Muir, the Week in Fake Sports, and Listener Mail | The Press Box

Episode Date: May 8, 2020

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker dissect the David Muir interview with Donald Trump (1:30), tackle the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week (23:00), discuss the steps certain sports organizations are taking when it comes to reopening (28:22), and finally, listener mail—when David tells us about a potential *tattoo*? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelly, and welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. We're excited to announce our latest podcast launching this week called Behind the Billions. Coming from the two co-creators of Billions, Brian Copleman and David Levine, give a behind-the-scenes look into Billions Season 5. Following each episode's airing on Showtime, the podcast will impact the writing of the script, exclusive stories from production, interviews with casting crew, and much more. The first episode is out now, so make sure to subscribe to Behind the Billions on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello media consumers. Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker of the Ringer here. This is the press box. David, David, we got a lot to talk about. We'll discuss the week in replacement sports content. Yeah. A.K. how we entertained ourselves with an NFL schedule release show and theories about when the NBA might come back.

We'll answer your listener mail questions, including if David and I get a tattoo-laden life, what tattoo would we get? Plus, David guesses a strain pun headline and the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But David, I want to start with a really cringy moment in TV this week. Donald Trump finally did his first non-Fox interview about the coronavirus, and he did it with ABC News as a handsome anchor, David Muir. Warning sign number one, team Trump asked for David Muirer rather than ABC News's

George Stephanopoulos, according to the Daily Beast, Lloyd Grove. And let me tell you, they were not asking for the guy who was going to ask the tough questions. So that's a bad sign. Warning sign number two, mirror began his report with this tease. We asked the president about those two new models, those two projections that warn what could happen if we as a country do not proceed with extreme caution. And of course, the Americans out of work. I asked, is it possible will reach 19% unemployment, as one of his advisors has said, that would be nearly one in five Americans out of work. So many questions tonight you've been asking all along. Among them, will there be a vaccine by the end of the year? And what does

the president say to the families tonight of those who have lost their lives? So just a little bit of inside baseball here. If you get an interview with a big newsmaker and you're teasing the questions you ask them rather than what the newsmaker said that's a really bad sign like if I go on a reporting trip I don't come back to L.A. and say, tell

fantasy like you'll never believe what I asked this person. I sat right down next to him and I asked him what he was thinking when he said John's just sitting there with a blank look on his face like and what? Yeah, it's like the natural question is well what did they say

and it turns out in the case of Donald Trump with Muir not much. Here's Mirror asking Trump about coronavirus testing. Let me ask you about testing right now in America. You know, early on there were hurdles. Dr. Fauci at the time acknowledged it was a failing. But for Americans who do want to go back to work, should they be able to have access to a test now?

Should they know whether they've been exposed to the virus? Should they know if somebody's at the workplace asymptomatic and they simply don't know? Or do they have to go back to work having faith in the virus? and their leaders and you, Mr. President, that the workplace will be safe. No, they don't. They have to test if they want. Oh, okay. Can we just stop the tape right there?

Okay. Interviewing technique problem number one. One question at a time, please. Yeah. Because even if you're a listener who's skeptical of Donald Trump, do you have any idea what David Muir really just asked the president? No. In that bramble of questions?

No. This is, I mean, this is, I mean, I can sympathize. my number one interviewing flaw. I just kind of keep circling the question because I know I haven't quite hit it on the nose and then I'm 30 seconds later I just, you know, leave my subject to mumble incoherently. But

yeah, no, I mean, he's got to do better than that. Especially for, I mean, when you're interviewing somebody who will take any opportunity to ramble in the direction of his choosing. So, I mean, you got to, I mean, there's no excuse for doing anything. You got to, I mean, for doing

anything except just pinning our president down. and with very simple questions. Well, let's let that clip keep playing. And listen to the way Donald Trump slips the hook on the question of testing. Test if they want. You know, some people are strong believers in testing. So right now, for any American worker who's nervous about going back,

if they want to get tested to see if they've been exposed to the virus, they can have access to both the antibody tests. They should have no problem. And as good as this is, we're even getting better. We came up, don't forget, the cupboard was bare. The other administration, the last administration left us. nothing. We didn't have ventilators. We didn't have medical equipment. We didn't have testing. The tests were broken. You saw that. We had broken tests. They left us nothing. And

we've taken it and we have built an incredible stockpile, a stockpile like we've never had before. See, that's just bullshit right there. And that's where the interviewer has to come back and say, no, no. To adequately test in a state like New York, we need X number of tests, Mr. President. This stockpile you speak of has why number of tests, right? You never invoke the Defense Production Act, as many people were begging you to do early on in this crisis. And again, even someone who might be skeptical of Trump who's watching this interview

might not remember that or might really not understand those numbers. And they might not even understand that Donald Trump there is being dishonest. Right. So I just don't understand. not coming in with like numbers written on a piece of paper and saying here's what I'm going to press the president on because I know he's going to try to muddy this issue. You would be better off rather than going in with the litany of questions that he opened the, you know, did the preamble of the interview running through. You'd be better off picking two

questions and trying to actually pin him down. But I do think there's a sort of exhaustion. There's just sort of like you just get worn down by the by the pretense of going into this interview, right? I mean, just by all of the nonsense, I mean, just the lack of answers that the president gives in a regular news conference or at any other time, you just are sort of like so inured to his non-answer that you just assume that everybody else knows what's going on. And that's actually what you said was exactly right. There's a lot of people who don't realize that he's dissembling, you know, or that he's evading the truth. And you have to, you have to pin him down. Yeah, or maybe even people that thought he was dissembling and then heard that answer and go, well, that sounded pretty reasonable. Yeah, David Muir just let him off the hook. He must be right. You saw the headline today Friday, David. 14 million people unemployed in the United States, worst figure since a Great Depression. Now, Muir didn't have those figures when he did this interview, but listen to how he raises the issue of unemployment. Let me ask you about the tremendous hurt in this country.

