The Press Box - Trump’s Crime Talk, the Death of the Newsroom, and Jeff Benedict on the Patriots

Episode Date: August 31, 2020

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss Trump’s approach to this year’s election. They break down his remarks on protesting, violence, and the Democratic Party (2:35). They then discuss the newspapers that are getting rid of their newsrooms and the impact it could have on the profession (20:30). Then, sportswriter Jeff Benedict joins to talk about his new book about the New England Patriots, ‘The Dynasty’ (31:30). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, this week, Vin Scully, the 92-year-old former Los Angeles Dodgers announcer, join Twitter and Instagram. Oh, my gosh. What I want to know is how will Scully use his newfound social media power? According to Scully, it's not going to use Twitter for, quote, any controversy in any shape or form. Yeah, that would be shocking. very careful what goes out. I mean, listen, you're asking me to make old people jokes.

I'm guessing we're going to see some a celebration of Vince Gulli's career, probably some, you know, milk toast sports highlights and commentary on current baseball, and probably a whole lot of, like, tweets that just say, like, call Sarah enter. Oh, come on. You said you were going to not make old people jokes. Then you just did. Oh, man. I don't know.

What do you think we're going to see? Well, this is a particular gripe as a sports media writer person, but there's been this thing over the last couple of years where people are constantly trying to draft Vince Gully to come back and call one inning of the All-Star game. Or call like one game of the World Series on national TV. And Vince Gully, to his crisis, I don't want to do that.

please do not draft me. So I would just like a standing Vens Scully tweet, maybe early July right before the All-Star game in October, before the post didn't say, by the way, please do not draft me. I will not be coming back to call. I've given you decades and decades in my life. I will not be coming back to call bonus innings for you. So please now write another media column.

It's just to find something else. That's the pen tweet. Yeah, that's great. I'm actually just going to tag Vince Culley and tweet that right now. myself. It's time for the press box, a part of the Ringer podcast network. Media consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here with lots of stuff for you. Newspapers across the country are getting rid of their newsrooms. What does that mean for our fair profession?

Sportswriter Jeff Benedict stops by to tell us how he infiltrated the New England Patriots for his new book, The Dynasty. Plus, David guesses a strain pun headline and the overworked Twitter joke of the week. But first up, David, here's Joe Biden in Pittsburgh. this morning. Ask yourself, do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters? Really? I want a safe America. Really?

Joe Biden is saying that because Donald Trump has been talking and talking and tweeting and tweeting about crime. Last week's Republican convention, it became clear that this is the issue Trump is going to try to use and misuse to make. make up ground on Biden.

Kelly on Conway, David, came out and said, hey, the more crime, the more we feel this is a significant wedge issue in this election. So I thought we should start by talking about the way Trump talks about crime and break down some of his strategies that he uses. All right. Trump rhetorical move number one. Deny there is such a thing as a peaceful protester. Here's the president speaking Friday in New Hampshire.

They're not protesters. Those aren't pro- those are anarchists, they're agitators, they're rioters, they're looters, they're not, you know, you say that. And some of the people, not all of them, but some of the people back there, oh, I dare, how dare you? These are friendly protesters, right? Friendly property. They're just looking for trouble. Has nothing to do with George Floyd, has nothing to do with anything. They don't even know who George Floyd is.

They don't know who George Floyd. They have no idea. If you ask him, who's George Floyd? They couldn't even tell you. These are just bad people, troublemakers. And they shouldn't be representing our country at important events. And we've got to stop it. Yeah, I guess the low-key irony of that quote is that he's actually making the case to a lot of people on the left are making, too,

that the kind of worst offenders and the whatever criminality is going on out there are not, in fact, the protest, you know, do not make up, they're not represent the Black Lives Matter and other protesters that are spending time peacefully protesting in the streets across the country. The subtle distinction which Trump

did not bother making, at least out loud, was that he, I mean, he was clearly trying to discredit all protesters as part of this movement of violence. But the words that he, I mean,

the specific words that he used could have been taken or used sort of by either side in this argument. Absolutely. And, you know, in that clip, he's talking very specifically, we should note about some of the protesters who have showed up in Washington, D.C. over the last couple of days. But the larger rhetorical trick there is to convince that people that these are the only protesters, right? And you know what it really reminded me of is that very, very first Trump campaign speech when he was talking about immigrants. And there was no distinction between immigrants, a large pool of people coming to the United States and a tiny handful of people. And of course, that was Trump. Trump's trick, right? Yeah. I want you to think that there are these criminals coming over the board, all these things

happening, and take a large group of people and boil them down. In some way, you know, you could make the totally, you know, imaginary argument that the migrant caravan somehow did end up coming into America and now they're the ones protesting it all across the country because it's the exact same boogeyman the way that Trump brings it up. Maybe that just shows the greatness of America that that sort of metamorphosis can take place. But you make exactly the right point, which is that the lack of distinction. I mean, I should have said that, I guess, when I was talking about that last Trump quote, the lack of clarity, the lack of precision, the lack of distinction between different kinds

of protesters and different sorts of whoever he's talking about is exactly the point, right? I mean, if you're making, if you're wasting times differentiating, then you're actually watering down your own argument if you're Donald Trump. Right. The idea is that all of this, all of these scary things are of the same cloth. Absolutely. Rhetorical flourish number two, David, that all violence, quote unquote, is coming from the left, right? So in Trump's sort of summation of this, cops aren't committing violence. He leaves out Kyle Rittenhouse, 17 year old who was accused of killing two men last Tuesday, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Writtenhouse apparently attended a Trump rally earlier this year.

Can you imagine if we found one of these, if we found a left-wing protester who had committed some instance of violence, had been at a Biden rally, how much that would just be playing on Fox News? He leaves out the pro-Trump forces that poured into Portland on Saturday, some of whom were shown on video using paintballs and pepper spray against the protesters. Man who may have been part of the Patriot Prayer Group was shot and killed over the weekend, But Kaylee McInanini was asked. No, wait a second.

What about the president? What about the president sort of these people who support the president shooting paintballs, you know, coming into to confront the protesters? McInney and he said, well, Trump hasn't seen those videos. In fact, Peter Baker, the New York Times points out Trump himself tweeted out one of those videos. So again, right, it's a little bit of the same point. Trying to take lots and lots of different kinds of stories that are violence, quote unquote, and hoping you will be so confused that you won't be able to discern what's happening. You said, I mean, the idea that all the violence is on the left. I mean, obviously, you're correct. That's the point.

Elsewhere in the speech that you quoted from earlier, he laments the fact that police aren't able to rough up people like they used to because of the PC culture that we live in, which I guess doesn't contradict this point, but it kind of contradicts the spirit of it. I think that this is sort of tied to what we were discussing before. The idea is not necessarily that, you know, all of these violent forces are, I mean, you're right, they're blurred together. The idea is that you hope you can't distinguish between them. And it's not, it's not, we're not getting into the specifics of who's who. It's that all, and it doesn't even matter their political affiliation, right? It's not that all of, it's not that it's only liberals or only far left people that are committing

violence, it's that all of those, anyone committing violence, is now part of the ambiguous them, right? And them is who we're shaking our fist at. They're part of the ambiguous them, and they are themselves a reason to reelect Donald Trump. Yes. I'm glad you brought the political correctness thing, because that was another flourish of the speech. Let's actually play that clip from New Hampshire. Here is Trump, and he's talking about Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who had some protesters sort of screaming at him after Trump's speech last Thursday at the RN. And see, Trump has a take on that. Because of the Democrats, you can go out and you can have thousands of people marauding through the streets,

threatening other people beyond threatening, kicking them in the face, doing what they've done, you've seen it. And they would have done that to Senator Rand Paul last night. He'd either be in very bad shape or dead, and that would include his wife if those policemen didn't happen to be there. And they took some big beating. And the reason they didn't fight back too much, they don't want to lose their pension. They don't want to lose their job.

Because we've become so politically correct, everybody's afraid to do anything now. But they did a good job. This is a really minor point. Why? I cannot discern why Rand Paul seem to be the only senator who was walking down. the street and do that mob? I didn't quite understand that myself. I don't want to impugn or,

you know, question any part of the narrative based on that, but that was very strange. And no matter, you know, where you stand, that did seem to be a pretty frightening situation. I mean, just from Rand Paul's perspective, I'm kind of perplexed still, again, as to why he was there. But the fact that Trump pivots away from, I mean, kind of away from the initial point, into the point of like, well, if only the cops could have done more, it's just, I don't know. It's a little bit distressing. But the whole thing is. It's like two amorphous concepts in the Republican mind, right?

Violence, number one, and number two, political correctness. And how can I tie these together, right? How can I say that the cops don't want to rough up the protesters because the cops are afraid of getting canceled? That's essentially what Trump is saying. And that blurring of the lines is more, I mean, that's, it's important to hear that because that is what is going on in the hearts and minds of a lot of the electorate out there. That the distinction between getting canceled and losing your job for committing an act of violence doesn't exist. Right. I mean, the idea that the cops are worried about, it's the PC movement.

And that's what's keeping a cop from illegally punching someone or attacking someone or killing someone. It's this this PC atmosphere that we're in. I mean, that's utter nonsense. But those things are very closely tied together for a lot of people. Now, the comeback to Trump from Democrats is, but aren't you the president? Even if we accept your very gloomy, dark and as we said, factually inaccurate representation of what's going on, you're the president. This is happening on your watch to which team Trump responds. No, no, no, no, no, no, I'm sorry. No, no, no, no.

We didn't mean that at all. This violence we're talking about, this crime is happening in quote-unquote Democrat-run cities. That's where it's happened. Listen to this bit of thin slicing from White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Sunday on Meet the Press. And it is in Democrat cities. You know, you want to talk about Donald Trump's America. Most of Donald Trump's America is peaceful.

It is a Democrat-led city in Portland that we're talking about this morning, who just yesterday, denied help once again from the federal government. So there's Donald Trump's America, David, that is free of crime. But if you venture into the Democrat-run cities, that's where the crime starts. And hence, that's why it's not Donald Trump's fault, because he's being undermined by the local Democratic mayor. Therefore, we need to re-elect him because I guess the mayor will listen to him in the second term or something. It doesn't make a lot of sense.

I would wager that most of the Republicans that surround the president are probably also from Democrat-run cities, or a lot of them are. I'm pretty sure Mark Meadows is. But liberals should be very reluctant. It should be very concerned about the inclination to eye-roll that stuff away. And I think what Joe Biden's speech today had a lot of value, I think there was a lot of power in just seeing him exiting an air. airplane looking like a president, you know, but I think that more than anything. I thought the same thing. I think that more, I mean, and, and you know what that does? That makes you stop for a second, catch your breath and say, you know, Trump's attack line about him campaigning from his basement is

actually meaningful. I mean, at least to some extent, you know, when you, when you catch yourself saying that. But I think more important than that is that what Trump, I mean, what Biden did today was sort of give a formality to that eye role, right? I mean, he, instead of just, instead of just the assumption that everybody's going to be smart enough to see through this, which is incorrect and also sort of condescending, at some point you just have to be out there in public saying, do I look like an anarchist?