There are 30 million Americans who are unemployed. You don't need me to tell you that. We're expecting the new unemployment rate this week. there have been forecasts 15, 16, 17%. One of your advisors projected at an unemployment rate of 19%. That's nearly one in five Americans without a job. How bad is this going to get? That's almost a Fox News question.

How bad is this going to get? And I think with every question, especially when you have a really limited amount of time, like Muirc clearly has with the president here, the president was in Phoenix doing a tour of a facility that was producing masks. You have to think, what am I going to get out of this, right?

Is there any way the president of the United States going to go, hey, David, it's going to resemble the Great Depression of the 20th century, and American should be ready for that. Like, he's not going to say that. So the president or the president or David Muir? The president is not going to say that.

So I don't quite know what you're fishing for there in how bad is it going to get when clearly the president throughout this crisis either doesn't know, know, like most of us, or when pressed on that question, has just kind of lied about it, right, or taking the rosiest possible scenario. Yeah, I mean, I think to a certain extent, you don't go in with some sort of pretense. You don't go in necessarily with a goal in mind as what, you know, you're not trying to skew

the interview, but you do have to go in, you do have to go in with an objective in mind, right? I mean, you have to have some sort of like objective, not an overarching objective, but you've got to figure out what kind of answer you're looking for with your question, I mean, if I've asked this, like, hugely open-ended thing, and you could get, it's not like whatever he says is fine. You know, this isn't like the front of the book at Parade Magazine or whatever. I mean, presumably you're, presumably you're searching for something beyond the press release, right? Walter Scott's personality parade? Is that what you're saying?

Right, right. Yes. But, so, right. So, I mean, that's actually a good point of comparison because Walter Scott is looking to pose a question that wherein it will be, the distance between the sentence between the press, a sentence on the press release has the least distance. right? Or you can just, you pose a question so that you can just use a sentence that someone else has provided for you. This is supposed to be the reverse, right? Because if it's not inherently adversarial, the president's goal is, in answering these questions, is explicitly to promote his own reputation for the purposes of re-election, right? If that's what you're going and they're assuming,

then I don't think it's necessarily an interesting question. I don't think you're necessarily bound. I don't think there's any reason why David Muir should ask, is this your fault if you're wrong as a follow-up to every question. But if you know that the lie or you know the answer is going to be skewed in the direction of this is not my fault no matter what happens, then you at least have to touch, like, what is the point of asking the question about unemployment, right? If he's not going to answer you directly, it's like, well, then what if you're wrong? What does the country do? You know, like what is your administration going to do? There has to be some angle to it, you know, and you have to get to some answer. Yeah, to use our catchphrase,

I think that's right. And furthermore, I'd say that I think when a lot of people watch the White House press conferences, there's this kind of expectation of the public is that a journalist should basically stand on their chair and accuse the president of lying. And then the president will shrivel up into a puddle and lose the election. That's what they think in their fantasy land should happen. Sure. There should be some adversarial, but you should also be trying to get information from the president.

Right. I think that's a very worthy goal of any interview is to get. We need to find out information from this guy. How bad is this going to get is not even going to turn up information? It really isn't. There's nothing really discoverable there that the president's probably going to share with us. David, we know Trump has been making ridiculously optimistic forecasts about the coronavirus since the beginning. Okay, maybe making him answer for those outside of Fox News is something worthy for this interview.

Listen to how Mirror approached it. Let me ask you because people will look back. and we have an election six months from now, they're going to look back to the beginning of this, and they're going to wonder what you knew and when you knew it. And I have no interest in going back over everything you said. But there was one thing you said that perhaps you could clarify. You said this was at the end of February.

A full month had gone by. You'd stop. I'm sorry, Eric, one more time. You don't need to basically apologize to the president for calling him on something. he said publicly to the United States at the beginning of this huge pandemic that was going to kill more than 70,000 people. Just ask a question, right?

Yep. This is what you're here for. Just ask what? I'm not going to go over everything you said. Maybe you should, right? There's an argument to do that and you certainly don't need to say you're sorry about it. Anyway, let us continue.

You'd stop travel from China. And you said of the cases here in the U.S. when you have 15 people and when the 15 within a couple of days is going to go down to zero, that's a pretty good job we've done. Help me understand that moment. Did you really think we were going to have 15 cases in the U.S.? So let me let me, I said even, you would say worse than that. I said one person one time.

And it's true. There was a time when we had one person in this country. We knew about it. We worked on it, but we had one person, it mushroom. The 15 people mushroom. other people were coming in also from Europe. Don't forget. But we're at more than a million cases now.

But don't forget, in January, okay, let's talk about cases. You know why you're at a million cases? Because we have more testing than anybody else. If we test it as much as these countries down here, okay, who don't do very much testing at all, look at Japan, very little testing. They're at the bottom of the rung. Look at South Korea, it gets so much publicity.

The president of South Korea's a friend of mine. President Moon, he called up. He said, what you're doing with testing? with testing is amazing. If I tested this number of people instead of this number of people, I'd have far fewer. If I see this line goes all the way up over seven million tests. If I tested down here at one million tests, I would have a lot fewer cases too. I understand the argument you're making.

So that rustling sound you heard is Donald Trump reaching into his coat pocket and pulling out a chart, a graph with numbers on. it and referring to this graph that of course people at home can't see now once again that's not only is that bad tv that's incredibly confusing and that's where david meur has to have his own numbers and be like okay let's talk about how many people you've tested the united states per capita right versus japan south korea etc or or whatever number you want to use but just sort of letting him point at random numbers and say, well, I tested a lot more people than all these other countries that, according to this sheet of paper, I just pulled out of my pocket. That's not really going to lead us anywhere, is it? No, I mean, like you said, it's not,

it's totally untrue. I mean, it's just, it's, it's so incredibly misleading. I mean, I guess, you know, he wouldn't be the first person to just wag a piece of paper at a camera and insist on his sincerity, but, I mean, this is literally what, like, you know, when he was out, when he was just like giving power to the states in the early going or just like forcing the states to make decisions for themselves and and you know just crumble under the under under under the weight of this thing this is literally what like west virginia and even some other southern states you know were doing i mean they were literally just not testing people and then touting there's zero cases and now he's just like and and he think and he's acting like like we're absolved of anything like that

i mean that's just crazy yeah and we just had an incident where the white house prepared a projection of coronavirus deaths where they went down to zero in mid-May. That was like a big story this week. So any piece of paper produced by Trump should probably be considered untrustworthy until proven otherwise. One more clip for you.