I mean, and even though that's maybe not even like the most concise way to, or concise it is, Maybe that's not the most direct way to sort of rebut what Trump is saying. You got to be out there kind of, yeah, just like kind of almost smirking and rolling your eyes at this stuff. Because you can't assume that people are going to be doing what you're doing in your head. Every voter is not saying, oh, Trump's full of it and everybody knows that. I'll do one better. You can't assume people remember that Joe Biden has been speaking out against rioting and looting and violence throughout the campaign.

No matter what the Trump team tells you, Joe Biden has not been a tool of the left on matters of protest. The big speech early in the summer that was widely covered. He has talked about this all the time. But what he's doing, as you say, is making sure the people won't forget that. It's an interesting speech today he gave. He used lots of different kinds of tactics to sort of rebut this. He once again renewed his objection to rioting. He ticked off crime stats from his administration.

if we're just comparing administrations, which Trump seems to want to do. And then he had this formulation, which I thought was really good and really powerful. This is a sitting president of the United States of America. He's supposed to be protecting this country, but instead he's rooting for chaos and violence. The simple truth is Donald Trump failed to protect America. So now he's trying to scare America. Yeah. I mean, again, keep it simple.

And that, I think, goes to the same sort of emotional place that a lot of Trump's attacks are resonating in a lot of voters, right? I mean, it's one thing to be like, he's trying to say that everything is happening during his own presidency as someone else's fault or it's going to get worse. And yes, there is a dissonance there. But the argument, I think that the real way to rebut a lot of what Trump is saying is what Joe Biden just got at. He's supposed to be keeping us safe. That's his job. And he's not. Yes. And he's supposed to be keeping us safe. Dot, dot, dot, pivot immediately back to the

coronavirus, which Trump has not kept America safe from. And again, of course, what underlies all of this, right, is that Trump would much rather be arguing with Biden about crime than talking about the coronavirus, where his record is terrible. Yep. Trump traveling to Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday. That will be something to watch. And finally, David, on a lighter note, I want to play one more Trump soundbite from New Hampshire on Friday. Trump is dumping on the motives of the protesters, but for some reason, he's really desperate to avoid the words, protesters, my ass. Protesters, my ass. Listen to what he came up with. Protesters. You know what I say? Protesters, your ass.

I don't talk about my ass. Protesters, your ass. Have you ever heard that one before? No, no. But I'm guessing that's going to, you know, take on a life of its own on Twitter now. But then Trump, the shy violet coming back and say, I don't talk about my ass.

I listened to that quote before I saw, I mean, separate from the speech, I listened to that soundbite three or four times trying to understand if he was actually saying ass because it just didn't make, I was trying to figure out why he was. saying ass over and over again. What a great...

It took even a few lessons to understand that he was circling back around to the line. Yes, protesters. It's so weird. And I don't know if it came out Garbo the first time and then he started defensively in this kind of, you know, really sort of shy and demure way, which we know Trump is, said, well, I don't talk about my ass. I just don't feel that's appropriate. I'm not going to give you the privilege of sharing a sentence with my ass.

It's time for the overworked Twitter joke of the week, David, where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received. David, this weekend we lost Scooby-Doo co-creator Joe Ruby.

Man who entertained us Saturday mornings taught us the value of a villain pulling off a mask to reveal the person we had seen 20 minutes earlier in the program. Dead at the age of 87. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write, Rest in Reese.

I think I need to do the Scooby-Doo arrest in Reese. Thanks to Andrew 3,000 for that one. Headline from Jezebel, David. Jim Cunningham's going to come out of retirement to use that sound bite. Jim, wherever you are, that was for you.

Headline for Jezebel, David. Jalo and A-Rod bought a very expensive house that will likely sink into the sea. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write. This is an interesting way to find out that A-Rod has bought the Mets. that was good

and finally David remember we had that overworked a while back about the Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota the band Smashmouth was performing there and Smashmouth somewhat surprisingly did not care about the coronavirus well the AP reports that 103 cases of COVID-19

have now been linked to that rally okay I'm excited to see where this goes it was an award Twitter joke to write hey now you're a hot spot spot. Thanks to Brian Cername. Oh, that's great. If you continue to find ways to clown smash mouth,

congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, time for the notebook dump, David. And if we're going to talk about the death of the newsroom, let our spiritual advisor, Humphrey Bogart, get us in the mood. I'm trying to save a newspaper. Which is not going to the first place. That is true.

The day consists of a big building. I don't own that. It also consists of typewriters, teletypes, presses, newsprint, ink, and desks. I don't own those either. But this newspaper is more than that. We're all aware of what a newspaper consists.

I'm not so sure about that. I was thinking about Bogie and Deadline USA this month, David, when a memo came down from Tribune publishing that the New York Daily News, the Orlando Sentinel, and the Allentown Morning Call and other papers, were closing their newsrooms forever. Now, this isn't just the newspaper headquarters,

sell off, which we've seen before. This is the media business threatening to become a work-from-home business, even after the coronavirus. As The Washington Post says, some journalists, quote, are confronting the very real possibility that they may never again work in a physical newsroom. Now, this is happening to a lot of industries now, right now, but I want to talk about what it means in particular for us, for journalists. The first thing we would lose, David, if we did.

did not work in a newsroom, letting our colleagues make us better. Right? Yeah. Now, you and I live on separate sides of the country, but if you and I sat next to each other all day, five days a week, it would make me a better writer. Absolutely. And let me give you two reasons for that. Number one, I would be explaining a story that I wanted to write to you in this really

tangled way and you would come up with the bumper sticker sentence that clarified it for me. And I'd say, yes, yes, sitting next to David. He gave me the key to unlock this story. That's number one. And let me tell you, number two. And this is the one we don't talk about so much. You would have a really successful day at work.