Here's the windup of the interview between David Muir and Donald Trump on ABC. I would be remiss if I didn't ask you one more question about the nearly 70,000 Americans whose lives have been lost. Grandparents, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters. We've lost more people now than we lost in the Vietnam War.

What do you want to say to those families tonight? I want to say I love you. I want to say that we're doing everything we can. I also want to say that we're trying to protect people over 60 years old. We're trying so hard. And I want to just say to the people that have lost family and have lost love and the people that have just suffered so badly and just made it and just made it. that we love you, we're with you, we're working with you,

we're supplying vast amounts of money like never before. We want that money to get to the people and we want them to get better. Etc, et cetera, et cetera. I think what he was doing there was hitting this idea that Trump has been very empathy deficient during this whole thing. So I guess he's going there and seeing if Trump will have the kind of hard, hearted answer that he's had a lot of the times behind the White House podium about this. But again, what do you say, what would you like to say to these families tonight?

There's just not a ton of upside there. There really isn't. And, you know, again, being made to answer for what policies the United States government has enacted or not enacted. What would you like to say, you know, you've got to connect it rather than please give a kind of banal presidential benediction to all the people suffering in the United States. Yeah. I mean, I don't, I feel like I'm, I could go both either way on this. You're right that there's no, there's very little upside there. I mean, I think in a different presidency, though, that might have, I mean, that would be a,

I mean, that answer wouldn't have felt so out of line. I think that, you know, I think that it, when there's no caloric value to anything that's being said, it sort of feels even more, maybe more hopeless than ever. like, you know, a low calorie, I love you and God bless America. I mean, that feels even less significant. I mean, so much less significant than it might, coming from another president's mouth. But certainly there's not going to be any caloric value to the substance of what he's saying. I mean, that's, but like I said, maybe it's just, maybe that's a sort of question you just got to ask, give the president a moment to seem to look presidential or something, even knowing that this one is going to not make it.

I want to pursue that idea of another president's mouth. Because in terms of on-camera interviews, this is about as on message as Donald Trump gets. It's about as much as he sounds like generic Republican president here. There are a couple other moments. We won't play them. But when Muir quotes Andrew Cuomo, Trump doesn't take the bait. Trump actually uses the political phrase, I'd have to see his full statement, which senators and congressmen have used from time,

immemorial, but Donald Trump never does, right? Donald Trump always takes the worst. When Murr throws out Donald Trump's now discredited predictions of how many people would die, Trump says, oh, it will probably be somewhat higher than that. Minus a rant in there about Russia and Ukraine and those investigations, Trump had either decided to or had been coached to be normal, which may have been the problem, part of the problem with this interview is Muir walks in saying, like, most of the time with Donald Trump, you throw some chum into the water and you get this.

this crazy newsmaking performance. And in this case, he sort of acted like a fairly normal politician. Yeah, I mean, listen, that's true. And certainly, like, I mean, you could tell from the answer to his, what do you say to those people question that he was, you know, adhering to the talking points, right? I just want to say, I love you. Let's get that out of the way and I'll go to the other stuff.

But still, I mean. For the first time ever. Well, that's what I was kind of getting at earlier with the, you know, sort of concept of exhaustion. I mean, I do think that Trump's got a little bit of opportunity, probably for the rest of his political career, to sort of rope a dope interviewers like this, right? I mean, if all he, if you go in, you're just like, all to do is ask the questions and I'm going to win the news cycle, then, you know, all Trump has to do is just slow it down, you know, just to act somewhat responsible for five minutes and he's kind of got you got to where he wants you. And that's something I've actually worried about. we've talked about on this pod before, is that how much of the blame Trump is getting for the coronavirus response is directly tied to Trump lighting himself on fire every day at the White House press conference.

Yeah. And if he hadn't done that, if he pursued exactly the same policies, but hadn't just like basically gone out in front of America and admitted all these incredibly damning things or said all these really random things off the top of his head, how much would we be blaming him right now? And I just think that's a fascinating question. Now, the good news is if you want to correctly blame Donald Trump for a lot of the things have gone wrong is Donald Trump won't be able to do this for long. There's no chance that this will last more than one or two interviews. But you're right. If you're just trying to win the media game, there's huge upside for him in just being normal for the next six months and refusing to engage and getting, you know, a sucker to write Donald Trump, you know, today. it truly is the day Donald Trump

became president. But I don't know that he's capable of that. By the way, in terms of the looks like the news economy, here's the biggest problem with this interview. They didn't even get like the Twitter-sized nugget, right? You got the president of the United States. You pulled him out of the Fox cauldron, essentially. Finally get him.

And you didn't even get a well-traveled soundbite, which is, as we know, the economy with interviewing Trump is these little sound bites. One rival journalist tells Lloyd Grove of the Daily Beast, I don't know how you get an interview with the president and not make news. That's what happened here. Which again, just beyond pure interviewing technique

and all that stuff is really wild and really damning. Yeah, it's true. I mean, it was, I can't imagine. I seriously don't remember a sit-down interview with the president off of Fox News. I mean, sometimes they happen on Fox News. I don't even know they've happened. But I don't know there's been another one that I've,

that has made so few waves. And especially at a moment right now. I mean, I guess there is the case that, I mean, you mentioned the way Trump's been kind of presenting himself to the country in these press conferences and stuff. I mean, maybe it's,

there's no way that maybe he's reached his, his pinnacle, you know, maybe he's reached his, like, peak in those and that there's really no upside, you know, there's no, like, real, I mean, there's nothing else you get

out of a one-on-one interview. He's not going to be, he's not going to say something worse than drink bleach, you know? I mean, he's not going to see, he's not going to, He's not going to take credit for more things that, well, I guess he could,

that he hasn't actually been responsible for. But I just don't think there's a, I mean, it's feasible that if you want to go in with some decorum, then you're already losing, right? But you're right. It's kind of shocking that just nothing, there was like nothing came out of this. 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. All right.

please send your nominees to at the press box pod David here's a tweet from the movie site IndiWire the creator of the TV show Black Mirror says the world is too bleak right now for season six. The world is too bleak. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write

Black Mirror is about to sue 2020 for plagiarism. Thanks to John Spalding. David, you saw the first home runs hits at Bats from the KBO, Korean Baseball League, which started airing games on ESPN this week. There was more Twitter chatter about Korean baseball than you might have ever imagined there would be in your life, at least over here.

It was an overword Twitter joke to write, I'm a lifelong diehard fan of insert KBO team. Thanks to Kyle A. Madsen. Didn't we do that for the XFL way back when, like week one? We might have. I don't even remember now. Finally, David, this one was a softball or an item off the night. 99 cent menu, if you prefer. CNN notes,

one in five Wendy's is out of beef, analyst says. One in five Wendy's is out of beef. It was an overwork Twitter joke to, of course, right, where's the beef? Thanks to Pete Croato, Large Cube, Elijah Wolfson,

Jacob Bixhorn, Michael Zilber, and MKO. Do we have time for some quick Wendy's notes? Let's do it. Do you remember the name of the woman who uttered the immortal 1980s catchphrase? where's the beef? Where's the beef? God.

Was it in the commercial or is this just like off-screen lore? In the commercial. Is it? God. What is it? I know this.

It's like Margaret or... Also in a wrestling pay-per-view one time. I found out. It would be Clara Peller is her name. Was her name. She departed the Earth.

Oh, her real name. Yeah, yeah, okay, okay. You were thinking to Clara Peller, you just wanted her on-screen name in the Wendy's expanded universe. Do we want to hear a very awkward interview, Clara Peller, conducted with Bryant Gumble on the Today Show back in the 80s? Please, please. All right, hit it, Erica. Joining us this morning is the star of that commercial, Clara Peller. She's here along with the ads producer, Joseph Settlemeyer, who is president of Settlemeyer Productions.

Good morning to both. Good morning. Clara, these new ads have brought you a lot of attention. Do you like it? I love it. What's best about it? About what? About all the attention.

Oh, isn't that wonderful? I love it. I understand that you get an awful lot of fan mail. I sure did. What do people say in the letters? They remind me of whether I owe them. They remind you of what you owe them? Yeah.

What do you owe them? Well, I owe them. steak. Oh, okay. Will you say Where's the beef for me one time? Did I what? Will you say Where's the beef for me one time? I sure will. Please.

Where's the beef? I like that. I like that. Just someone whoire, tell me, why does Clara work in these ads? And then Bryant brings us very quickly to the man who made the ad. Just reminder, that woman was like one of the most popular people on the planet in 1985. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Clara Pella. It's only one of the most popular people in my mind. I mean, one of the most, she was like, as she was like as famous as Michael J. Fox for me at that period in time. I think so. Yeah, I love that though. Will you say your famous catch race for us? What?

She left this earth in 1987. Rest in power. Clara Peller. And anyway, if you're urging news organizations to do jokes there were obvious back when David and I were wearing jams, congrats. You made the overwork,

Twitter joke of the week. Even worse, off brand jams. Like homemade. We definitely, my house was full of homemade jams. I'm not even kidding. Yeah, we'll do a segment on that in the future. David, I want to talk to you about the week in replacement sports content. But first, this message from the ringer.

Hey, this is Brian Koppelman. And this is David Levine. We are the showrunners and co-creators of billions. And this is behind the billions. Behind the billions. We're going to talk about how we make the show, the decisions we made in terms of of what we decided to shoot, how we wrote it. We are going to share Inside Skinny on what it's like to make the show.

Dave, I'm sorry, I just said Inside Skinny. You did. I mean, you've set the bar high. We have a lot to provide now. And we will be providing it on Sunday nights right after the show. We'll have guests who are actors on the show. We'll come in and talk to us, people who make cameos on the show. Should we interview crew members, too?

Well, we're going to talk about some crew members, maybe standout crew members, superstars, crew superstars, if you will. Really psych to do this. Sike to talk to everybody about the show. Listen in on Sunday nights right after the show airs on showtime.

All right, David, in the notebook dump. I don't know about you, but Thursday, I got my interviewing and writing done. I chopped some carrots for dinner, got all that in the oven

because I didn't want to miss a moment of the three-hour NFL schedule release show. This is our entertainment. three hours of people looking at a schedule and then trying to imagine. I saw Mike Florio say this on Twitter. I don't always agree with Mike Floreo, but I agree with him this one. How absurd an exercise is to say,

do you think the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Tom Brady will win their first game in November? Oh, you do? Okay. How about their second game in November? Yeah. That might be the single weirdest thing that happens on sports television anywhere. Well, I mean, listen, we're knee-deep in this stuff.

We're probably up past our knees when the season is, when the actual season is going on. And I think that the one thing we feel like we've learned every year is that whatever we thought in week one is the farthest thing from the truth one way or another. So it does feel really, really ridiculous to go, like you said, to spend time with week two, alone week three or any weeks beyond that.

It also feels like this sort of just, crazy, I mean, it feels like they got their calculus completely wrong, right? I mean, there's a reason why the draft is popular, and there's a, there's a reason why the draft can sort of become a bigger national phenomenon, especially in the era of coronavirus. But it's like we've talked about a million times because we're talking about, it's baseball, all sports have become like, it's not just, it's not fantasy football, it's imaginary football, right? You want to imagine what your team, it's fantasy booking. You want to imagine what this wide receiver that you've actually never watched a game,

watch them play a game could do for your team and now we can lead somebody to a Super Bowl but this is just real like we're like in the weeds here talking about matchups in week one I mean nobody certainly not the people who tuned in to ABC to hear stories of the personal you know trials of these young men

that audience does not give a shit about the Tampa Bay Buccaneers match like line matchups in week one and you know what led us to this world and I think people kind of pass over this is The NFL back when, it's like 2004, I want to say, created the NFL network. And the NFL network desperately needed programming. The NFL network is also, to a certain extent, an advertisement for the NFL, right? So the NFL network started making a big deal of the schedule release.