You'd get some praise from the boss. And I would like, this motherfucker had a good day. Now I've got to have a good day. Right? Yeah. Because newsrooms are competitive. Not only competitive with other newsrooms, but competitive with each other. And seeing people succeed, I'm convinced this may be the single,

this may be the single most important part is you want to compete with your peers, don't you, so that you will be as good as they are day in and day out. It's true. I mean, we all are motivated. I mean, we all find sources of motivation whether or not we're looking for it,

right? And working in a newsroom, I mean, there's some people who are motivated to, I'm sure, get to five o'clock, they can go home, newsroom and other jobs.

Sure. So there's people who are motivated to get done with the one task that they have. or whatever so they can leave whenever that's finished. But the newsroom is a achievement driven place, a pride-driven place. And it's also, you know, your workload is a little bit more amorphous. I mean, you might have a beat, and you might have a deadline. But it's not like you show up on Monday knowing like the 12 things you have to get done before you can clock out on Friday, right?

So you do find those sorts of sources of motivation. And, you know, like you said, maybe places were not always, places we don't always say out loud. Second thing we would lose post newsroom, fear of our bosses by proximity. I was rereading all the president's men the other day, and one of the things that Woodward and Bernstein are motivated by is that Ben Bradley is going to come out of his office at the Washington Post and tell them they're doing a bad job. Be disappointed in them in person. And let me tell you, that is a very different kind of disappointment than that comes through a Google Doc. when you get the story back from your remote boss, right?

And to me, that's a hugely important. I think of my first job, first real job being at Slade and Jack Schaefer was there. And, you know, like part of, part of me doing a good job every day was like, I didn't want him to be disappointed in me. And that was not just like a concept. I was like, I'm going to see him. And I'm going to see the disappointment in his face if I screw this up. And I want to be good today so that he. is happy with me, and that I can tell he's happy with me.

That, to me, is a huge part of all working in the same place. I could not agree more. Again, that's maybe not the sort of thing that you seek out on a regular basis, that direct contact with the boss for some people. But when you get it, it validates your existence. It validates all the time that you've spent there, right? And, you know, there's just a world of difference between the occasional, like, pat on the back, even company wide pat on the back that you might get on Slack, you know, or whatever, or even on a Zoom call. And just the actual kind of organic feeling, you know, appreciation that you could get from your boss.

It's totally true. I mean, I think that I'm sure there are people, you know, we're at kind of a more advanced stage in our careers than some of our coworkers. I'm sure everybody experiences this differently, but interaction with my boss or bosses is one of the biggest things I've lost, you know, being kind of estranged from a newsroom. Strange from a newsroom, I like that. So you're talking about pats on the back in person. I'm talking more about fear and shame.

Oh, no, no, no. I mean, I guess I was talking about the inverse, but you're right. The fear is, I mean, the fear is real, too. I mean, you can't, you know, you're going to see the person in the hallway, you know. you're going to, I mean, that's, that's going to be a part of your, I mean, that's a part of your everyday life. You can't just duck all, you can't, you know, it's easy to duck somebody on Slack. Yeah. You know, via email or whatever.

Scott Maxwell, the Orlando Sentinel, had a really good column about that paper's downtown headquarters closing. And there was a former Sentinel editor named Dave Bergen, Maxwell writes, who was sick of reporters turning in lengthy copy. So Bergen sends a memo to the newsroom that begins, please be alert. Any moment now, I intend to go into the newsroom and set fire to myself. That was away. That's what you call instilling fear in person.

Another thing we lose if we don't have newsrooms, journalism's highly ironic team spirit. Right. We're all in this together for our particular publication. And I don't want to sound like the old sports writing crank here, but the world of journalism changed a lot in our lifetimes when social media came in. And suddenly journalists had all these incentives that were not always. always lined up with the publications incentives, right? You could be cracking jokes on Twitter and become this Twitter personality outside of whatever you were in the pages of wherever you worked.

Right. But to me, newsroom with leaving a newsroom is another sort of hit to that, right? Yeah. All of a sudden publications and this kind of idea that we're all working under the same banner, whether we're happy that day or not, just that becomes a little bit less of a thing somehow. It's a lot harder to go out for drinks with your coworkers when you're not starting from the same, you know, exit door from the office building. But yeah, I think that the team spirit is really hard to manage when you're all so far flung

from each other. Yeah. And I think we become journalism becomes less a collection of publications, right, than a bunch of Twitter accounts you like, writers you like. And like I said, I think that was already happening. And I think if we're not in newsrooms, that probably happens a little bit more. here's a contrarian argument against physical newsrooms. And you and I faced this up a while back when we were young and living in New York,

which is if you don't have to have people in a central newsroom in New York or L.A., and then meaning you have people that can afford to be in that situation, do you wind up getting to hire different kinds of people? Right? Do you admit more people into the profession? Also, if people are in cool spots around the country rather than one big newsroom hub, are they bringing you stories you wouldn't have gotten if everyone was in the same place?

Yeah, I think those two points are really, really strong. I mean, at the ringer, we've hired some people who are not currently in New York and L.A. And they might have been people that would have migrated there for the job. But the fact that it wasn't mandatory, I think, is I'm sure, helped the sales pitch and greatly benefited by it. And you're right. I mean, you, having a, you know, broader purview, I mean, just to be able to experience different things.

I mean, I've been in three different states in the past three months and just, and they were all pretty close to four different states. And, you know, I mean, anybody that does that can tell you, you've experienced the world in different ways. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's funny. I think I said this on the pod before, but the best thing about newsrooms is that they're full of other journalists. and the worst thing about newsrooms is also that they're full of other journalists

but I'm going to miss it if we are moving in that way where we're not around our own little tribe all the time I am going to miss that absolutely I say there's a media reporter because I'm interested in journalists but I'm going to miss it.