They're like, we're going to essentially make this into an event. It had previously been, you know, done on television a little bit, like released basically to the AP, that kind of thing. but we're going to turn this into a television show. And guess what? As soon as ESPN sees us doing this, having this NFL content in the middle of May, they're going to go, oh, oh, we have to have our own schedule release show.

We can't let our nominal competitor do this. And so all of a sudden, what is an ad for the NFL in the NFL's house network becomes an ad for the NFL on ESPN. And the NFL network did this with by covering the draft even more. They did this with a combine, which is now on ABC. All this accrues. And if you're an NFL writer, I think I told you, we talked about this the other day

in some other contexts, maybe it was a draft. There's enormous pressure on you to participate in this, right? You can't be a big time NFL writer and go, you know what? The release of the schedule is really dumb. I'm going to sit this one out. I have nothing to say about this. You can't do it because guess what? your competitors have no such compunction.

In fact, they might even work for the NFL network or ESPN. So you get left out and you have to cover the kind of fake sports thing, which just means at some point, all of us are covering the fake sports thing and the NFL is enjoying the fruits of our labors. And I think that as much as we talked about, again, we talked about this, as much as we are our culture right now in quarantine in search of a monoculture, we're like desperately trying to find things we can communicate with each other about,

be it on, you know, FaceTime calls with our moms and sisters and brothers or, you know, Slack channels and Twitter and everything else. I do think we're still, we're still very attuned to these sort of craven attempts to replicate things that have come before, right? Like, I have no idea how many people watch, like, the Tiger King after show that,

or that they released a couple of weeks later, but all the responses I heard were just like loud eye rolls from people around me. the same people who had been gushing over the show itself two weeks before. And this is the same thing. I mean, listen, it's not like the draft caught ABC and ESPN off guard. They wouldn't have been putting, they wouldn't have had, you know, these huge blocks on two different channels if they weren't expecting some sort of response.

But certainly the volume was a little bit shocking to everybody. And this just feels like this like sequel to a movie that you kind of regret paying the ticket money for now, right? Totally. I mean, I think to me the takeaway, because even as a huge Cowboys fan, somebody who's related to a Cowboy season ticket holder. I can't really get, you know, excited on that granular level quite yet. But the takeaway was the brazenness of the NFL at this moment when everybody is treading so carefully, the NFL is going, you know what?

Here is the date our season's going to start. And it's not going to be in a bubble in Las Vegas or Arizona. The Dallas Cowboys are going to open Sunday night football by playing in the Rams new stadium in L.A. Never mind all that stuff we're seeing. And I'm not even saying like, that's not going to happen. because if I had to bet, I would bet on the NFL making this work because the NFL is the NFL and such a giant part of American pop culture in the economy. In fact, I'm probably rooting for the NFL to make this work. But the NFL is doing what nobody except maybe Dana White and a few other people are doing, which is like, here's a schedule. This is happening. And we're not pussyfooting around or anything. We're just going right in. Yeah. I mean, listen, I'm a everyone listening to knows I'm a professional wrestling fan. They were kind of out there in front of everybody else in the sports world because I guess they can kind of get by on not being sports when it suits them. Yeah.

You know, you might think that in a moment such as this when there's no sports on television, the pro wrestling would just have all this oxygen to consume. But it turns out that nobody really wants to watch wrestling in front of zero crowd either. And despite the fact that they've had new programming on weekend and week out, not just WWE. The WWE has there three shows, new programming every week. AEW wrestling has one show every week. Raw just posted its lowest, WW Monday Night Raw just posted its lowest rating of the modern era.

I mean, like ever, it was like 1.6 rating. I mean, it's just like shockingly low. So I think that like I said before, to think that it's going to be this ratings bonanza, whatever you put on is probably misguided. It'll be interesting to see what UFC does. Dana White was very eager to keep going

because he certainly saw an opportunity to be the only sport in town. And I think that's what's driven him more than politics or anything else. So we'll see this weekend. I mean, they have a show. They're doing it. They're down there in Florida,

which is the whole state of Florida is now apparently Fight Island. I mean, you can just do whatever the hell you want down there. Yeah, that was that order signed by Ron DeSantis on April 9th, which was seen as like a wrestling friendly executive order and has now become licensed to have any sport you won on Florida, including UFC 249. I mean, I think, listen, I think of wrestling had never existed.

And he had said, if I signed this piece of paper, I can get a monopoly on the UFC for a while. I think Ronda Samos would have done it. But yeah, I mean, whether or not it was a direct response to, you know, the money that not so secretly arrived from the McMahon family super pack, or whether it was just really like playing, like, you know, like playing nice with the big companies that are in the state. I mean, they're constantly, Ron DeSanis is constantly trying to get W.W.E to like open a Hall of Fame down there. I mean, it's not like it's, I mean, they want more and more from these big companies.