Yeah I mean it's an interesting thing I don't think it's ever going to be gone if the newsroom I'll tell you what I can imagine I can imagine a world in which all of these publications get rid of the physical newsroom and then after about six months start replacing, you know, that with a,

either like a show newsroom, every, every place will, at least in New York and L.A. will still need some, a place to throw parties, right? A place to like, I thought you were going to say the background for when you have the TV hit. Well, that too. I said the backstage, the background for the New York Times photo shoot, if everything goes well or, you know, whatever, the Columbia Journalism Review photo shoot. everybody needs something in the shape of an office, whether or not it's a functional day-to-day office.

So it would be, as crazy as it sounds, I would not be surprised if it was like the living room at my house when I was growing up where it's like they, it looks exactly like a place where you sit down with your family and have a good time, but you're not ever allowed in there unless company's over. Like I think that that might be the newsroom of the future. All right. So farewell actual newsroom. welcome Potemkin Newsroom to our world. We'll let Bogie play us out of this segment. Today is more than a building.

It's people. 1,500 men and women whose skill, heart, brains, and experience make a great newspaper possible. We don't own one stick of furniture in this company, but we, along with the 290,000 people who read this paper, have a vital interest in whether it lives or dies.

Got an update from the world of books, David. Here's how you can tell Jeff Benedict's book, The Dynasty, which is out this week, is big. It doesn't have a subtitle, right? Oh, wow. Uh-huh. If you don't have to put a subtitle on your book like Tom Brady, Bill Belichick in the 20 years that changed the course of the NFL and geopolitical history, that's a subtle sign that your book has some gravitas. Yeah. It has some sway.

Here's Benedict talking about what he wrote and how he got it. All right. In 2018, Jeff Benedict and Armagedehan published a big sweeping into my mind, absolutely revelatory biography of Tiger Woods. So for his next book, Benedict decided to pursue a small out-of-the-way subject, The New England Patriots. The Dynasty, which is out tomorrow, is a story that stretches from 1962 when future Patriots owner Bob Kraft meets his wife, all the way to March 2020, when Kraft and Tom Brady say their final goodbyes in Kraft's house, with Brady wiping away. tears. Jeff Benedict is here to talk about how he reported on those tears and other things. How are you, Jeff? I'm well, and thanks for having me on. Absolutely. So here's the basic question.

Bill Belichick doesn't love reporters. Tom Brady doesn't love reporters, though he's a little nicer about it. How did you get inside the Patriots franchise to write this book? From the start, and when I say start, I mean going back years when I was thinking about this project long before I actually got to do the project. One of the things I spent the most time pondering and thinking about was how to, what would be a different angle to go at this? Because so much has been written and said about the Patriots, just like with Tiger Woods. There's 25 books about Tiger Woods. What could we possibly say that would be different and new and revealing? And I thought about that with this story. And the thing that stood out to me was we know a lot about Belichick and Brady because they've been covered so much.

We know a lot less about the contribution of Robert Kraft, the owner to the making of the dynasty. And so from the beginning, I was thinking I'd like to tell the story from the top down and from the inside out. And from top down, I mean from ownership right down to the field level. And from inside out, I mean from inside the organization, as opposed to being on the outside trying to look in. So I began by my first step in this process was writing a letter, the old-fashioned way. I almost felt like the Pony Express compared to how we communicate today, but I wrote a letter to Robert Kraft. And that was my first outreach to anyone in this project. And eventually, in my letter, I introduced myself because he doesn't know me. Coach Belichick

doesn't know me. Tom Brady doesn't know me. And I've never met any. of them, nor have I ever covered this team or been around the Patriots organization. So I am a complete outsider. But I wrote the letter and introduced myself, and then he wrote me back. I mean, I got a letter back from him in my mailbox. And that was the beginning of a communication that I opened with the owner. And it was, I was trying to form a relationship and trying to communicate to the organization, starting with the owner, that my approach was going to be different, that I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to write a book about the greatest sports dynasty of the 21st century.

And I had sort of a plan in my mind for how to go about it. I wanted to put it in the context of the other dynasties we've seen, the Packers of the 60s, the Steelers of the 70s, and the Niners of the 80s. And that was my approach going in. And so this is not a gotcha book. Yes, I'm going to cover Deflate Gate and SpyGate and Aaron Hernandez and the turmoil that happens at different times during the dynasty. I'm going to cover all that. But what I'm really focused on is how did this dynasty get built?

How is it constructed? And I said, you know, I want to get inside the engine room. I want to look at the levers and the meters and the numbers and the numbers and the numbers. and the knobs, and I want to see them. And then I also want to see how does this, how was this dynasty sustained for so long? Those were my central questions, and that's how I started. And obviously it took time to build relationships

with different people in this process, but that was my beginning. Did you get a sense from Bob Kraft and his son, Jonathan, that they shared your sentiment, that the story of the Patriots have been told in many different ways, but not with them as the protagonist, essentially the main characters of the story? Sure, absolutely. I think that just because that's a fact, you know what I mean, it wasn't necessarily

something that needed to be expressly said, but that was a fact that was well known. And I, in fact, talked about that a lot in my initial conversations with them when I was talking about how I would do the book, because I was just thinking, if I was looking at this from their perspective, here's this guy that we don't know, who's not a football writer, who hasn't been around our organization, who comes in here and says he wants to write a book about our history, you know, who is this guy and what's his plan? And so I was trying to be as expressive as I could and transparent about what I wanted to do. And luckily, I had other people that I've worked with and written about in the past, and there were plenty of references that they could look to get a sense of kind of who I was

and how I worked. When I was talking to your former co-author, Armand Catea, when you were doing the Tiger book, he contrasted your reporting styles this way. Armin said, I'm the fire and Jeff's the ice. So in what sense are you the ice as a reporter? That's funny that he said that. When you say ice, I think of ice and top gun,

and I'm not that ice. I have just, I think with Tiger's, Tiger Woods, for example, I've never played golf in my life. Like to this day, I've never played a round of golf. I don't claim to know anything about the game. And yet I was writing a biography about the greatest golfer whoever lived. And similarly here, I know a lot more about football than I know about golf. I'm a consumer of football and I understand and know the game. But at the same time, I'm not an insider in the Patriots world. So I'm coming at this from the standpoint. of I want to build relationships because I want to paint intimate portraits of the characters in this story. And so I think what Armand's talking about is that's kind of what I do. I try to do in all my projects is I want to show you sides of people like we did with

Tiger Woods. There are sides to him that despite the 20 books that had been written before ours that had never explored aspects of his personality, his childhood, his upraising, all of which explained why he was so great. Similarly here, when you try to create the dynasty, I think it's really important to go back and start following Robert Kraft when he's not Robert Kraft, when he's Bobby, Bobby the kid. You know, who was that guy before he was RKK, Robert Kraft, the owner? He was Bobby, and then he became Bob, and then he became Robert. There's this evolution of character that you see in Robert Kraft that there's a lot of foreshadowing in the early days of his life that I think is

critical to explaining the dynasty. And I wanted to do a similar thing with Brady, right? We know what he is now. But I wanted to go back when I introduced him and show you who was he before he was anybody. Because in those years, that's when you see the formative qualities, human qualities, that position them to become the greatest owner, the greatest coach, the greatest quarterback. And so it's that kind of, this takes so much more time. And it takes a, I'm not patting myself on the back when I say this, but it takes tremendous patience and discipline to do this because you got to be in it for the long run, right? This is a long, long haul.

And I think that I had to convince people in New England that, that I was in it for the long haul. I wasn't looking for quick headlines and glitzy, you know, catchphrases. I'm trying to tell a sophisticated story about a sophisticated franchise. And so that's how I went about that. What is, what conclusion did you come to to this question? What is Bob Kraft's superpower, do you think?

I think he's got more than one. But in the first chapter that I write about him, which is called Bobby, the second chapter of the book. And I start with him walking into a diner with three friends when he's in college, and they're looking at the menu board, and he's looking at a girl. And knowing right away, he wants to figure out a way to date that girl. Problem is that girl already has a boyfriend.

And that is Myra, who will become his wife. But in a matter of 24 hours, he goes from, how do I get this girl's phone number to her proposing marriage to him? That happens in 24 hours. And I tell that story at the beginning of this book because it's a foreshadowing of a couple of things, or three things. This tells you something about how he's going to get the franchise as an owner. That's about perseverance. This tells you something about how he's going to hire Bill Belichick, which is all about instinct. And then this tells you something about how he's going to keep Tom Brady in New England for 20 years,

which is all about his way of building relationships, personal relationships with people. And so I think with Kraft, if I were to sum it up, I would say he has wonderful skills of diplomacy. I interviewed Rupert Murdoch for this book and actually interviewed a lot of people for this book who are not quoted in the book. and Murdoch is one of those people. But Murdoch was really helpful in shedding sort of light on who Kraft is as a human being. And he said to me, if Kraft had not gone into the business he's in and had had instead gone into politics, he might have gone down in history as one of the greatest diplomats in American politics.

And instead, he's in sports and other businesses. and he is a wonderful diplomat, which is what has allowed him and enabled him to keep Brady and Belichick married for 20 years, which is unprecedented. And so I think that's his superpower. And that's the stuff you can't see. Like there's a lot of things that Kraft does that are visible. We know that. He's one of the most visible owners in the NFL.

But the really important stuff that he does is invisible. And that's one of those things. You're burrowing into Bob Craft's past here, and you're also tagging along with him in the present, which is 2018 and some of the 2019 season. What was it like to tag along with Bob Kraft? You know, that's a great question. And because he's so busy, he literally is a citizen of the world. And I love that. I love that about him as a character to write about is he's a citizen of the world.

And so I knew, you know, he basically told me up front that if you're going to interview me, you need to be ready to go on a moment's notice. He asked me early on, where do you live? And I said, you know, Connecticut. I didn't understand at the moment why that mattered, but it quickly became apparent because what would happen is I would get an email or a text message or sometimes a phone call saying, you know, if you can be at the airport in Boston in three hours, you can get on a flight with Mr. Kraft and you'll have the flight to interview them.

And the next thing I know, I'm going to Los Angeles. And it was that kind of thing. But the beauty of that was, those airplane interviews, by the way, were fantastic because when you're up in the air, it's just the two of you. There's no distractions. Sure.

And wonderful opportunity, but also maybe more important than that was the ability to just observe him. I think I certainly learned a lot talking to him. That's a given. But I learned an immense amount about him and others in the organization by just being able to watch them. Keep my mouth shut. Stay in the corner, almost like a fly on the wall, mind your own business, and just watch and learn.

And I learned a lot. And it was unfiltered. That was the thing. It's not like he said, you can't write about this. There was never a conversation like that. It was just I was there and I was watching. And that enabled me, particularly in chapter one and in chapter 44. So the first and last chapters, those chapters are about the 2018, 2019 and the beginning of 2020. That was all observation in real time. And being around him as much as I was enabled me to do that. There's an amazing scene. October 2018, Patriots are playing the Dolphins. And you follow Kraft and his guest, who is Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, of all people, into the Patriots locker room. And can you tell us a little bit about what that scene looks like?

Sure. And this is what I mean about just keeping your mouth shut and just, you know, kind of like you're not there. But I had watched that game from the owner's box. And as the game was ending, and New England had played really well. and won by a lot. And Mike Pompeo was in the box that day. And Robert Kraft was bringing him to the locker room to meet with the team after the game.