So whether or not it was like specifically targeted or kind of a more general thing, it doesn't have to be a conspiracy theory to say that Ron DeSantis was just like, oh yeah, like let's just let TV shows keep doing TV. I mean, it's like he wants every business to keep operating. If it were up to Ron DeSantis, they wouldn't have closed any ice cream parlors, you know? I mean, it's like they would just keep going. That's exactly what I would predict Ron DeSanis would do without looking at the SuperPack

contributions. Yeah, exactly. And now that now UFC's down there. I mean, just seriously. Like nothing has changed from like UFC being like like you know from Disney having to lean in or a or sorry I mean the parent company is having to lean in WME and just being like no you can't we're you can't have a pay per view on an Indian reservation because that'll just look really bad and now they're just like well Florida is letting us do it it's like okay and we're just popped up that Florida that like the Orlando magic are just going to reopen their practice facilities now because apparently they have enough tests down there and it's not a big deal I mean it's just anything goes man I thought the reservation thing was just so amazingly a pulp novel that it, you know, whenever anything is just like the plot of a pulp novel, it probably shouldn't happen. But christening Florida as Fight Island writ large is also kind of a pulp novel. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, if there, I mean,

if, I mean, the Florida pulp is its own fantastic tradition. This might be taking it in a step too far, though. What's the name of the novel, Swamp Land? Was that a book? No, it was what was the name of what? Didn't a woman write a big novel about Florida? Oh, yeah. Swampland. Was it Swamplandia? Karen O. Russell. What's her name?

Karen Russell? Yeah. David O. Russell, I believe. Yeah. Swamp, get Karen Russell. Because we got a sequel here. We're ready to rock. One more, David, for you at this top of the NBA.

Basketball, as opposed to Dana White, is not as publicly eager to sort of put a date on anything they're doing. There's reportedly even been an internal push to cancel the season. But it seems likely that they've played. resumes, we're going to start with the playoffs. Though there is a wrinkle, our very own Kevin O'Connor reports, the NBA has contracts with regional

sports networks for regular season games. Once most teams hit 70 games, the league retains 100% of the revenue from those so-called RSNs, except for a handful of teams such as the Lakers who have a per-game contract with Spectrum Sportsnet. So teams

have a vested interest in trying to get over that 70-game hump, right? or we suddenly start to lose revenue in a very big way. No official announcements have been made, but some franchises like the Toronto Raptors are opening their practice facilities as early as next week. This also comes from Adrian Woznarowski. In municipalities where the coronavirus testing has become readily available

for at-risk health care workers, teams opening facilities for voluntary workouts will be allowed to administer COVID-19 tests to ACE symptomatic players and staff. so there's that. Also looking at my inbox and by the way, sports television people have never in their lives sent as many press releases as they've sent over the last six weeks. I mean, it's absolutely is absolutely incredible. ESPN and ESPN2 to televise the Cornhole Mania 2020

this Saturday, a cornhole league. And and congrats to the ESPN executive who got elected to offer a quote about how sports like Cornhole are bringing America together. All right, let's do some listener mail. We do this every Thursday. Hit us up at the press box pod. This one comes from David Shockey. Dave Shockey.

Sorry, Dave. I love this question. Given the recent debate about whether Michael Jordan would dominate in the current NBA, which of our greatest presidents would translate as a successful candidate slash president in the modern era? Could Lincoln, Washington, or Teddy Roosevelt be successful in our media climate? That is a great question. I have no idea. who would be the back god i mean i think it's fair to say that there is a certain amount of

like earnestness baked in all of like the pre 20th century presidents that that would just that would not translate well although it's really hard it james tyler you're saying you don't think he would play well in 2020 the um i i kind of thought of the anti example of for some reason i was thinking about jfk and i'm like would jfk just have been betto or orc you know in 2020 like oh well you know he looks he looks apart but he's kind of a lightweight you know pretty thin record i'm not sure i um you know father was instrumental in getting his political career started that's one another one was dwight eisenhower you know such a just gigantic swaggering american hero after world war two would he have played in a media environment where clearly like talking you know

emoting presumably tweeting would not have been his strong suits those came to mind kind of as anti-examples. Lincoln was a great writer, right? So he just would have written medium posts and probably won the election hands down. I mean, JFK with the amount of like attention, with the amount of like, with the amount of like kind of blind eye

that was turned him by the media, I don't think would be able to function in this media marketplace that we're in right now with the camera trained on him at all times and rumor innuendo fair game. I don't know. I mean, obviously, we didn't live through the vast majority of these answers.

I find it really, I always find it every time I see Bush senior give a speech, I am just sort of amazed that he was ever elected president. I think he's like, I think he's a rather, I mean, a pretty respectable dude, but you just see him give a speech and it's like, like, like, he seems like more, he seems like less attuned to like the television era than Richard Nixon did and all of his fame, like, sweaty brow debate moments or whatever, you know, I mean, it just, it's just, it. It just seems, it doesn't seem like he's a modern politician by any definition. He feels in retrospect like the vice president of the popular president who failed to win the popular president's third term, except he won. And one convincingly. Yeah. Which is really weird. Yeah.

Also, that would be, that would be an incredible, George Bush Sr. would have been an incredible candidate for the Twitter era when it's just like the entire internet is consumed with George Bush Sr. conspiracy theories, just CIA conspiracy theories all over the place? Yeah, that would have been hard to live down for sure. This comes from Richard Dijt, David. Media writer over there at the Athletic. Would love to know if Brian sees any viewership trends in the 18 to 35-year-old demographic when it comes to Bundesliga viewership. Thank you.

Now, see, what he's trying to do here is, you know, I don't like television ratings. Like, that's something I dislike. Richard's trying to start a Jordan Isaiah kind of thing among sports media critics. I'm not doing it. I'm not going there. I just don't know. My authorized documentary doesn't go there. Sorry, Richard, but thank you very much for the question. This is from Chad Orzel, one of our friends and frequent contributors. In this era, do you think political hypocrisy matters?