And he took him down there early. So the game was still being played and the players were still on the field. The locker room was empty. And I had the opportunity to just follow them. And so I'm walking with them into a quiet, empty locker room. And basically he was showing Mr. Pompeo around and I was just kind of standing there.

And then all of a sudden the double doors came flying open, and Rob Grunkowski walked out of the training room into the locker room. He didn't know anybody was in there. And we didn't know that he was in the training room. So he comes hobbling out. He had a big ice pack around the bottom of his leg. And, you know, just the lovable, gregacious guy that he is comes out. And he's like, oh, hi, fellas.

And Mr. Kraft introduced him. to Mr. Pompeo and a conversation started. It was a dialogue between Kraft and Grankowski, and he was asking him about the ice pack and what happened and Groskowski was telling him. And there's this great moment where, you know, Kraft's basically saying, we need you next week because we're playing the Colts and we got to kill those guys because they're the ones who started deflategate. And, you know, Grancowski is like, yeah, yeah, I'll be ready. Don't worry about it. And then moments later, the whole team came in because the game had ended and everybody comes flying into the locker room. And the Patriots did what they always do.

gathered for the, you know, the quick, you know, sort of Lord's Prayer and circle around Belichick. And it was interesting because Josh Gordon was there. And I think it just played his first game in a Patriots uniform. And Brady was kind of bucking him up and supporting him. As they went to kneel down, it just happened this way. It was so organic. Kraft grabbed one of Josh Gordon's hands and Pompeo grabbed the other one. And the three of them knelt down together with Brady behind them for the Lord's Prayer. And I was standing there, again, I'm just a fly on the wall. I'm watching this and I'm thinking, what a moment because where else in the NFL, frankly, where else in any team sport could Josh Gordon, as he's making his entry into this team, kneel down with the

Secretary of State and the owner with Tom Brady behind him to do the Lord's Prayer? And I was just thinking as it was happening, this has to go in the book. And there were so many scenes like that that I just happened to observe just by being there. And again, I never interviewed anybody about any of this. I just watched it. Yeah, well, my journalist's brain was just quivering on your behalf when I'm reading that scene. Are you just excited? Like palpable, like, oh my gosh, I am seeing this is going straight in the book when you witness something like that? I just thinking that for me, storytelling is all about showing and not telling. I mean, that's really the key to good writing is showing people and not telling them what to think or what to see. Just show them. And

these kinds of moments are wonderful portals into who these men are. It just tells you a lot about them without you having to explain stuff. Just show them. And so my thought was whenever I'd see things like this is I need to take the reader where I am. In other words, take my glasses off and put them on the eyes of the reader and let them see through my eyes what I'm seeing. And so it's just a matter of recreating those scenes on the page. Let me ask you about one more scene that a lot of people will be interested in a March meeting where Tom Brady tells Kraft that he's leaving the Patriots. You have the text messages they exchanged before the meeting, and one of which Kraft tells Brady,

I'm corona free because we're now in the virus era here. You have the dialogue between Brady and Kraft. You have Brady and Kraft calling Bill Belichick on a speaker phone to tell him the news and the dialogue that ensues from that. How do you go about reconstructing a scene like that? So there's a, there's a tremendous amount of reconstruction of scenes and dialogue in this book. And it has its challenges for sure when you're trying to do reconstruct.

but the idea is to try to have at least one, if not both, or in some cases like this scene where there's multiple people in the scene, you try to talk to them and do your best to recreate through them. I can do this better with, that's the last scene in the book that you just mentioned. The first scene in the book, right? She goes all the way back to the other end is in a hospital room like in an ER, right, where Drew Bledsoe is about to have his chest just slightly. cut open by a doctor who's going to perform a procedure on him. And the sort of penultimal scene

is when Brady, Ballotichick, and Kraft are standing over Bledsoe's hospital bed when he wakes up. So you've got six characters in that scene. You've got Bledsoe, the patient. You've got the surgeon. You've got Drew's wife who's sitting there holding his hand. And then you've got Kraft, Bellichick, and Brady standing over him. In that instance, to recreate that scene, it was a lot of work because I talked to all six parties to that scene about it. And some of that, when I say talking, some of that is sending an email to someone and asking them about a particular part of that scene

and having them email you back. Or it's getting on the phone and going through the dialogue. Or it's, in some cases, when you're doing dialogue reconstruction, you might construct a part of it and actually send it to a person who's saying it and say, is this how it was? And, you know, and I did some of that with the doctor in that case because there were a lot of times where the physician and Bledso were the only people in the scene and one of them was under the influence of a painkiller and certainly can't remember anything.

And so it's, you know, working with a physician to try to get it right. But it's a lot of legwork to do all that. But it's just sort of, it's checking back. If you have emails or text messages, those are really helpful, obviously, because. because that's a real-time communication. Like, well, what did you say? Well, it's in this text message. The book is yours, of course.

But do you, when you finish a draft, do you send that to, do you show that to the crafts as a means of fact-checking or something like that? So what I've done throughout my career in Armin and I did this with Tiger Woods, it's just you take, there's certain parts of manuscripts that you have to have fact-checked for accuracy. It could be that there's a lot of medical terminology. It could be that there's a lot of legalese. It could be that you're going through some sort of complex business transaction. And one of the things you worry about is when people, you know, I'll go back to the doctor example,

when you've got a physician who never talks to a journalist ever. So this is his first time in his lifetime that he's actually talked to a journalist. And you're writing this part. The last thing you want is for the book to come out and him to call you and go, this is ridiculous. This is not right. You have the medical terms wrong. This isn't what I told you.