Or is it just too easy for partisans of whatever stripe to retcon or rationalize the actions of their guy? as due to changed circumstances. I've got to stab at this one because something kind of fascinating is going on with Boris Johnson in the UK, where essentially they've just tried to massage the coronavirus numbers as much as they can. First of all, it was, well, you know, these, is this the real number of deaths because they were thinking of hospitalizations versus people that might have died of the coronavirus at home, something that's come up in the United States too, right? Then when that number started to look really bad, they started to say, well, okay. we may have the highest number or soon to be highest number

of coronavirus deaths in Europe. So why don't we start talking about per capita in Europe because that will make us look better vis-a-vis Italy and all these other countries. I honestly think that's the way most of this goes, right? And whatever hypocrisy you might imagine

just gets massaged away like that. What do you think? Yeah. I mean, I guess a point in comparison there it'd be like employment numbers or whatever, or even economic numbers, that we always see them sort of, you know, you always see,

we use the same employment standard for decades. And when it looks bad, you know, people start flailing and looking, and explaining why that standard is inaccurate and whatever. I mean, the only thing you can really do is compare against history. And in this case, you know,

we don't really have a historical context for a lot of this stuff. You know, you're not comparing it against previous plagues or whatever. All you're doing is comparing it against, you know, if you're picking the formula, then I guess it's pretty easy just to make whoever is interviewing you

or whatever the standard is, just sort of like go by the wayside. It's tough. It's really tough. And listen, hypocrisy is, I mean, I think that we came out of Trump's election almost four years ago now, feeling like hypocrisy was totally out the window.

But it's hard to watch, like, I mean, it's not like Mika Brzynski, like, read Joe Biden the Riot Act when he popped up on Morning Joe to defend himself last week. But, you know, he certainly didn't conduct himself. He conducted himself much more like a pre-Trump candidate than a post-Trump. You know, what we expected a post-Trump candidacy would look like, right? I mean, he actually did, like address the issues and clearly felt like he was obligated to do it. And I guess there was some question in terms of hypocrisy that you would be like, yes, I mean, despite what he said in previous cases, he would just be like, listen, nobody can. cares about this or just like let me just ignore it all together. So hypocrisy does matter, I think. I think it just matters personally to a lot of people and it matters to the institution. But it's tough. I mean, we're certainly in a, we're certainly in a world where you're able to issue hypocrisy with just a wave of the hand. Fantastic question here from Ben Chadwick. I had not thought of this. A lot of young people these days tend to cheer more for individual athletes than they do for teams. We've talked about

this before. Do you think we could see the same change happen in politics? to Bernie Trump voters, where the voters care more about that candidate than they do a certain party winning. I think both those things are obviously true, and I have just never connected them in the same way, where you're a Bernie fan and you don't really care if the Democrats win, or if you're, I don't know, KD fan, whatever it is, and your allegiance is transferable, much more so than maybe it used to be where more people were aligned with the party. What do you think of that? Well, okay, my temptation is to say yes, but let me try to think this through a little bit. The reason why, I mean, one of the big contributors is the reason why we feel differently about players is that players aren't stuck on one team, right?

I mean, if your favorite player growing up was Kevin McHale or whatever, you didn't have the opportunity to go, I mean, if Kevin McHale had left, you know, 10 years or six years before we retired and went and played those seasons with like, you know, the Orlando Magic, which didn't exist then. Right, the Mavericks. Then, yeah, I think there probably be a lot of Boston fans. who had been like, well, we, setting aside the fact that we can't watch Dallas Mavericks games and the fact that, like, you know, my dad would be really mad if you found out I was at a soft swap for the Mavs, but there probably would a lot of people who would be like, yeah, you know what, I still respect Kevin McHale. You know, he did a lot of good stuff for us.

Yeah, but that's different than, that's different than being a Kevin McHale fan saying, like, I wish him the best unless they're playing the Celtics. That's like an age old sports thing. But what we have now is like, I'm a, I'm a Steph Curry fan. I'm a, yeah, but like. LeBron fan. Look at the political example. Did Ralph Nader lose anybody's vote by switching parties every time he ran as a third party?

Didn't he run as like an independent and then as a like a green party? Didn't he have several different party affiliation? I thought he was just a green, but he may have had some later ones. Yeah. Well, whatever. I mean, I'm saying like there is a lot of allegiance to Republicans and the Republican Democrat parties for sure, for sure. But I'm not sure that it would be that mind blowing.

I mean, listen, if Bernie Sanders ran as an independent, nobody would be so. Nobody would be like, but wait, I thought you were a Democrat. crowd. I mean, it's... Yeah, I mean, just to push on this, the metaphor a little bit, I think there's a little bit of like people like Bernie and people like Trump for may, are for a major presidential candidate much less attached to their party, right? Yeah.

Than almost any major presidential candidate of the past. So they do create like, like in a way, like an NBA free agent who is swapping teams much more than they used to. create this opportunity for you to be a fan of them independent of the institution. Yeah. I can roll with that. It's true. I think that, I mean, honestly, you might say that that's what those two candidates had

going for them. I mean, certainly Bernie was a big idea as candidate, but those were, those, one of the most attractive things about either of them is that despite being politically affiliated with one of the major parties, you could kind of look at it. That was just, like, that was just to get on the ticket, right? I mean, they both seemed sort of separate and above the parties that they were attached to. So, yeah, I mean, I listen.

I think that there's, I think that could certainly be a thing we see more of in the future. But I, but again, with how ingrained the two main parties are, I find it hard to imagine that it's going to be like the wave of the future, you know, I just, it's, it's, we're too stuck in a rut. By the way, Ralph Nader, a couple of Green Party runs, a right-in candidate and also something called the new party in 1972. David was correct. Uh, from DJ Chapman, jumping off your COVID commercial talk. What are your power rankings for the kind of? of times we're in right now.

Here are some to get started. Unprecedented, difficult, challenging, changing, or unique. These difficult times or these challenging times, that feels like the default setting, right, of your like fast food commercial. Yeah. I like the unprecedented. The unprecedented is more of the news, like the news report adjective. Yeah. The challenging is really tough.

I mean, they're all, I mean, it's just, the thing is like all those words mean different things, but they're all entirely like interchangeable and all these commercials that we're seeing today. Yeah. We were watching as a family, one of these commercials, like a, you know, commercial break earlier. And my wife was just like, did they not understand. My wife did not hear the segment that we did on the show was just like, do they not understand that they're all doing the exact same commercial?

I just like, yes. I don't think they understand that. I don't think they know. Or the people who made the ads totally understand it. They're just like, you know, well, here we go. Let's do the same thing. You know, we did the last time. This one's from Henry T. Casey.

For both Brian and David, if you could only read three news sources online, what would they be? That's a great question. This is like a desert island, but it gets three websites. But wait, not just news. I know Henry T. Casey, by the way. Henry T. Casey is an acquaintance of mine. The, is anything at all? Or is it just new like like hard news specifically?

No, I think news sources. This is this is the challenge of the question. You get to read three things essentially. I get let's, I'll let you get Netflix and stuff like that. But these are the only type ways you get information. See, I think the New York Times is a no-brainer. Yes, the New York Times.

And I'm trying to like, I'm crossing, I'm like putting things in verticals, right? I think the New York Times sort of crosses a lot of sports thing. I don't know what it would be. I get all of my sports news from like, Twitter and Slack. I think, but do you want Twitter? Is that a news source?

I mean, is that, can we put those in here? I mean, I would definitely do like wrestling Reddit. I mean, it would probably be in my top three. Yeah, only to be to be occasionally preempted by Westworld Reddit when that's a going concern. I, I, um, but yeah, I mean, there, there's probably like some like wrestling Reddit news type news source, uh, the New York Times. And then, yeah, you have to go sports or something to sport. I mean, can I just pick?

to ringer.com. Does that count? Yeah. I mean, that's a, that's an incredible, incredible, uh, boss move by you in terms of corporate politics. I'm literally saying the words right now. I'm literally saying the words. If I get, if I got wrestling and news out of the way and how do I get something with sports and pop culture and one pick and then, uh, got to be sad to leave the ringer out of that question. Then I, then I look down and saw the shirt that I've been wearing for free this is from Andrew 3,000. At 40, I recently became a late, in life tattoo guy. Is this something you two

think about? And if so, what would the tattoo be and where and why would David's be of Charles Portis's face on his lower back? That is a fantastic question. All the way up under the last word. I don't... Wait, you're okay with lower, just not back?

I would definitely be in for a Portis tattoo. The problem is he's not very... He doesn't even look like himself from like decade to decade. So it'd be kind of hard to pick one specific look, although I was tempted to become a late in life tattoo guy, like in my late 30s. And then, because I think at some, on some level,

I felt like 40 was the cutoff. Yeah. But who knows? Anything's possible. I mean, I think now, you know, you and I are probably both in the same situation where we're like, you see how much it costs to get a good tattoo and you're immediately just weighing that against like family vacations and they, you know, or like, or like actual needs that your children might have.

I want to push back. What you mean we on that? because you aesthetically have a lot in common with a person with a tattoo. Now look into your Zoom camera and see me wearing a gray polo shirt. The only person wearing collars in quarantine. And having the kind of generic default haircut and glasses. I do not look like that kind of person. No. And I am not that kind of person.

And there's nothing wrong with that kind of person. Right. I say that I'm not cool enough to be that kind of person. Yes, but in terms of generally, in general terms of spending your money the way that you might have in your 20s, right? We still both have impulses of like, we're grown-ups, but man, that 70-inch television

sure is appealing or whatever, you know. I mean, then you have to sort of weigh that against the rest of your life. Yeah, I mean, listen, I don't have any tattoos in my body. The last phase that I had of thinking about, considering tattoos, it got so much, there's so much pressure involved by the time I actually just gave it up.

But the last phase I had was getting old. Instead of getting tattoos of things like people that I liked, it was just getting the tattoos of people, like the tattoos that wrestlers in the 60s had, the old Navy tattoos. That would have been my last go. So if I had any, that's what would have been.

The tugboat earthquake style kind of like anchor on the... Tattoos of tattoos. Yeah, basically just like completely self-referential meta-tattoos. I just... Thankfully, I didn't do any of that. No, I spend so much time thinking about like what old movie poster I should buy, which I can, if I stop liking it, I can just sell it and get rid of it. I could never, I couldn't handle the pressure. I agree. From Evan, I'll leave you with this one,

David. What do you think will be the first anecdote that comes to mine when you're telling younger people about coronavirus in 20 years? Oh, man. See, I think both of us are so kind of ensconced with our kids right now. This will probably take the form of a family story that we're reminding our kids about or remember when we were all in this strange house together for months and months on end? Well, I hope that that's the story because otherwise the story is like, this is a thing that happens every couple of years now in like the new disease age that we live in. I thought you were going to say the story is like Stephen King's The Stand or something

like that. But yeah, no, that's that's that's right. That's right. Yeah, we wanted the story to be this was a unique unprecedented, unprecedented, to David, time in American history. Challenging. Challenging time. And now we're happily free and humanity is free of the plague.

That's a good place to leave it. All right, David, time for David Shoemaker. Guesses the strained pun headline. All right. All right. Monday's headline about the release of defensive lineman Taco Charlton was Dolphins ordered Taco to go. It's still pretty great. A week later.

Wait, I just thought of another one. Can we about Taco Blues Day? Somebody did send me out and suggest Taco Newsday was another way just to signal the existence of the story. Today's headline comes from Noah Leiford. It's from our pals of the economist. We know from the Wendy's news we mentioned earlier that there's a problem, David, with the meat supply. Problem with the meat supply. I want a headline that describes said problem by way of Kurt Vonnegut.

What was the economist's strained pun? headline. What? I mean, so it's got to be slaughterhouse something? Slaughterhouse God, what is it? It's not jive. I'll rule that one. It's the jive, drive, knife, live, live. He's circling around it, folks. He's getting closer. Dive? Slaughterhouse dive is correct. Okay, there we go. Slaughterhouse dive. The virus threatens a meat industry that is too concentrated. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis.

Research by Chris Alameda production magic by Erica Servantes. We're back Monday. What are we going to talk about? We're going to talk about Michael Jordan in the media. You and I have nibbled on that discussion. I want to go there in detail. And probably some other stuff involving the coronavirus. By the way, if you venture out into reopened America this weekend,

please be safe because we can't lose you. We don't have enough listeners. So don't, don't do anything. If you're listening to this podcast, don't do anything to put yourself at risk. Plus, of course, more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you, Brian.