And so I go to a lot of lengths to make sure in certain places where the fact checking is done to make sure that it's not only accurate, but that the context is right, because you don't want people, particularly people who participated and gave you a lot of time to then read it and go, you don't know what you're talking about. or how did you get this wrong? And that's part of that sort of laborious process that I'm talking about. What did you find was the hardest part of the story for you to get? That's a good question.

So much of it was hard, actually. Reconstructing the past is certainly harder than writing the present when you're in the present. And so there's the farther back you go, I guess I would say, the harder it becomes to reconstruct because people's memories fade. And it's not that people purposely mislead you when you ask them questions and then they give you an answer. And then you come to find out that the answer isn't quite right factually. It's often just because they're misremembering it. And that's human nature. It happens to all of us. And so one of the challenges in a book like this is where you're going as far back as I did, 25, 30 years. There's

going to be misremembering going on or just the inability to remember at all. But some of the best stories that I got from this book, for example, the early years, the early chapters are largely centered on craft. Most of the good stories about him in the beginning of the book, I didn't get from him. That's what's interesting. I got those from other people, and then I would take them to him and ask him about it. And then he would say, oh, yeah, I remember that now. But if someone else hadn't told me the story in the first place, it wouldn't be in the book. Because again, it's not that he wasn't being helpful or cooperative or that he was withholding information. It's just that he's one of those people who's had such a full life. And you could say the same thing about Brady. They've had so

much go on that they forget more than you remember about your life. And you need other people to say to you, here's a story you need to know. And then you hear it and you go, oh, wow, what a great story. And then you take it to the guy who's the subject and he goes, oh yeah, I forgot about that. And then they can fill it in because you've triggered something in their memory that goes, oh yeah, now I remember that. And that was when I say hard. I only mean hard from a time, you know, time commitment standpoint. But I think the hardest part about writing this book was probably just the construction of the narrative, the architecture of the story. I spent more time and struggled more with that than anything because there's a lot of ways to do this. And I was

trying to put my stamp on it and do it a certain way. And I spent more time thinking about what to write than I ever have before. I love this note from the acknowledgements. You took a 20 19 trip to Israel with Kraft and several players. He likes to take people to Israel. And Vince Wilfork, who was this mammoth former Patriots defensive tackle, baptized you in the River Jordan. Now, Jeff, there is immersion reporting. And then there is literal immersion reporting. Yeah, that was, I really, from the first time that I met Vince Wilfork, I was just so taken by his humanity, his wife as well. And so to get to go on that trip to Israel was a life-changing experience for me,

partly because of just the ability to go to all these places where Jesus walked and the history of Christianity played out. All these things I'd read in the Bible, I actually got to see with my eyes. That was just in itself a profound experience. But then when you couple that with, I was having that experience with 15 Patriots players and their wives or girlfriends to see how it was impacting them was really incredibly helpful in terms of writing this book because talk about having a way to see players outside football. And, you know, I'm thinking of that moment where I got baptized by Vince Wilfork, it was because the minister who was baptizing, all of us that day. You know, he looked at all these Patriots players and how large they are, and he was concerned he wasn't going to be able to baptize them alone. Like he needed someone to help

him dunk these guys in the water. And Vince Wilford, being the kind of guy is, basically said, I'll help and climb down into the river with the minister. And he helped baptize everybody that got baptized that day. And I was one of the last people. And as I came up out of the water, It was just, for me, it was a very emotional experience to think that I was actually being baptized in the River Jordan. And then I was taken by the fact that Drew Bledsoe and his wife were, they had come out of the water and were up on the sort of the bank. And Drew had tears in his eyes. And looking at him like that, put tears in my eyes. By that time, I had done a bunch of interviews with Drew and his wife, Maura, and I'd gotten to know them pretty well.

and Drew's role in this story is quite amazing. And I was just feeling really lucky that I was getting to see sides of these men and women that were really where I wanted to go as a journalist. I'm seeing the humanity, seeing the spiritual side in this instance. And I said to Vince, after, would you mind? I think it was the only time in all of my reporting

that I asked someone to take a picture with me, but it was only because I wanted it for posterity's sake, because it was for me just such a personal, impactful moment. The book is The Dynasty, no subtitle, just the Dynasty, which I have very in favor of no subtitle books. And you know it's a big deal in publishing. Jeff Benedict, available where all books are sold right now as soon as you hear this podcast. Thank you so much for being here, Jeff. Thank you.

All right, it's time for David Schuemaker, guess is a strain pun headline. Yeah. Thursday's pun, the title of an Eric Alterman book about presidential lying was lying in We had to vote for the lying king, which I think has been used a couple of times in various forms. Ooh, I got a stamper for you today, David. It's from Eric Reynolds. It's from the American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology.

Fantastic. There's a paper in the journal about COVID-19. Here's a sentence. The prevailing theory is that SARS-CO-2 induces the production of cytokines, in particular, IL-6. and that these cytokines are a key driver of both lung damage and mortality. Translation for dumb people like us, we need to understand more about IL-6, okay? I-L-6, which is the pun word here.

Oh, my God. What was the American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biologies's strained pun headline? IL-6. I'll see. Isle six. You want to go there. Isle six? I'll six.

I'll six. God. Isle six. Oh, clean up on aisle six. There we go. Yeah. All right.

Bang. Very nice, right? Pretty good for a medical publication there. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis, researched by Chris Almeida production magic by Erica Sivantis. We're back Thursday with Lister Mail and more lukewarm takes about the media. See your ass then, David.

My, no, no. You don't get to share his ends with my ass. I'll see, you'll see, you'll see your ass. You'll see your ass then. Yeah, you know, we don't do a podcast with my ass. All right. Podcast with your ass. See ya.